Godless in Eden. Fay Weldon

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СКАЧАТЬ there’s no time for ‘proper’ cooking. It’s a vicious circle. Since the introduction of the poll tax no-one has been able to live cheaply.

      

      Mothers, who wants ’em? Stay at home (if you’re lucky) and be told you’re boring and unaspirational. Go out to work and be told you’re breeding delinquents.

      

      Mothers, who wants ’em? Not the State. Mothers are a drain on the national purse. They’re either lone or divorced and on benefit or claiming low income family supplement, or kicking up a fuss because their child didn’t get to the school of its choice, or failing to teach it its times-tables before it gets to school or irresponsibly going out to work so it ends up delinquent.

      

      Mothers, who wants ’em? Not even children. The crèche, the nursery, the school, the after-hours homework club takes the place of home. As the traditional family turns into a unit with two breadwinners and no parent, children learn to do without mothers very fast. (Even grandmother’s out at work.) The teacher, the peer group, television and youth culture become more important in their lives, are a greater cultural influence. Watch the four-year-olds dancing to the Spice Girls. And that can be even if you don’t go out to work.

      

      What’s to be done? This is not a happy situation for mothers. Everyone wants to be needed. Feminism has been the only movement in recent times to turn its attention to matters of social justice, personal dignity and the quality of our lives. Let the New Feminists attend to these rather than the gap between male and female wages. Let them stop congratulating themselves on how happy they are to wear lipstick and what a good thing Mrs Thatcher was, and extend their remit. Let them start by diving the world into four separate categories, not two, and looking at what is really going on. Men, Women, Mothers, Fathers, not just Male and Female. Let them bring about a society in which there is parity of parenting. So ‘the problem of the working father’ is as much talked about as ‘the problem of the working mother’. Younger men, trained by earlier feminists to have full and loving relationships with their children, will co-operate. Apart from a few emotional dinosaurs. We might all even end up working less hard, having fuller lives, and happier relationships with our children.

      

      As for Mrs Thatcher, it was she, remember, who in repealing the Shops Act took away the right of the shop assistant to have a chair.

      As written for Harpers Bazaar, New York, to celebrate the New Year, 1998, and a New Age, in which New Eve rules in the Garden of Eden, and New Adam feels weaker for the loss of a rib.

The Feminisation of Politics

      Back in the seventies the feminists argued that the personal should become the political. So it did. The word sexism was coined, men (in this scheme of the universe) could no longer operate by dividing and ruling; a woman might be a victim by virtue of her gender, but she no longer cried into her pillow alone. Her woes, politicised, became the stuff of legislation and social disapproval.

      Time and the process rolled inexorably on and lo! one day we woke up (some say the morning after Princess Diana’s death) to find that the political had become the personal, and that person was a woman. Not perhaps the nicest woman in the world, perhaps now the archetype of the wicked stepmother (sweeping out everything that went before); not lisping like a fairy princess, but certainly speaking in a womanly tongue. Here in Britain, Tony Blair’s New Labour Party presents itself as female, using the language of compassion, forgiveness, apology, understanding and nurturing – qualities conventionally attributed to women.

      

      The Conservative Party, who ruled the country for the greater part of a hundred years, is to all intents and purposes no more; the old male values – so epitomised in John Major’s grey-suited self – of gravitas, responsibility, self-discipline, the Protestant work-ethic, stiff upper-lippedness, the appeal to reason and intellect – have vanished in the sudden wind of gender change. They try to learn the new language fast: the old philanderer Parkinson talks of love; the hard case Portillo, once scourge of the immigrant, talks of caring and compassion; William Hague, the new Tory leader, takes off his tie and undoes his top button, and wears his baseball cap back to front, but it’s all too late, too late. They were too old and too male too long to be credible now. This is the Age of the Anima. Male voters searched for it in themselves and found it.

      This stuff may be catching. Does not President Clinton eschew penetrative sex, does not his nation forgive him his waywardness on this account? The otherwise strange behaviour of the feminists in failing to condemn in this analysis becomes explicable. A sweet smile, a confiding air, as he sets about nurturing. What price masculinity now? Let American spin doctors keep an eye on what happens in Britain. The symptoms of social change tend to surface here first, erupt in spots, if only because we began first. First to abandon the feudal system, to endure agricultural and industrial revolutions, to fight Germany; Thatcherite monetarism started here. Flu may spread from Asia, and economic confusion, but for the infectious mechanics of cultural change, the converging dynamics of religion, politics and feminism, watch this space.

      

      One way or another along the path, the gender switch was thrown, the male-female polarities were reversed. Even God has become female. He is no longer the single bearded patriarch in the sky, Lord of Guilt and Retribution, to whom one kneels, but She of the multiple personality, Mother Nature, creator and healer of all, Goddess of victims and therapees everywhere. Princess Diana dies. Gay Sir Elton John sings the lullaby, the new women priests nod and smile, Tony Blair takes the Queen’s arm, daughter-like, the candles flicker in the wind and the ceremony is complete. The bearded patriarch slips out the Great West Door at Westminster Abbey, and dissolves in the scent of a million, million, tearful roses.

      

      Politics, in this new gender theory of the universe, ceases to be a matter of right or left, Conservative or Labour, Republican or Democrat. Confrontation is demoded. The old language no longer applies. It is not the rulers against the people, management against labour, the rich against the poor, the strong against the weak – all that fell with the Berlin Wall – rather it is the animus fighting a losing battle against the anima. Even the old Freudian concept of the superego, like the Conservative Party, has vanished in the wind of change: the id now acts without restraint or overview. The old complain that the young are de-politicised, but where are they to go? Where are the young to find their resentments, other than in themselves? What price revolution now, since the enemy is within? The harm was done by an unkind mother, an abusing father, a cold spouse, not by any grievous social arrangement. Let us change ourselves, not change the world. The government may rule in peace.

      

      Sure, in today’s Britain people of all parties still unite. They will raise their banners to save the noble tree and the poor hunted fox: the Rights of Man is extended now to the Rights of all Sentient Creatures above the Ranks of Roaches, and anyone who saw the film Men in Black will know that even that last barrier begins to fall. The Humanitarian Society of America, so we are told, in case you think it’s only in Britain, counted in four hundred roaches a day onto the set and checked them back out at night, to make sure not a single one had been harmed in the making of that film. Nor were they. The ones who got crushed by a human boot were made of plastic with yellow slime filling. It was only after a day’s filming that the fumigators were sent in to control the native inhabitants. We are beset by an excess of empathy: how we feel for others, even insects! Men and women both, we are thoroughly female, in the traditional, not the power-dressed, sense.

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