Читать книгу The Pavlova Omnibus - Austin Mitchell - Страница 17

MOST COUNTRIES have oppressed minorities. New Zealand has an oppressed near majority, sometimes called The New Zealand Woman, sometimes known by her Christian name, Sheila. She’s constructed locally from internationally approved patterns. Basic design is good and sturdy, though finish is unimaginative and trimmings limited. Controls are in the usual place and she needs little attention or maintenance: mumble at her occasionally, slap her on the back (never the bottom) and you can ignore her for hours. Above all, she’s clean—fanatically so—and you will be, too, if you have anything to do with her. Yet aside from her outstanding contribution to the soap industry, what is her role? America is female dominated; France is male dominated. New Zealand you have to accept as a world divided into ‘his’ and ‘hers’.

The ‘his’ compartment includes all the positions of power and the interesting jobs, all the folk heroes and all the dominant myths: sport, war and virility. Woman’s role is to run the home, raise the children and make the scones. Like Dr Johnson, a Kiwi is ‘better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek’, though he might tolerate a little flower arranging. Naturally the Outward Bound Trust, considering courses for girls, thought flower arrangement, make-up and nursing more appropriate than the more energetic pursuits for boys. With the comfortable average measurements of 36-28-39, Norma Average is built to be mater not Mata Hari.

Despite her impressive statistics, Women’s Liberationists find the Kiwi woman as underdeveloped as Twiggy. She leaves school almost a year before the male and she’s half as likely to go to university. New Zealanders are low on the world league for the proportion of women working. Only a third go out to work and then usually in lowly paid jobs: a seventh of men workers get under $1,400 compared with two-thirds of women, while the average man gets over $1,000 a year more than the average woman. Female Cabinet Ministers are as rare as the captive kakapo, no woman has ever run a government department, only eleven have ever sat in Parliament, and now only 5 per cent of M.Ps, 7 per cent of those embalmed in Who’s Who and 8 per cent of doctors are believed to be female. The rare woman who gets to the top gets there by transforming herself into a man in skirts, an embattled suffragette, or as a token gesture—most bodies feel it necessary to appoint a woman, an advisory broad, in the same way as a token Maori. Even the leaders of the campaign for female emancipation are men. Like its counterparts elsewhere, the Pohutamanurewa Women’s Liberation Movement (membership three) has a male quorum after 9.30 p.m.—the two women members have to be home early to prepare hubby’s supper and bake cakes.

A situation which horrifies overseas emancipationists hardly interests the New Zealand woman. She’s programmed to want something different. Unimportant, honorific positions from Prime Minister to chairman of U.E.B. can be left to mere males. The female has real power and a more fulfilling role. The male clings to the myths of dogged masculinity as social conformity, and the growth of organisations and bureaucracies steadily emasculate him. The New Zealand woman is still a pioneer, the last to savour the joys of being an independent small businessman. She commands and manages the home unit. She determines the destinies of its denizens, mobilises its resources, manages its labour force of husband and children. Welfare and tax determine the floors and ceilings of the man’s income. Much more important in determining the family’s welfare is the way the woman mobilises the minimum the husband provides. Her housekeeping, budgeting, scrimping and saving and her efforts at the cottage industries of dressmaking and bottling make all the difference to the family’s wellbeing.

The Kiwibird has the job of the small entrepreneur or the pioneer. She also has the characteristics. No wilting violet she, with her capacity for hard work and her dogged toughness. The dull plumage hides a fierce spirit. She knows what she wants—a husband, a lovely home, children, preferably though not necessarily in that order. Woe betide anything or anyone who stands in her way for she’s a fierce and terrifying species. Her looks betray her spirit. Where the Kiwi male has a face younger than his body, her efforts have told to such an extent that her body is younger than her face.

Unfortunately her role doesn’t provide universal satisfaction. Since she marries at 20 and has produced 2.6 children by the time she’s 28, the joys of being a homemaker (notice the distinction from the English ‘housewife’) can pall when the children grow up, if only because it’s useless. Sometimes she takes refuge in neurotic symptoms from backache to the National Council of Women. Or she throws herself into a strident hostility to change because she feels herself let down and without realising why, dimly puts it down to forces beyond her control. More than one in three go back to work around forty as an under-paid labour force, though slightly less exploited than the remainder, who devote themselves to the frenzied organisational work which alone keeps the machinery of welfare and education going. Committees are the opium of the people. The field of endeavour ranges from the Women’s Division to the Mothers’ Union competition for the best pikelet. Rarely does the embattled female fighting the rearguard action of life on one or all of these fronts realise that she is doing all this because the role she is programmed for has let her down.

Compared with the dogged singlemindedness of the single ladybird, and the implacability of the Great New Zealand Mum, the man’s role is that of an ephemeral faineant. While she bottles, he gets pickled, seeking escape from a home he can’t dominate, in the boozy camaraderie of the pub or the solitudes of the garden. The only thing he’s allowed to run is the car. He hasn’t even got the initiative to form the Men’s Liberation Front, the Y Front, to support his case.

While other advanced countries move towards unisex, this role tension between men and women is a basic division in their society. In literature it becomes a dominant theme of intermittent guerilla war or entrenched mutual incomprehension. In life it is the weak spot of their paradise, a vague, little understood dissatisfaction, a weakness in the roles they think should satisfy and fulfil, but somehow don’t. In other countries the social battleground reflects the basic tension in society: in Britain, class; in America, colour. In New Zealand the battlefield is sex.

Your first impression will be that sex does not exist. The word is not used and the act itself is referred to as UNO, as in the phrase, ‘They were going out with each other for six months and (pause) you know’. UNO is thus different from ‘yer know’, because the one is something too shocking to talk about, the other too boring to discuss. Yet even when you know the name it is difficult to discover whether UNO exists. It may have been abolished as a distraction from the war effort by a government committed to the socialisation of the means of reproduction, distribution and exchange.

Where America goes topless, New Zealand has pioneered topdressing. The porn laws protect New Zealanders against the imminent threat of invasion from Denmark. No electrodeloaded volunteers devote themselves to a labour of love in the back seat of a mock-up car in some Auckland University laboratory and Patterns of Sexuality in a Northland Town by those well known social eroticians and bicycle menders Fischbein and Roganblatt remains unwritten. In Britain, women’s magazines devote themselves to the sexual problems of their readers: the formula for a successful newspaper’s women’s page is ritual doses of abortion, illegitimacy, divorce and the pill. New Zealand counterparts tackle more fundamental problems: ‘What to do about my winter sweet shrub which is making no growth, while the leaves have become brown, P.F. Auckland’. The Havelock you will hear about is North not Ellis and it is not necessary to get New Zealand Wildlife under plain cover.

Compared with Britain, this looks to be a cautiously antiseptic society. Prostitutes are as common as coelacanths and in most places taxi drivers will ask you where they can get a woman. Nary a nipple will confront you from the newspapers. Two-thirds of the population has fluoride in its water (the rest oppose it nail if not tooth) and you may well conclude that fluoridation eliminated nipples with dental caries. The idea of key parties where wives are swapped by the throwing in of car keys is unthinkable in a society more likely to throw in wives and swap precious cars.

Then you will begin to notice symptoms of UNO. In pub and rugby club, beer inflates the imagination, if not the libido. Men are men and women grateful for it—often. The Homeric narrators become the Edmund Hillarys of sexology; life a kind of sexual Outward Bound course. No scientific accuracy exists because Kelburn harbours no Kinsey defining norms for Ngaio or frequencies for Feilding. Yet feats are recounted in action replays, feats which would have tested the stamina of a sex-crazed superman, raised on vitamin E in Nero’s Rome. The narrators may exaggerate slightly in their surveys of the performing arts, but at least they think about sex.

Then you notice another symptom: the titivation industry. Much of this is imported. They don’t assemble pornography locally under licentiousness and the Feltex version of The Carpetbaggers has yet to be filmed, so the pornshop is not the grossest part of the G.N.P. as in Scandinavia. Nevertheless, the sex substitutes are there. Look at the movie billings. One newspaper described Irma La Douce as ‘a story of passion, bloodshed, desire and death—in fact everything that makes life worth living’. Others follow on similar lines. ‘Insatiably, music drove her onward’—The Sound of Music. ‘Shocking things, things that astonished the world, happened in this car’—Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. Truth titivates. Its billboards are usually more exciting than the actual newspaper, but its headlines also excite. ‘Bedding-out in the North Island’—gardening column. ‘The Master and the Forty Boys’—overcrowding in primary schools. Here is a nation sublimating.

Stage three of the process of adjustment is the assumption that beneath the surface New Zealand throbs with a sexual activity from which you alone are excluded. You see few outward symptoms simply because sex is the most asexual activity. Everyone is sexually content, possibly exhausted. The prostitute has vanished because no one needs her. You alone are not getting your share and you begin to feel like the psychiatrist who wanted to be a sex maniac but failed the practicals.

Understanding comes as a compromise between these extreme views of bromideland or wall to wall sex. As in everything else, they conform to a norm: a quarter-acre, one-car, three-children, two-orgasm family. UNO exists. Unfortunately it can’t be talked about. This is partly because of their puritan legacy which makes it easier to get sex than actually discuss it. The small town environment, when Big Neighbour tenderly watches over them every step every yard of the way, also makes frankness difficult. Note that in Britain, adverts for feminine deodorants are quite explicit on where and why they are to be applied. Counterpart adverts in New Zealand could be for catarrh.

UNO involves relationships between people, deep feelings and emotions, things the New Zealander has been conditioned to avoid and repress. It brings up basic problems of the relationship between the sexes, that fault line in the New Zealand society. In America the social battleground is the streets—in New Zealand it is the bedroom. Here the role conflicts and tensions which characterise this society are put to the basic test. The battle goes on in an atmosphere of sullen incomprehension. They don’t know what it’s all about.

Hence the embarrassed silence: the altar of hymen has to be discreetly draped in candlewick. Children have to be left to find out for themselves which, being good Kiwi pragmatists, they promptly do. This is perfectly acceptable. UNO itself isn’t objected to—just indications that it goes on. A deaf ear is turned to anything that goes bump in the night, but one mistake brings the shotguns out and makes the erring youngsters sooner wed than dead.

If anything becomes public, the government will appoint a Royal Commission or the Railways Department will inquire into the Bluff-Invercargill train. This is the morality of ‘thou shalt not be known to’ rather than ‘thou shalt not’. Negative all this may be, but it’s vigorous. Since it can’t stop intercourse, it will stamp out contraception. It can’t check conception, so it will prohibit abortion. Critics who attack such acts as making bed situations worse, completely mistake the importance of morality, which isn’t really about other people but about salving our own consciences. The job of the moralist is really to push the inconsiderate tip of the iceberg (the point at issue) back under the water.

Formal instruction is ruled out, by their religious belief in the trinity of monkeys, so the great amateur tradition takes over. After a collective initiation in the group gropes, which pass for teenage parties, the explorers are off on their own (‘together we found out’). Their endeavours are confined to cars, fields and livingroom floors, so as to reinforce the inbuilt feeling that sex is dirty and beastly, and to preserve the feeling that marriage and clean sheets are a desirable goal. New Zealanders are among the highest users of the pill in the world (indeed thanks to it there will be over a quarter of a million fewer New Zealanders by 1990 than there would otherwise have been). Yet it is officially denied to the unmarried, which explains why the number of babies born in the first seven months after marriage now runs at around a third of nuptial first births and why the illegitimacy rate is second only to Sweden and has been rising more rapidly than practically any country, even without encouragement from the Monetary and Economic Council. Progressive churchmen have long been considering changing the marriage service to read, ‘I did’. Small wonder that in 1969 the government ‘authorised further research into the causes of the increase in extramarital intercourse’, a study which would have been as enjoyable as it was pointless.

So there’s your final picture. New Zealand is a society in which sex undoubtedly exists—in fact it’s almost as common as rugby and can produce just as many injuries. Yet like rugby, it has to be restricted to amateurs. There is no pulsating promiscuity, just a rather sad amateur experimentation, a low standard of loving. In a drugged sleep, William James once thought he had stumbled on the key to the human dilemma. Hastily he wrote it down. He awoke next morning to read the legend, ‘Higamus hogamus, woman is monogamous. Hogamus, higamus, man is polygamous’. His disappointment was not at the triteness of the message but because it did not really apply to New Zealand. Big Neighbour behind the Venetian blinds does not allow the male Kiwi to be anything more than monogamous. His fierce female mate is determined to be nothing else. The unmarried experimenters enjoy a monogamy before marriage that’s almost as glum as the monogamy after marriage; by the time they are married they have lost the taste for the whole business.

In America they escape from monogamy by adultery; in New Zealand they escape by segregation, hence their parties. These typically fall into two camps: an unbeleaguered garrison of women and the men clustering in the kitchen to keep supply lines short. This enables men to talk about ephemera like sport, cars and sex and women to talk about homes and children. Their concerns are always the more basic and practical.

The New Zealand marriage is the transfer of the embattled sexual relationship from car seat to candlewick. The system isn’t likely to change. Co-education doesn’t undermine the set-up for it makes the Purdah Principle informal rather than formal. Even emancipation will work against women unless it is total and complete. For a woman going out to work means letting go of the tiller and surrendering real power for a dull job and a low wage. Even the extra income only boosts the man’s spending power since the Kiwi-hen is constitutionally incapable of spending money.

As for UNO it can only flourish when removed from the battleground and Big Neighbour. Visiting sailors, pop groups and American forces in war and what passes for peace are all outside the integration machinery so they find our sex life like our welfare state: rough and ready but free.

Still, I don’t want to seem too critical. The New Zealand woman is the most attractive in the world. She’s the best housekeeper and she brings up the cleanest children in conditions so antiseptic Dr Barnard would be proud to operate in them. She may prefer Alison Holst style to Graham Kerr but her cooking is certain to win your heart. It was after all Dr Barnard who remarked that the best way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. And even if she weren’t quite as good as I’m painting her I’d never dare tell you. She might break my arm.