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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?
