Godless in Eden
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:
– 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
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
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
The Fish and the Bicycle
Pity the Poor Men
Today’s Mother – Bonded and Double-binded
Has Feminism Gone Too Far?
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
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?