Fay Weldon explains why she believes that feminism has gone too far in the Nineties
Perhaps feminism goes too far? Perhaps the pendulum has stuck and needs nudging back to a more moderate position? Our young men, it seems, are in a sorry state: under- achieving in educational matters, if we are to believe a new British report, from the age of four. Parents don’t bother to read to boys, apparently.
These days, everyone wants girls. Males, disheartened, grow up to be, on the whole, unmarriageable. If one is to believe young women, that is.
When I was at college in the Fifties, the professor of moral philosophy would tell us: “Women have no capacity for rational thought or moral judgment.”
Not strange to us that he said it: strange now in retrospect that we young women didn’t find the remark offensive. It was just the way the world was. We were going on to be wives and mothers anyway.
In the Sixties, the professor of English was still returning essays to male students one by one, but throwing the rest in a heap, saying: “And those are the women’s. Help yourselves.”
By the Seventies, all kinds of other things began to get annoying. Job opportunities for women were opening up, but not promotion. Husbands were still “allowing” their wives to work, or “forbidding” them to join political parties and complaining about the size of their tits over dinner. Feminism took off. It could. Women were no longer dependent on men for their living.
By the late Nineties, find the gender switch thrown. It is men who complain of being slighted, condemned by virtue of gender to automatic insult by women. “Oh men! What do you expect?”
They hear it all the time. Men, or so the current female wisdom goes, are all idle, selfish bastards/potential abusers/rapists/think with their dicks. So men shrink, shrivel and under-perform, just as women did once. Serve the men right, I hear women say. After all those centuries! But feminism was not after punishment or vengeance, simply justice.
Men grow restless; too many women, they complain, continue to believe that they are automatic victims, entitled to insult an oppressor who no longer exists. It is true, they acknowledge, that men continue to own and control what used to be called “the means of production”, but the glass ceiling begins to shatter; below the age of 40, men and women level-peg in the promotion stakes.
In 20 years’ time, expect more women than men to be in top management, the gap between male and female earning capacity to be reversed.
In the Seventies, men were able to say: “Feminism will never work. Women are too catty, too bitchy to one another, too competitive for men. They’ll never get together.” They were wrong. Women did.
“If you feel so bad about it all,” I found myself saying to a suffering young man, “why don’t you do something about it? Get together with other men. Start a masculinist movement.” I was irritated, half-joking.
“Because it would never work,” he replied. “Men are too competitive with one another for women. They’ll never get together. They want female approval too much.” Oh gender switch indeed! It is left to me to speak for men, it seems, while they get their act together.
Let me put it like this. Young Nineties men complain that they are in a hopeless double bind. They care desperately for the good opinion of women. They want nothing more than to live a domestic life. If they show sensitivity, strive to be New Men, they are despised as wimps. If they keep a stiff upper lip, they are derided for their insensitivity.
Women, young men complain, want them for only one thing. They find themselves treated as sex objects. If they make sexual overtures, they are accused of harassment. If they don’t, the same thing happens.
If he wants children, he has to search for a woman prepared to give him one. If he succeeds, if the woman doesn’t have a termination with no reference to him, he is expected to bond with the baby and do his share of child-rearing, but is given no rights if the relationship goes wrong.
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 a merciless child support agency after them. (Yes, yes, I know that for every one male horror story, there are probably 10 female ones, but 10 wrongs don’t make a right.)
Girls are seen as having a better life. Girls do better at school, gain more qualifications, find it easier to get jobs, are better able to live without men than men can live without women. (Unmarried men die sooner than men who are married. Unmarried women live longer than their married sisters. Marriage for women is a pain.)
Sons are more likely to be schizophrenic, autistic or criminal and not to survive beyond the age of 25. Daughters are more likely to grow up to look after you in your old age.
Girl power triumphs, certainly in the metropolitan areas. See the current fashion for male loutishness as a desperate cry for help — hopefully female help — from a drowning gender.
I do not think for one moment that women should be complacent. The price of female liberation is eternal vigilance. Maintaining a just society in an unjust world is no easy matter. This is still the age of the Taliban.
In Afghanistan, women who were once engineers, businesswomen, teachers, social workers, earners of all kinds, have been driven back indoors and shrouded in black by fanatical young men who live by principle. It is not likely to happen in Britain, but nasty surprises can occur.
The answer is not to rouse the antagonism of men by insult — but to remember that men are people, too, and to try to see them as person first and of a certain gender second, as once we beseeched men to do for us.
Back in the Seventies, the personal became the political. The speed and energy with which the notion took off startled everyone. On the whole, the revolution succeeded magnificently. The female predicament became a matter not just of common concern but of social significance. Weeping into the solitary pillow turned into banners at the demo.
Once women began to compare notes, it was no longer possible for men to pick them off, one by one, to bully and insult. Dish- washing, childcare could be seen as “work”; marriage as a form of slavery.
Now literature and art could take on the domestic themes and be taken seriously. And the only sanction ever applied was female disapproval. That was astonishing. It may have gone to our heads. The impetus for change rolls on, perhaps after the necessity has passed. Forget the personal becoming the political; the political is now becoming the personal.
Some remark on how the British government itself has become feminised. New Labour certainly presents itself as female, using the language of compassion, forgiveness, apology, understanding and nurturing, qualities conventionally attributed to women. It wants to be loved.
The old traditionally male values of constancy, gravitas, restraint, heroism, dignity and honour are seen as belonging to a past world. Perhaps they do. Perhaps it is no bad thing.
Where the feminist revolution failed, where women still have cause for lamentation and where they are least powerful, is when it comes to their children. Sure, fathers now bond with babies and are seen in number at the school gate, but it’s the problem of the working mother everyone talks about. The dream of equal parenting has not come true. Exhaustion takes its place.
Women may have achieved equality and even be on the road to superiority, but mothers somehow remain a separate case. The child cries, her heart hurts, that’s it. While she looks after the baby, someone, somehow, has to support the pair of them.
Some women solve the problem by not having children. For others, the state does the providing. But here too, I fear, the gender switch has been thrown, and not in a benign manner.
Mummy is taking over from Daddy and finds it in her heart to be harsher than he ever was. “Out you go to work,” she snaps to the lone mother. “I’m a woman, I’ll look after the baby, I’ll call it Welfare to Work. But frankly, I can’t stand you hanging around the house all day doing nothing. You should never have had this baby in the first place. I know your sort!”
The state, once feminised, can turn all too easily into a wicked stepmother. Well, nothing’s for nothing.