The starting point for a lot of this writing was the feeling I've always had that women are not less powerful than men. There was a time before the 1960s when women had far fewer rights than men of course, but I've never really known it like that. In my life the women and girls always seemed stronger and in many ways better than the men and boys. I come from quite a poor working class background and went to some pretty rough schools. The women in the family routinely looked down on the men - affectionately, impatiently, not in a mean way but because they saw the men as primitive, crude, smelly, immature, and not very bright. I never heard the men talk that way about the women - although there was a lot of what would now be seen as sexism, there was a lot of respect too. The men went out and brought home the money, sure, but it was the women who did the real work - managing the household and the kids - keeping things together. The men did filthy back-breaking work in all weathers while the women ran the house pretty much as they saw fit, went to the shops, met their friends for tea and had part time jobs. My mum did bar work and home-help while my dad worked at the power station. Mum would have been cycling around town in the rain, which is pretty miserable, but she loved bar work. At the same time dad told me how he had to crawl into the still-hot turbines to fix them, breathing coal dust, heavy metals, exotic hydrocarbons and asbestos. He died at 60. Mum is still going strong 24 years later.
It's not that mum's work was a doddle - wash day especially was a slog, but I was under no illusions about which job I'd prefer. Absolutely no way did I want to do what dad did - or anything like it.
The previous generation - my grandparent's generation - was different. In both cases the men were hard and authoritarian, and in one case, violent. One was loathed for his bad temper, the other was despised for his bigotry. Nobody respected that sort of behaviour, though nobody called the police either. In our family it was mum who lost her temper and she was pretty scary. Dad could get angry but he'd never shout because he didn't want to be like his dad.
When I got to school just after my fifth birthday I had never met another child my own age before and found the whole experience overwhelming. The boys especially seemed to be totally out of control. I don't remember being bullied much but the feeling that anything could happen at any time was always there. I was permanently on edge and hated school. The girls though generally seemed calm and confident - industrious and neat, though sometimes subtly nasty. My first friend was a little girl called Annie who told me to stop picking my nose. When mum met her later she said "You never told me she was black." I also had a little girlfriend called Maria but she left when we went to junior school. I loved Maria. My school work was a complete mess but the girl's work was always immaculate and I never felt I could live up to that standard. If anyone had asked me at the time I'd have said I wasn't doing very well but now I know I was always near the top of the school. I got nine O levels and was the only one from my class who even attempted A levels, though the stress got to me and I flunked totally. At that time the girls were still exemplary and they outnumbered us in the 6th form 21:18. The jobs I've had have been female-dominated - bar work and care work, teaching, and then gardening (not landscaping, which is very male). At university the humanities and ecology degrees had at least as many women as men.
At no point did it ever seem like girls were in any way inferior or less capable. I wanted nothing to do with men generally. I didn't want to do what they did - the sports, the beer, the engines, the banter.
I think it's fair to say that I felt a lot of self-loathing or even misandry, and that has stayed with me. I still don't really understand boys or men. All my life I've felt repulsed and disturbed by men and embarrassed about myself, but I've had many female friends and, given the choice, I know I'd rather have been born a girl. I don't want to be trans because, for me anyway, it would feel fake, but I've never wanted to be a man. I've always been very heterosexual because, like I said, I find men a bit repulsive physically, but at the same time I usually get on well with gay men, probably because they're not like 'normal' men. My family suspected I might be 'queer' and I'm fairly sure my dad would have been ok with it if I was. I was distinctly 'effeminate', and if I had been gay my life might have been simpler - at least I'd have known why I was different and I'd have had a bunch of people to hang out with, but I'm not. I don't really fit in anywhere - I'm probably somewhat 'neurodivergent' and strongly introvert.
I was always a staunch feminist and believed that women were intrinsically better than men - that the world would be better run by women. I guess I've tended to put women on a pedestal. I was alert to the slightest hint of sexism or misogyny. More recently though I guess I've become more realistic. There were always things in feminist theory about how men think and feel that, being a man, I simply knew weren't true, and the fact that people I saw as strong and capable were trying to make out that I had the power in the relationship simply because of my biology seems laughable. More recently I've accepted that women can behave absolutely deplorably, while most of the men I know are actually decent people. My attitude to men has been almost like a kind of bigotry or phobia but I know now, at least rationally, that most men are ok, generous, good-hearted, well-meaning, even if I still find them difficult. At the same time I've had some dismal experiences with a few mean-spirited, aggressive, selfish women, so my opinion of the sexes has levelled out. I guess the expectation would be that a man who becomes sceptical of feminism would go to the other extreme and be anti-feminism, or anti-women, but I've just become more egalitarian. I know now that all people behave badly sometimes but are also capable of great good, and in terms of power, almost none of us has any to speak of - a few mostly old white men in the top jobs, and a few men who get what they want by violence at the bottom, but for most of us, men and women, we're just making do, getting on in the world as best we can. The most offensive thing I can say now is not that men are superior or oppressed (which would be laughable), but that men and women are really not all that different. That really upsets people.
Most people have very little education or wealth and just don't have the time or energy or resources to even think about making the world a better place let alone doing the research - they're too busy just getting by. I think this is something my fellow progressives don't get - possibly because it's a very educated middle-class movement. I remember one exchange about the way men approach women they fancy - why they so often cause offense and fear. I said you have to remember the lives most people lead - you leave school as soon as you can, get a crappy menial job, live in a crappy estate, work incredibly hard then try to have a bit of fun on a Saturday night on your meagre wages (bearing in mind I went to school with these people - I know this stuff), and, more than anything - with no prospect of anything getting better. Probably you have some kids on top of this, and you buy stuff to relieve the monotony, and eat cheap crappy food. You don't really know anyone who lives differently so you have to fit in. You can't afford not to. And then there's the violence. So remember we were talking about how men should approach women, and this feminist man says "but there's plenty of literature out there", as if those lads off the estate are going to check the literature.
I'm horrified at how little modern progressives know about poverty, or being working class. They denounce anyone who doesn't think the way they do and try to make out they're all fascists - not worth talking to. What they don't seem to understand is that these people are in the majority and we need to be on good terms with them if we want people to vote differently. Back in the 80s when all this was new to me, there were still powerful trades unions and a relatively left-wing Labour party. My dad was a trade-union shop-steward, and believed passionately in working class power. Now it seems these poor manual workers are beneath contempt for progressives because they won't talk or think the way educated middle-class kids say they should. Progressives who go on so much about privilege don't seem to be aware of their own when talking down to working class people, who, not surprisingly, go elsewhere and we wonder why they vote for Trump and Brexit.
Their lack of education means they perhaps don't realise it's not in their interests, but that's not their fault. Back in the 80s we left-wingers knew that lack of education was the main reason people stay powerless. We didn't blame them for it. It was a deliberate policy on the part of right-wing parties to keep the working class down. It was not their fault. But now modern progressives don't understand why working class boys don't 'read the literature' and conclude that they're either evil or stupid and not worth talking to, and then wonder why they don't vote with us...
I was like this until recently - I remember ridiculing the working class opinions on Brexit, as if I wasn't working class myself. I was lucky - for whatever reason my dad was one of those working-class men who believed in self-improvement. There were reference books around the house, and we went to museums and zoos on holiday. I was one of the last to get a full grant to go to university and I got a BA in humanities at Brighton Polytechnic - a genuine hot-bed of radical leftist thinking.
I've had three epiphanies over this last decade - 1. that woke/progressives really need to understand the working class and take them far more seriously if they want things to change, 2. that we need to talk, and listen, to people we don't agree with - respectfully, without putting them down or lecturing them, and also that, 3. as I said above, the distance in status between men and women now really isn't that great any more - that we're all more or less flawed and all more or less powerless and we need to work together if things are going to change.
No comments:
Post a Comment