Читать книгу What Makes Women Happy - Fay Weldon - Страница 28

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.