« August 1993 | Home | October 1993 »
Books: Sex without significance
This is the kind of book that gives feminism a bad name, says Minette Marrin
Sexing the Millennium by Linda Grant, HarperCollins, pounds 12.99
THERE are many books which are difficult to understand, for one reason or another, but there can be very few titles that are largely incomprehensible.
It must be admitted that Sexing the Millennium conveys very little in the way of obvious meaning, though I suppose sex for one thing and the millennium for another are quite exciting words and ought to add up to a good, brisk-selling title. But what exactly does sexing mean? And how do you do it to a millennium?
The word made me think immediately of Jeanette Winterson's novel Sexing the Cherry, which, excellent though it is, may perhaps have come to be used as a calling card for those seeking correct credentials in the area of gender and politics - a sort of authenticity by association. Otherwise the only thing that sprang to mind was the useful craft of chicken sexing, which seemed of doubtful relevance, since one can hardly determine the gender of a thousand years.
The flabby, vaguely right-on feel of the title characterises the book. It never becomes entirely clear what it is about. In part it deals with the sexual revolution and its disappointments - why female desire has not yet transformed the world, why we still suffer from phallocentrism, why prostitution hasn't withered away in the face of women's greater sexual freedom and how sad it is that men still persist in preferring to mate with young and pretty women. Why can't men be more like women, in fact.
It is also a personal quest to discover what had happened to the author and her (Sixties) generation. It looks forward in hope to an end to phallocentrism and a way in which 'real people could have real sexual lives'.
Along the way there is some interesting material, especially some medical history; the book began as a social history of the contraceptive pill, which perhaps explains its lack of clear direction. There is something likeable about the author; she is obviously straightforward in her character but hardly in her arguments. Her analysis of society is naive, as in the old howler about 'real people'. And her generalisations generally do not inspire confidence: 'There is no doubt that by the beginning of the Eighties, people were bored stiff with sex.'
How can she write that 'until women find their own sexuality, what we will have is a single, hegemonic definition of pleasure, male sexuality' (sic)?
This is the patronising, out of date and ill-educated nonsense that has driven so many women, reluctantly, to distance themselves from feminism. It is sad that Linda Grant's attack on phallocentrism tends to confirm certain phallocentric prejudices (which I do not share) about the female mind.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 26, 1993 | Comments (0)
A mite too many
EVERY pain is a progress, as my Scottish ballet master used to say, whacking our trembling teenage legs with an elegant cane as he passed along the barre -there was no Childline then - and equally, contrariwise, every progress is a bit of a pain.
Take the common house dust-mite, for instance - widely discussed last week - or rather accept it, because you cannot choose but have it, in millions and billions, even in your bed, no matter how much vacuuming you do.
These vile-looking creatures, which live on sloughed-off human skin, are far more numerous than they used to be, simply because modern houses are far more comfortable. Our homes are much warmer and less draughty, and this new-fangled luxury provides the perfect conditions for the fearsome mite, smaller than a full stop but terrible to contemplate, with its horror-movie hooked feelers. Our houses are completely infested with dead skin, dead mites, live mites and all their droppings, which we breathe in. It is the droppings to which people are allergic. Hence the enormous increase, with rising living standards, in allergies and breathing problems.
Call it the Zeitgeist - call it what you will - but in the very week when the British Allergy Foundation, unknown to me, had decided to launch its Fight the Mite campaign I had arranged for a home demonstration of a ruinously expensive German machine, which is the only weapon know that can take this creature out. My children suffer from almost every fashionable allergy, and I have finally begun to take them seriously. Besides, I have always resented the thought that our mattresses are teeming with parasites swarming in their own excrement. What the lady demonstrator got out of our supposedly clean rug was disgusting; thank goodness we do not have a microscope.
I was reminded of a wonderful book I read years ago called Life on Man, or Life on Person as it would now be called. The strange truth is that our persons are alive with vast armies of parasites, some of them Bosch-like in the hideous variety of their feelers and tentacles struggling for survival in the quaintest ways. There is even one animalcule that lives at the root of the human eyelash and has adapted to the presence of mascara. In order to show his students the huge populations that live on the gums, the author of Life on Man took a specimen from the teeth of his office cleaner and invited her to look through the microscope: she was so horrified by the wildlife she saw that she immediately had all her teeth removed. Perhaps these creepy-crawlies offer new evidence at last for the theologian's argument from design - what immortal hand or eye could frame this fearful variety? It is just like the idea of God - a reality so close, so completely unseen, so unimaginable and so completely implausible.
INCIDENTALLY, I am afraid that poor Kenneth Clarke has missed a great public relations opportunity by ignoring Fight the Mite week. With all the trouble he has been having with VAT on fuel, this would have been be the perfect moment to point out that lower temperatures will actually be good for us all. A few old people may grumble about the winter cold, but it is every bit as life-threatening to the house dust-mite as it is to them, and dust-mites cannot put on extra woollies. The boys at Central Office have not thought this thing through.
IN the aftermath of the British National Party victory in Tower Hamlets, perhaps enough has been said about the causes of racism in the East End. All the same, I do not think many commented on the role of the National Federation of Housing Associations. In the same week as the notorious election, this body published some new policy guidelines for its 2,200 members, urging them to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities when renting homes or appointing staff, and to set 'race equality targets' for this purpose.
Under British race-relations law it would be illegal to set racial quotas, but targets, it seems, are not the same thing and therefore perfectly lawful. Lawful they may be, but in a climate of such deep suspicion on all sides it was hardly wise to set down such guidelines, let alone publish them, in a week when everyone knew that racial tensions, particularly about housing, were bound to be expressed. From a public-service organisation, it is not much of a contribution either to justice or to racial harmony.
THE older I get, the more I think people should do less of what they do, not more. Most horrible medical stories have to do with doctors who simply do things because that is what they do, not because the things need doing.
Surgeons cut things out.
That is why a gynaecologist recently aborted a pregnancy. He was simply cutting out her uterus, with the woman's consent, but given when neither knew of the pregnancy. And not cutting things out is not what surgeons do.
Physicians prescribe medicine. That is what they do and they do much too much of it.
Last year a Birmingham University survey reported that doctors found it difficult not to prescribe. 'In medical school they are trained to do things, but in half the cases you see in general practice, not doing is more appropriate.' Politicians talk, but since they cannot always tell the truth they are forced to lie, whereas not talking would have been better. The same applies to the unnecessary exertions of tree surgeons, guideline writers, armies and novelists, who impose their activities on the rest of us, often with disastrous results. Judicious neglect is injudiciously neglected.
The Sunday Telegraph | | Comments (0)
Song of the racists
RULE, BRITANNIA, the height of English operatic can belto, inspired the usual mass rapture on the last night of the Proms last weekend. I felt it myself, watching on television, warmed up by Land of Hope and Glory and the customary, suppressed hysteria. This emotional high is one of the few truly shared moments of popular culture in this country, one that cuts through class and generation; only the very cerebral really look down on the joyous last night of the Proms.
At the very least it is one of the greatest gigs ever. But also it plays on the heart-strings that throb at the sound of a brass band, at old war movies, at cricket on the village green and the cadences of the language of this sceptred isle. It plays on the longing for something that is grand and great and British - harmless sentiments, I have always thought, and ones I share.
But this year I began to wonder. The Union Jacks and silly hats and noises off may be all part of the fun, but all those young nerds gawkily doing nationalistic knee-jerks, up and down to the rhythm, with their risible, root-tooting jingoism suddenly seemed to me worse than ridiculous. What could these hymns of Empire possibly mean to anyone under 40? They were being carried away by something completely meaningless to them, for the pleasure of the emotion; this was not sentiment but sentimentality.
Sentimentality is unearned emotion, as James Joyce said - emotion without content or direction. It is very dangerous - easily aroused and easily misused as groups like the British National Party understand. It is a chilling thought that just as the Proms ended, a young Asian boy was beaten to within an inch of his life by young white racists. And what white ultra-nationalists like to sing, apparently, on their Paki-bashing forays, the song that gets them going, is Rule, Britannia.
Perhaps with the success of the BNP in Tower Hamlets, in east London, it is time to reconsider the Proms. Perhaps Rule, Britannia should be put away, as a middle-aged matron keeps her wedding-dress in tissue paper and nostalgia, as a memory of a glamorous and exotic past, but something that no longer becomes her and no longer even fits her.
THE worst thing about the story of the babies who are being deliberately starved to death in China because they are not boys is that everyone is so astonished. None of this is new. I cannot imagine why it is that Westerners so consistently and for so long have resisted the truth about what goes on in China. There is a well-worn path of blinkered liberals going to vile totalitarian regimes and coming back to prate about the joys of socialism, from Sidney and Beatrice Webb to Jane Fonda, but you might expect better of the general public.
When I moved to Hong Kong 20 years ago, and first learnt and wrote about China, I tried to tell my bien pensant friends from university back in Blighty about the Chinese concentration camps. They do not exist, my friends firmly told me, from their flats in Islington and Pimlico. Mao is the best thing that ever happened to China, they said. The East is Red. So it was, with blood. Mao holds the Guinness Book of Records top score for genocide - of his own people. My English friends simply ignored me when I told them that hundreds of Chinese were fleeing China to Hong Kong through shark-infested waters on lilos, although they could not swim, and were regularly washed up on Hong Kong beaches, mutilated or dead.
Junking of 'useless mouths' - a Chinese expression that includes the old - is not new in China. Girl babies have been culled in China, not just since the notorious one-child ruling but time out of mind. The daughter of the heroic Professor Wu Ningkun, whose account of life in Maoist China came out this year, described what happened in the early Seventies to her peasant playmate. Married off young, this girl gave birth in rapid succession to four female babies, who were considered 'debt collectors' and thrown into the river. Other baby girls in the same village were drowned at birth in a urine bucket by their fathers.
The fact is that the Chinese still do, and the Japanese in their time have done, terrible things. Yet we prefer to ignore them. We accept their refusal to feel guilty, although at the same time we require Germans to do unending penance for their crimes against humanity. This can only be racism - the same racism that condemned the evils of white South Africa while remaining silent about the horrors of black Africa. We do not expect much of the little yellow people, after all; they have a different attitude to death, don't they? So why not have the Olympics in China anyway? Peking would be so much more amusing than Manchester.
BUS passes seem to have been sent to drive us mad. One reader has written to tell me the story of a friend who is on income support. In order to receive this, she has to walk over nine miles every two weeks, since she cannot afford the bus fares, to collect it in person. Other people have their benefit paid without having to collect it personally, but she was told she lived too close (sic) to the office to be entitled to this treatment and if she wanted cheaper fares, should get a bus pass. To get a bus pass she would have to get to a bus station 12 miles away, with two photographs. As she uses the bus only once a fortnight, the bus pass would be prohibitively expensive. Perhaps she too will be driven to vote for the British National Party.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 19, 1993 | Comments (0)
How they buck the pass
THERE seems to be a bit of backsliding about denationalisation these days: anyone whose nerve is failing should try to get a bus pass in London. That would soon stiffen the resolve.
My friend and next-door neighbour, who is foreign, embarked with confidence on this simple enterprise. However, despite being a graduate of the best business school in Europe and a person of great and egalitarian charm, she failed.
It all began when her two daughters, who now take a bus to school, suggested she might look into bus passes for them. Knowing that one has to inquire at the post office for the most unlikely things, she went to her local one for advice. There she was told to go to a Tube station or a newsagent. At the Tube station she was told that bus passes were not available there.
So she then went to one newsagent who was rude, and to another who was charming. The latter, who was Indian, said he would love to sell bus cards, but they (meaning London Transport) would not let him, because his shop was too close to the Tube and, if he was allowed to sell bus passes, he would have to sell all cards, including Tube passes, and They did not want that.
At yet a third newsagent, a pleasant man, agreed that he did sell bus passes but my friend would first have to go to the the post office to get a photo card, a fact no one had mentioned to her during her earlier visit there.
So equipped with passports, photographs and all possible documentation about her British daughters, my friend was still in a good humour when she went back to the post office to fill in two forms and produce photos. However, when the post office employee said the two girls would have to appear in person, her mood clouded over; as a result of what she then said to him, he rapidly agreed to make an exception and issued the photocards.
Back at the third newsagent, a different but equally pleasant man rummaged about in a box containing about 15 different packs of travel cards, of which the cheapest cost pounds 3.80 per week. However, as the children's journey costs only pounds 3.50 a week when they pay cash to the conductor, he agreed that he probably had not got the right card in stock. He promised to order it when the rep came round, which would not be until the end of the month at the earliest: he expressed his sympathies and suggested a call to London Transport.
The complexities of this telephone conversation were rather addling to the brain, but the upshot was that for this journey there is no bus pass that is as cheap as paying cash. What is more, the one that is available (at pounds 3.85) must be purchased each week - no stockpiling - from newsagents where available or from a travel centre (the nearest one is not yet open). But, the London Transport voice revealed, you could get a suitable travel card for pounds 3.55 a week, valid for buses and Tubes, and available from your local Tube station. My friend's investigations were made by car - had she attempted all these journeys by public transport, she would be at a bus stop yet.
IT is just as well for London Transport that it is not operating in America, where about 90 million people cannot understand a bus timetable at all. A recent report commissioned by the US Department of Education has shown that nearly half the adult population are virtually illiterate and innumerate (though these harsh words were not used). And at the bottom two levels of literacy - where people cannot remotely follow a bus timetable or understand a simple written sentence - 15 per cent are college graduates.
Perhaps we should be grateful that we all muddle along as well as we do getting around London, and for our over-production of graduates, and stop complaining.
FOR some reason, com plaining is very satisfac tory, even for people who do not approve of it. Contrariwise, it is not considered stylish to try to think of things to be glad about - 'Pollyanna' is almost a word of abuse, used regularly on liberal radio programmes to suggest wilful complacency - and one cannot help feeling depressed by whichever misery is currently in fashion. All the same, some things in this country are better than they were. Although the gap between the rich and the poor has grown wider, even the worst off are better off than they were in 1979. According to an audit done by the Economist, 69 per cent of 'poor' households have central heating, against 29 per cent in 1979; 73 per cent have telephones (47 per cent); and Britain has fewer suicides, murders and road accidents than most Western countries. And one would have to be irretrievably cynical this week not to find at least one thing to be glad about. If the Israelis and Palestinians can make peace, then the world is not quite hopeless.
THERE have been a great many attacks on the family in the past few days.
Somebody at the top of the Mothers' Union has questioned the value of the nuclear family. Radio 4 has had a phone-in on the proposition that Families are Bad for You, with an earlier one thrown in about how useless old people are. Then we have had the tragedy of the empty marriage of Diane Abbott, MP, which, according to her husband, she embarked on only to avoid being yet another single black mother; and Martin Amis has left his wife.
National morale is sagging. I put it down to the nervous irritation of the long, long summer holidays. If the return to school does not ease the strain on family life, perhaps people should emulate the father-of-four rock star Sting and his wife Trudy, who do two hours' yoga every day, which keeps them in trim for their regular five-hour love-making sessions. Unfortunately, most people probably do not have the time - they are too busy queuing for buses.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 12, 1993 | Comments (0)
Books: The strange career of Donald Trump
Minette Marrin enters the world of greed and sleaze created by 'The Donald'
The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by Harry Hurt III Orion, pounds 18.99
'YOU'VE got to do something to keep life interesting while you're waiting to die.' This is something Donald Trump has often said and one can only assume from the extraordinary story of his life so far that he is very easily bored. Indeed, according to one of his former senior executives, he has an attention span of only 26 seconds.
The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump is an account of how this dazzlingly unpleasant property developer has been trying to amuse himself.
At the height of his power, at the end of the Eighties and still in his early forties, Donald Trump had made his mark all over the New York skyline, with Trump Tower, Trump Plaza, Trump Palace, Trump Parc, not to mention the famous Plaza Hotel. In Atlantic City there were three big casinos and there was more, more, more, including an airline, Adnan Khashoggi's famous yacht and Mar a Lago, the sumptuous Florida estate of the breakfast cereal heiress, Marjorie Merri weather Post.
Trump also had a remarkable, arriviste Czech wife, Ivana, a new-age mistress Marla Maples - the celebrated Georgia Peach - and a mountain of debts.
The Lost Tycoon gives a very detailed account of all this and certainly captures the atmosphere of greed and manic self-delusion in which 'The Donald' did his 'scheming and beaming', as his wife put it in her broken English. It is a world of extravagant sleaze, inhabited by bent lawyers, venal politicians, fawning journalists, compliant bankers and turncoat advisers: this story is not so much a fairy-tale as an American bestiary.
Clearly Harry Hurt III has done a great deal of work in preparing this book, but it does not entirely inspire confidence. 'Donald J. Trump', starts the first page, 'wakes up in the middle of a bad dream and sees a band of baby angels hovering over his head. It's 6 am on Tuesday, October 10, 1989.
Donald has just spent another fitful night . . . still dressed in a T-shirt and undershorts Donald tosses off the covers and stares at the winged cherubs painted on the ceiling over the bed.'
If this is supposed to be a work of factual journalism, it is a curious way to begin. The continuous present tense has the feel of fiction, and in any case how could the author know such tiny details? It is possible that Trump told him about staring at cherubs but it all seems a bit implausible.
This lack of confidence is increased by the bad production of the book. Page 55 excitingly describes The Donald, driven mad by the pain of his liposuction and cosmetic scalp surgery, brutally tearing Ivana's bottle-blonde hair and raping her on their sumptuous bed, according to her.
But as the page turns, her formal account of this is suddenly interrupted; unaccountably page 56 begins mid-sentence on a construction site, with Donald about to cradle Marla in his arms.
Pages 60 and 61 are in an even worse mess, with one long section printed twice: The Donald and Marla strap their seat belts for their notorious trip to Aspen, Colorado twice in 18 lines.
Harry Hurt's style is often unattractive, with expressions such as 'braggadocian' and 'crapping out'. And despite his attempted intrusion into their private thoughts, his characters remain two-dimensional. What he is best at is straight business reporting: he has unravelled Trump's extremely tangled web of leverage and cronyism into a clear narrative thread. He makes it easy to understand what Trump did, how he rose and why he fell. He also makes it depressingly clear why no one stopped The Donald on the way up.
Goebbels was right about the size of the lie.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 05, 1993 | Comments (0)
No place for a boy
CONSIDERING our national obsession with violent crime, child abuse and the rising tide of juvenile delinquency, the current enthusiasm for male au pairs seems distinctly odd. Not that I am suggesting there is anything wrong with Vito Vitolovic, who has just started work in London as the first male au pair under the new Home Office rules, which now let in the boys. He does look very gloomy, as well he might, being Croatian, but he is no doubt a prince among au pairs in every other respect. It is just that it seems to me quaintly optimistic to invite into your house, sight unseen, a young male foreigner about whom you know very little, to look after your most precious possessions, including your children.
I am all for equal opportunities, other things being equal, but in this case they are not. I do not want to keep nagging on about testosterone, but this is what sorts the boys from the girls. Because of floods of male hormones, very young men are at the most aggressive stage of their lives, and at the height of their sexual powers, but are often without the maturity that brings self-control. And little boys and girls at bedtime can be both infuriating and seductive.
Men are hugely more likely than women to commit crimes, and violent crimes at all ages, but particularly at the age of the average au pair. Almost all sex offenders and the criminally insane are men.
Men are 13 times more likely than women to commit a motoring offence - should anyone think of letting Heinz or Jacques drive the children to school in the family motor - and commit nearly 100 per cent of dangerous driving, drunken driving and speeding offences. And men under 22 are far more likely than young women to have an accident.
It may seem morbid to dwell on these statistical risks. The real problems of male au pairs are much more likely to be struggling to be one of the girls with all the other au pairs. Nonetheless, anyone who has employed nannies and au pairs will know that there are always one or two who are off their heads; it is rather frightening to find you have left your children with a drunken pathological liar who has terrorised the cleaner into silence, and worked her way though your entire collection of wine, as happened to friends of mine. How much worse if this monster had been a big, strong testosterone-crazed male and an aggressive driver to boot.
THE formidable Beryl Goldsmith, formerly personal assistant to Lord Tebbit, has hit a national nerve with her criticism of the Princess of Wales. 'Why the lady continues to be regarded as hardly less than saintly by the British press remains one of life's great mysteries.' Miss Goldsmith is quite right, or rather she was, because one mystery has been suddenly replaced by another. The tabloids have turned on the saint to denounce her: 81 per cent of readers called a Daily Mirror hotline to say she is a hypocrite, which is almost as silly as calling her a saint.
It is the function of the tabloids to add to the gaiety of nations with malicious gossip and gross irrationality, so no one can be surprised, least of all the Princess, who has been very shrewd in manipulating them for many years. However, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, and the same applies to the media. The Princess rose by an inflated view of her merits; she escaped popular criticism when she deserved it; but she is, for now at least, sinking under accusations that are quite unjust.
Her only real crime seems to be that she has enjoyed her exotic summer holidays. There is nothing particularly hypocritical about going on expensive trips to beautiful places, as well as doing good works; it is exactly what all the very rich women in her set do. They have the private tropical island and couturier circuit and then they have the disease-ball circuit. The Princess of Wales falls neatly into this convention; she is actually a very typical jet-setter.
Her only problem is one of image, and here she seems to be losing her touch.
She still does not quite seem to realise that a great many people resent her dumping the Prince of Wales, while retaining all the privileges of his position, and that in order to get away with it she will have to go around looking miserable and pressing lots of leprous flesh for quite a while longer. That might make her a hypocrite, but if she does not do it, she will continue to be called one.
LATERAL thinking is not something you would normally associate with British Rail, but I am profoundly impressed by its inspired new rules on drinking.
It will be impossible to drink a pint of beer at lunchtime without risking disciplinary action, since the permitted levels of alcohol in the blood are to be even lower than the police breathalyser threshold, and this applies to everybody. And unions are warning employees to beware of the morning-after effects of drinking. Life as an employee of British Rail will soon be quite intolerable, but it will be impossible to complain because the measures have the full support of the Government and health quangoes. It is a strategy that should recommend itself to every company trying to cut costs and encourage voluntary redundancies in droves.
IN the Psychiatrist's Chair last weekend, on Radio 4, Marjorie Proops, the agony aunt, told Dr Anthony Clare, the handsome media psychiatrist, that she had decided to reveal all about her sexless marriage and her long adulterous affair with a colleague, to general outrage, as a result of going to a psychotherapist. 'Don't you think,' he asked thought- fully, 'that this passion for revelation may itself be a sickness?' Well, he said it.
