What Makes Women Happy
Fay Weldon
With her inimitable wit and insight, Fay Weldon offers her wisdom on the subject of female happiness and how to achieve it.What makes women happy? Nothing, for more than ten minutes at a time, so stop worrying.In this book, Fay Weldon offers wisdom gleaned from a remarkable life, a brilliantly successful career and a fair share of trouble. She explores what makes women happy; how our lives, jobs, families, bodies, desires, morals and responsibilities affect that happiness, and what we can do to lead more rounded and desirable lives. As she delivers the verdicts, she also delivers short stories, or perhaps parables, to prove her points. To be good, she concludes, is to be happy, to be happy is to be good. The Victorians had it right.A blend of philosophy, storytelling and self-help, this inspirational work shows Weldon at the peak of her creative powers, brisk, stylish and entertaining.
What Makes Women Happy
Fay Weldon
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#uf3171d1e-f602-5957-8579-fbd5e104b307)
Title Page (#u24b2c428-eadb-5357-8e75-4a880611befc)
ONE Sources of Happiness (#ucb22a075-0a1f-5540-8ab4-fc21b29be4dc)
Sex (#u03f608b2-f5ec-59a5-87fd-d9cbf407fc93)
Food (#litres_trial_promo)
Friends (#litres_trial_promo)
Family (#litres_trial_promo)
Shopping (#litres_trial_promo)
Chocolate (#litres_trial_promo)
TWO Saints and Sinners (#litres_trial_promo)
Death: The Gates of Paradise (#litres_trial_promo)
Bereavement: Unseating the Second Horseman (#litres_trial_promo)
Loneliness: Unseating the Third Horseman (#litres_trial_promo)
Shame: Unseating the Fourth Horseman (#litres_trial_promo)
Something Here Inside (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Fay Weldon (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About The Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
ONE Sources of Happiness (#ulink_9aebc815-ba31-5672-9c90-da2f27f51cba)
Women can be wonderfully happy. When they’re in love, when someone gives them flowers, when they’ve finally found the right pair of shoes and they even fit. I remember once, in love and properly loved, dancing round a room singing, ‘They can’t take this away from me.’ I remember holding the green shoes with the green satin ribbon (it was the sixties) to my bosom and rejoicing. I remember my joy when the midwife said, ‘But this is the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. Look at him, he’s golden!’
The wonderful happiness lasts for ten minutes or so. After that little niggles begin to arise. ‘Will he think I’m too fat?’ ‘Are the flowers his way of saying goodbye?’ ‘Do the shoes pinch?’ ‘Will his allegedly separated wife take this away from me?’ ‘Is solitary dancing a sign of insanity?’ ‘How come I’ve produced so wonderful a baby – did they get the name tags wrong?’
Anxiety and guilt come hot on the heels of happiness. So the brutal answer to what makes women happy is ‘Nothing, notfor more than ten minutes at a time.’ But the perfect ten minutes are worth living for, and the almost perfect hours that circle them are worth fighting for, and examining, the better to prolong them.
Ask women what makes them happy and they think for a minute and come up with a tentative list. It tends to run like this, and in this order:
Sex
Food
Friends
Family
Shopping
Chocolate
‘Love’ tends not to get a look in. Too unfashionable, or else taken for granted. ‘Being in love’ sometimes makes an appearance. ‘Men’ seem to surface as a source of aggravation, and surveys keep throwing up the notion that most women prefer chocolate to sex. But personally I suspect this response is given to entertain the pollsters. The only thing you can truly know about what people think, feel, do and consume, some theorize, is to examine the contents of their dustbins. Otherwise it’s pretty much guesswork.
There are more subtle pleasures too, of course, which the polls never throw up. The sense of virtue when you don’t have an éclair can be more satisfactory than the flavour and texture of cream, chocolate and pastry against the tongue. Rejecting a lover can give you more gratification than the physical pleasures of love-making. Being right when others are wrong can make you very happy indeed. We’re not necessarily nice people.
Some women I know always bring chocolates when they’re invited to dinner – and then sneer when the hostess actually eats one. That’s what I mean by ‘not nice’.
Sources of Unhappiness
We are all still creatures of the cave, although we live in loft apartments. Nature is in conflict with nurture. Anxiety and guilt cut in to spoil the fun as one instinct wars with another and with the way we are socialized. Women are born to be mothers, though many of us prefer to not take up the option. The baby cries; we go. The man calls; ‘Take me!’ we cry. Unless we are very strong indeed, physiology wins. We bleed monthly and the phases of the moon dictate our moods. We are hardwired to pick and choose amongst men when we are young, aiming for the best genetic material available. The ‘love’ of a woman for a man is nature’s way of keeping her docile and at home. The ‘love’ of a man for a woman is protective and keeps him at home as long as she stays helpless. (If high-flying women, so amply able to look after themselves, are so often single, it can be no surprise.)
Or that is one way of looking at it. The other is to recognize that we are moral creatures too, long for justice, and civilized ourselves out of our gross species instincts long ago. We like to think correctly and behave in an orderly and socially aware manner. If sometimes we revert, stuff our mouths with goodies, grab what we can so our neighbour doesn’t get it (‘Been to the sales lately?’) or fall upon our best friend’s boyfriend when left alone in the room with him, we feel ashamed of ourselves. Doing what comes naturally does not sit well with modern woman.
And so it is that in everyday female life, doubts, dilemmas and anxieties cut in, not grandiose whither-mankind stuff, just simple things such as:
Sex: ‘Should I have done it?’
Food: ‘Should I have eaten it?’
Friends/family: ‘Why didn’t I call her?’
Shopping: ‘Should I have bought it?’
Chocolate: ‘My God, did I actually eat all that?’
But you can’t lie awake at night worrying about these things. You have to get up in the morning and work, so you do. But the voice of conscience, otherwise known as the voice of guilt, keeps up its nagging undercurrent. It drives some women to therapists in their attempt to silence it. But it’s better to drive into a skid than try to steer out of it. If you don’t want to feel guilty, don’t do it. If you want to be happy, try being good.
What Makes Men Happy
Men have their own list when it comes to sources of happiness. ‘The love of a good woman’ is high in the ratings. Shopping and chocolate don’t get much of a look in. Watching porn and looking at pretty girls in the street, if men are honest, feature large. These fondnesses of theirs (dismissed by women as ‘addictions’) can make women unhappy, break up marriages and make men wretched and secretive because the women they love get upset by them.
Women should not be upset. They should not expect men to behave like women. Men are creatures of the cave too. Porn is sex in theory, not in practice. It just helps a man get through the day. And many a woman too, come to that.
Porn excites to sex, sure. Sex incited by porn is not bad, just different. Tomorrow’s sex is always going to be different from today’s. In a long-term partnership there is room and time for all kinds. Sex can be tender, loving, companionable, a token of closeness and respect, the kind women claim to like. Then it’s romantic, intimate, and smacks of permanence. Sometimes sex is a matter of lust, release, excitement, anger, and the sense is that any woman could inspire it. It’s macho, anti-domestic. Exciting. Don’t resist the mood – try and match it. Tomorrow something else will surface more to your liking. Each sexual act will have a different feel to it, the two instincts in both of you being in variable proportions from night to night, week to week, year to year. It’s rare for a couple’s sexual energies to be exactly matched. But lucky old you if they are.
I have friends so anxious that they can’t let the man in their life out of their sight in case he runs off with someone else. It’s counter-productive. Some girls just do stop traffic in the street. So it’s not you – so what? Men like looking at pretty girls in the street not because they long to sleep with them, or because given a choice between them and you they’d choose them, but because it’s the instinct of the cave asserting itself. Pretty girls are there to be looked at speculatively by men and, if they have any sense, with generous appreciation by women. It’s bad manners in men, I grant you, to do it too openly, especially if the woman objects, but not much worse than that.
This will not be enough, I know, to convince some women that for a husband or lover to watch porn is not a matter for shock-horror. But look at it like this. A newborn baby comes into the world with two urgent appetites: one is to feed, the other is to suck. Because the nipple is there to satisfy both appetites, the feeding/sucking distinction gets blurred for both mother and baby. If you are lucky, the baby’s time at the breast or bottle is time enough to satisfy the sucking instinct. If you’re not lucky, the baby, though fed to completion, cries, chafes and vomits yet goes on sucking desperately, as if it were monstrously hungry. At which point the wise mother goes to fetch a dummy, so everyone can get some peace. Then baby can suck, digest and sleep, all at the same time, blissfully. (Most babies simply toss the dummy out of the cot as soon as they’re on solids and the sucking reflex fades, thus sparing the mother social disgrace.)
In the same way, in males, the instinct for love and the need for sexual gratification overlap but do not necessarily coincide. The capacity for love seems inborn; lust weighs in powerfully at puberty. The penis is there to satisfy both appetites. If you are lucky, the needs coincide in acts of domestic love; if you are not, your man’s head turns automatically when a pretty girl passes in the street, or he goes to the porn channels on the computer. He is not to be blamed. Nor does it affect his relationship with you. Love is satisfied, sex isn’t quite. He clutches the dummy.
An Unreliable Narrator
Bear in mind, of course, that you must take your instruction from a very flawed person. She wouldn’t want to make you anxious by being perfect. Your writer spent last night in the spare room following a domestic row. Voices were raised, someone broke a glass, she broke the washing machine by trying to wrench open the door while it was in the middle of its spin cycle.
Domestic rows do not denote domestic unhappiness. They do suggest a certain volatility in a relationship. Sense might suggest that if the morning wakes to the lonely heaviness that denotes a row the night before, you have no business describing your marriage as ‘happy’. But sense and experience also suggest that you have made your own contribution to the way you now feel. And the early sun beats in the windows and it seems an insult to your maker to maintain a grudge when the morning is so glorious.
You hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner downstairs. Soon it will be safe to go down and have a companionable breakfast without even putting on your shoes for fear of slivers of broken glass. Storms pass, the sun shines again. Yes, you are happy.
What the quarrel was about I cannot for the life of me remember.
Except of course now the washing machine doesn’t work. When it comes to domestic machinery, retribution comes fast. In other areas of life it may come slowly. But it always does come, in terms of lost happiness, in distance from heaven, in the non-appearance of angels.
And since this book comes to your writer through the luminiferous aether, that notoriously flimsy and deceptive substance, Victorian equivalent of the dark matter of which scientists now claim the universe is composed, what is said is open to interpretation. It is not the Law.
Why, Why?
Like it or not, we are an animal species. Darwinian principles apply. We have evolved into what we are today. We did not spring ready-made into the twenty-first century. The human female is born and bred to select a mate, have babies, nurture them and, having completed this task, die. That is why we adorn ourselves, sweep the cave, attract the best man we can, spite unsuccessful lovers, fall in love and keep a man at our side as long as we can. We are hardwired to do it, for the sake of our children.
Whether a woman wants babies or not, whether she has them or not, is irrelevant. Her physiology and her emotions behave as if she does. Her hormones are all set up to make her behave like a female member of the tribe. The female brain differs from the male even in appearance. Pathologists can tell which is which just by looking,
(Of course if a woman doesn’t want to put up with her female destiny she can take testosterone in adult life and feel and be more like a man. Though it is better, I feel, to work with what you have. And that early foetal drenching in oestrogen, when the female foetus decides at around eight weeks that female is the way it’s going to stay, is pretty final.)
In her young and fecund years a woman must call upon science and technology, or great self-control, in order not to get pregnant. As we grow older, as nurture gains more power over nature, it becomes easier to avoid it. A: We are less fertile. B: We use our common sense. The marvel is that there are so few teenage pregnancies, not so many.
To fall in love is to succumb to instinct. Common sense may tell us it’s a daft thing to do. Still we do it. We can’t help it, most of us, once or twice in a lifetime. Oestrogen levels soar, serotonin plummets. Nature means us to procreate.
(Odd, the fall in serotonin symptomatic of falling in love. Serotonin, found in chocolate, makes us placid and receptive. A serotonin drop make us anxious, eager, sexy and on our toes. Without serotonin, perhaps, we are more effective in courtship.)
Following the instructions of the blueprint for courtship, the male of the human species open doors for us, bring us gifts and forages for us. If he fails to provide, we get furious, even when we ourselves are the bigger money earners. We batter on the doors of the CSA. It’s beyond all reason. It is also, alas, part of the male impulse to leave the family as soon as the unit can survive without him and go off and create another. (Now that so many women can get by perfectly well without men, the surprise is that men stay around at all.)
The tribe exercises restraint upon the excesses of the individual, however, and so we end up with marriage, divorce laws, sexual-harassment suits and child support. The object of our erotic attention also has to conform to current practices, no matter what instinct says. ‘Under 16? Too bad!’ ‘Your pupil? Bad luck!’ Nature says, ‘Kill the robber, the interloper.’ Nurture says, ‘No, call the police.’ The sanction, the disapproval of the tribe, is very powerful. Exile is the worst fate of all. Without the protection of the tribe, you die.
Creatures of the Tribe
We do not define ourselves by our animal nature. We are more than creatures of a certain species. We are moral beings. We are ingenious and inquisitive, have intelligence, self-control and spirituality. We understand health and hormones. We develop technology to make our lives easier. We live far longer, thanks to medical science, than nature, left to its own devices, would have us do. We build complicated societies. Many of us choose not have babies, despite our bodies’ instinctive craving for them. We socialize men not to desert us; we also, these days, socialize ourselves not to need them.
‘I don’t dress to attract men,’ women will say. ‘I dress to please myself.’ But the pleasure women have in the candlelit bath before the party, the arranging and rearranging of the hair, the elbowing of other women at the half-price sale, is instinctive. It’s an overflow from courting behaviour. It’s also competitive, whether we admit it or not. ‘I am going to get the best man. Watch out, keep off!’
To make friends is instinctive. We stick to our age groups. We cluster with the like-minded. That way lies the survival of the tribe. A woman needs friends to help her deliver the baby, to stand watch when the man’s away. But she must also be careful: other women can steal your alpha male and leave you with a beta.
See in shopping, source of such pleasure, also the intimidation of rivals. ‘My Prada handbag so outdoes yours – crawl away!’ And she will, snarling.
And if her man’s genes seem a better bet than your man’s, nab him. Nature has no morality.
Any good feminist would dismiss all this as ‘biologism’ – the suggestion that women are helpless in the face of their physiology. Of course we are not, but there’s no use denying it’s at the root of a great deal of our behaviour, and indeed of our miseries. When instincts conflict with each other, when instinct conflicts with socialization, when nature and nurture pull us different ways, that’s when the trouble starts.
‘I want another éclair.’
Agony.
Well, take the easy way out. Say to yourself, ‘One’s fine, two’s not.’ No one’s asking for perfection. And anxiety is inevitable.
A parable.
Once Bitten, Twice Shy
Picture the scene. It’s Friday night. David and Letty are round at Henry and Mara’s place, as is often the case, sharing a meal. They’re all young professionals in their late twenties, good-looking and lively as such people are. They’ve unfrozen the fish cakes, thawed the block of spinach and cream, and Henry has actually cleaned and boiled organic potatoes. After that it’s cheese, biscuits and grapes. Nothing nicer. And Mara has recently bought a proper dinner set so the plates all match.
They all met at college. Now they live near each other. They’re not married, they’re partnered. But they expect and have so far received fidelity. They have all even made quasi-nuptial contracts with their partner, so should there be a split the property can be justly and fairly assigned. All agree the secret of successful relationships is total honesty.
After graduation Henry and Mara took jobs with the same city firm so as to be together. Mara is turning out to be quite a highflyer. She earns more than Henry does. That’s okay. She’s bought herself a little Porsche, buzzes around. That’s fine.
‘Now I can junk up the Fiesta with auto mags, gum wrappers and Coke tins without Mara interfering,’ says Henry.
Letty and David work for the same NHS hospital. She’s a radiographer; he is a medical statistician. Letty is likely to stay in her job, or one like it, until retirement, gradually working her way up the promotional ladder, such is her temperament. David is more flamboyant. He’s been offered a job at New Scientist. He’ll probably take it.
Letty would like to get pregnant, but they’re having difficulty and Letty thinks perhaps David doesn’t really want a baby, which is why it isn’t happening.
Letty does have a small secret from David. She consults a psychic, Leah, on Friday afternoons when she leaves work an hour earlier than on other days. She doesn’t tell David because she thinks he’d laugh.
‘I see you surrounded by babies,’ says Leah one day, after a leisurely gaze into her crystal ball.
‘Fat chance,’ says Letty.
‘Is your husband a tall fair man?’ asks Leah.
‘He isn’t my husband, he’s my partner,’ says Letty crossly, ‘and actually he’s rather short and dark.’
Leah looks puzzled and changes the subject.
But that was a couple of weeks back. This is now. Two bottles of Chilean wine with the dinner, a twist of weed which someone gave Mara for a birthday present…and which they’re not sure they’ll use. They’re happy enough as they are. Medical statisticians, in any case, do not favour the use of marijuana.
Henry owns a single e, which someone for reasons unknown gave him when Mara bought the Porsche, saying happiness is e-shaped. He keeps it in his wallet as a kind of curiosity, a challenge to fate.
‘You’re crazy,’ says Letty, when he brings it out to show them. ‘Suppose the police stopped you? You could go to prison.’
‘I don’t think it’s illegal to possess a single tablet,’ says David. ‘Only to sell them.’
He is probably right. Nobody knows for sure. Henry puts it away. It’s gone kind of greyish and dusty from too much handling, anyway, and so much observation. Ecstasy is what other people do.
Mara’s mobile sings ‘Il Toreador’. Mara’s mother has been taken ill at home in Cheshire. It sounds as if she might have had a stroke. She’s only 58. The ambulance is on its way. Mara, who loves her mother dearly, decides she must drive north to be there for her. No, Mara insists, Henry isn’t to come with her. He must stay behind to hold the fort, clear the dinner, make apologies at work on Monday if it’s bad and Mara can’t get in. ‘You’d only be in the way,’ she adds. ‘You know what men are like in hospitals.’ That’s how Mara is: decisive. And now she’s on her way, thrum, thrum, out of their lives, in the Porsche.
Now there are only Henry, David and Letty to finish the second bottle. David’s phone sings ‘Ode to Beauty’ as the last drop is drained. To open another bottle or not to open another bottle – that’s the discussion. Henry opens it, thus solving the problem. It’s David’s father. There’s been a break-in at the family home in Cardiff, the robbers were disturbed and now the police are there. The digital camera has gone and 180 photos of sentimental value and some jewellery and a handbag. David’s mother is traumatized and can David make it to Cardiff for the weekend?
‘Of course,’ says David.
‘Can I come?’ asks Letty, a little wistfully. She doesn’t want to be left alone.
But David says no, it’s a long drive, and his parents and the Down’s sister will be upset and he’ll need to concentrate on them. Better for Letty to stay and finish the wine and Henry will walk her home.
Letty feels more than a little insulted. Doesn’t it even occur to David to feel jealous? Is it that he trusts Letty or that he just doesn’t care what happens to her? And is he really going to Cardiff or is he just trying to get away from her? Perhaps he has a mistress and that’s why he doesn’t want to have a baby by her.
David goes and Letty and Henry are left together, both feeling abandoned, both feeling resentful.
Henry and Letty are the ones who love too much. Mara and David love too little. It gives them great power. Those who love least win.
Henry and Letty move out onto the balcony because the evening is so warm and the moon so bright they hardly need a candle to roll the joint. On warm days Mara likes to sit on this balcony to dry her hair. She’s lucky. All Mara has to do is dunk her hair in the basin and let it dry naturally and if falls heavy and silky and smooth. Mara is so lucky in so many respects.
And now Henry walks over to where Letty sits in the moonlight, all white silky skin and bare shoulders and pale-green linen shift which flatters her slightly dull complexion, and slides his hands over her shoulders and down almost to where her breasts start and then takes them away.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘No, you shouldn’t,’ she says.
‘I wanted to,’ he said.
‘I wanted you to do it too. I think it’s the moon. Such a bright night. And see, there’s Venus beside her, shining bright.’
‘Good Lord!’ he says. ‘Think of the trouble!’
‘But life can get kind of boring,’ Letty says. She, the little radiographer, wants her excitements too. Thrum, thrum, thrum goes Mara, off in the Porsche! Why shouldn’t it be like that for Letty too? She deserves Henry. Mara doesn’t. She’d be nice to him. Letty’s skin is still alive to his touch and wanting more.
‘But we’re not going to, are we?’ he says.
‘No,’ says Letty. ‘Mara’s my friend.’
‘More to the point,’ he says, ‘David’s your partner.’
They think about this for a little while.
‘Cardiff and Cheshire,’ says Letty. ‘Too good to be true. That gives us all night.’
‘Where?’ asks Henry.
‘Here,’ says Letty.
All four have in the past had passing fantasies about what it would be like to share a bed and a life with the other – have wondered if, at the student party where they all met, Henry had paired off with Letty, David with Mara, what their lives would have been like. The fantasies have been quickly subdued in the interests of friendship and expediency. But Mara’s sheets are more expensive than Letty’s, her bed is broader. The City pays more than the NHS. Letty would love to sleep in Mara’s bed.
‘We could go to your place,’ says Henry. To elbow David out of his own bed would be very satisfactory. Henry is stronger and taller than David; Henry takes what he wants when he wants it. Henry has wit and cunning, the kind which enables you to steal another man’s woman from under his nose.
But Letty’s envy is stronger than Henry’s urge to crush his rivals. They agree to stay where they are. They agree this is greater than either of them. They share the e, looking into each other’s eyes as if they were toasting one another in some foreign land. It is in fact an aspirin, but since they both believe it’s ecstasy, it has the effect of relieving themselves of responsibility for their own actions. Who, drug-crazed, can help what they do?
They tear off each other’s clothes. Mara’s best and most seductive apricot chiffon nightie is under the pillow. Letty puts it on. Henry makes no objection. It is the one Mara wears, he has come to believe, when she means to refuse him. Too tired, too cross, just not interested. He pushes the delicate fabric up over Letty’s thighs with even more satisfaction. He doesn’t care if he tears it.
‘Shouldn’t you be wearing a condom?’ she asks.
‘I don’t like them,’ he says.
‘Neither do I,’ she says.
For ten minutes Letty is supremely happy. The dark, rich places of the flesh unfold and surround her with forgetfulness. She is queen of all places and people. She can have as many men as she wants, just snap her fingers and there they are. She has infinite power. She feels wholly beautiful, consummately desired, part of the breathing, fecund universe, at one with the Masai girl, the Manhattan bride, every flower that ever stooped to mix its pollen, every bird that sings its joy to heaven. And every one of Henry’s plunges is a delightful dagger in Mara’s heart, his every powerful thrust a reproach to pallid, cautious David.
Then Letty finds herself shifting out of a blissful present into a perplexing future. She’s worrying about the sheets. This is condom-less sex. What about stains? Will Mara notice? She could launder them – there’s a splendid washer-dryer in the utility room, but supposing it broke down mid-wash? Henry could possibly argue that he spilt wine on the sheets – as indeed he has, and honey too, now she comes to think of it. She is very sticky. Can Mara’s chiffon nightie be put in the machine or must it be hand washed?
‘Is something the matter?’ he asks.
‘No,’ she says.
But she no longer feels safe. Supposing Mara gets a call from her family on the way to Cheshire and turns back? Supposing she and Henry are discovered? Why is she doing this? Is she mad?
Her body shudders in spite of herself. She rather resents it. An orgasm crept up on her when she was trying to concentrate on important things. She decides sex is just mechanical. She’d rather have David, anyway. His penis is less effective and smaller than Henry’s, but it’s familiar and feels right. David must never find out about this. Perhaps she doesn’t want a baby as much as thought she did. In any case she can’t have a baby that isn’t David’s. What if she got pregnant now? She’d have to have an abortion, and it’s against her principles, and it would have to be secret because fathers can now claim rights to unborn embryos.
Henry rolls off her. Letty makes languid disappointment noises but she’s rather relieved. He is heavier than David.
Henry’s phone goes. He answers it. Mara is stuck behind an accident on the M6 north of Manchester,
‘Yes,’ says Henry, ‘I walked Letty home.’
Now Letty’s cross because Henry has denied her. Secrecy seems sordid. And she hates liars. And Mara? What about Mara? Mara is her friend. They’re studied together, wept together, bought clothes together and supported each other through bad times, good times. Mara and her Porsche and her new wardrobe have all seemed a bit much, true, but she sees why Mara puts Henry down from time to time. He’s not only irritating but untrustworthy. How could you trust your life to such a man? She ought to warn Mara about that, but how can she? Poor Mara, stuck behind an ambulance in the early hours in the far north while her partner betrays her with her best friend…
Henry is licking honey off his fingertips suggestively. ‘Shall we do that again?’ he asks. ‘Light of my life.’
‘No,’ says Letty and rolls out of bed. Her bare sticky feet touch the carpet and she is saved.
Moral
Few of us can resist temptation the first
time round, and we should not blame
ourselves too much if we fail. It’s the
second time that counts. Let sin pass
lightly on and over. Persist in it and it
wears your soul away.
Letty’s sense of guilt evaporates, washed away in the knowledge of her own virtue and fondness for her friend. Guilt is to the soul as pain is to the body. It is there to keep us away from danger, from extinction.
And good Lord, think what might have happened had Letty stayed for a second round! As it was she got into her own bed just minutes before David came through the door. His father had rung from Cardiff and the jewellery had been found and the burglary hadn’t happened after all. Letty hadn’t had a bath, thinking she’d leave that until the morning, but David didn’t seem to notice. Indeed, he fell on her with unusual ardour and the condom broke and he didn’t even seem to mind.
If she’d stayed in Mara’s bed David would have come round to find Letty and at worst killed Henry – fat chance! – and at best told Mara, or if not that then he’d have been able to blackmail Letty for the rest of her life. ‘Do this or I’ll tell Mara’ – and she’d have had to do it, whatever it was: go whoring, get a further degree (not that there wasn’t some attraction in surrendering autonomy…)
But as it was it all worked out okay. Letty had her 10 minutes of sublime pleasure, felt anxious, felt guilty, and was rewarded by having her cake and eating it too. I don’t know what happened to the sheets. I daresay Henry calmed down enough to put them through the washer-dryer and get them on the bed again before Mara got back. I hope he had the sense to rinse out her nightie in the basin at hand temperature, not hot.
I do know that in the following week Henry sold the Fiesta and got a Jaguar which could outrun the Porsche any day, and he used the joint account to do it. He felt better about himself.
I allow Letty, having observed the moon, to sleep illicitly with Henry once, but not twice. It is a balancing act and she got it right.
It is doing what you should, if only in the end, and not what you want which makes others respect and like you, and to be respected and liked by others is a very good way to be happy.
Save your moral strength for what is important.
The Inevitability of Anxiety
What makes women happy? Nothing, not for more than ten minutes at a time. Anxiety, doubt and guilt break through.
‘Supposing my boyfriend comes back?’ ‘Have I left the fish out for the cat?’ ‘Should I be doing this?’
Blame nature.
It’s the hormones doing it, interfering with our happiness, not the mysterious thing called me.
Instinct rewards us by gratifying our sensual appetites. It also punishes us if we go too far.
It is when we are following the promptings of instinct, doing what nature suggests, going through the motions of procreation – however unlikely they are to succeed – even in the midst of our triumph and greatest pleasure that other warring instincts set in. ‘Clean the cave, keep the baby safe, are the food stores okay? What’s that rustling at the back of the cave? Can it be the sabre-tooth tiger? We can’t just lie here enjoying ourselves! Hasn’t he finished yet? Is the fire going out? Might a vulture swoop down to get the baby? What’s the woman in the next cave up to? Has he noticed my spare tyre? Is she a better bet than me? Will he go to her?’
While he, the man, is thinking solely about pleasure and completion, concentrating on the task in hand, our female minds are already wandering.
He: ‘Is something the matter, darling? You seem to have lost interest.’
She: ‘I just remembered I left the butter out of the fridge. Sorry. Now where were we?’
Our instincts overlap and contradict each other: the one to make babies struggles with the need to look after the ones already there; the one to compete with our friends with our need to have them at our side. It leaves us confused.
Sex with the new true love brings bliss, optimism, unguarded delight – and then: ‘Am I too fat, will he notice my varicose vein, will the baby wake, will his wife come back, should I have told him I loved him?’
With the wedding, it’s all ‘Will the flowers arrive, should I have worn this tatty veil, should I really be doing this?’
With the promotion, ‘Will my friends hate me, will my new office be okay, will my partner leave me if I earn more than him?’
The pleasure in the new baby is balanced out by the anxiety that goes with bonding. Bonding is one of the worst tricks instinct plays on us. The baby cries; the mother leaps to attention. It is a lifetime’s sentence to anxiety. It doesn’t get better with time. And it is not open to reason. Experience may tell us that the teenager late home is usually late home. But mother love is panicking: ‘He’s come off his bike. There’ll be a call from the hospital.’
The baby’s quiet – and it makes you happy and proud to have got him through to the end of the day. ‘But perhaps he’s stopped breathing?’ Wake him and see!
There are so many things to be anxious about. The baby’s not breathing. You only mascaraed one eye this morning. Sheer pleasure can trigger anxiety. When you’re nibbling caviare, or taking a taxi home loaded, or feeling spaced out at a concert, what do you think? ‘I shouldn’t be here. I am going to be punished. I shouldn’t be doing this. Something terrible is about to happen. I do not deserve to be happy.’
Well, maybe you don’t. That may be the trouble.
We are more than creatures of the cave, ruled by instinct. We are moral beings as well.
Guilt, Offshoot of Anxiety
Guilt also stands between you and enjoyment. It’s an offshoot of anxiety.
‘Shouldn’t have done this, shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have had a one-night stand. Shouldn’t have eaten a bar of chocolate…’
It too is instinctive, hardwired in. It applies itself to any number of situations. When we succumb to ‘inappropriate’ sexual desire, eat the forbidden chocolate – anything that makes us feel bad – that’s when the instinctive self, determined to satisfy its appetites, is in conflict with the socialized self.
‘Ought not to endanger my relationship. Ought to lose weight.’
Feel it in its purest form when you neglect your children: ‘Three in the morning, the baby’s crying, but I’m too tired to bother.’ Baby wins: eventually you stir yourself, get out of bed and see to it. Thus Mother Nature, that unseeing, unthinking, callous creature, ensures the continuation of the race.
Whether or not you have children, the capacity to feel guilt is there. Stronger in some than in others. Certainly stronger in women than in men.
She: ‘We need to get back, darling. The babysitter’s waiting up.’
He: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. What do we pay her for?’
Guilt is society’s safeguard. If you don’t feel guilt at all they declare you’re a psychopath and lock you up, and quite right too.
Let me add to that – just to counter the effect of so much Darwinian reductionism, which is true enough but there are other truths as well, namely that we have a spiritual life – that guilt is the soul’s safeguard. And if the soul is safeguarded, we start from a higher level of life content than we would otherwise do. If you are good – abstain from bitchiness, doing others down, malice and complaint – people like you. If you are liked, you tend to have a good life.
Be good and you’ll be happy. Be happy and you’ll be good and go to heaven.
As a corollary, if you don’t respond to the promptings of guilt, you might very well go to hell – in other words, fall into a depression, get ill and end up with no friends.
The Value of Guilt
You could see the ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ which litter our lives as a nuisance, as contrary to our own self-interest. So our partner suffers because we were unfaithful, so our mother is lonely and upset because we didn’t visit, so our children weep uncomforted. So who cares? ‘I really deserve a holiday. I deserve it because I’m me.’ Stuff and nonsense.
‘Now at last,’ says the new-style granny, abstaining from babysitting, spending the children’s inheritance, ‘I’m going to do something for myself.’
You won’t enjoy it, you know. You will feel guilty and selfish every minute of your sun-soaked, pampered holiday, and so you should.
Therapists may well try and iron the emotion of guilt out of us, and some do, seeing it as ‘negative’. By which they mean it’s uncomfortable, painful and inconvenient, and aren’t we trying to achieve happiness here? ‘Look to your own skin,’ they advise. ‘Do what you want.’
Alexander Crowley, black magician, rapist and philosopher of Edwardian times, self-styled Beast no. 666, had this as his philosophy: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. It was an attitude seen as very shocking at the time, even satanic. If it doesn’t sound all that unreasonable now it may be our loss as, seeking validation for our bad actions, we virtuously pursue the ‘authenticity of our feelings’ (‘I have to leave you and the kids because I’m in love’) and decide we deserve every good thing, in the words of the shampoo ad, because we’re worth it.
Self-esteem can go too far – a little low self-esteem might not come amiss as we consider our faults and failures. On our deathbeds the memory of the authenticity of our feelings might not seem as important as the love and company of our friends and relatives.
There is a truly simple answer to the pains of guilt: If you feel bad about it, don’t do it.
Now there’s an old-fashioned doctrine. Step by step, little by little, do what you should, not what you want.
Conscience is to the soul as pain is to the body. It keeps you out of harm’s way.
Doing Bad and Feeling Worse
There are little everyday acts of meanness, little evils which are under our control, little tactlessnesses meant to hurt, which contribute to our own unhappiness. For hidden somewhere within us is the fear of retaliation. ‘If I do this, you might do that.’ You get wary and untrusting. Meanness shows – it’s bad for the complexion, gives you a dull skin, wrinkles and squinty eyes. You end up, in fact, with the face you deserve.
And then there are the great big destructive acts, like bringing your family toppling down like a house of cards. It’s quite easy to do and you will always find allies.
Daughter: ‘You were a terrible mother. That’s why I’m such a mess. My therapist says so. I hate you. I’m not letting you see your grandchildren any more – you’re such a monster you might do the same to them as you did to me.’
Mother: ‘But I did the best I could. You are the meaning of my life. I love you the way you love your own children.’
Daughter: ‘Daddy, you must have abused me when I was a little girl. My therapist says there’s no other explanation for my feelings of hostility and depression.’
Father: ‘Perhaps you were just born that way. Perhaps you should go to church and not a therapist. Meanwhile, thanks a million for breaking up the family. I’m off.’
One day you come to your senses and wonder what it was all about, and you can remember everything, but there’s no one to tell, no family shoulders left to cry on, and your own children don’t seem to seek your company.
Conclusion
There are some truly bad therapists out
there as well as some very good ones.
Proud, Defiant and Unhappy
You can take the proud and defiant path through life, of course. Some do and get away with it. You can decide you have problems because you let yourself be trampled on and go to assertiveness classes.
It has never seemed to me, however, that assertiveness classes have done anyone any good. My friend Valerie went to one, complaining that other people walked all over her. My own feeling was that she was the one who normally did the trampling, while worrying about her self-esteem and tendency to self-effacement. When she returned after her two-week course she bullied more, smiled less and her self-esteem was sky-high. It’s true she got a rise, but she lost her boyfriend. Justice was on her side, but life wasn’t.
The fewer the mini-nastinesses we do – and we all do them – the better able we will be to deal with the real, great, imponderable areas of unhappiness when they come along. Which they do, unasked, in everyone’s life.
Moral
If you haven’t anything nice to say, don’t
say anything at all. Smile though you want
to spit. When in doubt, do nothing.
This flies in the face of contemporary wisdom, I know. Valerie was told to give voice to her anger (or she’d get cancer), speak emotional truths (it was only fair to herself), claim the authenticity of her feelings (‘I feel, therefore I’m right’) never fake orgasm (it’s a lie, an indignity) and in general claim her rights and seek justice in the home and at work. Above all she must never be persuaded into making the office coffee, because she was worth more than that.
Valerie sounded off at her boss when he said it would be nice to have a cup of coffee, and he said that was the last straw, he was tired of being bullied, and he fired her. She told her mother she’d rather she didn’t phone the office because of her Birmingham accent and her mother spent her savings – those that hadn’t gone on Valerie’s expensive education – on a little cottage in France and wouldn’t be there to babysit when she was needed – not that there was much question of babies any more, since Valerie was 41 and her boyfriend got so nervous in the end about not ‘giving’ her an orgasm (which didn’t seem in his power to give anyway) that the sex dried up altogether and he left. And she had to make her own coffee in her lonely home, while trying to find a lawyer willing to accept her unfair dismissal case, and these days caffeine gave her palpitations, and her mother was out of even mobile range.
An Alternative Therapy: Prayer
Suffer a pang of remorse when in bed with your best friend’s boyfriend and act upon it by getting out of the bed, and you will have less sensual pleasure in the short term, but it is amazing how gratifying doing the right thing is. Your best friend may not see it quite like that, of course, concentrating only on the fact that you were in the bed in the first place.
But pray God she will never find out.
I mean that. Actually pray. Gather a few forces around you. The way to be happy, to forestall anxiety and guilt, is to be good.
The world being what it is, you may not know what praying is. (Look it up on the Internet and you can’t find a definition.) But this is how it goes. You sit down. You create a mental space around you. Shutting your eyes helps. Hands steepled together helps: you’re enclosing yourself within yourself, making a separation between yourself and what’s outside you. Which, you will find, if you develop the antennae, is a kind of breathing presence, the majesty of existence itself. You are part of it.
Pray for others, not yourself. (Praying for yourself is vulgar.) Hold your friends in your mind, household by household. Direct your thoughts towards them, wish them well, enfold them and surround them with goodwill. Family too, of course, but anxieties and practicalities are more likely to break through here. Attention wanders.
You can link what you’re doing with a known religion, the Father (‘Dear Holy Father’), the Son (‘Dear Lord Jesus’) or Holy Ghost (though very few pray to him because he is so hard to envisage), or any of the saints (‘Dear St Anthony, help me find my lost sentence’), or Pan, I suppose, if you’re a pantheist (‘Dear Lord Pan, help me find my lost virility’), or Mother Mary (‘Help me get pregnant’), but with all these what you are doing is using an intermediary to connect you. Prayer is easier than meditation, which encourages self-centredness and too great a sense of ‘Look at me, meditating!’ You seldom fall asleep when praying for others, as you do when meditating. You just stop when concentration fails.
Perfection is impossible to achieve, of course. But we can try, and angels will attend us, and we can take pleasure from the gentle air of their beating wings.
A Joke: Man Prays to God
‘Dear God, let me win the lottery!’ The voice is piercing, shrill and desperate, amongst all the others pleading to God for help. It goes on for week after week, Wednesday after Saturday after Wednesday: ‘Let me win the lottery!’
The Almighty does his best to ignore the voice, but finally he can’t stand it any more. He speaks like thunder from the clouds. ‘Okay,’ says God, ‘tell you what, I’ll meet you halfway. Buy a ticket.’
The Major Enemies of Happiness
Forget guilt, forget anxiety. There are real enemies of happiness out there, real tribulations, which are powerful and not self-inflicted. Things that just happen.
Difficulties Along the Way
Old age
Illness
Bereavement
Isolation
Debt
Bitterness
Old Age
Make no mistake about it, money helps. It makes most troubles easier, while not necessarily solving problems.
Failing money, friends help – as does a long record of good behaviour and kindness to others. The comfort of strangers, if sought, is often there. What you put into life at the beginning you can take out with dividends at the end.
Old age seen from the outside can look horrific. But if you’re in there in that derelict body it’s still you; there are still pleasures and ambitions left to you. You are Ivan in the Russian story by Solzhenitsyn, the man in the prison camp who guarded his piece of dry bread successfully all day, and when he finally ate it, enjoyed incomparable pleasure. Seen from the outside, it was dreadful; from the inside, triumphant. May it be like that for you.
Illness
Illness is bad. But it can be very interesting, especially if it’s your own. Symptoms are fascinating. It’s another world, a bubble one, perhaps, and precarious, but those in it have already found a way to live with it. The skill of physicians and surgeons is inspiring. As is other people’s selflessness. The walls of your experience may narrow to the width of a hospital bed, but it is still a stage, this is your drama and you are the centre of it. A good performance will get good reviews. Understand and please your audience: the visitors who may or may not cluster round your bed; at the very least the volunteer who brings round the library books or the man who wheels the trolley of newspapers and junk food.
‘How are you today?’ they ask. Well, tell them. That’s pleasure in itself. If ill enough, you are excused selflessness and martyrdom.
And if you are temporarily in a hospital ward, try not to hate it. Go with the flow. The social life of the ward is rich and strange, never mind the routine. People elaborate their symptoms and treatments with a relish others share. They support and understand each other. They joke about death. The ward is a mini-tribe, sharing experiences.
In the private ward you have your comfort but you can be lonely, and another patient is more likely to come to your aid than a nurse. Sometimes money is not the universal solution.
When Children Are Ill
There is nothing good to be said about the serious illness of a child and not much comfort to be offered to the parents involved, other than to try to shift the perspective, see the small body as too frail and weak to support the intense existence of the mind and soul of this particular child. See how the latter exists, how clearly and powerfully it becomes apparent even as the body fails. The inner being makes itself clear – let the parents try to gain strength from it. Difficult, because parental distress is based in one of the most powerful instincts we have: to protect and save the children. The mind has little defence in these circumstances. The soul has. It is strong in the child. Those who suffer with children will understand the concept.
You can pray, though your sense of a benign universe will be somewhat blunted. That in itself is unsettling. The prayers would have to overcome your sense that you are picked out by fate for cruel and unjust punishment.
And it might help you, selflessly, to let the child go, to not struggle pointlessly for the continuation of its existence.
You could try Lourdes. I haven’t been there, but they do say that a community of the like-minded, on the edges of despair, within which you don’t have to explain yourself, with standards you can adapt to, however idiosyncratic and peculiar they may seem to the healthy and flourishing rationalist you once were lucky enough to be, can be a great comfort. You’re with the tribe you have inherited. It might seem grotty compared to the one you were born into, but it is a tribe.
Bereavement and Isolation
We’ll get on to these universal enemies later, and in more detail, when we are feeling stronger. I can be quite cheerful about bereavement, there are cures for isolation, and as for debt, well…
Debt
It’s probably your own fault. You had a vision of yourself which did not accord with reality. You upgraded yourself to a wealthier sort of person than you actually were. It happens. You should have listened to the Voice of Guilt. You have my every sympathy. Earn your way out of it.
Bitterness
Very little in life is fair. Some of us are born with longer legs than others. Some of us are born into poverty in the Sahara desert, others into prosperity in leafy suburbs.
It’s unfair that some are born thin, active, nervy ectomorphs and others are born rounded, easy-going endomorphs. Society these days smiles on the former rather than the latter, who have to spend their lives on diets, never eating what they want, except in those few places left in the world where obesity is valued.
Seeking natural justice is absurd: justice does not exist in nature. Seeking justice in the home is okay, but tends to end in exhaustion: it can be easier to wash his socks than argue that he should do it.
Resenting men, an emotion familiar to most women, is understandable but pointless. Don’t let it make you bitter. Some things are just not fair. It is not fair that for men the culmination of sex is always an orgasm – or at least for 98 per cent of them – and for women it is not.
Sex (#ulink_164b0754-3c36-5578-b09b-0189352ad3cf)
Sources of Envy
10 per cent of women never experience orgasm.
20 per cent occasionally do.
50 per cent sometimes do.
20 per cent usually do.
10 per cent always do.
Or so the current figures say. But figures change. Someone in the 10 per cent ‘always’ category suddenly goes down to the next division: ‘My partner came back from his trip and he’d grown a beard.’ Someone in the ‘never’ group claims now to be in the ‘sometimes’ category: ‘I met another man.’ But the broad pattern is clear. The pleasure so liberally bestowed upon men by nature is only grudgingly given to women.
Of course women resent it. Listen to any conversation between women when men aren’t there: at the hen night, on the factory floor, over the garden fence, at the English Lit. tutorial. Women may laugh and joke, but actually they’re furious. ‘They can, we can’t, unfair, unfair.’ They may not know what’s biting them, but that’s it.
But facts are facts and there we are. Deal with it. Life is not fair. Resenting the fact is no recipe for happiness.
Indeed, the less you think about orgasms the better, since the greatest bar to having one, if we’re to believe the research, is wanting one. Best if they creep up on you unawares. Women are at their most orgasmic when they are least anxious, but wondering why you’re not having one can make you very anxious indeed. Which is ironic, since what you want most you’re going to get least.
But a lot of life is like that. Want too much and it’s snatched away. An attitude of careless insouciance is more likely to pay dividends.
Because really, having an orgasm or not doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, just as having an éclair or not doesn’t matter. Life goes on pretty much the same with or without. There are other pleasures. There’s true love, trust and sensual pleasure. Or, if you’re that kind of person, and I hope you are not, the victory of disdain. ‘See, knew you were no good in bed.’
But actually, it’s as likely, if not more likely, to be your doing, not his.
Unfair – but what you are after is happiness. Sexual repletion is not a necessary ingredient. Sexual satisfaction can happen anyway, and is not dependent on orgasm. If women were not so often described as ‘achieving orgasm’ then there would be no sense of failure when they didn’t. The word is wrong, not the thing itself.
‘I don’t do orgasm’ might be a more useful way of describing yourself, initially, to a partner, and it’s a bonus to both if it turns out not to be true. But having an orgasm is not a sign of true love any more than the lack of it is the opposite. I have read letters from girls who think they must end a relationship because sex between them and their true love does not conclude with an orgasm for her. Imagining sex has failed, they feel the relationship has failed. It hasn’t – all that has happened has been that she didn’t have an orgasm. So what? Better, more conducive to happiness, just to see orgasm as an additional extra, something special that happens, a bonus, a surprising gift from heaven which descends like manna from time to time, not your natural-born right – and then a whole raft of unhappiness will be wiped from your life.
In Any Case
Female orgasm has no apparent usefulness to the human race. This puzzles those who think that everything in nature has to have a purpose, those who personalize evolution as if it knew what it was doing and had some end of perfection in sight. Some say muscular spasms help the sperm on its way to the egg; others doubt it. It is not the longing for orgasm which makes the virgin girl fall in love – though it may be the boy’s. Another inequality, another injustice!
The peacock’s tail demonstrates sexual attraction in overdose as he struts before the female; his voice would be enough to put anyone off. I don’t suppose nature was after fairness, trying to balance things in the scales of justice, when she gave with one hand and took away with the other.
Why different birds have different voices no one knows – and no one’s worked out what they’re for – but those with (to our ears) the sweetest voices are the ones who sing the loudest and seem to relish their singing most. I like to think that the thrushes in my garden sing because it occurs to them that it’s a beautiful morning and they feel like acknowledging it. It’s an irrational thought, but it makes me happy for at least ten minutes, wandering in the garden and listening, but then the sun gets too hot and I worry because I haven’t got a hat.
Some say that, like male nipples and the appendix, female orgasm is a mistake which nature has failed to recognize as a non-necessity. Better to see it as a celebration and a reward just for being alive. But there are others – the exhilaration of ideas, conversations, the company of good friends and so on – which probably add up to more.
The Joy of the Fake Orgasm
Just fake. Happy, generous-minded women, not too hung up about emotional honesty, fake. Research tells us that when you do there is ‘activity in the part of the motor cortex that relates to the genitals, the amygdala, but not the deactivation of the cerebral cortex that occurs prior and after a genuine orgasm’. In other words you have to be happy to have an orgasm, but if you have an orgasm you will be happy.
Activate the positive. Deactivate the negative. That’s what it’s all about.
The more highly educated you are, the more likely you are to fake orgasm. I am not sure what we deduce from that. Is too much intellectual stimulation bad for the love life? Or does it just occur to clever women pretty soon that it’s only sensible to fake it?
Genuine orgasm experienced, acknowledged and stored away as one of the uncompromisingly good things in life, you will then no doubt leap out of bed and make breakfast, or squeeze orange juice or pour champagne or whatever your lifestyle, with the words ‘You are so clever’, or however you express enthusiasm, ringing in his – or her, of course, should you be a lesbian – ears.
If you are sensible you will do exactly the same if you’ve faked it, because half the pleasure of sex is being nice to the other person, and half is better than none, on the half-full, half-empty cup principle. Clever, judgemental, honourable people who feel deception is unworthy of them, who say, ‘But relationships must be based upon truth,’ are likely to be of the half-empty sort.
Remember you are not in pursuit of justice, you are seeking what makes women happy. You must catch it as it flies, and if it flies just out of reach, well, it was a nice sight while it lasted, wasn’t it?
Faking is kind to male partners of the new man kind, who like to think they have done their duty by you. Otherwise they too may become anxious and so less able to perform. The more the woman rates ‘performance’, the more likely the man is to wilt and fail. Do yourself and him a favour, sister: fake it. Then, who knows, as a reward for your kindness, sublime pleasure may creep up on you unawares.
There is a great confusion here between the pleasures of love and the pleasures of sex. Both can carry on along parallel tracks, never touching, to the end of time. Or one day, who’s to say, they may meet.
My friend Olivia, now 69, had an orgasm for the first time when she was 54 and nine years into her second marriage. It took her by surprise. But she said it was like learning to ride a bicycle: once you knew how to do it, you could do it all the time. She’s been clocking them up ever since. Life does not begin at 20. She was doing well enough without them, was earning a salary at that time as CEO of a media communications firm and had seemed to me to be living a full, even over-full, love life since I first met her when she was 18.
Her first marriage ended in scandal and divorce – her husband, a writer, naming seven co-respondents. (In those days of guilty and innocent, sexual infidelity had to be proved. Illicit couples had to be discovered in flagrante, stained sheets produced and so on, before the judge would grant a divorce.) The press went to town. Oddly enough, the naming and shaming did Olivia no harm in the business world. Even then, everyone liked anyone who had their name in the papers. And then the sixties were upon us and a great deal of random sexual activity went on as a matter of course, and after that divorce was not a matter of right or wrong but about the division of property. Meanwhile Olivia rose rocket-like through the corporate world and who is to say, if she had had more orgasms, she would have bothered to reach such heights? A touch of discontent in the night may be good for all of us. Sexual satisfaction, sensual repletion and the irrational sense of gratitude which tends to go with them, may be the last thing a career woman needs.
Most women, I suspect, are after true love, rather than orgasm, though they will put up with many stages on the way, from pure lust to pride assuaged to boredom endured. And even if true love is not on your agenda, it is always gratifying to stir it in others. If faking it helps, do it.
The Naturalness of the Hen Night
Girls together is good, girls together is fun and usually noisy. But notice how bitterness against men seems to be hardwired, as if nature had bred us to be suspicious of the male, on the lookout for bad behaviour. There’s something in us of the female cat, not letting the tom near the kittens in case he eats them. Put us together and there’s no stopping us. Listen in to the talk and laughter at a girls’ night out: anecdotes about the follies of men, jokes about the minimal size of their parts, tales of male vanity and self-delusion – their stumbling mumbleness, their crazy driving.
We egg each other on to disloyalty. We are the women; we close ranks in opposition to men. The food gets cold on the plate in our excitement. The wine is quickly drunk, and more wine, and vodka shorts. We are the Maenads just before Orpheus comes on the scene to get torn to bits.
And then the mirth gets bitter. It isn’t really funny, it’s real. Someone begins to cry.
Men who leave, men who won’t leave, men who fail to provide, men who don’t love you after all, men who are a sexual disappointment. Past husbands, vanished partners, the ones who never washed, the ones who had the au-pair girl. Men: ridiculous, pathetic, sad.
The noise diminishes and fades away. Silence falls. Time to count heads and divide the bill. Those who have partners slip away, feeling guilty and grateful. Those who haven’t go home on their own, or walk each other to the bus, and tell themselves all they need is their friends.
I have in my time enjoyed such gatherings immensely. They are a great pleasure. Life is good. The trick is to pay and leave just before the silence falls. And try not to be the one collecting the money and tipping the waiter.
Go to Norway and Sweden and notice how the restaurants are full of men. Few women eat out. Yet in theory these are super-equal societies. The women, one supposes, can only prefer to stay at home. These all-male meals – tables for four, six, eight, ten, more – tend to be silent, grim affairs. Men like to sit side by side, silently, metaphorically locking horns, and don’t seem to have nearly such a good time as women do. But they do seem to get happier as the evening progresses, not the other way round. Life gets better, not worse. It isn’t fair.
Nothing’s fair.
It’s unfair that some people like sex a lot, some very little, some not at all. The capacity for pleasure is not doled out equally or fairly.
(It is probably a good idea that people with equivalent levels of sexual energy partner one another, if they want the union to last. People need to wear each other out in bed. Three times a day, three times a week (the norm) or once a year – so long as both are suited, what’s the worry?)
Mind you, the easy-orgasmers, the lucky 20 per cent, are not always popular with others. The papers this morning were in a state of outrage about Sandy, a feckless girl of 19 who went on holiday to Spain leaving her three children in the care of a 15-year-old. When summonsed home by the police and the media, she refused to go. She was having too good a time, she said. She had her photo taken burying her head into the bare chest of a semi-naked waiter. I bet she had orgasms at the drop of a hat. She knew how to enjoy herself. She was not anxious. She did not feel guilt. She well and truly broke the ten-minute rule. She stretched it to a whole week of drink, drugs, sex and ecstasy before guilt set in and she flew home. That’s one way of doing it.
It Isn’t Fair But It’s a Fact
The fight for gender equality is bad for the looks. It makes no one happy, unless you find some reward in struggling for a justice that evolution failed to deliver. It will just develop your jaw, wrinkle your brow beyond the capacity of Botox to unravel, muddy your complexion so much that no amount of Beauty Flash will clear it, and in general do you no good.
Fight for political justice by all means – join the party, reform and re-educate. Fight for domestic justice – ‘Your turn to clean the loo’ – if you must, though personally I don’t recommend too much of it, it’s too exhausting. But do not fight for physiological equality because it does not exist.
If you have a period pain, you have one. Accept it. Don’t fight it. Sit down. Take a pill. A male voice raised is impressive; a female voice raised creates antipathy. Accept it. You are not trying to be a man. You are proud to be a woman. Do not shout your enemies down at the client meeting – leave that to the men. Get your way by smiling sweetly. The end is more important than the means.
Accept that for women happiness comes in short bursts and the ten-minute rule applies. For men it can last as long as a football match before they realize they’re late picking up the child from school.
So is the sum of human happiness greater for a man than for a woman? I suspect so. Lucky old them.
Be generous. You can afford to be. At least you occupy the moral high ground, and they know it.
Occupying the Moral High Ground
It’s quite nice up here these days. Women can look out over the urban landscape and know they are nicer than men, more co-operative, more empathic, better at communication, better at getting to university and better at getting jobs. Women multi-task – everyone knows. They can do many things at once. Men tend to do one thing at a time. If a woman loses a sock she finds another which will do just as well; a man continues the search until he has found it (albeit in the bin where he threw it), by which time the train has gone and the meeting has begun.
Women abjure the idle languorousness of sexual contentment and get on with things. Women leap out of bed after sex to feed the cat and wash out their smalls so that they’ll be dry by morning. Men just go to sleep gratified and satisfied, happy that all is well. (Though if it’s not his own bed he may well want to regain it before falling asleep. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he says. Oh yes!)
Women worry in advance. They search through their bags for the dry-cleaning ticket before they even get into the shop. Men wait until they’re in there and then hold everyone up.
Just Accept It
Accept gender differences, don’t deny them. That way you make the most of what happiness nature did allow you as a woman.
Evolution has allowed you an intellect that’s pretty much the same as the male’s.
(Though the male bell curve when it comes to IQ is a little more flattened than for the female. That is to say there are more males at the extreme ends of the spectrum – extreme intelligence, extreme lack of it – which is why you get more male double-firsts at Oxford than female and more males held in police cells overnight than females.)
Evolution has also allowed you an aesthetic appreciation equal to that of the male. There are as many men as women listening to flute concertos at the Wigmore Hall, as many men as women wandering round art galleries.
(Nature might slightly favour the male when it comes to creative activity – men’s books may be ‘better’, if less readable, than women’s, their paintings fetch more in the art market, and so on – but that claim would take a whole book on its own to discuss.)
The traditionally female qualities of caring and nurturing, sharing and co-operating were not always seen as admirable. Inside the home a woman did them for free; outside the home they commanded low wages. Society favoured to male virtues: dismissing and disposing, self-control and a stiff upper lip. But then women, released by technological advance from the domestic drudgery required just to keep the children alive, have used their new power brilliantly. Theirs are the qualities now most valued in Western society. Forget the old male values of never apologizing, never explaining – they’re out-moded. Presidents weep, prime ministers apologize, monarchs explain. To have to accept your genetic make-up, the femaleness of your body, its irritating habit of keeping menstrual time with the moon, is not so bad a fate. These cosmic forces are too great for you to take on single-handed anyway.
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