The lady writer on the TV felt free to say that ‘men are pretty useless’. The lady author between the hard covers gave it as a fact that more men consult their doctors about impotence than any other illness or ailment.
Try switching the terms of the first of those remarks and you can instantly get a light touch of the intolerance in the atmosphere surrounding men. Try applying the tests of reason and the rules of evidence to the other remark and you can catch a potent whiff of the stink of totalitarianism.
Imagine, for instance, what the public response might be if a studio guest on a morning TV programme voiced the aside that ‘Dogs are pretty useless’; or cats, horses or budgerigars; terrapins, grasshoppers or jumping fleas. Before the interviewer has time to draw breath for her next question, the telephone lines to the TV company would be blocked with indignant protesters, lovers of the little companions who felt personally aggrieved by the insult to their dumb friends.
If the studio quest had said, ‘Anybody under the age of ten or over the age of fifty-five is pretty useless in my opinion,’ she and the television company might run some small risk of a nationwide petition being raised in the defence of the dignity of the elderly or the rights of infants, which petition would be borne to Whitehall by the nimble and child-minded Mary Whitehouse and presented to Lord Rees-Mogg for investigation by the Broadcasting Standards Brigade of Guards (or whatever it is called).
Think, further – and here is the most telling illustration – what might happen if any man appearing on television were to say ‘Women are pretty useless’. Can you imagine that any man other than Sir Kingsley Amis, who seems to be proud of the pips he has been awarded as the country’s number one Misogynist? Can you imagine what would happen to any man other than Kingsley Amis if he voiced that though on the airwaves of public transmission?
The interviewer, for a start, would be bound to give him a sharp crack across his prejudices with her clipboard. If she were Anna Ford, she might rise to some heroic display of righteous militancy such as throwing a glass of water down the interviewees’ clothes. Teams of women workers at the studios might go off-line on their terminals, requiring assurances from their employers that the quest should never again be invited to express his hateful opinions. The Equal Opportunities Commission would investigate, report and chide. Clare Short would rise in the House of Commons to being in a Bill making illegal the casual expression of demeaning thoughts about women. The Style section of the Sunday Times would devote its front page to an investigation of the size of the offending man’s penis and the state of his marriage. All the hell, in other words, that the feminist lobby can raise would be kicked up. (I aggress that, in sum, it’s not a very terrifying array of sanctions compared with, say, the Official Secrets Act but it does, nonetheless, represent a body of retaliations and punishments which are consolidated, officious and automatic).
It is universally understood, after twenty years of feminist campaigning on the topic, that women are not to be demeaned by generalised insult; that their nobility and worth as individuals are not the be undermined by sneer or jibe; and that special respect must be paid to the plight and the disadvantages all women are supposed to share as members of an oppressed majority, sometimes known as a minority. Men, in other words, known that they must watch their step in speaking about women. They also know that they are not, themselves, entitled to the respect of a dog.
What followed, then, when out lady writer smirked and dismissed half of humanity as being ‘pretty useless’? What challenge was she given to justify and to amplify a remark of such base and gormless vulgarity? What response did she get from her interviewer to a line of cant which pisses upon all the efforts made by all men who devote their lives and all their waking energies to their families, all those whose principal desire is to be a good and dutiful husband and father, all those for whom the love of and for a woman is the critical and indispensable focus of desire in adult life?
She was asked if her remark applied to her husband. She said that, of course, it did not. She excepted him. The conversation moved on.
(You may be feeling that I am making a lot out of this trivial incident. I should say that I haven’t yet made the half of it. The very triviality of the moment is the reason that it matters: it is a moment like any other.)
When the lady writer was asked if her husband was useless, the question meant, by extension, ‘Is it true in your direct personal experience that men are useless?’ Her answer declared, unambiguously, that is was not true in her direct experience that men were useless. Remembering that feminists have, throughout the last twenty-five years, insisted that personal experience is endued with political meaning, we may wonder what political deductions this woman may draw from her experience.
When she explained that she was not speaking personally but was referring to men in general, her interrogation ceased. No further explanation was necessary or called for. It was perfectly okay for her to be running down a gender of humanity so long as she wasn’t taking a dig at her own man no, by implication, yours.
So why say it? If neither her own man nor yours should be called useless, who or what did she have in mind? And why did nobody object, protest or care that public utterance was being given to a prejudice which was without foundation even in the experience of the speaker?
The answer, I want to say, is that, by the early years of the 1990s in the West and, to my knowledge, most especially in Great Britain, many women and plenty of men felt more than free, felt obliged, to give vent to any irrational sliver of derision which darted across the frontal lobes of their brains. They were not, in so speaking, describing their own direct experience – neither, as women, of the men they lived with nor, as men, of themselves. They were describing an other. They were referring to a universal spectre of ill, a commonly agreed bogeyman, whipping-boy and boogaboo.
A picture of this frightful man can be found in all out minds: that is where he takes his primary existence and performs his essential role. He is the filthy sod in the thigh-high Doc Martens, torn denims and AC/DC T-shirt who hauls his snarling Rottweiler on to the underground train, drops a soiled hypodermic, lights up a stinking roll-up and belches over a can of larger. He is the one who leers over the tits in the Sun while he is waiting to collect his packet of dole and who passes over the cash at the counters of the pub and the betting shop as son as it is in his greasy fingers, sticking the remains up the fannies of whores. Reeling home with a head full of losses and a gut full of bitter and chips, he clamps his teeth into the cartroid artery of the starving Rottweiler before he rips the rags from the back of the little woman, belabours her with the dogs studded leash and takes his prick to the anuses of his screaming children.
We do not know of this horror on the terms of personal acquaintance. He is not one of us; but we have all agreed that he is out there somewhere and that he is the All-Man.