Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon

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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 there’s something wrong with the male ‘type’!) Maintaining a just society in an unjust world is no easy matter. This is still the age of the Taleban. In Afghanistan women who were once engineers, teachers, writers, social workers, earners of all kinds, have been driven back indoors and shrouded in black by fanatical young men who live by principle however odd that principle may seem to us.

      

      It is not likely to happen here, I say, but nasty surprises can still occur. Supposing Tony Blair isn’t just a wicked stepmother putting her house in order, throwing out the poor relations and hangers on, supposing she’s just a man in drag after all and a woman-hater?

      

      Let no-one forget that Hitler solved Germany’s high unemployment problems at one fell swoop, by simply banning women from most of its workplaces. One wage earner per family please, and that wage earner the man. And Hitler, like Blair, spent the early populist years, just like any other politician, having his picture taken with dogs and children. Women are right to be fearful.

      

      The Blairs fall down rather on the dumb animal front, as it happens. Cherie failed to love the Downing Street cat, Humphrey, sufficiently for public taste. Indeed, it was rumoured that she’d had the poor, mangy, incontinent old thing put down. But the murmurings of the people quickly produced pictures of Humphrey safe and sound if looking surprisingly young, retired, ‘living quietly’ in a distant suburb, away from the hurly-burly of No 10. No-one quite believed it. And then Tony’s offer to ‘ban hunting’ and save the poor fox somehow seemed to hang fire – the foxes still flee, the hounds still run, the horns still sound over the green English countryside.

      

      The electorate worries about this, more than it does about the projected abolition of the House of Lords, the new government’s habit of issuing edicts and by-passing Parliament, the strange programmed zombification of hitherto lively and intelligent politicians as dull-eyed and brain-washed they spout the party line. If I were the Blairs I’d quickly get a dog – preferably not a beagle lest anyone forgets and holds it up by its ears. No, a corgi would be better: one of the palace puppies perhaps – to restore the first family’s animal-loving credentials.

      

      In ‘women’ I do not, by the way, include the category ‘mother’. Mothers remain a separate case. The feminist movement does not know what to do with them and never has. The child cries, the mother hurts and runs home and no amount of conditioning seems to cure it. The ‘problem of the working mother’ seems insoluble; ‘the problem of the working father’ is never referred to by either employers or government, though paying proper attention to it, I do believe, would pretty soon solve the technological society’s overlong, over-exhausting work schedules. Paradoxical that the more automated the society, the harder and longer everyone seems to have to work. But all that’s another story.

      

      See feminism and politics as a converging dynamic: see another one creeping up on the outside, a softly implacable, bendy-rubber force, that of Therapism, surging alongside the others into the Parisian tunnel, into that solid concrete wall, to meet the sleek, phallic Mercedes which was to make a martyr of Diana. (Ah Di, poor Di, what you are responsible for!)

      

      Therapism is the ‘therapy’ we are all familiar with entered into public life: a belief structure edging in to take the place of Christianity, Science, Marxism – all overlapping, none coinciding – as those three fade away in a miasmic cloud into the past. Therapism gives us a new idea of what people are, why we are here; one which denies God, denies morality, is ‘value-free’, which rejects the doctrine of original sin – the notion that we were born flawed but must struggle for improvement and replaces it with the certainty that we were all born happy, bright and good and would be able to stay this way if only it weren’t for harsh circumstances or faulty parenting. It is a cheerful idea espoused by the nicest and kindest of people, which is why it’s so hard to refute. It is also dangerous.

      This being the Age of Therapism we turn our attention, like Princess Diana in the famous BBC interview, to our anorexic

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