Читать книгу Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon - Страница 15

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.