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
