There is always bad news for women, but rarely so bad as in the past few weeks. If you ever dreamed that in the modern world you could avail yourself of freedoms unknown to women in previous generations, the warnings are now being posted on every door. You meddle with nature at your peril, girl.
What, did you think you could go play with the boys and not get hurt? Recent research has shown that women who drink are far more vulnerable to assault and rape than you would imagine. More than one in three young women say they have been sexually assaulted after getting drunk. In a report on the research, Professor Robin Touquet, a consultant in accident and emergency medicine, said: ‘Women must not put themselves in vulnerable positions.”
Or did you think you could be like the men in another way, beavering away in an office instead of concentrating on your ovaries? Recent research has shown that women in their 30s are being overconfident about their fertility, so dooming themselves to probable disappointment. The authors of that report, Melanie Davies and Susan Bewley, said women were ‘defying nature and risking heartbreak”.
And if you have managed to get pregnant, did you think you could be like the child’s father, and still keep a foothold in the workplace? New research purports to show that mothers who leave their babies to go out to work are doing their children a disservice. Co-author Penelope Leach said that if children are cared for by people other than their mothers, their development is ‘definitely less good”.
Listening to these voices of doom, women may feel that, despite all the attempts women have made to change society, we have now come up against the biological imperatives that will lock us out of the freedom and equality we desire. We cannot just wish away women’s vulnerability to attack by men, women’s shorter fertility span or the neediness of young children.
‘The more woman aims for personal identity and autonomy… the fiercer will be her struggle with nature — that is, with the intractable physical laws of her own body. And the more nature will punish her: ‘Do not dare to be free! For your body does not belong to you.’†So spoke Camille Paglia 15 years ago, so speak all the media now. More and more, when feminists talk about change, the voices of the backlash talk about the impossibility of going against nature. Biology, in the Western world, acts almost like the Qur’an in the Eastern world — it is the ultimate excuse for why things for women cannot, and will not, change.
I’m not saying that these researchers have dark intentions. But if we were not living in such a fatalistic age, their studies would never have been reported and received as they have been. In the reception given to them, there has been a marked interest in the punishment of women — they will be raped, they will be infertile, they must give up the pursuit of autonomy — and a marked lack of interest in how those situations could be changed.
Because whatever kernel of biological truth lies at the heart of these findings, the truth is that biology is not some immutable reality for women or for men. We live in complicated societies in which women need not succumb to the darkest rhythms of nature. Take the finding that women are assaulted more than men when they get drunk. Rather than saying that young women should curtail their own lives because of the danger around them, we must go on demanding that men take responsibility for this violent society.
Earlier feminists made this point repeatedly, but recently the impetus has gone out of this demand. Those real, concrete reforms that women have for decades been asking for, such as specially trained prosecutors in rape cases, are still being ignored. Is it really time to give up and impress upon young women only the risks they are taking? Or should we say it is time for men to take responsibility for the violence they commit?
In the debate about child-bearing and child-rearing, a similar deafening silence on the role of men is being observed. If women are facing miserable disappointment because they do not take the time out of work early enough in their lives to have children, the reason does not just lie with their own misguided attempts to defy nature. There are real reasons why young, middle-class women are holding back from child-bearing — and one is that they know that having children penalises them in the workplace far more than it penalises men.
This debate is not, then, just about the cruelty of nature, but about the cruel expectations of workplaces that are built around the working practices of men who sidestep their family responsibilities. When you are seen as slacking because you’re not available to the boss 18 hours a day, how can you find the time to listen to your ovaries rather than your BlackBerry?
It’s time to move beyond these neanderthal posturings that pass for debate on the battle of the sexes. Or do we want women to feel that they have no choice but to live a circumscribed life decided by red-toothed nature, while men are free to roam, and rule, the world? —