Cristina Odone
Body Language
At my all-girl high school in Washington DC, the most popular course on the curriculum was women’s studies. Twenty-five uniformed teenage girls sat in front of a (woman) teacher and learned that for years we had been victims of a pernicious white male culture that had robbed us of our rightful legacy.
Together, Teacher told us, we would spend the next semester blowing away the dust of history from female painters, writers, minences grises whose influence had been deliberately belittled by the ruling patriarchy.
And so our class busily raked through centuries, in a fruitless search for geniuses to rival Van Gogh and Dante.
This was the Seventies, when women’s lib was a new and glamorous cause for which an eager sisterhood linked arms and marched in the streets under banners calling for equal pay, legalised abortion and equal opportunities.
Girls and women both looked back on the frustrated potential of earlier eras and vowed Never Again. Women’s studies served a purpose: we needed to study our ancestresses more and more, in order to mirror their roles less and less.
Twenty years on, women’s studies has given way to gender studies. Why do boys strike a tough-guy pose, take foolish risks and go in for violence in their prepubescent years, only to then gain confidence and academic honours in their adolescence? Why do assertive, confident and proud young girls “lose their voices” when they hit adolescence?
Psychologists, sociologists and now Jane Fonda, who’s just endowed a gender studies chair at Harvard, to the tune of $8-million, are convinced that understanding gender will shed light on the family, the econo-my and crime.
Our goal equal pay, equal opportunities, an end to discrimination and oppression is social justice for women as for men. But too many women think that to attain it, they must take up the same weaponry as men: the hard-nosed, harsh-voiced, “my kid has flu but hey, I’m here for the meeting” machismo that turns the workplace into a colosseum, and colleagues into gladiators fighting to the death over a scrap of meat or a promotion or a bonus.
In this Russell Crowe scenario, there’s not much room for women to be women. Place a photo of the family on your desk, or change into a low-cut dress before you leave the office, and just see who the lions will breakfast on.
And so women cut and paste their personae to fit more easily in the company of men. Blurring sexual identity seems necessary in order to crush the clichs trotted out to distinguish woman from man: woman is emotional, man rational; woman is scatty, man organised; woman gossips, man discusses.
These stereotypes are no less offensive for burdening him just as much as her: a man forces himself not to weep or flinch just as a woman tries not to swear or sweat . To take on the clichs, woman has had to grow into an impossibly capable being. She must do more, longer and better than anyone around her, boast a husband, a few children, and a high-gloss finish too.
It’s a balancing act that drains her, but dazzles her audience.
And while she’s out there, performing her guts out, she knows that it’s the men in the audience she’s playing to. They may be only half the audience, though in professional terms, they’re still more than that, but men are there none the less, a critical group that she can impress, charm or thumb her nose at.
She must both compete with them and compete for them. This impossible double act has triggered an inevitable backlash and a generation of women who fear that, in blurring their identity into an androgynous “it”, they may be losing their audience share.
Hence the popularity of The Surrendered Wife, which hails geisha-style submission to husbands (“Make yourself available for sex at least once a week, whether you feel like it or not”) and The Rules, which rehashes the dos and don’ts (“Never have sex on your first date”) that 1950s American prom queens lived by.
Contradictory rules of engagement, then, define the battle of the sexes. Everyone is armed with prejudice and resentment, but no one is any longer sure who the enemy is.
Is the supine wifelet in her babydoll nightie, eyes tightly squeezed and teeth clenched as she lets her husband have his weekly way with her the treacherous plotter? Or is the fiendishly competitive professional woman who brown-noses her way into her boss’s good books more dangerous?
Or is our foe the age-old one man, in any shape or form?
In all this, women are no better off, not in a Britain where they earn only 82% of what men employed in the same job earn, where childcare remains prohibitively expensive and the United Kingdom’s governmental women’s unit faces the axe after an inglorious stint as official promoter of women’s rights.
Gender studies is what kept Shakespeare writing, Picasso painting and Gershwin composing. It would be too much to expect the recipients of Jane Fonda’s largesse to solve the age-old question of the difference between the sexes.
Posing the right questions would be a good start.
Notes & Queries
Joseph Harker
I have recently started linking my arms behind my back. I notice that this habit is confined to old men (I am 61). Why?
n I don’t think that this is limited to men. Many ageing people of both sexes become bent forward in the chest or hip as a result of disease or orthopaedic conditions. They may begin to walk with their hands behind their back to help balance the weight of the chest and head over the centre of gravity. Ginger Schnaper, Scarsdale, New York, United States
n Prince Charles once spoke at an annual dinner of a tailors’ association. He had been invited by his tailor, who also served the Duke of Edinburgh. Charles said the habit he shared with his father of linking his hands behind his back was generally ascribed to heredity. In fact the cause was the tailor’s custom of cutting their jackets so tight at the back that they were unable to get their hands round to the front. Robert Matthews, St Michaels, Kent
n Obviously, to keep one’s hands away from whatever-it-is in front. Norbert Hirschhorn, New York, US
n If your waist has grown as much as mine has over the years, the answer is simple: your arms simply can’t fit around your front any more. John Ryder, Kyoto, Japan
n I have also recently found myself linking my arms behind my back, but I am neither male nor old (27-year-old female). I find myself doing this when I have a tired or stiff back. It helps by slightly taking pressure from the spine and making one walk more upright. Where the arms are linked also keeps the lower back warm. So perhaps it is not a function of maleness or age, but of tired backs. Dr Kerry Knight, Cambridge
My sister and her husband were born on the same day. How common is that?
n My wife Julie and I were born on January 28 1961. We also share the same wedding anniversary! Ian Goodfellow, Sunderland
n The late Czech distance runner Emil Zatopek, winner of three track gold medals at the 1952 Helsinki Olympic games, was born on the same day (September 19 1922) as his wife Dana Zatopkova. Dana won the gold medal in the javelin. A husband-and-wife gold medal-winning combination at the same Olympiad now that is unique. Simon Evans, Beckenham, Kent
n A British population of 60-million will have at least 10-million married couples. Although men are on average about two years older than their wives, it seems plausible that at least 5% of married couples (half a million) are born in the same year. The chance that they are born on the same day exceeds one in 365 (birth dates are not evenly spread), suggesting that more than 1 500 currently married couples were born on the same day. John Haigh, Brighton, East Sussex
Why is it that I always sneeze in threes?
n Lucky you I always sneeze in elevens. But I seek comfort in a statement by one of our great authors, Axel Sandemose, who wrote: “One does not sneeze, one is sneezed with!” Kjell Langholm, Oslo, Norway
Any answers?
n Why are teenagers bored? Hilary Muray, Wester Ross, Ross-shire, Scotland
n How can I verify that tins of tuna are “dolphin friendly”? Andrew McCloy, Youlgrave, Derbyshire
Send your Notes & Queries to POBox 91667, Auckland Park, 2006, fax to (011) 727?7111, or e-mail to [email protected]. Please keep questions and answers short