Deep Thoughts: level-headed words on feminism

Gender agendas -- by Salley Vickers

Perhaps because I was brought up in the British Communist party during the 1950s, whose strengths and follies were such that it tried to practise what it preached, I never had an expectation of being treated differently for being female. All the women I knew with any intimacy earned salaries, smoked, swore, drove, drank, argued vociferously and wore trousers. Any suggestion that they were too feeble, or feeble-minded, to tackle any task undertaken by a man, would have been perceived as reprehensible shirking. Doubtless that prompted my girlish hankering, not entirely abated, for frilly knickers, can-can petticoats, nail varnish and white high heels. But it did ensure that a sense of equality, which has subsequently been tested but never seriously eroded, was something I took for granted.

So it was at first a surprise and then a shock to learn that the rest of the world had other views. At my primary school, a mixed state one, girls outstripped boys in all the competitive exams. I saw this as entirely natural. But the concept of “natural” is a moot one.

What one age, or society, considers “natural” - slavery, flogging, military service, corsets - another construes as an assault on personal liberty. And this, of course, has been the basis for fierce argument in the case of gender roles. Yet it does now appear there are some objective grounds for discrimination (a word which deserves to have its old meaning of impartial judgment revived). But the grounds challenge rather than reinforce the old models.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was claimed that gender behaviour was the result of social moulding; however it is widely accepted today that male brain chemistry is distinctive, and that from the first trimester a male foetus will produce the testosterone which influences his gestation. But it turns out that the development of the area of the brain that organises complex thought, the prefrontal cortex, is also gender specific. In girls it is fully evolved by the age of 11, while boys reach their maximum potential around 18 months later. Even in early adolescence, it seems that girls perform more ably in intelligence tests and things don’t even up until about the age of 18. And it has long been established by midwives that newborn male babies are the fragile ones.

It would look, then, as though nature favoured the female of the species and if there were any special pleading to be done rationally it should be on behalf of the male. But life, notoriously, has failed to read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the early days of modern feminism, some longstanding anomalies in the social attitudes towards the sexes were made visible. Groundbreaking works such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970), or, a book which deserves wider recognition, Mary Ellman’s Thinking about Women (1968) explored the effects of a culture which devalued the feminine contribution to society, and sanity, and attempted to expose the constraints of hierarchical, or patriarchal, modes of thought.

Since the beginning of recorded time, civilisations have licensed a control over women that almost certainly stems from the simple biological fact of superior male physical strength. Also, because land passes via the male line, a practice which is almost universal, procreation has always been linked to property, which has led to the differing rules on sexual behaviour for the genders (if a man sleeps around no harm is done but if a woman does it might be your neighbour’s seed you are nurturing to take over your land and title). Unquestionably, violence towards women has been sanctioned, albeit covertly, by successive ages.

So, what has become of those who led the movement, and what does today’s generation of feminists look like? Andrea Dworkin, who died last year, was one of the most iconoclastic examples of an ardent feminist, and her memoir, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant, reveals a life which partly explains her vigorous crusade against pornography and the sexual exploitation of women.

Dworkin describes, without self-pity or melodrama, her journey from prostitution, a husband who beat and burned her, and a personal experience of rape. Rape for Dworkin is the ruling metaphor for the male/female relationship. That this is often only a metaphor is an issue that remained blurred for her. Dworkin was primarily an activist, not a thinker, and thus her arguments slip between the stools of justified effort to rectify real abuse and some passionate invective and wobbly reasoning. But, for all that, she never trivialised and her intransigent radicalism, often at cost to her own comfort, commands respect.

For Dworkin, the “worst immorality is apathy”. Apathy, meaning without pathos - the ability to feel for others - a crime she could never be charged with. That female energy is equal to anything achievable by a man is one corollary of Dworkin’s position. It gives rise to the familiar caricature of feminists as boot-faced scolds, charmlessly shoving men aside in an unseemly bid for power. It is a sad fact that this picture is not always entirely baseless. Any social movement will attract and encourage extremes, for it is often only the extremist who has the necessary will to fight. Most of us falter at causes. Like saints, men and women who fight for freedoms do not always make the most sympathetic company; nor do they necessarily have the gift of putting themselves in others’ shoes - even the shoes of those they are allegedly fighting for.

And inevitably, extremism triggers backlash. The unshaved armpits and overalls which were Dworkin’s hallmark have been discarded by modern feminists in favour of Botox and Prada. Not that glamour is itself an ill, but it is the absence of any of that serious, if unadorned, idealism which left me dissatisfied with New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Maureen Dowd’s Are Men Necessary? This is a wide-ranging but superficial account of the relationship between the genders; its title, as Dowd acknowledges, is commandeered from James Thurber and E.B. White’s 1929 classic Is Sex Necessary? But in so doing Dowd demonstrates a failure to register irony. For White and Thurber, sex was highly necessary; that was the point of the book and its title. Dowd’s anecdotal style is entertaining but neither witty nor subtle about the complexity of sexual need or foible. Her over-simple thesis is the reverse of Dworkin’s: the male chromosome is in rotting decline, while women’s power is increasing and accelerating. As a result, men are running scared and this, by and large, is a pity as it leaves women no one to play with.

Much of Dowd’s book, a collection of her articles, involves tips, some of which made me laugh - albeit reluctantly - such as “avoid the post coital cigarette, it causes lines around the mouth”. But there is something depressing about her take on relationships, which appears to have little to do with relatedness, or love, or friendship, or other affinities. Her own unmarried condition she attributes, rather disturbingly, to her superior mind, appearance and earning power, a state which by her own admission has never restricted the desirability of men. It is this asymmetry which Dowd perceives as unjust. And yet this may be like complaining of the injustice of the law of gravity. That men are often frightened of women, just as women are frightened of men, is surely no secret. They are frightened for similar reasons: that human beings can, and do, hurt each other in myriad and alarming ways. Possibly there is something in the male psyche which resists being hurt more effectively than women resist it. For all her friskiness, Ms Dowd is narcissistic, and narcissism has always been better tolerated by women and may subvert male desire.

It is versions of male desire which is the essential subject in Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, a highly readable book which is also enlightening. Vincent, a gutsy young journalist, took the audacious step of successfully disguising herself for a year as “Ned”. In this persona she infiltrated male preserves as far apart as a lap-dancing club, a therapy group and, to me most enjoyable, a bowling league where incompetence produced some heartening instances of male solidarity. I was delighted to be initiated, via Ned, into these interesting anthropologies, especially lap-dancing, a subject which I have none of the credentials to permit me to explore. Vincent demonstrates one of the less acknowledged advances of modern feminism: an unblinking broadmindedness which allows men the frailties of all human beings, and is merely interested to observe them.

That non-punitive moral purpose is reflected in the best of today’s feminism, which seeks what all ideals should seek, the increase of possibility for all of us to be who we are, or who we wish to be, without threat to self or to others. Catharine MacKinnon’s Are Women Human? is a sober and scholarly series of essays on subjects as serious as torture, rape and genocide. A professor of law at Michigan University, she sanely reminds us that Dowd’s preoccupation with fainthearted men doesn’t touch the sides of the vast continuing problem of inequality and the barbaric uses of force.

Like Dworkin, but with less heat, she perceives rape as the ultimate symbol of inequality and makes a parallel with genocide. Both rape and genocide, she argues, create disassociation and compliance, with a concomitant desire to propitiate the potential captor/rapist, which dissolves a sense of identity and vitiates social bonds. That this is not a condition confined to women does not lessen her argument, which is based on the ancient recognition that right is no match for might.

That might has mainly been a male prerogative does not mean that there is not also a fair bit of attitudinising about. Too often, positions are avowed which appear to be based on a need to seem to be mistreated rather than any genuine affront. The wish to dismantle forms of address, such as the Lord’s Prayer, based on older traditions, is concern misapplied. The policing of language for “phallocentricity” (a word which is synthetic and misleading) is - let me risk saying it - tiresome. I do not care a brass farthing if I am subsumed under a category called “mankind”. It is but a shortening of “humankind” and semantically has always encompassed the whole boiling of us. And there is another thing, too, which many feminists jib at, but Dowd touches on, and which Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider’s The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right exploited but did not entirely contrive. The Rules notoriously revived the notion of the submissive position of women as part of a ploy to flatter men, but desire has always been a subversive force, stronger than reason or social privilege, and can neither be commissioned nor subject to legislation. There remains an inescapable mystery about sexual allure, one which will always elude reform. Indeed, reform, or the urge to reform, heightens both the draw and the mystery.

I took my 15-month-old granddaughter for a walk recently. She is generally good-natured but that day she was fractious. I stopped at a cafe, hoping to divert her, where a waiter came to take our order, a handsome, flashing eyed Sicilian, who bent down and “coo-cooed” my raging granddaughter. She stopped her howling, batted her lashes and afforded him her most engaging smile. They flirted with each other openly while I played gooseberry. That this was old-fashioned, inalienable sexual chemistry at work was as clear as daylight. It was a moment which lifted my spirits, and I wouldn’t have it outlawed for the world.

(Salley Vickers’ latest novel, “The Other Side of You”, is published by 4th Estate.)

Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by Andrea Dworkin
Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide by Maureen Dowd
Self-Made Man: My Year Disguised as a Man by Norah Vincent
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues by Catharine MacKinnon