Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#ulink_cdc67871-9ff0-5f91-9e0f-315a3be55420">The Perils of Sexuality

      I have often felt envious of women younger than myself, simply because they were born, as I see it, into an easier age than I was. I envied the young girls of the sixties who did not have to struggle, and fail, as I did, with the inappropriate and sophisticated clothes of the fifties. I envied the choices which the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies gave to young women. Yet, as I watch what happens to girls and women nowadays, even the educated women who handle work, children, husbands and lovers with such flair and competence, I can see that the same sacrifices are demanded of girls as have always been demanded if they are to join the group called women. Boys too are still sent down a path which leads to a truncated, inadequate manhood, the man denying so much of himself that he becomes much less than he might have been.

      Life in the second half of the twentieth century offered people in the developed world many more opportunities for satisfaction, enjoyment and progress, yet from 1946 there was a steady rise in the number of young people killing themselves. In recent years the suicide rate for young men has continued to rise while that for young women has levelled out.

      The problem is that boys are still being educated for a society which no longer exists. The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century created a society in which a young man who conformed to society’s rules had a place. He could secure an apprenticeship in an industry and rise steadily through the ranks. If better educated, he could join a bank, go into trade, or join a profession. Whichever, he had a job for life and the respect of the society that had created a place for him. The end of the Second World War and the dropping of the atomic bombs in 1945 ended the old certainties. My generation was the last which could safely assume that it would have a job for life. As the old certainties crumbled, many young people struggled to find a place in society. Young women could still find a place as a mother, but where was the place for a young man brought up to be a real man in the old tradition? Being a coalminer, or a steelworker, or a deep-sea fisherman was a real man’s job. Working in a call centre is not.

      To maintain our meaning structure we need the people around us, not just friends and family but society generally, to confirm who we know ourselves to be. Lacking such confirmation, and lacking the self-confidence to confirm ourselves, we feel threatened with annihilation. If we believe that we cannot change ourselves or society, the threat of annihilation can become so great that we turn to the most desperate of defences. We destroy our body in order to survive as the person we know ourselves to be. Many young men have said to themselves, ‘If I can’t live as a man I’ll die as a man.’

      Meanwhile women were now required to enter the competitive workplace but still exhibit the old necessary attributes of femininity and beauty. This was a daunting task, and to relieve their anxiety many young women took up smoking, a slow form of suicide. Educated young women, holding responsible positions and competing successfully with men, smoke for the same reasons that schoolgirls of limited education, ability and opportunity smoke. Smoking is a way of denying the fear of annihilation. These young women believe that to be allowed to exist they must be attractive; that to be attractive they must be slim; that smoking dulled their appetite and made them look sophisticated and in control. Unfortunately, nicotine is more addictive than heroin, and thus many women who have lost their youthful slimness find themselves trapped in an addiction which, even if it does not kill them, wrinkles and yellows their skin. In our society the old, if they are noticed at all, are not regarded as attractive.³²

      Although the roles for men and women have changed, the methods of child-rearing have changed very little. Consequently, many girls and boys are still finding that the best way of surviving their childhoods is to become traditional women and men.

      My garden borders on one side a row of large Victorian houses which have been turned into a hotel used by the council to house homeless families. My garden wall is topped by a trellis where jasmine and clematis grow riotously. A great profusion of growth developed on the hotel side of the trellis and, with this weight on one side, the strong autumn winds pushed the trellis away from the wall. I took my garden shears and a roll of plastic bags into the hotel garden and began cutting back the bundles of intertwining branches.

      The garden was empty and all was quiet. Then there was the sound of a woman’s voice raised in anger. She was yelling, ‘Stay in or get out! Just close the bloody door.’

      I could not hear anyone reply, but the woman screamed at this person, ‘I don’t care what you want. Get out.’

      A door slammed. Round the corner of a hedge came a fair-haired boy of about six. Although the day was chilly he had no jacket on. He saw me and headed straight at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

      I described what I was doing. He eyed my shears enviously. ‘Can I have a go?’

      ‘Wait till I’ve cut some more, then you can do some cutting while I put all this stuff in these bags.’

      He waited impatiently while telling me about some fantastic garden where he cut things down, and then grabbed the shears as soon as I offered them. He clipped a few pieces and for one moment I thought he might prove to be actually helpful, but his interest soon waned. He tried out bigger and bigger branches and, even though his attempts were unsuccessful, kept boasting to me how great he was at cutting things down. ‘I’m the best at this,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I the best cutter you’ve ever seen?’

      Ordinarily I would not have agreed, but, knowing that he needed some help in recovering from the onslaught his mother had made on him, I said that he was doing an excellent job.

      A little girl of about four was watching us from a balcony. She was the daughter of a couple I had taken to be Kosovan refugees. She never attempted to speak English but her mother would struggle with a few phrases when she and I exchanged pleasantries over the wall. The little girl came down the steps from her flat and stood watching the boy, who had now lost all interest in my task and was wandering around the garden trying to cut down different kinds of unlikely branches. The little girl’s gaze inspired him to greater feats of strength, all unsuccessful, but which he passed off as brilliant.

      As all women know, the duty of watching a male while he demonstrates his prowess in some masculine endeavour is a tedious one, and we soon find more interesting things to do. The little girl came over to see what I was doing. When I tore a fresh black bag off the roll and opened it, she reached out her hands, grasped the top of the bag, and held it up in exactly the position needed for me to put the greenery into it. It was precisely the kind of help I needed. Obviously she had done this many times before. Perhaps she had held the plastic bags open when her parents were hastily packing a few possessions as they tried to escape from what seemed like certain death.

      The little girl helped me gather the last scraps of greenery and we both stood back to admire a job well done. By this time her mother had come out on to the balcony and was watching us. Now I come to the saddest part of the story. I was very sorry for the little boy, and I was sorry for the women who, one day, would bear the brunt of his anger against the mother who had so humiliated and threatened him, but now I tried to convey to the little girl’s mother how clever and wise her daughter was. I wanted her to agree with me, but she did not. She believed that it was wrong to accept praise, and praise for her child was to be negated just as she would negate praise for herself. Moreover, she had to teach her daughter womanly modesty. ‘No, no,’ she said, and with her hands she pushed away my words. Secretly she might have been proud of her daughter, but neither I nor her daughter were allowed to know this. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘it was nothing.’

      Girls and boys are brought up differently, but the message each gets is the same. As you are you are not acceptable. You must become what your parents want you to be.

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