Godless in Eden
Fay Weldon
A selection of lectures and essays contributed to newspapers, magazines and books over recent years, revised for this volume and all highly relevant to today.In these essays find a portrait of the times, to help us map our way through the new Garden of Eden, in which men hold the baby and women the mobile phone. The garden is timeless, its beauties are ineradicable, the angel’s blazing sword no longer bars the way – so what’s going wrong? Tricky to see the wood for the trees in this new-old land, hard to find a Third Way through: let this collection point the way.From the changing face of government, the feminisation of politics, the stamping of the warrior foot, to whence and whither Feminism, via the dangerous new cult of Therapism, to our turbulent and benighted Royals, brushing up against the famous (Roseanne, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jean Paul Gaultier) on the way – it’s all here. Plus a rare glimpse of the author’s life and loves.
FAY WELDON
Godless in Eden
A book of essays
Contents
Cover (#ua1ccaca7-275d-51c8-bbb8-8502e38baeae)
Title Page (#uec4c8ba2-5db5-53c4-a469-8eecf853a040)
The Way We Live Now (#uc174d3d3-0008-5304-a19f-90f94caa4c16)
The Way We Live As Women (#ua10e83b8-91a4-5808-b5aa-e14d04bf4d2a)
A Royal Progress (#litres_trial_promo)
This Way Madness Lies (#litres_trial_promo)
The Changing Face of Government (#litres_trial_promo)
Brushing Up Against the Famous (#litres_trial_promo)
Growing Up and Moving On (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliographical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
The Way We Live Now (#ulink_c4fcc8e2-a733-5991-8d54-b5b37c3d8ab8)
A new Britain indeed: a Third Way, a great sea change in how we see ourselves. Fifty-eight million people, in fact, in profound culture shock. To determine how we live now, first determine how we lived then.
Pity a Poor Government (#ulink_7ed11f51-a7ec-5a3a-9580-cefdc3b31ef8)
Behind the Rural Myth (#ulink_8cd5ca5a-0214-5535-8e47-0e21b18c3c67)
Mothers, Who Needs ’Em? (#ulink_c6f617b3-c827-55ad-bd0a-8111e525d524)
The Feminisation of Politics (#ulink_b1fdd241-5f0e-5b16-a663-daa3efbd5158)
What This Country Needs Is: (#ulink_5f8463ca-e19d-574a-84b0-1f73d174fc81)
Take the Toys from the Boys (#ulink_bacd829a-69e3-50e4-87a7-a5cdf924ba9c)
From The Scotsman Millennium Lecture, delivered at the Edinburgh Book Festival, summer, 1998.
Pity a Poor Government (#uc174d3d3-0008-5304-a19f-90f94caa4c16)
Adam and Eve and Tony Blair. The beginning and the end: or at any rate as far as we’ve got at the close of the fourth millennium since the Garden of Eden, when we all began, and the second since Jesus, when we started counting.
But these things may be circular; the end may yet turn into a new beginning. We now have a New Adam and a New Eve (if the same old Cain and Abel kids). God is no longer seen to exist, to bar the door with flaming sword. The bearded patriarch has been replaced by Mother-Goddess Nature. The happy couple walk again in paradise. The Garden, mind you, is pretty battered these days, it lacks its ozone layer, it is buffeted by the storms of global warming and so on. But at least the serpents of hunger, poverty and ignorance have slid off into the undergrowth, driven out over the centuries by marauding parties of the Great and Good.
Pity any poor government as it tries to keep up with unprecedented social change and the collapse of the old ways of living, dealing as it has to with an electorate still immersed in the old myths of what we are and how we hope to be, obliged to piddle about with Ministries for Women when what we need is a Ministry for Human Happiness. Changes in the female condition, however welcome, have had their effect on men and children too. Takes two to make the next one – and our evolution as a species, over too many millennia to count, suggests to us most forcibly that we are all inextricably interlinked, and if we try too hard to escape our conditioning, fly too obstinately in the face of our human and gender nature, we will be very miserable indeed. But what are we, if we don’t try? Let government admit a paradox, and help us all pursue our happiness, not just some of us our rights.
The young couple, the New Adam, the New Eve – he beginning to feel the effect of the lack of a rib, she taking over the gardening: their life expectancy now in the late seventies (him) and the early eighties (her) – have in returning to the Garden been returned to innocence: they walk about its glories in a daze. Innocence may not be enough if they are to remain, this time round, in the state of grace we want for them. Let them have some information.
I can’t cover a thousand years of gender politics but I can just about manage the last hundred years. The great advantage of being no longer young is that what to many people is dead history to me is living history, if I add in my mother, that is, who is alive and well and thinking and ninety-one. Since she was there for the decades I was not, between us we can set ourselves up as experts on the century.
I spent my early years in New Zealand, where the education was based upon ‘the Scottish system’. By which is meant that the young are not trusted with independent judgement, and no-one asks ‘what are your feelings about this?’ because your feelings are irrelevant. We learned what others older and wiser than ourselves had to say. We quoted authority if we wanted to prove a point. (In those pre-television days it was possible to take authority seriously. Put Locke, Berkeley and Hume on a late night chat show and you’d soon lose respect for them.) In 1946, my family, mother, grandmother, sister and myself, took the first boat ‘home’ after the war, and I went to a girls’ grammar school in London which expected its pupils to join the great and the good and work for the betterment of mankind. Many of us did. And later I went to the University of St Andrews, where I developed the art of rhetoric. Thus: you make your case, overstating it dramatically. Your opponent does the same. In response you reduce your argument a little: so does he. Thus a consensus, or at any rate a moderation of extreme views can be reached. Except of course if you’re arguing with someone who doesn’t understand the rules of engagement, and they usually don’t down South, you’re in trouble. Others conclude you’re hopelessly argumentative, given to rash overstatement, and would be well advised to stick to writing fiction, which as everyone knows, and as my mother pointed out to me long ago, is all lies and exaggeration anyway. You make a statement: they leave the room.
It was my Professor in moral philosophy at St Andrews who, when obliged by new university directives to accept females into his class – there were three of us – declined to mark our essays or acknowledge our presence, other than from time to time to remark, with a toss of the bald head, that females were not capable of moral decision or rational judgement. The only conclusion we could come to was that we were not female. That was in the early fifties, of course, and in those days to be denied ‘moral decision’ and ‘rational judgement’ was meant as an insult. Today a young person might well interpret the remark as a compliment. Feeling takes such precedence over morality and judgement, emotional response is declared to remain so much the woman’s prerogative, that it is the young men in the class who would be the ones to feel inadequate, and long to be women, just as we then longed to be men, to be allowed out after our begrudged education into the great wide world of adventure, excitement, earning, and freedom. Not into the domesticity which seemed to be our fate, both as natural born women and because it was so difficult for a woman to earn anything other than pin money. And today’s young man might well find himself the solitary male in a Gender Studies Class expected to stay quiet when the female lecturer tells the class that all men are potential rapists.
When my mother observes, as she did the other day, that when she was a girl only working women wore blouses and skirts, and that a lady would be horrified to be seen in anything but a dress, and equally horrified if a working woman turned up wearing something in one piece, you realise how profoundly and invisibly and silently things can change, and how easy it is to forget the kind of society we once were, as we try to make sense of the one we have now. You understand why the office liked you always to wear a suit to work, and wearing a dress made them, and you, feel uneasy, and why the BBC got so upset in the sixties if you wore trousers to a meeting.
Why, I asked my mother, if there are only six million more people in this country than there were in 1950, and this is only a ten percent increase in the total population, is it so difficult to get along Oxford Street for the crowds? And why is it that the simple purchase of a pair of shoes these days takes so long and requires a lengthy session with a crashing computer? To which she replied ‘Because once upon a time everyone used to stay home, you silly girl. They were poor. Their one pair of shoes was wet and they couldn’t go out until they were dry. They didn’t even aim to have two pairs. No-one ate in restaurants, bread and cheese was the staple diet and you got them from the corner shop and paid cash, and if you didn’t have cash you went without. And that was in the fifties – things were twice as quiet when I was a child.’
My mother’s parents, at the turn of the century, ran to a cook and a maid who lived in, and had one half-day off a week. They were certainly not out littering the streets, buying shoes or overcrowding public transport.
In the East End of London, before bombs razed so much of it during two world wars, and the planners got busy with their theories, nearly everyone lived within walking distance of work. And how they worked! In 1901, we had 75,000 boys under fourteen in the factory workforce, and nearly as many girls. The school leaving age was thirteen and child labour was common in spite of it, and it was normal for women to work before they had families. But not after, if they could help it. In the civil service and in teaching, what was called the Marriage Bar meant a woman had to give up her employment – in blouse and skirt, of course – when she got married. Otherwise who would run the nation’s homes? A whole lot of women just got married secretly, of course, and failed to tell their employers.
Halfway through the century, by the time I was being taught by Professor Knox, though the Marriage Bar was gone, it was certainly assumed that an educated girl chose between a personal life and a career. Now it is assumed that somehow, what with the washing machine, the microwave, the vacuum cleaner, and this strange thing called childcare, which is another woman looking after her child for less than the mother earns, she will be able to manage both. And she can, just about, and often wants to, and often has to. And it can be hard. We have paid a heavy price for our emancipation, but more of that later.
And when I say people worked hard then, believe me they work harder now. My mother views with horror today’s average working week of forty-eight hours – and middle management works sometimes sixty or seventy, plus the journey to and from work – saying that even before World War II the attempt was to get the figure down to thirty-five. And that when in the late fifties she worked as a porter on London’s Underground – the winters were cold and staff were issued with heavy greatcoats, for which she was thankful – even then the staff worked only a forty-hour week. What happened? And as for part-time work – the kind women with children so often do – this is usually an employer’s definition and doesn’t necessarily mean shorter hours, just that the employee works without holiday or sick pay and has no statutory rights. I know ‘part-time’ college lecturers who work longer hours than the full-time staff, but for less money, and are still grateful. It’s that or nothing.
Of course things have improved. They must have. Our life expectancy is greatly increased. My mother’s life expectancy when she was born was fifty-two years. My father’s was forty-seven. A girl child born today can expect to get to eighty-one, a boy child seventy-six. The gender gap in this respect has neither closed nor narrowed. Women are born to live longer on average than men, in the human species as in most others. At the beginning of the century one hundred and sixty males per million did away with themselves: the figure for women was forty-eight. Now it’s down to one hundred and four males and thirty females. Woman is not so given to despair, it seems, as Man, and though the totals drop, thank God, they stay pretty much in the same gender proportion, three times fewer women than men. We both mostly do away with ourselves when we’re old and lonely. We were not bred for loneliness, though the contemporary world forces too many of us into it. The government plans to build 4.4 million new housing units, to house those expected to live alone in the next decade, and that figure rises steadily. As Patricia Morgan at the Institute of Economic Affairs points out, in a booklet on the fragmentation of the family, men’s disengagement from families is of immense and fundamental significance for public order and economic productivity. This is something which is only just beginning to be acknowledged – as we blithely head for a situation in which, by the year 2016, fifty-four percent of men between thirty and thirty-four will be on their own.
So pity the poor male as well as pity the poor government. One’s anxiety on their behalf has less to do with girls doing so much better at school exams than boys, which they so famously do, but with changes in society which make it difficult for us all to do what comes naturally. That is, to fall in love, marry, and live happily ever after in domestic tranquillity, even though we prefer now to do this serially. The late twentieth century is wreaking havoc with our aspirations to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. May we please have our Ministry for Human Happiness? Or if the government really wants to be useful, and preserve the marriage tie and so forth, thus saving itself large chunks of the £800 thousand million annual benefit budget spent mopping up the mayhem left by divorce, it could institute official stigma-free dating agencies, and set about arranging sensible marriages. The self-help system seems to be breaking down. And the steadiest citizen is the married citizen, and the one most pleasing to the State, tied down and sobered by kids and mortgage obligations.
My mother and I, of course, both have to thank the twentieth century for our continued existence. Let me rephrase that. Were it not for medical advances we would neither have seen so much of it. I would have been dead twice, once for lack of antibiotics, once for lack of plausible surgery. So would she. I would have three surviving children, not four. One would not have survived birth. Mind you, were it not for the advent of contraception, I might have ended up having ten. When Marie Stopes worked in London’s East End at the beginning of the century there were women around who had survived twenty children or more: but the normal fate of the married woman was to die young from repeated childbirth, contraception being both illegal and seen as immoral. For every child she carried, Stopes estimated, a woman’s chance of dying in childbirth increased by fifty percent. If the marriage rate then was a mere one in three I am not surprised. Marriage might have meant status and children, and even, in George Bernard Shaw’s phrase, been a meal ticket for life for women, but was still too often a death sentence, especially amongst the poor. Things are better now: infant and maternal mortality is way, way down to almost nothing – from over one in ten in 1900 to less that four per thousand now – but with improved health, prosperity, the advent of contraception and women’s control of her own fertility, comes a new set of problems. So it goes.
My mother at the age of five, when first required to go to the little Montessori school around the corner, set up such a wail that my grandfather, a novelist, came down the stairs in his silk dressing gown, waving his ivory cigarette holder and said what can be the matter with little Margaret? To which the reply came she doesn’t want to go to school. ‘Do you want to go to school, Margaret?’ he asked, and my mother replied no, though she knew even then, she told me, that it was a life decision and she’d made the wrong one. My grandfather said, ‘Don’t send her then,’ and went upstairs again, and they didn’t. She stayed at home and read books and by the age of twenty was writing novels with her father.
Education for my mother and myself was for its own sake. It was not training, as it is now, for the adult world of work. The motive behind the education acts of the nineteenth century, which made school compulsory, was not by any means purely philanthropic: rather it was to accustom the children of an agrarian society to industrial ways, so by the time they left school they’d have got into the habit of turning up at the factory even when it was raining and cold, they felt poorly, or their shoes were wet and it was Monday morning. Monday was always a bad day for turning up at work. And the truant officers of the new compulsory schools, the morning and afternoon register, and the sick note required to prove illness, did indeed quickly train the new generation to daily work in the factories, bother reading and writing.
Likewise today we train our children, through longer and longer years, from their first day at the creche or the playgroup, to their last day at college, to turn up, to be there, to answer the register, to compete in exams as later they will for jobs, computer fodder in the new technological society, as once they were factory fodder. It is the effective use of computers we care about, just as once we cared about getting a return on our new industrial machinery: alas, machinery works day and night and doesn’t tire, as humans will.
Our children, training for their future, in which there will always be too many workers and not too few, and so a permanent level of anxiety to keep everyone striving, end up living in an examination culture: they are tested and tried on entry to playgroup, they have SATS at 7, 11 and 14, GCSE’s, A-levels, secret personality records and all. What price the old hated eleven-plus now? That exam was as nothing. Who wanted to go to the grammar school, anyway, it separated you out from your friends. Passing it was the problem, not failing it.
Life for the child mid-century was comparative heaven. No over-trained teachers, no national curriculum, and very little truancy, why should there be? School was where you went to meet your friends: education was a by-product: they were small, quiet places. Holidays were longer, the years spent in schools were fewer, educational standards were higher. And even so, my mother didn’t want to go.
Mid-century I was lucky. I got the best of perhaps any education system the world has had to offer. Under Mr Attlee, the last of the great disruptive wars behind us, having got off the boat from New Zealand in 1946, a small family of female refugees, without possessions, into the confusion and turmoil of that grey, pock-marked, war-torn city, London, with its rationed food and its icy cold, all of us living in one room with only a glimmer of gas to light and warm it, the State plied me with orange juice and cod-liver oil. It not just sent me to a ‘maintained’ grammar school, but paid for me to go, bought me my clothes, gave me free meals, sent me to university when I was seventeen to study Economics and Psychology and become part of the future. What you have in me is what the Attlee government made of me. I got a student’s grant of £167 a year plus tuition, paid for me by the London County Council, which seemed to me to be unbelievable riches, and which indeed, if you worked in the coffee shop in the evenings, was enough to keep you and indeed even buy you a second pair of shoes. And in the summers you hitched South: the world after the war seemed a safe and gentle place: it had got its violence out of its system. Now the violence is in the tent, not out of it. Forget hitch-hiking, we feel we can’t even let our children walk to school alone in safety. Lacking an outside enemy, the attack from Mars or a meteor from outer space, I fear it may well stay like that.
Conflict at the turn of the century, and indeed up to the middle of it, was solved by war, male antlers locking, carnage on the battlefront. War, at least in the mind, if not so much of course by those compelled to participate in it, was to do with courage, chivalry, sacrifice, nobility, prowess, endurance, patriotism. Traditional male virtues, now much despised. These days in our female way we negotiate, cajole, tempt, explain, forgive, apologise, touchy-feel our way to world peace, while small savage macho wars, mini-skirmishes, little spasms of ethnic cleansing, break out here and there.
The International Monetary Fund bales out the Japanese, the Russians: we look after our economic relatives: old enmities are forgotten. And of course this is preferable to war. But without our external enemies we turn inwards: societies and individuals go on self-destruct benders. Crime, drugs, the break-up of the family, the abandonment of children, the loneliness of the individual, the alienation of the young, the pause button so often on the sadistic act of violence on the TV: are all features of today’s peaceful, caring society. And perhaps they are all inevitable. Jung would talk about a process called enantiodromia, when all the currents of belief that have been running one way suddenly turn and run the other, in the same way a river zig-zags rather than flows steadily down a hill, reversing its direction when too much pressure mounts. The more smoothly the confining, caring, peaceful society seeks to conduct itself, the more likely some of its members are furiously to run in the wrong direction, lost to all responsibility and decent feeling, vandalising and tearing everything to bits as they go. It wasn’t what they wanted: it was never what they wanted. What they wanted – because the source of the trouble is mostly male – was to be allowed to be men in a society which so disapproves of maleness.
Signs of maleness – interpreted as aggression, selfishness, sexual addiction – are treated by the therapists and counsellors, who take the place of the old patriarchal priesthood: they are the new pardoners, forgiving our sins for the payment of money, releasing us from personal guilt. Women are confirmed in their traditional self-absorption: seek the authenticity of your own feelings, they cry. Go it alone! You know you can! Assert yourself, your right to dignity, to personal fulfilment! Never settle for second best.
And of course they are right, except, in the face of such stirring advice, and because in the new Garden of Eden men and women can, when once men and women couldn’t, marriages and relationships crumble and collapse. According to a recent poll in the women’s magazine, Bella, more than fifty percent of young women think a man isn’t necessary in the rearing of a child, and seventy-five percent think that if she wants to conceive a child when she doesn’t have a partner it’s better to go to a sperm bank than have a one-night stand. Seventy-five percent. Back at the turn of the century sex was something women put up with in return for a wedding ring and all that went with it, not something they were meant to enjoy. So what changes, in spite of what a lot of other women’s magazines have had to say on the joys of sex in between?
I am not lamenting the past. We live a whole lot longer than we did; that must prove something. Though quite how we keep our Zimmer frames polished I don’t know, as both the birth rate and the marriage rate falls. Many of today’s young will grow up to live alone and not with families: friends and colleagues will have to look after us, the New Adam and the New Eve, when we grow old, or break a leg, or are made redundant, or go mad or whatever. What price independence and self-assertion then? The State is increasingly determined not to look after us, and if our families are fragmented, how can we look after ourselves?
We are all so much weaker than we believe, than the myth of the strong man, even the new one of the strong woman, allows us to be. We need all the support we can have. And as for our financial arrangements! Good Lord, you can’t trust them. Banks collapse, as do whole national economies, nothing is secure, not even your Insurance Company, not even your PEPs. It’s understandable, I take the view. I belong to the robbed generation. I started work at the Foreign Office in 1953 – earning £6 a week as a temporary assistant clerk; I worked for some fifteen years, here or there, before I became self-employed, on PAYE, paying out a vast proportion of my weekly pay packet, or so it seemed to me at the time, for my Social Security stamp. Now I get the old age pension they promised me and it’s 44p a week. Robbed! And what about all those who having no savings, no longer able to earn, endure the indignity of having to ask for income support? Their mistake, having been told they were providing well enough for their futures, was to believe what they were told. Successive governments simply did a Maxwell with the pension funds, and didn’t even have the grace to acknowledge it, let alone jump overboard.
The State is increasingly cavalier with its dependants. I know of a man with two artificial legs who because he can walk across a room – just – doesn’t get incapacity benefit any more. It was withdrawn in the last so-called fraud purge, a few months back, when everyone on incapacity benefit was called to a fifteen minute interview with a non-specialist doctor and the lists cut across the board by some ten percent. Just like that. Sure you can appeal but if you do you lose a whole set of other benefits while you wait, and then how do you eat? Is so much misery worth so small a saving to the State?
The matter of the burden to the tax-payer of the benefit bill preoccupies government to an absurd degree. States with any spare money tend to go to war, and then we pay for that. Look at the books. Total government receipts, 1998, £309 thousand million. Total government expenditure £320 thousand million. We borrowed £11 thousand million from ourselves to balance the books. (You can get all these figures from the back of your Economist Desk Diary. Take off a few noughts from the sums and it’s no different from adding up your own cheque stubs.) Out of that £320 thousand million, Social Security costs us a mere £79 thousand million. I suspect one way or another we’d go on paying the same taxes even if we stopped spending on our poor relations altogether, and allowed the unemployed, the undertrained, the sick, the weak and the inadequate, the helpless in our highly complex society, to starve to death on the streets. And what kind of family would we be if we did this? How would we live with ourselves?
One of the phenomena of the late twentieth century has been the growth of political correctness, of self-censorship, a quite false belief that we have reached the pinnacle of proper understanding, and a fear of saying what we think in case we offend our friends. It becomes important that we all think the same: and indeed, the rise of emotional correctness requires that we all feel the same. We allow ourselves as little freedom of thought as if we were Marxist-Leninists, even though there’s no-one around to put us in prison. Sexism, it is held, contrary to the evidence of the eyes and the ears, can flow only one way, from man to woman, just as racism can flow only from white to black. That both are now two-way streets we find difficult to accept.
Sometimes it seems to me that with the fall of the Berlin wall freedom fled East and control fled West. Jung’s enantiodromia at it again. Turn, and run the other way down the tramlines. In Russia now see the worst excesses of venture capitalism and personal freedom, wealth which breaks all sumptuary laws brushing up against extreme poverty, an abundance of crime, coercion and murder, and the flight of altruism. While here in the West we have the creeping Sovietisation of our culture: the advent of a dirigiste government: we are controlled, surveyed, looked after, nannied, bureaucratised. We live amongst secrets: our news is manipulated. We all know it, but don’t much care. We have direction of labour. What else is Welfare to Work? If you can’t get your own job, take the one we give you. On which I notice the government spent £200 million last year, and did get a few actually back to work, but for the most part only temporarily. And for every person who got a job there must be another one put out of work – how can it be otherwise, when we still have a seven and a half percent unemployment rate. Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just go on paying out benefits and saved everyone a lot of aggravation, humiliation, cold calling and letter writing? Or better still created work for people to do? But that would interfere with the Bank of England’s belief that there is a ‘natural’ rate of unemployment – defined by them as the lowest rate compatible with stable inflation. They like it pretty much as is – not too high to cause rioting in the streets. High enough to keep workers in a state of anxiety and doing what they’re told. In the light of such official or semi-official policy, Welfare to Work projects look oddly like window dressing. Or, less cynically, the thinking goes like this. True, we need a calculable pool of people standing around doing nothing, to cool an overheating economy – but it’s just so irritating when they stand around. Let them at least be seen to be working at not-working, which is what the new Jobseekers’ Allowance amounts to.
Since the unemployed appear to be burnt offerings to the stability of our economy, martyrs in the cause of the low inflation and the high interest rates which keep the City happy, I think they should be treated with vast respect and allowed to live in peace, dignity and the utmost comfort.
As for the employed, the conviction seems to be that if only everyone works longer and harder, women alongside men, we’ll all be better off. But better off how? Where’s our Five-Year Plan? What exactly is all this effort for? And has no-one noticed that in spite of having the longest working hours in Europe we have the lowest productivity? Of course we do. We’re exhausted.
And we’re certainly no longer working for the children: they poor things are Kibbutzised, taken away from their parents and returned to them only at nights, so the parents are free to work to make the desert bloom. Which is all very well, but there’s no desert outside the window when the children look, and no drastic emergency, just a whole lot of new cars and new roads and new buildings and shoe shops and the Millennium dome.
We live now under Ergonarchy. By Ergonarchy I mean rule by the work ethic. Forget Patriarchy, rule by the father, it’s Ergonarchy which is woman’s current enemy, now that she’s joined the workforce. While she was doing battle with Patriarchy, Ergonarchy sneaked in under cover of darkness and ambushed her. Ergonarchy insists women work but goes on paying them less. This isn’t because Ergonarchy is male – Ergonarchy’s an automated accountant, neuter and blind and unable to tell one gender from another – but simply because women, if they have children, can’t give their bosses the time and attention they require, and so end up contributing less and getting paid less. Ergonarchy’s best friend being Market Forces.
And thus it will continue until society gets Ergonarchy under control, by the drastic measure of accepting that men are fathers too, and inviting them on board as equal parents. On the day when the problem of the working father is talked about as often as is the problem of the working mother, we will be getting somewhere. All children have two parents, though you’d never think it.
I am not suggesting, you must understand, that mothers should stay home and look after the children. I don’t want them forced back into the kitchen, heaven forfend, for this is just another kind of loneliness, albeit temporary. I want my Ministry for Human Happiness to ensure mothers are out there doing half as many hours for twice as much money.
Evidence of continuing male prejudice against women comes from the fact that the female wage is persistently lower than the male wage: though in Britain the gap is smaller than in the rest of Europe. But it is not on the whole the villainy and prejudice of men that leads to this undoubted inequity: it is the fact that the majority of women end up with children, and choose to give them more attention than they do their jobs. Even when partnered, many back off when the time comes for promotion, deciding that time for a personal and emotional life is more valuable than earning more money. The part-time nurse does not take the job as full-time ward sister, the TV researcher turns down the job as producer, because if they move up the ladder, when would they ever get to see the kids. The piece-worker in the home stitches shoes at 50p a pair because she has an ill child and is open to exploitation – not because she is a woman but because she is human being with a baby, and has no other options open to her. The earning capacity of the lone father (a fast growing group), falls as drastically as does that of the mother, when loneness strikes. While every working woman who has a small child pays another woman less than her own market value to look after the child – and she must, or she can’t afford the job – how can equality of wages be achieved? What meaning does ‘equal opportunities’ have, other than for the childless woman? If the statistics which told us about our comparative earnings made a distinction not just between men and women, but between men, childed women and unchilded women, we would begin to get somewhere – but they don’t. All women come under one heading. The fact that we do so well in the European league table suggests to me not that we’re moving towards gender equality, but that we have too many tired and overworked women with children amongst us.
We are barking up a dangerous and creaky old-fashioned seventies tree, when we go on struggling for equal wages, with the ardent encouragement of the government, when we would be better occupied turning men into resident and supporting fathers, instead of dismissing them from the case and saying, ‘Which way to the sperm bank?’ or, ‘How dare you treat me like this,’ or, ‘Oh I can manage alone and anyway there’s always the CSA, not to mention benefits. What makes you think I need a man?’
These days we tend to call our employment our ‘career’ and not our ‘job’. A career is something in which you compete with your colleagues for promotion, must be sharper and faster and harder working than they are, and put in longer hours. Thus we are divided and ruled, by big bosses so well hidden in the bureaucratic undergrowth it is next to impossible to fight them, let alone detect them.
There is no-one around these days to protect the employee – except now perhaps legislation out of Europe, for which God, male or female, be thanked. In the big State organisations – health, education, local government – accountants rule. Their duty is to cut costs and save the tax-payer’s money. So for the employee it’s all downgrading and re-writing of contracts, and here’s your redundancy money if you argue. The big companies look after the interests of share-holders first, customers second and employees last if at all. And the individual employer profits out of your skill and labour and always has but at least he’s around to meet your eye.
This Garden of Eden of ours is still open to Marxist interpretation, even in this the Age of Therapy.
Adam and Eve and pinch me
Went down to the river to bathe,
Adam and Eve were drowned,
And who do you think was saved?
Pinch Me, says the innocent child, and everyone runs round the playground screaming. Well, that’s how it used to be. The New Adam and the New Eve know better than to drown in the river, and the children’s playgrounds no longer ring with traditional rhymes: playtimes get shorter, and holidays too, as the schools adjust their working hours to the offices and not the other way round. The New Adam and the New Eve, victim of the Ergonarchy, have no time left to go down to the river and stand and stare, and contemplate the marvel of creation.
The New Adam, I say, and the New Eve. We are not what we were. Our instincts may lead us in the same old direction: our rational understanding leads us in another. Four things happened in the middle of the twentieth century to change our gender relationships profoundly and for ever, so that our nature and our nurture are no longer at peace. We’re just not used to it. The first two events are to do with medicine, the third to do with that powerful revolutionary idea, feminism, and the fourth to do with our new technological society. These are converging dynamics: you can’t have one without the other, like love and marriage back in the fifties. That was when we managed a marriage rate of nearly ninety percent, and the majority of those marriages were permanent. It can be managed.
The first event was female access to contraception. At the beginning of the century, as I say, contraception was illegal: it offended the Church – the flow of souls to God had to be maintained: it offended the State – whose need was for labour in time of peace and cannon-fodder in time of war. The convenience of authority sheltered, as ever, under the cloak of morality. From the sixties on, with the advent of the pill, gruesome in its early workings as it was, men no longer controlled female fertility. Sex was no longer intricately bound up with procreation: it could, and did, become recreational. A world outbreak of permissiveness, as we called it, with some relish. To have sex, in the New Age, you didn’t have to be married. And to be married, you didn’t have to have babies. Though it took a decade or so for people to get used to the idea, and the change to show through in the family-fragmentation statistics. But almost overnight men lost their traditional role, creator and protector of the family. The majority of men had lived up to their former responsibility very well. By and large, pre the nineteen-sixties, if you made a girl pregnant, you married her, and you looked after her and the child. Abortion was illegal, the world wasn’t set up for women to support themselves, and there were no State Benefits: other than that the State provided orphanages for abandoned children. Oddly enough, the moral censure thrown at the lone mother is greater today than it was back in the fifties, or that at least was my experience. Rash you may have been: lovelorn or deceived you probably were, and the consequences were dire enough without others feeling they had to join in, in condemnation.
The second great change is this. For the first time in history we have a preponderance of young men in our population. Young women are, believe it or not, in short supply. More men are always born than women – in this country it’s about one hundred and four males to every hundred females. But once upon a time illness, war and accident so sharply cut down the numbers of young men they were outnumbered by young women and so had a buyer’s market amongst them. It was they who picked and chose and women who did their best to attract. But young male life is safer now, thanks to medical care, the unfashionableness of war, and the trauma wards – and these days in all age groups up to forty-five men increasingly outnumber women: after that age the genders level-step until sixty or so, and with advancing age and man’s shorter lifespan, women once again begin to predominate. Today’s young woman does the sexual picking and choosing: she has the power to reject and uses it no better than the young man ever did. Women discover the gender triumphalism that once was the male’s preserve. See it in the ads. One for Peugeot at the moment: a brisk, beautiful, powerful young woman, followed by her droopy husband. She’s saying to the salesman, ‘It moves faster and it drinks less! Can they do the same for husbands?’ Try role-reversing that one! Does it matter? I suspect it does. It deprives men of their dignity: we all grow into what we are expected to be: this is the process of socialisation. Once women were indeed the little squeaky helpless domestic creatures the culture expected them to be. If we expect men to be laddish and appalling, that is how they will turn out. Where once it was the female fear that she might be left on the shelf, now, as young women get so picky, it is the man’s. We see the arrival of the men’s magazine: in which are discussed the arts of laddishness, flirtation, temptation, seduction: higher up the scale of sophistication, man as father, man as victim, man as sexual partner, man as cook. The way to a career woman’s heart is through her need for someone to do the childcare and the housework. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus but the space ships still need to flit between. Of course we are confused: courtship rituals are reversed. We have no traditions to fall back upon because tradition no longer applies. Poor us.
The third great change came with the seventies wave of feminism, when the personal became the political. In the course of writing a novel ‘Big’ Women (as opposed to ‘Little’ Women), in which I charted in fictional form the course of the feminist revolution, its causes, its progress, and its results. I came to realise the extent of the change we have lived through: to understand how difficult it is to see the wood for the trees.
The novel opens with two young women putting up a poster. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Outrageous and baffling at the time, it turned out to be true. That is to say, she didn’t need one at all. The world has changed, the laws have changed; our young woman is out into the world. She may be lonely at night sometimes but she has her freedom and her financial independence. She can earn, she can spend, she can party. She can choose her sexual partners, but is not likely to stick with them: somehow she outranks them. And she knows well enough that if she has a baby all this will end. And so, increasingly, she chooses not to. The fertility rate, 3:5 in 1901, is now down to 1:8 and falling, below replacement level. Which may be okay for the future of the universe, but isn’t good news for the nation. We lose our brightest and best.
And the fourth thing that happened was that in the last fifty years we stopped being an industrial nation and turned into a service economy, and male muscle became irrelevant. I remember the days when they said women would never work on camera crews because of the weight of the equipment. Now there’s the digital Sony camcorder. Put it in the palm of your hand, your tiny hand, no longer frozen. Anyone can use it.
Adam and Eve and Tony Blair, we all have a lot to cope with. And Pinch Me’s always hiding just around the corner, of course, waiting to spring: changing his form all the time, like the Greek god Proteus, to avoid having to tell us the future.
On being asked by the Features Editor of The Daily Telegraph to write a piece, in the wake of the Countryside March, in the early spring of 1998, to defend the city against the country.
Behind the Rural Myth (#uc174d3d3-0008-5304-a19f-90f94caa4c16)
The countryside is pretty.
It’s pretty because there are so few people in it. There are so few people in it because there are so few jobs in it. And that’s the nub of the matter.
Yes, you can have a mobile office. Anyone can work from home in these the days of the computer, e-mail, fax, phone and scanner. Who needs the soap-opera of office life? Who wouldn’t want green trees not concrete the other side of the window. So move out. Except it’s insanity, isn’t it? For aloneness, read loneliness. And the blinds stay down to keep the sun off the computer screen. And when the crunch comes you’re the first to go. If the boss has never seen your face why should he bother about the look on it? And try getting the dole in the country: it’s so personal. They don’t just dosh it out like they do in the city: no, they read every word you’ve written on the form you’ve just filled in, and compare last week’s answers, and look everything up in the book – they’ve got time – and say no. And you don’t belong.
The countryside is relaxing.
Yes. You can tell from the clothes of the people who come up on the Countryside March. They don’t have many full-length mirrors in the country; countryfolk being either too haughty and grand to need them or else the ceilings are too low to fit them in. That must be it. The countryside’s not for the vain – heels sink into the mud, like the heels of little Gerda’s pretty red shoes in the Hans Christian Anderson story. Down and down they pulled her, ‘til she stood in the Hall of the Mud King. The countryside’s all practical woolly mufflers and crooked hems and garments it would be a wicked waste to throw out. The country’s full of good worthy people. A good girl in the city is a bad girl in the country. In the country the hairstylists like to turn you out looking like their mother. Well, they do that anywhere in the world, but you get the feeling in the country that they don’t like their mothers very much. Not that it matters; go out for the evening and the place is hardly jumping with film crews and flashbulbs. Who’s to see you?
The countryside is healthy.
No. It isn’t. But it’s unkind to go into that one. Let’s just say, organophosphates have made fools of us all. What goes onto the crops and what goes into the soil? We moved to the country once – kept a tranquil flock of rare-breed sheep which roamed our fields, in the most natural of natural ways. We fed them sheep nuts by hand. What was in the sheep nuts? Ground-up protein from more than one animal of origin. ‘Dip them!’ said the government. We built a trough and pushed the startled, innocent animals in, one by one, dripping and shaking and spluttering, nerve poison all over the place. Oh, thanks!
Pollution drifts over the countryside from the cities, lingers over the valleys. And the pollen count! Good Lord. Just listen to the countryside sneezing and wheezing. The cottage hospital closes. The trauma ward’s an hour away. People live longer in the cities.
And yet, and yet! I know. The warm glow of the setting sun on the old barn walls. The brilliant acid green of early spring. The blackness of night, the great vault of the firmament. The sense of a benign and fecund nature, of being part of the wheeling universe.
But what’s weakness, irrationality. Let’s get back to the brisk facts of the matter.
The countryside is our heritage.
Fact is, it’s shrinking and shrinking fast: suburbia creeps out from the towns. Forty-one percent of British marriages end in divorce, and rising. Twenty-eight percent of us live in single-person households, and rising. We have to build houses and build we do. No choice. And where are the bus services to get us to work, from our new ‘countryside estates’? Not down our road, that’s for sure. And work still stays in the city, so travel we must, and travel we do, and use the car, and know every radio presenter by heart. The countryside becomes somewhere to go, not somewhere to be. A car park here, a car park there: this way the castle, that way the old oak tree, and a fast-food snack as you go! Oh, goodbye, countryside. What rats we are, to leave the sinking ship!
You’re not cut off when you move to the country. Friends will visit.
Well … the friends from the city who came down at first don’t seem to come any more. For a time they overlooked the fact that you’d deserted them, ran out on them, which is what you did, come to think of it. Nobody likes that. looked down your nose at their way of life and left them. So soon the inconvenience gets to them: the overnight bag, the traffic, and the hours that stand between you and them, your strange new friends with straw in their hair wearing long strands of New Age beads, and no proper signal for the mobile, and you’ve been nowhere and seen nothing except the back of the Aga. They settle you in, and their duty done, abandon you. Serves you right.
And the friends who do persist just seem to want a free weekend (well of course they do: what did you expect?) with you cooking and washing up because now you’re in the country that’s the kind of thing you do, isn’t it? Back to nature, back to the sink, and what, no home-made bread? Friends who seemed perfectly civilised for the length of a dinner, reveal over a weekend all kind of gross personal traits. Eat breakfast in their pyjamas, or smoke dope in front of the children, or complain about no dry towels, and quarrel with your neighbours, knowing you’re stuck with them and they can leave.
Let’s compromise. Let’s try a country cottage.
That one used to work, and very well, when husbands had nine-to-five jobs and wives stayed home and looked after the kids. But that’s in the past. Then there was time and energy to work out the logistics of transporting a family, its goods, its bedding, its games and toiletries, to a place some scores of miles away on Friday nights and the reverse process on Sunday evening. Plus guests. And it was lovely, if you were skilled at logistics, that is. Log-fires and cheerful talk and mild drunkenness and happy flirtations and country walks and pink cheeks and a ploughman’s lunch at the pub and no-one worried about drink-and-drive. Oh paradise.
But nine-to-five drifts to eight-to-eight. And Saturday mornings too, and women are working, and the mobile phone and the laptop turns Sundays into Mondays, and the traffic’s worse, and they’ve tarmacked the track and lopped the trees and it’s sensible, but the romance has gone. There’s a strong steel fence where you used to nip under the wire, and the badger set’s been cleared for fear of TB, and what’s that smoke on the horizon – surely not a funeral pyre for the poor dead cows? Or else the Right-to-Roamers have found a footpath through your garden, past your very own back window.
When change comes in the countryside, it’s seldom for the better. And the village store has closed. Okay so you never went in it – if you did they always said, pointedly, ‘Haven’t seen you for a long time’ – so it got embarrassing; but you like it to be there. Say no to the country cottage; it isn’t what it was!
The countryside’s good for the children.
Yes. But you wouldn’t think it to listen to them. They don’t sound all that appreciative. They look at TV a lot. They miss McDonald’s and the corner shop. There’s a strange-looking man lurking in the playing fields, and you see drugs behind every hedge. There’s nothing for the kids to do. Mother turns into a taxi-service, unpaid. They’ve got to see their friends, learn to ride, remedial speech, whatever. Mother’s gloomy and bored. Father’s commuting, now the home-office idea has collapsed, and becomes part of the divorce statistics. He met someone cheerful on the train. Someone who, like him, longs for a loft apartment in Islington – and if both country houses were sold and each took their half, and mother kept the children – well, they are her life – why then the move back to the city could just about be managed. For him. What’s good for the children is not necessarily good for the marriage.
But who’s listening? ‘We’re moving out,’ friends say, thrilled to the gills. ‘It will be different for us.’ And so it may be, and so I hope it will be. Humankind cannot live by reason alone, nor should they try to. And it is the spring, after all. And the mud’s drying out. And the early sun catches the hill-tops, and the wheat field’s sprouting green and strong, and lambs bounce in the fields, and what’s so good about here anyway?
The entrance to the Garden of Eden may no longer be barred by a flaying sword, but Mother has to get back to the baby. No way she can enter.
Mothers, Who Needs ’Em? (#uc174d3d3-0008-5304-a19f-90f94caa4c16)
Not employers, certainly. Mothers demand equal wages but have their minds on things other than their employer’s interests. Sick babies, for example, toddlers with chickenpox, sudden calls to the school, childcare. Mothers can’t be asked to stay late, won’t do overtime, use the phone a lot, won’t relocate, demand maternity leave. And they don’t look so good in the front office either.
ERRATUM: sweatshop employers rather like mothers. Desperation means mothers will put up with anything. No-one else will do the job, anyway.
Fathers, on the other hand are much like anyone else. Sometimes they take an afternoon off for the Christmas play, or for a session with Relate, and insist on having their holidays in August, but otherwise who notices?
ERRATUM: lone fathers of course count as mothers. Same problem. Who needs ’em?
You can’t blame employers. They’re not philanthropists. The rational aim of the individual employer is to make a profit out of the worker’s time and labour. If the employer is a company it must put the profit of the shareholder before the interests of the worker (let alone the customer). If the employer is the State – a shrinking section of the new economy – managers and accountants take the place of the old-fashioned boss. Their object is to save money, not make money. Which puts the employee in exactly the same situation: the pressure is on for longer hours and lower wages.
The working class can kiss my arse,
I’ve got the charge-hand’s job at last.
– as they used to sing in the old Marxist days. Thank you, Mr Blair.
Not that anyone admits to being working class any more. Who wants the Union to fight for their rights? It’s an indignity. Except we all go on working and earning, especially mothers, harder and longer than ever. Forget lone mothers, one average pay-packet is scarcely enough to keep even a family with a father in Pot Noodles, petrol for the car and Nikes for the kids. So out she goes to work, which is fine in one way because being with small children alone in a house can drive you crackers, but not in another because cramming stiff unwilling arms into coat sleeves on a winter’s morning in order to be at the nursery by eight and work by nine is no fun. When you and the child are half asleep.
It’s no use the self-righteous (usually the childless, who can afford to be minimalist) telling you you’re being ‘greedy’ or ‘materialistic’: you should magically do without the extra money. You have to have a new car because the old one breaks down on the way to work, and where’s the public transport? And you have to have a microwave because there’s no time for ‘proper’ cooking. It’s a vicious circle. Since the introduction of the poll tax no-one has been able to live cheaply.
Mothers, who wants ’em? Stay at home (if you’re lucky) and be told you’re boring and unaspirational. Go out to work and be told you’re breeding delinquents.
Mothers, who wants ’em? Not the State. Mothers are a drain on the national purse. They’re either lone or divorced and on benefit or claiming low income family supplement, or kicking up a fuss because their child didn’t get to the school of its choice, or failing to teach it its times-tables before it gets to school or irresponsibly going out to work so it ends up delinquent.
Mothers, who wants ’em? Not even children. The crèche, the nursery, the school, the after-hours homework club takes the place of home. As the traditional family turns into a unit with two breadwinners and no parent, children learn to do without mothers very fast. (Even grandmother’s out at work.) The teacher, the peer group, television and youth culture become more important in their lives, are a greater cultural influence. Watch the four-year-olds dancing to the Spice Girls. And that can be even if you don’t go out to work.
What’s to be done? This is not a happy situation for mothers. Everyone wants to be needed. Feminism has been the only movement in recent times to turn its attention to matters of social justice, personal dignity and the quality of our lives. Let the New Feminists attend to these rather than the gap between male and female wages. Let them stop congratulating themselves on how happy they are to wear lipstick and what a good thing Mrs Thatcher was, and extend their remit. Let them start by diving the world into four separate categories, not two, and looking at what is really going on. Men, Women, Mothers, Fathers, not just Male and Female. Let them bring about a society in which there is parity of parenting. So ‘the problem of the working father’ is as much talked about as ‘the problem of the working mother’. Younger men, trained by earlier feminists to have full and loving relationships with their children, will co-operate. Apart from a few emotional dinosaurs. We might all even end up working less hard, having fuller lives, and happier relationships with our children.
As for Mrs Thatcher, it was she, remember, who in repealing the Shops Act took away the right of the shop assistant to have a chair.
As written for Harpers Bazaar, New York, to celebrate the New Year, 1998, and a New Age, in which New Eve rules in the Garden of Eden, and New Adam feels weaker for the loss of a rib.
The Feminisation of Politics (#uc174d3d3-0008-5304-a19f-90f94caa4c16)
Back in the seventies the feminists argued that the personal should become the political. So it did. The word sexism was coined, men (in this scheme of the universe) could no longer operate by dividing and ruling; a woman might be a victim by virtue of her gender, but she no longer cried into her pillow alone. Her woes, politicised, became the stuff of legislation and social disapproval.
Time and the process rolled inexorably on and lo! one day we woke up (some say the morning after Princess Diana’s death) to find that the political had become the personal, and that person was a woman. Not perhaps the nicest woman in the world, perhaps now the archetype of the wicked stepmother (sweeping out everything that went before); not lisping like a fairy princess, but certainly speaking in a womanly tongue. Here in Britain, Tony Blair’s New Labour Party presents itself as female, using the language of compassion, forgiveness, apology, understanding and nurturing – qualities conventionally attributed to women.
The Conservative Party, who ruled the country for the greater part of a hundred years, is to all intents and purposes no more; the old male values – so epitomised in John Major’s grey-suited self – of gravitas, responsibility, self-discipline, the Protestant work-ethic, stiff upper-lippedness, the appeal to reason and intellect – have vanished in the sudden wind of gender change. They try to learn the new language fast: the old philanderer Parkinson talks of love; the hard case Portillo, once scourge of the immigrant, talks of caring and compassion; William Hague, the new Tory leader, takes off his tie and undoes his top button, and wears his baseball cap back to front, but it’s all too late, too late. They were too old and too male too long to be credible now. This is the Age of the Anima. Male voters searched for it in themselves and found it.
This stuff may be catching. Does not President Clinton eschew penetrative sex, does not his nation forgive him his waywardness on this account? The otherwise strange behaviour of the feminists in failing to condemn in this analysis becomes explicable. A sweet smile, a confiding air, as he sets about nurturing. What price masculinity now? Let American spin doctors keep an eye on what happens in Britain. The symptoms of social change tend to surface here first, erupt in spots, if only because we began first. First to abandon the feudal system, to endure agricultural and industrial revolutions, to fight Germany; Thatcherite monetarism started here. Flu may spread from Asia, and economic confusion, but for the infectious mechanics of cultural change, the converging dynamics of religion, politics and feminism, watch this space.
One way or another along the path, the gender switch was thrown, the male-female polarities were reversed. Even God has become female. He is no longer the single bearded patriarch in the sky, Lord of Guilt and Retribution, to whom one kneels, but She of the multiple personality, Mother Nature, creator and healer of all, Goddess of victims and therapees everywhere. Princess Diana dies. Gay Sir Elton John sings the lullaby, the new women priests nod and smile, Tony Blair takes the Queen’s arm, daughter-like, the candles flicker in the wind and the ceremony is complete. The bearded patriarch slips out the Great West Door at Westminster Abbey, and dissolves in the scent of a million, million, tearful roses.
Politics, in this new gender theory of the universe, ceases to be a matter of right or left, Conservative or Labour, Republican or Democrat. Confrontation is demoded. The old language no longer applies. It is not the rulers against the people, management against labour, the rich against the poor, the strong against the weak – all that fell with the Berlin Wall – rather it is the animus fighting a losing battle against the anima. Even the old Freudian concept of the superego, like the Conservative Party, has vanished in the wind of change: the id now acts without restraint or overview. The old complain that the young are de-politicised, but where are they to go? Where are the young to find their resentments, other than in themselves? What price revolution now, since the enemy is within? The harm was done by an unkind mother, an abusing father, a cold spouse, not by any grievous social arrangement. Let us change ourselves, not change the world. The government may rule in peace.
Sure, in today’s Britain people of all parties still unite. They will raise their banners to save the noble tree and the poor hunted fox: the Rights of Man is extended now to the Rights of all Sentient Creatures above the Ranks of Roaches, and anyone who saw the film Men in Black will know that even that last barrier begins to fall. The Humanitarian Society of America, so we are told, in case you think it’s only in Britain, counted in four hundred roaches a day onto the set and checked them back out at night, to make sure not a single one had been harmed in the making of that film. Nor were they. The ones who got crushed by a human boot were made of plastic with yellow slime filling. It was only after a day’s filming that the fumigators were sent in to control the native inhabitants. We are beset by an excess of empathy: how we feel for others, even insects! Men and women both, we are thoroughly female, in the traditional, not the power-dressed, sense.
I am reminded of the joke about a certain conjurer, entertainer on the Titanic. Every afternoon he’d make his parrot disappear. ‘Where’d it go, where’d it go?’ his delighted audience would yell. The ship sinks. Parrot and conjurer barely escape with their lives. For days they float upon a raft. The parrot keeps silent. The conjurer assumes it’s traumatised. But after three days the parrot speaks. ‘All right, all right, I give in. Where’d the bloody ship go?’
We were only playing feminism. Now where’s the bloody opposition gone? Down the gender divide, that’s where. I write, you must understand, more of patterns of thinking and speaking than of anything so vulgar and simple as generative parts. If women can wear trousers and still be female, men can wear trousers and be women in spirit. (The English language hampers us by defining only men and women as male and female: the French, with their ‘le’ and their ‘la’ do it to the whole world, including abstract notions, and a very fine thing that is.) In New Britain see woman-think and woman-speak. The marginalisation of the intellect is registered under the heading ‘seeking a feeling society’; a pathological fear of elitism as ‘fairness to others’; the brushing aside of civil liberties as ‘sensitivity to the people’s needs’. The frightening descent into populism becomes merely a ‘responsiveness to the voters’ wants’. New Labour is to put lone mothers and the disabled on harsh Welfare to Work schemes – ‘tough choices, long-term compassion’. And all this is brought about by men in open-necked shirts, not necessarily heterosexual, on first name terms, speaking the deceptively gentle language of the victor.
The personal became the political, the political personal, and lo! that woman was a female, and victorious. The gender switch was thrown and women turned into the oppressors of men, and men, as victims will, retaliate by taking on the role of those who oppress them. The first step that women took in their emancipation was to adopt traditional male roles: to insist on their right to wear trousers, not to placate, not to smile, not to be decorative. The first step men have taken in their self-defence is to adopt the language of Therapism; a profoundly female notion this: that all things can be cured by talk. (By Therapism I mean the extension of what goes on in the psychotherapist’s consulting room into the social, political and cultural world – but more of that later.)
Now it is no easy thing to suggest to women that men have become their victims. That, as Ibsen remarked in An Enemy of the People, give or take twenty years and the truth turns into a lie. That what was true for the nineteen-seventies – that women had a truly dreadful time by virtue of their gender – had ceased to be true by the nineteen-nineties. For murmuring some such thing recently in The Guardian, I was described in the Sunday Telegraph as the Winnie Mandela of the feminist world. I will survive.
Perhaps, I suggested, feminism in Britain goes too far. I know it’s hardly even begun to move in many parts of the world, but here at home perhaps the pendulum of change has stuck and needs nudging back to a more moderate position? I used as evidence the fact that in middle-class London mothers long for baby girls and have to bite back disappointment if they have boys. Girls are seen as having a better life ahead of them. Girls do better at school – even in traditionally male subjects as maths and the sciences – gain better qualifications, are more cooperative about the house, find it easier to get jobs, make up a smaller proportion of the unemployed, and in the younger age groups already break through the old ‘glass ceiling’ into the top income brackets. Women are better able to live without men than men are to live without women. Married men live longer than unmarried ones: the position is reversed for women. Sons are more likely to be born Down’s syndrome, autistic or criminal and not to survive beyond the age of twenty-five. (Dare-devil activities carry off many a lad.) Daughters will provide their own dowries, and look after you in your old age. Who wants boys? Girl power triumphs. Women have won the revolution.
Roundly I am chastised for such heretical views. The perception remains that women are the victims, that men are the beasts. Women are the organising soft-centred socialists, the nice people, the sugar and spice lot, identifying with the poor and humble: men are slugs and snails and puppy-dog tails and rampant, selfish, greedy capitalists. No wonder conservative and puritanical politicians, for such ours are, adopt female masks. It’s the boys who these days suffer from low self-esteem, don’t speak in class, lack motivation, hang around street corners, depressed and loutish. It is the men, not the women, who complain of being slighted, condemned by virtue of gender to casual and automatic insult. ‘Oh men!’ say the women, disparagingly. Males hear it all the time, in the workplace and in the home, at the bus stop and over the dinner-table, and suffer from it. No tactful concessions are made to male presence. Men, the current female wisdom has it, are all selfish bastards; hit-and-run fathers; potential abusers/rapists/paedophiles; all think only with their dicks, and they’d better realise it. So men shrink, shrivel and under-perform, just as women once did. So where’d the bloody men go?
‘Serves the men right,’ I hear the women say. ‘We’re glad if they suffer a bit, after all those centuries! Give them a taste of their own medicine.’ Except, except! Feminism was never after vengeance; simply justice. And it is hard to argue these days that women are still victims in a patriarchal world. In the new technological society, their smaller size does not handicap them: machines do the heavy labouring. Female fingers are nimbler on the computer. Women are economically independent of men: they control their own fertility, and need have children only if they want to. They fill the universities, and the restaurants. True, they have menstrual cycles and tend to swap, weep and drop things from time to time, but this is no handicap any more, just fashionable: men are to be pitied for their month-in, month-out sameness. Dull. And Nurofen cures the headache. Exercise eases the need for sex. If women are victims it is from choice not necessity: an agreeable whiff of recurrent erotic masochism.
Meanwhile young nineties men grow restless under the scourge of insult. They offer the same excuses for their passivity as once women used to. ‘A masculinist movement? Don’t be absurd. Men will never get together against female oppression,’ they say. ‘Individual men don’t want to offend individual women. They’re too competitive with other men ever to pull together, except for a few religious nuts who want to put women back in the home.’
But I remember women saying exactly the same thing of themselves, back in the seventies, before the truth became the lie. ‘Feminism will never work,’ pessimists said. ‘Women are too catty, too bitchy – a function of competition for the male – ever to get together.’ It just wasn’t true. Sufficiently oppressed, women acted, and brought about a new world.
Now it’s the men who complain of being used as sex objects, thrown out of the bed and the home after a one-night stand, waiting by phones for the call. If they make sexual overtures they are accused of harassment. Males must ask before they touch, and impotence lies in the asking. If a man wants a child he must search for a woman prepared to give him one. If he succeeds, if the woman doesn’t change her mind and have a termination, he is expected to bond with the baby and do his share of minding and loving. And yet the baby can still be snatched away; if the relationship goes wrong he has no rights. Fathers can find themselves driven from the home with no warning, the locks changed, a new lover in the bed they once occupied, minimum visitation rights to the children, and alimony to pay. They suffer.
Yes, yes, I tell my critics, I know that for every one male horror story there are probably ten that are female, but ten wrongs don’t make a right. And since the men seem too terrified to speak, or are too extremist to be taken seriously, someone has to speak for them.
Look, I say, don’t get me wrong. Women shouldn’t be complacent. The price of female liberation is eternal vigilance. Men could revert to type easily enough. (See, the in-built assumption that there’s something wrong with the male ‘type’!) Maintaining a just society in an unjust world is no easy matter. This is still the age of the Taleban. In Afghanistan women who were once engineers, teachers, writers, social workers, earners of all kinds, have been driven back indoors and shrouded in black by fanatical young men who live by principle however odd that principle may seem to us.
It is not likely to happen here, I say, but nasty surprises can still occur. Supposing Tony Blair isn’t just a wicked stepmother putting her house in order, throwing out the poor relations and hangers on, supposing she’s just a man in drag after all and a woman-hater?
Let no-one forget that Hitler solved Germany’s high unemployment problems at one fell swoop, by simply banning women from most of its workplaces. One wage earner per family please, and that wage earner the man. And Hitler, like Blair, spent the early populist years, just like any other politician, having his picture taken with dogs and children. Women are right to be fearful.
The Blairs fall down rather on the dumb animal front, as it happens. Cherie failed to love the Downing Street cat, Humphrey, sufficiently for public taste. Indeed, it was rumoured that she’d had the poor, mangy, incontinent old thing put down. But the murmurings of the people quickly produced pictures of Humphrey safe and sound if looking surprisingly young, retired, ‘living quietly’ in a distant suburb, away from the hurly-burly of No 10. No-one quite believed it. And then Tony’s offer to ‘ban hunting’ and save the poor fox somehow seemed to hang fire – the foxes still flee, the hounds still run, the horns still sound over the green English countryside.
The electorate worries about this, more than it does about the projected abolition of the House of Lords, the new government’s habit of issuing edicts and by-passing Parliament, the strange programmed zombification of hitherto lively and intelligent politicians as dull-eyed and brain-washed they spout the party line. If I were the Blairs I’d quickly get a dog – preferably not a beagle lest anyone forgets and holds it up by its ears. No, a corgi would be better: one of the palace puppies perhaps – to restore the first family’s animal-loving credentials.
In ‘women’ I do not, by the way, include the category ‘mother’. Mothers remain a separate case. The feminist movement does not know what to do with them and never has. The child cries, the mother hurts and runs home and no amount of conditioning seems to cure it. The ‘problem of the working mother’ seems insoluble; ‘the problem of the working father’ is never referred to by either employers or government, though paying proper attention to it, I do believe, would pretty soon solve the technological society’s overlong, over-exhausting work schedules. Paradoxical that the more automated the society, the harder and longer everyone seems to have to work. But all that’s another story.
See feminism and politics as a converging dynamic: see another one creeping up on the outside, a softly implacable, bendy-rubber force, that of Therapism, surging alongside the others into the Parisian tunnel, into that solid concrete wall, to meet the sleek, phallic Mercedes which was to make a martyr of Diana. (Ah Di, poor Di, what you are responsible for!)
Therapism is the ‘therapy’ we are all familiar with entered into public life: a belief structure edging in to take the place of Christianity, Science, Marxism – all overlapping, none coinciding – as those three fade away in a miasmic cloud into the past. Therapism gives us a new idea of what people are, why we are here; one which denies God, denies morality, is ‘value-free’, which rejects the doctrine of original sin – the notion that we were born flawed but must struggle for improvement and replaces it with the certainty that we were all born happy, bright and good and would be able to stay this way if only it weren’t for harsh circumstances or faulty parenting. It is a cheerful idea espoused by the nicest and kindest of people, which is why it’s so hard to refute. It is also dangerous.
This being the Age of Therapism we turn our attention, like Princess Diana in the famous BBC interview, to our anorexic and bulimic selves, not to the state of the nation. We see ourselves as wronged, not wronging, victims not persecutors; we ally ourselves with the underdog. We ‘felt’ our way to a Blair victory, didn’t ‘think’ it. When it comes to a decision about joining the common European currency, abandoning the Pound Sterling for the obnoxious new Euro, it’s the people’s intuition which is to decide the issue, not their judgement. A referendum’s to be held; let the people emote their way to the truth, since even the nation’s economists are defeated by the complexities of the matter.
This being the Age of Therapism, my local school, which has a leaking roof and no pens or pencils for the children, recently enjoyed a visit by a team of forty counsellors. They stayed for two weeks. Talk and listen, talk and listen. Adapt the child to its circumstances: reality is only in the head.
This being the Age of Therapism, the NSPCC, which knows how to wring hearts and raise funds, now focuses its ads along the lines, ‘Just £15 will provide counselling for a child.’ Forget hunger, poverty, wretchedness. Talk and listen, talk and listen. All will be cured.
Therapism absolves us of personal blame. The universe is essentially good! The fat aren’t greedy, or genetically doomed: no, their unaesthetic shape is caused by abusive fathers. (All switch! In Mother Nature’s new creation the old man is the villain of the piece, as in Father God’s it was the female witch.) As in Erewhon, our criminals are mentally ill, poor things, and the ill (as in AIDS) are the criminals. They didn’t eat right. All things are mendable; the paedophile and the rapist can be cured by talk and investigation of the past; the police, unlikely to catch the robber, can put the robbed in touch with their Victims’ Support Group. All will be well, and all will be well. Once Christianity was the opium of the people: now its sleeping draught is Therapism.
Poor suffering wretches that we remain, but now without sin, without guilt, and so without possibility of redemption, searching for a contentment which remains elusive. Though at least we cry ‘Love, Love, Love,’ not ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’. We strew flowers in St Diana’s royal parks, where’ere she trod, and try not to sew land mines.
Therapism demands an emotional correctness from us – we must prefer peace to war, tranquillity to stress, express our anger so it can be mollified, share our woes, love our children (though not necessarily our parents) and sacrifice our contentment to theirs, ban guns, not smoke, give voice to our low opinion of men (if we are women), and refrain from giving voice to our low opinion of women (if we are men), and agree that at any rate we were all born happy, bright, beautiful and free, and what is more, equal. This latter makes educational policy difficult: Mr Blair, little Mother of the Nation, loves us all the same: we must all strive for academic achievement and when we grow up must all work from nine to five, or eight to six or seven; not because work pays the rent, but because work makes you free.
‘Take up thy bed and work’ as The Daily Telegraph recently subheaded a rather extraordinary article in which a bold new Social Security Secretary of State declared that the disabled must not be condemned to a life of dependence on State Benefits. This government has the opportunity and the mandate – a familiar phrase from ministerial lips since the Blair Government swept into power – to reform the Welfare State so that it provides proper help and support in order to allow those people who can work to do so, while helping those who cannot work to live independently and with dignity. Disability grants, in other words, are to be cut. And indeed, and in fairness to the government in its new stepmother mode, she certainly finds her house cluttered up by unfortunate poor relations she truly cannot afford to keep. If only at the same time she didn’t throw quite so many good parties. (£7 million worth, they say, at Downing Street alone, since the election was won, attended by pop stars and flibberty-gibbets.) If only, ancient mutton dressed as lamb, stepmother didn’t keep claiming to be so cool and young and new; miniskirting those old blue-veined legs.
Everything’s being re-logoed. British Airways loses its flag and crown and becomes a flying gallery for ‘new, young’ artists – those two adjectives apparently being sufficient recommendation for excellence. (I won’t fly BA any more: the tail-fins bring out the critic in me.) The retiring head of the British Council in Madrid – the BC is the cultural arm of the Foreign Office – told me sadly the other day that its logo is to change too: from admittedly mysterious but at least recognisable rows of orange dots to something that demonstrates the Council is ‘all about people’. ‘But it isn’t about people,’ I protested. ‘It’s about civilisation, culture, ideas, the arts.’ Said he, sadly, ‘I wish you’d been at the meeting.’ Claim that anything is ‘about people’, magic words, and all opposition melts away. Diana reigns!
Stepmother doesn’t like other women much. Doesn’t want rivals. She gives them hot potatoes to hold and sniggers when they drop them. Clare Short of International Development, Mo Mowlam of Northern Ireland, and Harriet Harman of Social Security were all too powerful and popular not to be given office when the transition from old to New Labour was made. Clare Short is manoeuvred into taking the rap for Foreign Office bungling over the evacuation of Montserrat when the volcano erupted: Mo Mowlam is held personally responsible for failing to solve a two-hundred-year-old Irish problem within the year: sweet, pretty Harriet Harman, taking the rap for doing no more than mouth Treasury policy, is now universally disliked as cold and cruel. Oh, stepmother’s a smooth operator, all right.
When Diana died, when the black Mercedes crumpled, when the gender switch was finally thrown, when the male-female polarities reversed, when we all took to weeping in the streets and laying flowers, there was, let it be said, an ugly moment or so. That was when Monarchy, male in essence, headed by a head-scarved Queen, refused to show itself as emotionally correct. The Queen wouldn’t lower the royal flag to half-mast: the Prince declined to share his grief with his people. (Nor was that grief allowed to be in the least ambivalent: it was as if the divorce and the infidelities had never happened.) For an hour or so the milling crowd outside Buckingham Palace took on a dangerous mien. The people were angry. For once they wanted not bread, or circuses, not even justice – just an overflowing female response to tragedy. Forget all that dignified ‘private-grief’ stiff upper lip stuff. The crowd got their way. The flag was hauled down. The Prince shared his grief.
Since then the Palace too has shown a female face. Prince Charles is photographed with the Spice Girls, is seen tie-less with his arms around his boys, turns up somewhere in Africa to apologise for Britain’s behaviour in the past and has never been so popular. Even Prince Philip, that dinosaur out of the old patriarchal era, turned up on the occasion of the Royal Golden Wedding Anniversary to apologise to his wife. ‘She’s had a lot to put up with.’ The Queen glittered terrifically in a gorgeous outfit and looked pretty and smiled. Tony Blair escorted her once again as might an affectionate and indulgent daughter.
Women win.
Taking the plough to the Garden. The earth’s so stony: nothing blooms any more without effort. Written for the New Statesman as New Labour prepared its manifesto, preparatory to taking over the reins of government.
What This Country Needs Is: (#uc174d3d3-0008-5304-a19f-90f94caa4c16)
– So vast and profound a re-organisation of its manners and customs it’s hardly worth even dreaming of.
– But given the dream; a world in which utopianism ceases to be a dirty word: and a vision arises of a human society which echoes actual human needs; in which it’s recognised that daily nine-to-five work (if you’re lucky) is inappropriate in a prosperous technological society in which machines and computers do the donkey-work, and was never much cop anyway. (People wake and sleep in rhythm – sixteen hours on, eight hours off, roughly – but endeavour tends to come in bursts – weeks on, weeks off: how can nine-to-five be anything but a tedious pain?) In which over-manning is seen as desirable, and inflation is not a devil to be feared and loathed. In which everyone can walk to work. In which every child is a planned and wanted child and parenthood a matter of a joint opting in, not a failure to opt out, and compulsory parental leave (both parents) extends for six years (that would soon cut the birth rate): thirty million is probably a good workable level for the nation. In which school is not compulsory, but in which TV and film fiction is banned by order of the censor general: too much fiction is bad for you. So boredom, not the law, drives the young to school. In which people have enough confidence to see that the cloning of people is a perfectly possible route for humanity’s future. If nature creates the Taleban can human ingenuity do so much worse? Courage, courage!
Okay, I’m joking.
Failing all this, I’d settle for one little simple change in the law. That someone who leaves their employment because they’re expected to do something immoral or disgusting isn’t then declared to be wilfully unemployed and ineligible for unemployment or housing benefit. Employees once had the courage to blow whistles: now it is too difficult. It’s a pity. Societies are self-righting, given just half a chance.
‘Oh well, business as usual,’ was my mother’s sighing response to news of NATO’s bombing of Serbia. ‘How the menfolk love a war.’
Take the Toys from the Boys (#uc174d3d3-0008-5304-a19f-90f94caa4c16)
Look at the pictures coming out of the Kosovo war. What do you see? Men with blood lust. Men in uniforms, waving guns like phalluses: men in iron tanks, pounding and crushing. The men have got war fever again. Men launching cruise missiles, smart bombs; men having a great time with the toys of death, all the hard metal technology of killing and destruction. Older men back home proving they’re still virile and brave, spouting noble sentiments, sending young men to their deaths. This village must be destroyed to save it! Slobodan Milosevic, the old Stalinist hardman, happy to face death rather than dishonour. Into the bunker like Hitler, while the nation collapses into rubble around him. No-one’s going to give in, no-one’s going to back down, males antlers are locked.
What else do you see in the pictures out of Kosovo? Women and children suffering, of course, the natural female sacrifice to the God of War. What fun the men have, stampeding them from their homes. Not just ethnic cleansing, domestic cleansing, atavistic, of the pitiable and pitiful, the too young or too old to breed.
Couldn’t we perhaps get a gender perspective on what’s going on? This is the War of Lewinsky’s Mouth, of Tony proving his virility. All the electorate-friendly girlie touchy-feeling sentiments gone like a flash: let’s show some muscle here! Let’s forget about the Euro, about the collapsing Peace Accord, about education, education, education, every Scottish school a computer, the composition of the Second House; all that domestic stuff’s so boring, let’s be men, let’s bring Milosevic to heel.
It’s enough to turn you back into a feminist, holding hands around the US cruise missile site at Greenham, chanting take the toys from the boys: that was when the wimmin were fed up with living in the terror of nuclear threat.
‘Take the toys from the boys
Take their hands off the guns,
Take their fingers from the trigger,
Take the toys from the boys.’
But that was then and this is now. The trouble with the gender perspective at the turn of the millennium is that the sex divide is not so clear. Women are men too. They wear trousers, join the Army, beam blondely from tanks: Madeleine Allbright initiates the hard line: Clare Short declares pacifists to be fascists, Blair’s Babes bay for blood. White feathers are back in fashion. And our reconditioned, therapised men have discovered their anima. They run the Aid agencies, care and share, fund raise for refugees, train the army to keep the peace and not to kill (SAS excepted), pick up the pieces while others make the mess.
But that’s in the NATO countries. In the former Yugoslavia men stay men and women stay women. The God of War found his opening in the gap between the cultures, alighted laughing with his uranium tipped, incendiary wings, fanned the flames of discontent, cried havoc! and that was it.
Once unleashed the dogs of war are hard to recall, no matter what mantra you chant as you let them go. ‘In the name of humanity.’ ‘An ethical war.’ ‘They deserve it!’ If you’re one of the women and children, does the nationality of the bomb that kills you bother you? Whether it was meant or accidental, justified or not, or who apologises? It’s the end for you.
Once we send in the ground troops, albeit on the side of good, will the uprooted and dispossessed ever be able to return to Kosovo? The favoured weapons of destruction today are tipped with depleted uranium, the metal that’s left over when the radioactive element has been extracted to make even more fearful weapons. Depleted uranium (DU to its friends) is cheap and plentiful and safe, just so dense that when fired with enormous speed, as it is, it pulverises itself and the first thing it meets, without the bother of explosives. A mist of heavy metal rises and falls, permanently poisoning the earth. Such missiles are already being launched over Kosovo. When a shell meets the metal of a tank that turns to dust as well, and falls in a pinkish mist, mixed as it is with human blood. Depleted uranium was used in Southern Iraq in the Gulf War: the level of leukaemia in the children who live there is now, they say, equal to that of Hiroshima. Already, in the heart of Europe, the Danube is polluted, oil and toxic waste runs free.
What form exactly does the ‘unconditional surrender’ we now require take? Are we dogs, that one has to roll over on its back with its legs in the air, to stop the other biting? Wars are not for ‘winning’ any more. The victor has to clear up the mess, pay the costs of the conquered too. Serbia may be punished for electing the wrong man, just as Germany once was, but Serbians can’t be left to starvation and epidemic, any more than can the Kosovan refugees. Massive aid will be required to get the country on its feet again, under the ruler we impose. (Democracy being what we say it is, not what you thought it was.)
NATO, having destroyed Serbia’s infrastructure from the air, and poisoned Kosovo on the ground, will have to follow through its humanitarian gesture by itself taking in the dispossessed, in that same proportion as its members contributed to the war. We can do no less. And the 850,000 Serbian refugees still on the Bosnian border, whom no doubt Milosevic meant to resettle in Kosovo, will have to be dispersed and settled too, with us. We are as responsible, one by one, for the actions of NATO as the Serbians are for those of Milosevic, and we too must put up with the consequences.
But can it really be thought that Milosevic as an individual is to blame for the war, and not the sour dynamics of ethnic and religious antagonisms, cultural incompatibilities, and the legacies of Stalinism, which our bombs can only acerbate? The long-term way through, oddly enough, may lie with gender politics. The way our own macho-war-speak collapses at the drop of a hat into head-girl-speak sounds absurd but may be healthy.
Question: Why did we bomb the cigarette factory?
Answer: They may have been making arms and anyway we don’t approve of smoking.
Let the new Kosovo and Serbia Protectorates stand firm on equal opportunities, equal pay, and emotional and sexual correctness, until the politics of testosterone wither away. In the meantime let Blair and Clinton put their mouths where there bombs are and call a summit meeting with Milosevic, since he’s taken to playing Stalin, the greatest ethnic disperser of them all. Blair as Churchill. Clinton as Roosevelt. Yalta worked okay, didn’t it?
The Way We Live As Women (#ulink_5c2f33a9-abd4-58b7-ab63-f3b1f900226a)
Two years, 1996–8, spent writing the novel and screenplay of Big Women – a fictionalised account of the course of feminism over twenty-five years – and an increasing awareness of just how difficult it is to chart the course of revolution, produced a spin-off in the form of articles and lectures.
Girls on Top (#ulink_8f26d28b-bbbb-5b18-8f41-49f6ce354568)
The Fish and the Bicycle (#ulink_0ff5d9f1-f009-5a8a-944f-fcaa61687361)
Pity the Poor Men (#litres_trial_promo)
Today’s Mother – Bonded and Double-binded (#litres_trial_promo)
Has Feminism Gone Too Far? (#litres_trial_promo)
Somewhere along the way the gender polarities reversed. Men, being suddenly disadvantaged, notice it. Women, advantaged, tend not to. Why should they?
Girls on Top (#ua10e83b8-91a4-5808-b5aa-e14d04bf4d2a)
Something fairly earth-shattering has occurred. In the face of the old-age worldwide tradition that a boy baby is more valuable than a girl, Birth Clinics here in Britain report that the majority of parents now want girls, not boys. And why not? Everything has changed. Feminism happened. Girls are expected to have better lives than boys, to be better able to care for aged parents, to have better characters. Girls do better at school than boys, get higher qualifications, are better able to find jobs (albeit as cheaper labour), have higher self-esteem, are less likely to destroy themselves with drugs, go to prison, or take their own lives.
In many parts of the world, at worst, girl babies are still aborted, exposed after birth, fed less than their brothers: at best, parental faces fall at, ‘Sorry, it’s a girl.’ Here, all of a sudden, it’s different. Girls earn, girls control their own fertility, girls can do without boys. Girls are on top.
‘And high time too,’ as many a feminist would say. ‘Let the men see what it feels like for a change,’ – but tit for tat is no way to human progress. The danger is that the oppression of women will, little by little, be replaced by the oppression of men. It is true that in the top echelons of society, dinosaur men still rule the roost; run the government, the banks, the corporations, the institutions, and can command vast salaries, but do so more and more as figureheads. Women have the knowledge, the confidence, run the back office. If they don’t yet get full credit for it, they’re working on it.
It is also true that outside our metropolitan areas, our sophisticated cities, things tend to go on as they always have: men stay on top. Wash my shirt, woman! In places where Andy Capp still rules, and in our traditional ethnic communities, girls on top may sound far-fetched: but look round the corner and see it coming.
A gender switch has operated. Twenty-five years ago men gave women a hard time: now women give men a hard time. Hear it in our language; once the terms of abuse for women were plentiful – slag, slut, hysteric, castrator, shrill (if she opened her mouth in public), cackling harridan (if she laughed), and terms of opprobrium for men were almost non-existent. But now we have nerd, wet, wanker, macho, wimp, snam (Sensitive New Age Man), and the list is growing. Okay – evening out the balance, but careful! Better men as equals than inferiors. Moaning men are no fun.
In the last twenty-five years women have taught men tenderness and now deride them for it. Women have learned toughness from men, call it assertiveness and turn into bullies on the male model. Women lump men together as macho beasts. Women taught men how to love their children, and now are the ones who initiate divorce and snatch them away. Everyone dutifully talks about the problem of the working mother, but who mentions the problems of the working father? But for every mother there’s a father too.
Where does this leave the boys now growing up in a woman’s world, lumped together, as women once were, as the inferior gender? Having a hard time of it, confused and failing at school, struggling for self-esteem, wondering what exactly men are for. Unemployable, unmarriageable, and hoping for the love of a good woman to save them. For men are no longer a scarce resource. In age groups under forty there are now more men than women. Medical care keep the boys – the weaker sex – alive. So girls become the sexual pickers and choosers. If you have acne forget it. If you want to be my lover, you’d better get on with my friends. God help you!
If a girl wants a man at all, that is – nasty, uncouth, ugly things! She can get sexual pleasure from a pill. She can get herself pregnant at a clinic. She can get the State to take over the traditional paternal role – though a grim and grisly Victorian-style provider the State increasingly turns out to be. If she doesn’t want to be a mother – and now it’s the men who yearn to be fathers, and the women put it off, and off – she uses the man as a sexual object, a status symbol down the rave. The tables turned.
Our very society is now wholly feminised: we have turned our back on militarism, on toughness, on discipline: the aim now is to care and nurture. Even the old stern patriarch God is gone: rather we worship tender Mother Nature.
Male sexuality becomes a problem. Follow your natural instincts, and find them construed as sexual harassment. What you thought was sex turns out to be an abuse of power. A girl invites you into her bed for the night, then complains to the police that you did what (to you) comes naturally. So train yourself out of it! Which may lead to a problem. How are you doing, lad, potency-wise? Probably not too well. Tarred with the brush of the rapist one day, jeered at for bad performance the next? There is no brotherhood, as women have a sisterhood (in the last twenty-five years women have learned to be friends, not competitors for male favours, as once was the case) to show you a path out of your confusion. The therapists are on the whole female, and out of sympathy in sexual matters. Turn on the TV and see female comedians jeering at men, as husbands and lovers, as no male comedian would dare jeer at women, and cower. Every drama, every novel, shows woman as victim, men as villain. Never were so many male egos so regularly deflated. What price self-esteem now?
Sure, it’s men’s turn, but the aim of feminism was not to win, not to put men down, but to achieve equality: to be allowed to be a person first and of a certain gender second. These rights are now encapsulated in law. But how about the rights of a teenage boy in a working-class area? Girls jeer at you, police harass you, teachers (mostly female) give up on you. School inspectors shake their heads over you. Ofsted maintains that the underachievement of boys, particularly white, working-class boys, is one of the most significant problems that schools face today. Parents find you impossible. Old ladies cross the street to avoid you. What do you look forward to? Insecurity is the name of the male game. Thirty percent of all our unemployed are under twenty-five; and of that thirty, twenty are male, ten are female. Twice as many. Male unemployment goes up, female unemployment goes down. One in three men have suffered at least one period of unemployment in the last five years. Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the gravitas and dignity that came from being the family provider. Forget it. At best as a man you’re decorative and look after the kids, and earn a bit sometimes, at worst you’re a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down.
Twenty-eight percent of us now live in single person households – a lonely and unnatural state – and most of the twenty-eight percent consists of young single men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest in the normal nurturing way that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender’s status and self-esteem – call it masculinism, homoism, brotherism, machoism, what you want – and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done.
So who needs a man?
The Fish and the Bicycle (#ua10e83b8-91a4-5808-b5aa-e14d04bf4d2a)
Back in the seventies feminists slapped up a poster which announced to a startled and disbelieving public: ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ That is to say, she didn’t need one at all. Time, for good or bad, has proved that once unlikely poster right. The world changed: the laws changed: and any young woman these days can live without a man. She may not want to, but she can. It may feel unnatural, she may be lonely at night, but she has her freedom and her financial independence. She can earn, she can spend, she can party. She can find casual sex if she wants to and there’s contraception to ward off babies. (Because what she can’t have, if she values her freedom and independence, is a baby.)
If a woman is young, bright, educated, able-bodied, attractive, childless and in the professions she can live very happily indeed. And just as well, because this seems to be the kind of woman – like poor, nervy Ally McBeal: poor all-over-the-place Bridget Jones – who these days has to do without a man. ‘No wonder,’ observes my mother, who is ninety-one. ‘She’s too proud and picky for her own good. She wants someone she can look up to, and where’s she going to find him?’ New Woman, claims my mother, shocks potential partners to the core by demanding sex and refusing love (just as men once used to) so he’s off and away by morning. ‘And if they’re not shocking him they’re insulting him,’ says my mother. ‘So who can blame him?’
Sexism becomes something more directed towards men by women than from men towards women. Women can speak about men as men can no longer speak about women (at least in company). To do so becomes so much a cultural knee-jerk women don’t even notice they’re doing it. It is commonplace to hear the entire male gender written off as selfish, obtuse and bullying; rapists in spirit if not in deed. ‘Men, who wants them? Who needs them?’ And men laugh uneasily but, astonishingly, collude in this description of themselves. Men are portrayed as braying, despicable fools in cartoons, books, plays and advertisements. Male journalists and TV interviewers, talking to me on ‘pity the poor men’ themes, are even more scathing than traditional feminists. ‘But we’re crass fools,’ they say, in effect, ‘How can you have a good word to say for us?’ They behave like hostages who have fallen in love with their captors; with the colonised who admire the colonisers: I am perpetually amazed. Try writing a film these days about a woman who isn’t ‘strong and independent’. It won’t get made. You can be as insulting as you like about men.
When girl-babies are born – certainly in my part of London – there’s rejoicing: if it’s a boy, it’s, Oh well, better luck next time. Because it’s girls who on the whole look adorable, who don’t bang and crash about, who pass exams, take fewer drugs, don’t crash cars or go to prison, who get the jobs as school-leavers and satisfy today’s definition of what a good citizen is: a responsible, caring, sharing, nurturing, hard-working, mortgage-paying, not over-intellectual person, without too much aggression and not inclined to rock the boat: someone who makes a good employee. A woman, in fact. This is the age of oestrogen, not testosterone. Men begin to have a low self-image that women once had. The suicide rate for young males grows at an alarming rate, for outstripping that of young women. So yes, pity the poor men, whose maleness has become unfashionable. Even the male models are all gay, everyone knows. Pretty boys.
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