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?
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.
Today’s Mother – Bonded and Double-binded
Somewhere 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.
