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Mixing it with the men
WHITE'S is the only club in London that has never admitted women - apart from servants, of course. But never is never quite never, even among the most discriminating of men, and there have been two exceptions to this rule in my adult life, when White's opened its doors briefly to members of the opposing sex. One was for drinks on the occasion of the engagement of the Prince of Wales. The other was last Monday, when White's celebrated its 300th anniversary and women were allowed to dine there - one woman per member.
With very mixed feelings I went to both occasions. I have always admired White's for sticking to its guns, and never giving in to the half-hearted and insincere liberalism that, at last, has women lunching at the Athenaeum, but in the basement.
Hypocrisy in these matters adds insult to injury.
There is no good enough reason why people should not have private clubs that are exclusive. It may be painful for those of us who are excluded, but the freedom is surely more important than the grievance.
Yet it undoubtedly is a grievance, I felt very strongly, standing on the handsome staircase at White's on Monday. What a sense of themselves these men must have, or must have had, surrounded by such elegance and such comfort. At White's the style has the confidence of the throwaway line - understatement. Only at White's could a series of exquisite dishes - the usual, much loved nursery food had been suppressed in honour of the occasion -be announced, baldly, on the menu cards, as artichoke, turbot, vegetables and so on, without the slightest hint of vulgar persiflage.
How sustaining it must be to the morale to be so extraordinarily well served; the club servants showed a courtesy that is a fantasy to most of us -far better than in other clubs. How solid are the portraits on the walls - all men. And how opulent are the magisterial four-square wooden thrones, which look like seats of justice but actually are the lavatories. How natural must seem the power and influence that members for three centuries have enjoyed. And how restful it must be to know that never will the manly calm be interrupted by the trouble and strife - or, if not the wife, then the mistress, the ex, or the tart. But never no more.
I have often thought that whenever women get in on any male institution, it is because it is no longer worth keeping us out: as with Everest, MI5, 10 Downing Street and all the other men's clubs, so with White's. Our presence on Monday was a sign that the end is in sight. The names of the members are the names of families that were once great but no longer. The new members, much in evidence on Monday, according to a man near me, looked rather 'mildewy', and the power and influence have long since shifted elsewhere, partly, I am glad to say, to women. But for all the female networking that now goes on, we have yet to get such lovely premises.
IT was not very diplomatic of Lady Warnock to refuse to comment recently on the search for 'gay genes'. 'I really don't comment unless I am paid for it,' she said. Considering all that she has uttered, at the lift of a telephone, about this and that, from the horrors of Thatcherite philistinism to the mysteries of medical ethics, homosexuals might feel rather unfairly left out. Alternatively, of course, they might feel rather relieved to be spared.
But either way, Lady Warnock has a point. I should not like in any way to compare myself to her, but I felt just as she did when approached last week by a BBC local radio programme to hold forth about the evils of tourism. Had I been free, I should have done it, addicted as I am to attention in almost any form. However, it would have taken most of a morning, and I should have lost half a working day. Yet the BBC was offering no fee at all.
The assumption that people will automatically do such things comes from an entirely different economic climate, when people had secure, long-term jobs and when, if they took time off to hold forth in public, it was their employer's time.
All that is changing. Some people are still astonishingly generous with their thoughts - one immediately thinks of celebrities such as Rabbi Julia Neuburger, who can always be relied on for a challenging comment, like her recent fascinating remarks about her breasts. But one cannot, in these hard times, expect everybody to be so public-spirited.
DEMOCRACY has been on my mind all week, not in connection with the members of White's, who may not all be ready for it, but in connection with the tribal peoples of South America.
I have been saddened by talking recently to a friend in the world of ethno-biology; as far as I can understand the word, ethno-biology, for all its academic sound, canall too often be used in the race between Western pharmaceutical companies to rip off tribal peoples' medicinal plants and recipes.
In any event it seems that the latest fashion among Western pharmaceutical companies trying to set up deals with tribal peoples is to insist that democratic practices should be written into the contract. What nonsense] It reminds me of the way the Westerners brought Christian missionaries into 19th-century China on the opium clippers, inflicting both simultaneously on the helpless Chinese, with the result that the Celestials were understandably confused. Observers heard them speak, in one word, of 'Jesus-opium'. Now perhaps shall get Proportional Representation-Oil of Evening Primrose.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 25, 1993 | Comments (0)
Three cheers for gays
'WE know that there are gay genes, if you want to put it that way. We know that there are genes which influence people to be gay or straight, both in men and in women . . . and it is a very hot area of research at this moment, the search to identify these genes.' That was said to me only 10 days ago by Simon Levay, a distinguished neurologist who himself has published a study suggesting, to use crude tabloid shorthand, the existence of a 'gay brain'.
Sure enough, on Friday an extremely respectable American study was published by a friend of Professor Levay's, Dr Dean Hamer, at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, reporting a genetic basis for homosexuality - or, crudely, 'gay genes'.
The discoveries in these fields are happening too fast for us to respond - we have lurched into a revolution. Markers for several serious illnesses have already been found. And a few months ago a Dutch geneticist announced that he had identified a genetic defect in certain men that causes a chemical imbalance leading to extreme aggression. There is research going on into the genetics of human intelligence.
The contemporary term for Pandora's box, in these post-sexist times, is a can of worms, and these, you might think, are cans of worms best left unopened. The idea that the way we are is biologically determined - or more so than we had imagined - is profoundly disturbing. Recent horrors spring to mind; even our own dear Marie Stopes was a rabid eugenicist and was furious with her son for marrying a girl who was short-sighted and, therefore, of inferior breeding stock. Old ideas of equality are submerged, new ones of selective abortion and genetic tinkering rise up.
It is not unreasonable to fear that people may wish to get rid of gay genes.
I have often wondered what explains the persistent hostility to homosexuals; it seems such a waste. Few people in this country have religious objections to homosexuality, as many Americans do. Most people have encountered a good gay teacher, at the very least, and most people know how disproportionately greatly homosexuals have contributed to the arts and literature and - yes - to hairdressing. There are actually neurological reasons why they might tend to be more creative. As to sexual practices, there is nothing that gays do that many heterosexuals do not also do. Besides, according to this new study there are hardly any of them - only 2 per cent of men.
One close gay friend suspects it may be envy - he says that heterosexuality is for men not good-looking enough to be gay. Anyone who has been to a gay party will agree that he has a point, and will also perhaps object to gay smugness like this. But the most interesting theory I have heard comes from Simon Levay, who is himself gay.
He believes that homosexuality is an intermediate state, somewhere between the extremes of masculinity and femininity. And the hatred of homosexuals may be related to the hatred of women and of feminity in general; feminity is threatening and it is even more threatening to find it in men. This makes a great deal of sense - homophobes are closet misogynists.
I THOUGHT we had already done dinosaurs, but it seems that there is money in them yet. The media have given so much attention to Jurassic Park, which opened on Friday, that I am tempted to say nothing about it for fear of adding to the monstrous hype - a newish word for a newish kind of venality.
But the temptation to protest is even greater. How can the entire nation have been so bamboozled by the Hollywood public-relations industry as to let a children's monster-movie dominate the media so grotesquely, and for so long, providing what must be millions, actually millions, of dollars of free publicity? At least I hope it is free. Where is the independence of the Fourth Estate? This is not news and comment; it is advertising.
I dare say the film is very enjoyable: in fact I dare not say anything else, so brainwashed is my youngest child by all this promotion. But that does not justify the ceaseless adult feature articles in the serious press, interviews everywhere, giggles with down-home child stars, make-your-own Jurassic Park instructions, 10 things you need to know about Stephen Spielberg, and dinobingo.
I cannot remember such a publicity exercise ever. And what it is selling is not just the movie but all the Jurassic tat.
The last laugh is on the promoters, though. When, finally worn down by childish pleading, I tried to buy a Nintendo Game Boy Jurassic Park game (a mere pounds 25), Harrods, Hamleys and our local toy shop could not even say when supplies would arrive.
For this relief, much thanks. Our last resort against the Big Ideas Imperialists may well be human incompetence. One should not underestimate it; incompetence is one of the most effective forms of passive resistance, as so often demonstrated in the Third World.
SOCIAL workers given to interrogating couples who want to adopt children should consider the case of Miss Naomi March. This poor young black girl, despite the disadvantages of being adopted by parents who were rich, white and aristocratic - the Duke and Duchess of Richmond - and having been brought up not in the inner city but in one of the great houses of England, has survived the experience well enough to become an articulate and charming person and a very promising young actress, who was been interviewed about her achievements in the London Evening Standard. What went wrong?
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 18, 1993 | Comments (0)
Health: The brains behind a sexual U-turn
Minette Marrin meets a controversial scientist who is questioning the view that homosexuality is a matter of choice
THERE is a quiet revolution going on in our understanding of ourselves. It comes from the recent growth in scientific findings about the biological bases for what we do and how we are - new developments in neurology, endocrinology and genetics.
This revolution is quiet, usually, because the possibility that biology is destiny, or at least much more so than we had thought, makes people uneasy.
We would rather not contemplate it: we all remember the hideous experiments in eugenics of the recent past. These things have made ideas of innate biological differences understandably hateful.
That is why, in the ancient debate about which is more important - environment or heredity, nature or nurture - liberal Western thought has been committed to nurture for decades.
That way progress, justice and equal rights - the other way, the pink triangle and the yellow star of the death camps. It might seem profoundly unnerving that science may now be pointing more in the direction of nature.
But it is. And that is why a scientist in this field occasionally hits the headlines. Simon Levay is a distinguished neuroscientist who has become a hugely controversial celebrity in America; in 1991 he published a now famous study showing that a tiny part of the brain, which is responsible for sexual behaviour, is smaller in women and in homosexuals than in heterosexual men.
The response was explosive; many feared this work might be seen as evidence that homosexuality is some sort of innate defect and that Levay was giving comfort to the anti-homosexual enemy.
The responses to his study made Levay realise how much confusion and ignorance there is about the biology of brain and gender in humans: he decided to write a book, which could be understood by a non-scientific audience, explaining the evidence so far, including his own study. The result is The Sexual Brain, published in Britain last week. 'In my view,' he writes, 'the scientific evidence presently available points to a strong influence of nature and only a modest influence of nurture'.
Unfortunately, the general reader is not in a position to judge the scientific evidence, as so readably presented in Levay's book. It has had flattering accolades from Nobel prize winners Francis Crick at the Salk Institute and David Hubel at Harvard Medical School and others, but some reviewers feel he was not sufficiently cautious about what he included.
It is hard not to wonder why a successful scientist, previously noted for his work at Harvard on the neurology of vision in cats, would want to open this particular can of worms. The motive was partly personal. Levay is gay, and when his lover of 21 years died of Aids he found he wanted to address homosexuality and find research which had more personal meaning.
He appears too laid back and good-humoured to be a committed activist, and combines the modesty and open-mindedness one might expect of a successful scientist with the cool of a Californian, although he was born in Britain and educated at Dulwich College and Cambridge.
'In America - probably not so much in Britain - so much of homophobia is based on religious teaching and the idea that gay people are basically straight people who decided for some weird reason to be gay - some sort of wilful, immoral choice . . .
'In America about half the population still believes, according to studies, that gayness is both chosen and wrong. That's why my work is political, even though I'm a scientist. Because, in America, survey after survey shows that people who think homosexuality is a choice have more negative attitudes to gay people than those who think it is biological or genetic.'
This is understandable - if gays are 'born that way', heterosexual anxieties about guilt and seduction disappear. The same thing probably applies in Britain, though homophobia is not such a problem here, Levay feels.
'We know there are gay genes, if you want to put it that way. We know there are genes which influence people to be gay or straight, in men and women. We know these genes exist from the twin studies, and to identify them is a hot area of research at the moment. I know of three respected laboratories in America which are researching this intensely.'
The search for a 'gay gene' could lead straight to an attempt to eliminate it, either by genetic engineering, or, more practicably, by selective abortion, and a test could be devised which could be used against individuals by institutions. But Levay is undismayed. He believes that in America existing laws of privacy would protect people from this - though he suspects that British law might not.
'Basically are gay people worth having? Or are they a menace and a pest and let's get rid of them? If you can persuade society that they are just as healthy and desirable members of society as everyone else, then I think all these other issues fall aside'. He is so convinced of the positive nature of homosexuality, of the value of diversity and what he calls 'queer qualities', that he appears very optimistic about any risks of genetic engineering. He seems content - despite the fact that about 60 per cent of Americans are supposedly homophobic - to trust the judgment of society.
Simon Levay thinks these gay issues are simply in the vanguard of all such questions about biological differences between people and that societies are soon going to have a great number of decisions to make.
'I think that these biological issues will be the area of social debate in the next century. The human genome project has just started; right now we have acquired only some minute fragments of our genetic make-up, but 20 years from now we're going to know most of it. And it's going to be incredible.'
The ethical conflicts it throws up are going to be incredible, too.
The Daily Telegraph | Tuesday, July 13, 1993 | Comments (0)
No way to be fair
THOSE of us who do not support the Labour Party can only be glad that they have scored yet another own goal. I mean their new proposals to double the number of female Labour MPs by having women-only shortlists in the selection contests for half of Labour's safest seats. This will spread resentment, misery and confusion and, with any luck, cost them a few seats when the time comes.
However, anyone who supports the interests of women in general can only be dismayed. Positive discrimination is insulting to women. It may be a good thing actively to promote women's interests, but all we need is true equality of opportunity. To insist on equality of achievement is demeaning.
It is such an old-fashioned idea, too. More than 20 years ago, in the Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer stated the conventional view that there was no difference between male and female brains. Since then a quiet revolution has been going on. It is now known that there are significant differences between male and female brains (on average), affecting personality and aptitudes as well as sexuality.
These studies - in neurology, endocrinology and genetics - are still in their infancy, but the evidence is growing fast. The current state of play has just been summarised by a distinguished neurologist, Simon Levay, in a book called The Sexual Brain - he became notorious for his study showing that a tiny part of the hypothalamus, which is responsible for sexual behaviour, is smaller in homosexuals and in women than in heterosexual men.
It is really no longer possible to dismiss all this evidence with accusatory shrieks about biological determinism, and it is no longer possible to believe in positive discrimination.
THE British Tourist Authority and the English Tourist Board have the same new chairman. She is Adele Biss, a talented member of a talented family, which is a pity, because she will probably do the jobs extremely well. But whether the jobs should be done well, or done at all, seems to me highly debatable.
The British Tourist Authority is committed to attracting foreign tourists to Britain, and the English Tourist Authority seeks to promote domestic tourism, on the assumption that more and more tourism is better and better.
In fact, tourism is horribly destructive. What we need is less and less.
It is not often that one feels faintly thrilled by a proposed spending cut, but Whitehall's intention to reduce tourism funding from pounds 13.6 million to pounds 9 million is encouraging. It was probably only a cost-cutting exercise, however, and not part of an enlightened and radical move to undermine tourism. Tourism may produce masses of jobs and foreign currency, but the cost of these benefits is high - nothing less than our environment and our way of life. The bossy little signs that have sprung up in recent years, pointing out historic towns or beauty spots, are the gravestones of peace and unselfconsciousness. They are like the first warning spots of a rash - a plague - of cars, coaches, noisy hordes of trippers, bogus festivals and pageants, pedestrianised streets full of shops selling tourist tat, inflated prices, infested beaches and condom-littered woods.
What is the sense in urging people to ruin what is left of our fragile inheritance, especially when a great many of them are not interested anyway?
Poor Alec Guinness complained last week that when he visited the great basilica at Vezelay, in Burgundy, he found it swarming with French teenagers, shouting, laughing, screaming, chasing, kicking and goosing each other. I once used to take American students round Europe for a job, and I know such behaviour is normal, and not only among teenagers. What British tourism needs is a self-denying ordinance and the immediate abolition of all official encouragement.
APART from inventing tourism, the practice for which the British have traditionally been notorious - le vice anglais - is not homosexuality but whacking, including, presumably, smacking. Of course I believe passionately that consenting smackers and whackers should be allowed to do what they want in private. I also believe that parents should be able to bring up their children as they see fit, within reason. All the same I find the triumph in the courts of Mrs Anne Davis, the right-to-smack childminder, something of a hollow victory.
Sensible parents must follow their convictions, but smacking is hardly worth fighting for. It is a minor assault on someone peculiarly defenceless. But more to the point, smacking doesn't work.
The most unruly, nasty children, those with 'future thug' written all over them, who terrorise playgrounds and misbehave in supermarket queues, are those whose wretched mothers smack them regularly. The children who do best in life, contrariwise - those driven little goody-goodies who dutifully slog their way into the Establishment - have mothers who would never dream of smacking them. The employers' handbook for Norland nannies warns primly that Norland nursery nurses never smack. They don't need to, as I discovered when I employed one of these paragons. They find other ways to teach good behaviour, and there is no better behaved child than a Norland child.
OH, in these uninspiring times at Westminster, for a breath of hot air] How we feel the absence of Mr Kinnock at the heart of things] I have almost come to miss the Welsh windbag, especially as he was so gallant last week about his 'personal and political failure'. Still, he is not entirely silent.
Talking on the radio on Wednesday about John Smith and his little local difficulties, he delivered, with that suave orotundity of his, the following comment: 'He's got to play to win, because it's not a game.' When comes such another?
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 11, 1993 | Comments (0)
Leave parents alone
JUVENILE crime may be a desperate ill that demands desperate remedies, but it is unwise to overreact. One reader wrote to me to recommend branding for shameless young offenders (if only with long-lasting vegetable dye). This seems a little excessive. And so too does the response of Mr Peter Bottomley MP; it is surely desperate beyond the call of duty to respond by jettisoning basic Conservative principles. Yet Mr Bottomley, mindful of new research linking a child's early upbringing to his future tendencies to crime, has called for 'parenting' to be moved up the political agenda.
It is difficult to understand how we have reached the point where a prominent Conservative - and a Conservative with such pillow power - can make such a profoundly unConservative statement. How would any reasonable, true Conservative feel if it were a Labour politician, under a Labour government, threatening to move 'parenting' up the political agenda?
Nervous, at the very least, I should say.
Why should we be subjected to Government videos on 'parenting skills', as recommended by the Government-backed Family Policy Studies Centre? Who is to say Government quangos know best about these skills? Their record on cot deaths and heart disease and Aids gives one every reason to doubt their judgment. As for local authorities, one only needs to say 'Cleveland'.
Bringing up children is one of the most important aspects of private life.
And 'private', in common sense, means outside the sphere of government or other busybodies. What our masters should be doing is moving the provision of good nursery schools up the political agenda: that is the proper duty of government and one at which ours fails. Traditionally fools and socialists rush in where Conservatives know better than to tread. Or ought to know.
A YOUNG woman being beaten up by her middle-aged professor is not usually the sort of scene that attracts a burst of applause, or not, anyway, in a respectable London theatre. But that is what happened recently at the first performance in London of David Mamet's play Oleanna I could not quite clap myself, but I sympathised; if ever a woman had it coming to her, it was this politically correct anti-heroine of our time.
This student, Carol, is made the mouthpiece of all the worst politically correct ideology in American university life. Maddened by her own stupidity, she finally accuses the professor of sexism, racism, elitism, pornography and - as always - rape, thus destroying his career and leaving him to face serious criminal charges. The point of the play is that we, the audience, have seen that all these accusations are completely baseless. A total Anita Hill, in fact.
Though quite intriguing as a look-at-life in America, this play, I assumed, could never make much of a stir here; political correctness is simply not much of a problem in Britain, even if a few politicians nag on about 'parenting'. How wrong I was.
I learnt later that the British actress playing the student believed that she was 100 per cent justified in everything she said - just as huge swathes of American women do. This is alarming news, given that actresses are usually the most sensitive weather vanes in the winds of fashionable opinion.
An English student I met recently said she'd been given a student questionnaire about her sex life so worded that by answering 'yes' or 'no' she effectively confessed to having been raped, even though she'd never even been harassed. And debating about date rape at the University of Cork, I was astonished by the students' obsession with it - I am surprised that they go out at all. What's curious about PC language is the topsy-turvy way it lurches from euphemism to sensationalism - using euphemism to disguise painful facts where they do exist and turning to hysterical rhetoric to invent them where they don't. So no one is unintelligent or blind or even really dead - the phrase 'non-living person' has even appeared. Yet people cry rape at the drop of a euphemism.
HAVING very little interest in watching sportsmen at long distance, and not much in pretending to, I no longer have any interest in going to Ascot or Wimbledon or Henley, or any of those suburbs made briefly fashionable at this time of year. But, equally, I have not been asked to any of them. The fact that I would not want to go does not prevent a slight feeling of unease. It is not simply that I have been denied the subtle pleasures of refusal. It is that it confirms a demoralising and persistent feeling about life in general - that somehow, in the great scheme of things, one's invitation got lost in the post. I wish I had said what Oscar Wilde did about it, so I will; in A Woman of No Importance he wrote that to be in Society is merely a bore, but to be out of it is a tragedy.
PROMPTED by a wonderful description by the novelist Harold Brodkey of his approach to death from Aids, several friends have talked about their plans for signing off. Most think primarily of putting their affairs in order. It seems rather bleak to spend one's last months tidying up for the executors, but I suppose it shows a certain stoical detachment that is endearing: I am profoundly touched by my mother's unselfish labours in her attic. It has made me think of rereading at last all those painful letters and diaries that have lain untouched in suitcases for decades, full of menace. Mae West or somebody once said: 'Keep a diary and one day it will keep you.' It would be nice to imagine it might keep one's grandchildren, or keep them in whisky for a while. At the very least, I think one should try to leave something to shock somebody.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, July 04, 1993 | Comments (0)
