Читать книгу Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon - Страница 19
ОглавлениеSomewhere along the way the gender polarities reversed. Men, being suddenly disadvantaged, notice it. Women, advantaged, tend not to. Why should they?
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?
Sure, it’s men’s turn, but the aim of feminism was not to win, not to put men down, but to achieve equality: to be allowed to be a person first and of a certain gender second. These rights are now encapsulated in law. But how about the rights of a teenage boy in a working-class area? Girls jeer at you, police harass you, teachers (mostly female) give up on you. School inspectors shake their heads over you. Ofsted maintains that the underachievement of boys, particularly white, working-class boys, is one of the most significant problems that schools face today. Parents find you impossible. Old ladies cross the street to avoid you. What do you look forward to? Insecurity is the name of the male game. Thirty percent of all our unemployed are under twenty-five; and of that thirty, twenty are male, ten are female. Twice as many. Male unemployment goes up, female unemployment goes down. One in three men have suffered at least one period of unemployment in the last five years. Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the gravitas and dignity that came from being the family provider. Forget it. At best as a man you’re decorative and look after the kids, and earn a bit sometimes, at worst you’re a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down.
Twenty-eight percent of us now live in single person households – a lonely and unnatural state – and most of the twenty-eight percent consists of young single men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest in the normal nurturing way that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender’s status and self-esteem – call it masculinism, homoism, brotherism, machoism, what you want – and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done.
So who needs a man?
Back in the seventies feminists slapped up a poster which announced to a startled and disbelieving public: ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.’ That is to say, she didn’t need one at all. Time, for good or bad, has proved that once unlikely poster right. The world changed: the laws changed: and any young woman these days can live without a man. She may not want to, but she can. It may feel unnatural, she may be lonely at night, but she has her freedom and her financial independence. She can earn, she can spend, she can party. She can find casual sex if she wants to and there’s contraception to ward off babies. (Because what she can’t have, if she values her freedom and independence, is a baby.)
If a woman is young, bright, educated, able-bodied, attractive, childless and in the professions she can live very happily indeed. And just as well, because this seems to be the kind of woman – like poor, nervy Ally McBeal: poor all-over-the-place Bridget Jones – who these days has to do without a man. ‘No wonder,’ observes my mother, who is ninety-one. ‘She’s too proud and picky for her own good. She wants someone she can look up to, and where’s she going to find him?’ New Woman, claims my mother, shocks potential partners to the core by demanding sex and refusing love (just as men once used to) so he’s off and away by morning. ‘And if they’re not shocking him they’re insulting him,’ says my mother. ‘So who can blame him?’
Sexism becomes something more directed towards men by women than from men towards women. Women can speak about men as men can no longer speak about women (at least in company). To do so becomes so much a cultural knee-jerk women don’t even notice they’re doing it. It is commonplace to hear the entire male gender written off as selfish, obtuse and bullying; rapists in spirit if not in deed. ‘Men, who wants them? Who needs them?’ And men laugh uneasily but, astonishingly, collude in this description of themselves. Men are portrayed as braying, despicable fools in cartoons, books, plays and advertisements. Male journalists and TV interviewers, talking to me on ‘pity the poor men’ themes, are even more scathing than traditional feminists. ‘But we’re crass fools,’ they say, in effect, ‘How can you have a good word to say for us?’ They behave like hostages who have fallen in love with their captors; with the colonised who admire the colonisers: I am perpetually amazed. Try writing a film these days about a woman who isn’t ‘strong and independent’. It won’t get made. You can be as insulting as you like about men.
When girl-babies are born – certainly in my part of London – there’s rejoicing: if it’s a boy, it’s, Oh well, better luck next time. Because it’s girls who on the whole look adorable, who don’t bang and crash about, who pass exams, take fewer drugs, don’t crash cars or go to prison, who get the jobs as school-leavers and satisfy today’s definition of what a good citizen is: a responsible, caring, sharing, nurturing, hard-working, mortgage-paying, not over-intellectual person, without too much aggression and not inclined to rock the boat: someone who makes a good employee. A woman, in fact. This is the age of oestrogen, not testosterone. Men begin to have a low self-image that women once had. The suicide rate for young males grows at an alarming rate, for outstripping that of young women. So yes, pity the poor men, whose maleness has become unfashionable. Even the male models are all gay, everyone knows. Pretty boys.
