« September 1993 | Home | November 1993 »
Books: Brave lives spent flat out
'Mistress' is too vague an appellation to use nowadays, finds Minette Marrin
The Encyclopedia of Mistresses by Dawn B. Sova Robson Books, pounds 16.95
THIS Encyclopedia of Mistresses is no such thing. It is not encyclopaedic nor does it appear to have any clear idea of the nature of a mistress.
Anyone who can include Elizabeth I of England, who almost certainly died a virgin, was independently rich and subordinate to no mere man, in 'An Under-the-Covers Look at the 'Other Women' of History's Most Influential Men', cannot be taken very seriously as an encyclopaedist.
What this book does offer is a collection of sexy and adventurous women, and at that level it makes encouraging reading. Most of these women are remarkable not for their greed nor their cynicism but for their charm, their courage and their enormous vitality. Undeterred by bastardy, illiteracy, poverty, social censure, marriage, venereal disease and pregnancy, they manage to redesign their lives according to their own appetites. They tried, I think, to be mistresses not of men but of their own destinies.
One of my favourites remains Nelson's mistress, Lady Hamilton, a blacksmith's daughter who began her career at 17 in a rather sporting manner: she gave herself to the captain of a British warship in exchange for the release of her cousin's husband, who had been pressed into service. A year and a baby later, in 1782, she found employment with a Dr James Graham in his Temple of Health, performing erotic nude dances around a special celestial bed for impotent patients. Sic itur ad astra: a certain tolerance of the ridiculous seems to have been an important qualification for the would-be star-boffer.
The author of this book does not display the realism of her subjects. 'Each woman,' she writes, 'has risked social disapproval, financial uncertainty or even the loss of her own social or political standing to follow her heart.'
One can only smile.
What is most striking about the grandes horizontales of the great tradition is not their tender hearts but their strong stomachs and hard heads. And, in any case, what she says is not true of every woman in her own collection - some, for instance, like the society mistresses of Edward VII, did not risk their social standing at all - quite the reverse - and a great many others did not adventure their hearts.
Dawn B. Sova Ph. D, for all her doctorate, is clearly in an intellectual muddle about her subject. It is true of course that 'mistress' is a word that, with the emancipation of women, has gradually been drained of its meaning and now connotes suspender belts as much as anything else. But in a book like this, an author should make some attempt to define her terms.
What is the distinction between a lover and a mistress, for instance?
Margaret Sanger, the great pioneer of birth control, who had a passionate affair with H. G. Wells, among many others, and exchan ged erotic whispers with him on public platforms in her middle age, was married, rich and successful in her own right. According to Dawn Sova, she 'had numerous lovers and became mistress to a few'. Yet nowhere does she explain what she means by this. A lot of the women in this collection simply had affairs with other people's husbands - not all were kept, or dependent, or outcast.
So what are the qualifications? Even the simple definition of a woman who beds married celebrities will not do: it won't explain the inclusion of the American girl who tempted the unknown John Wesley. And why is Maria Callas in but not the great Colette? Why no Mrs Paddy Campbell and what about the legendary La Paiva, or La Presidente? Dawn Sova is not as professional as most of her subjects had to be. Her individual entries are sometimes clumsily put together, with occasional lapses of grammar and spelling, showing signs of poor editing. There is nothing wrong with producing a silly, sexy book for fun but it should, like some of the great whores within, give value for money.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 31, 1993 | Comments (0)
Gift of the gab
THE truth tends to surprise people either into anger or into laughter. One of my favourite literary heroines is a weather-beaten, middle-aged widow called Jane, who appears, sadly only once, in a Somerset Maugham short story. Although she is very provincial and dowdy, she suddenly, at the age of 55, becomes the toast of London society and is in demand everywhere for the sake of her dazzling and original wit. She is not a raconteur, she has no gift for repartee. The secret of her humour, it emerges, and what makes her so startlingly original, is simply that she tells the truth.
In these less playful times, however, the response to the truth is all too often furious indignation. A pseudonymous Harold Wilde, wisely concealing his real name, started an angry debate in The Daily Telegraph recently by suggesting that fortysomething women were no good at dinner parties - he wrote of 'the unspeakable, speech-defying tedium of middle-class female gentility'.
Naturally he has been furiously denounced. But he was only saying something that a great many people, men and women, actually think. I have (unlike Mr Wilde) been lucky enough to meet lots of women of all ages who are extremely interesting to talk to, and quite a few women wits as well. But I have also always felt that one of the booby prizes of being a woman was that one sat next to men at dinner parties - because the chances are, things being as they are, that men will be more entertaining.
This is now an impermissible thought.
But to think this is not to betray my own sex. There are many reasons why women do not always shine on these curious occasions, the main one being that men ceaselessly and shamelessly interrupt women. The last time I looked into the research on this irritating fact I found some American surveys reporting that of all interruptions in mixed company, more than 95 per cent were by men against women - which is why single-sex education for girls is essential. Men are not allowed to interrupt in the United States now, which is a good thing, though like all good things in America it has been taken too far, and men are now only allowed to address women in tones of sycophancy.
Here in Britain this boorish interruption still goes on, though much less among the young. For this reason, and for others too well known to reiterate, women's strength does not usually lie in verbal combat and rhetorical self-display. Generally speaking, women are often quite dull at dinner, and bored themselves. To deny this is just to add confusion to injury.
THE Prince of Wales caused a great deal of controversy by speaking his mind last week, not least with his remarks about Muslims in Britain. In a speech at the Centre of Islamic Studies in Oxford he said that Muslims must try to fit in with the British way of life rather than try to change it, and he warned that Muslim extremists are causing hatred in this country. What is needed is tolerance on both sides, he said, and Muslims should respect our history and culture.
I cannot imagine why it should be so courageous or so shocking (which it was) to say something that is so obviously true. It is also something that a lot of people believe: nearly 13,000 callers rang the Sun to register their agreement with the Prince of Wales. But I don't think his approach was shocking enough.
To call for tolerance on all sides, as liberal and reasonable people do, is to miss the point of true religious belief. Tolerance is at odds with true belief. We tend to miss this obvious point because we do not have many religious beliefs ourselves, or, if we do, we see them as a private matter.
For other faiths, religious beliefs cover social and political life as well.
The painful truth is that it is not possible for certain other faiths to respect our culture, or not much, and vice versa.
ONE of the most striking comments in a recent burst of public outrage about juvenile crime was the remark of a senior policeman that the path to delinquency begins with bad language and bad manners. This is well known to criminologists, it seems; rudeness and swearing in young children is a good marker for getting into trouble later. This must be one of those odd occasions when common sense coincides with sociology, for it is obviously right. Rudeness comes from the absence of orderliness, the absence of high expectations and of some sense of ceremony in life - all those things that encourage children to make something of themselves rather than drift into crime. It is particularly sad that one of the worst features of inner-city schools, according to a recent report from Her Majesty's Inspectors, is the teachers' low expectations of their pupils.
It is no accident that rude means both bad-mannered and uneducated or unskilled. And it is no accident either that the motto of one of the best and oldest schools in the country is Manners Makyth Man, though curiously enough there is no one quite so horribly rude as a clever ex-public-school boy when he is trying to be offensive. It would be a great mistake to imagine that rudeness is restricted to the proletariat; it was rather rude of Prince Philip, for instance, to ask a young woman in public whether she was wearing mink knickers.
The Sunday Telegraph | | Comments (0)
Books: Granny knows best
Life's too short for this look at ageing, says Minette Marrin
The Fountain of Age by Betty Friedan Jonathan Cape, pounds 17.99
AT A period when time is short, trees all too few and books far too many, there has to be a quite outstanding reason for producing a tome that is more than 600 pages long. The Fountain of Age, Betty Friedan's new book about growing old, is 616 pages long, and there seems to be no obvious reason why she feels entitled to take up so much of the reader's remaining time on earth - I guess it would consume at least 11 hours of one's appointed span.
Perhaps, as the celebrated grandmother of the American's Women's Movement, she is now too important to be edited.
Literary long-windedness seems to be a peculiarly American failing, for some reason. And this book falls into a peculiarly American genre, with its rushed and confusing combination of political tracts, demographic detail, scientific survey, personal testament and individual anecdote.
It is the ceaseless anecdotes that make the book so wearisome: do we really need to know, in a book of supposedly serious social analysis, that Ms Friedan spent time in her hotel lobby worrying about the driving skills of the very ancient Dr Charlotte Buhler, former psychoanalyst and next appointment for Betty Friedan if she didn't crash first? 'Suddenly, there was a flurry at the entrance and a red-headed woman, with that wonderful creamy Viennese skin, sprang across the hotel lobby, kissed me effusively on each cheek, and led me quickly out to her sporty new American car.'
By chapter nine, 'Going Beyond', it has become clear what kind of writing this is. This chapter contains a lengthy account of Betty Friedan's experiences of an outward bound course of wilderness survival for the elderly, complete with sodden woolly underwear, farting, sleeping bag zipper problems and reflections on lavatory paper.
The fact is that, for all her attempts to write a serious and carefully researched account of ageing in Western society, for all her commonsense and humanity, Betty Friedan is, as a writer, spiritually stuck on the How-to shelf - with the appropriate combination of bossiness, indelicacy and triumphant assertion of the obvious.
This is a pity, because her subject is an important one and deserved a more disciplined treatment. As she points out, a huge demographic change has taken place in this century. The life expectancy of women has gone from 49 in 1900 to 79 now. The proportion of the old in the population is increasing rapidly. Yet these changes have been accompanied by an obsession with youth and a revulsion against age.
Betty Friedan argues that our horror of growing old is often ill-founded; she says only three per cent of people in Britain suffer from Alzheimer's Disease, and only four per cent of British old people over 65 live in institutions.
She puts up a good case for the last stage of life as a time of change and development - a time, in fact, for the getting of wisdom. And she makes the true, if obvious, points, that old people wither and die if deprived of their independence and contact with other people.
Ms Friedan has plenty of suggestions of what to do about all this. But she might have had more success in getting them across if she'd written more clearly, less sentimentally and at a tenth of the length.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 24, 1993 | Comments (0)
The ugly face of misandry
MISANDRY is a word that hardly exists. It means the dislike of men, just as misogyny means the dislike of women. But when I recently wanted to write a book called The Misandrist my publisher told me the title would be incomprehensible. This is odd, because there is misandry all around us, even if it is a feeling that dares not speak its name. It is misandry that has so muddied the waters of the current debate about rape and date-rape, and led to so much wilful misunderstanding. There is a terrible danger that these attitudes are going to alienate men from women even more tragically than nature did in the first place.
Not long ago my small son burst into tears when his older sister told him censoriously that it is men who do all the bad things in the world; men start all the wars and little boys love pretending to shoot and hurt people.
If you want to know what the prevailing orthodoxy is, you have only to listen to school-children; out of the mouths of babes and sucklings comes all the one-sided propaganda about smoking, rain forests, ivory and fur coats. My daughter's attitude was just a watered-down classroom version of the hard-line feminist view that all men are rapists.
Of course it is not difficult to understand misandry. But it would be a tragic mistake to be as unjust to men as they have traditionally been to us.
Yet that is what women seem constantly tempted to do. In the debate on date-rape there seems, on the part of the most vociferous women, to be a wilful indifference towards men. They seem interested only in female sexuality and perspectives, and to discuss these things in a way that is clearly quite incomprehensible to most men.
For example, it is not immediately obvious to the uninitiated what is so wrong with goal-oriented, penetrative sex, in which men are so perversely interested. Earlier generations may have been unnecessarily fearful of the awful dangers of leading men on, but some of today's young women seem oblivious - or, worse still, disapproving - of the overwhelming force of sexual arousal in young men. Obsessed with their own embarrassments, they are indifferent to the sexual humiliations and uncertainties that young men suffer too.
If you look at the world from the point of view of a young son or a grandson, women must seem like a constant threat. A sexual misunderstanding could land you in court on a criminal charge.
Misunderstanding is the word for it - last year Cosmopolitan reported that hundreds of women wrote in to say that until they read the magazine's article on date-rape, they had not realised they had been raped. And if they did not know it at the time, how could their unfortunate assailants? If a young man emerges from this hurly-burly to marry and have children, then they and most of his life's earnings can be taken away from him if his wife decides to leave. And at work he may be passed over in favour of women, as part of a positive discrimination policy. There is perhaps a tragic conflict of interest between the sexes - women who are not really misandrists should be careful not to make things worse.
I AM not quite sure why I feel so resentful of the ageism bandwagon now lumbering across our newspapers and television screens. We had Germaine Greer last week, and now the American feminist superstar Betty Friedan publishes her thoughts on growing old.
I share their feeling that it is sad to grow old, and that people are horrible to old people and imagine that they are completely incapacitated long before they are. What annoys me is the activists' indignation. It really is not anybody's fault that we all decay and die. It is inevitable that we will give up our jobs and our status in the end, and if our children and grandchildren come to think of us as useless mouths, that may be hard, but not entirely unreasonable.
The fact is that people quickly become obsolete these days, even in middle age. Although my youngest child is only six, new mothers make it witheringly plain to me that I know nothing about the latest bottle sterilisation technology, or sleep positions, or child-abuse symptoms. And to judge from conversations after a date-rape chat show last week, girls under 21 find the attitudes to sex of women over 65 more or less incomprehensible.
I am afraid we shall all just have to retire into the pleasures of our own perception - which, contrary to popular belief, will not usually be dimmed by Alzheimer's disease. As W. B. Yeats put it: Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.
TO return briefly to rape: most of the terrible misunderstanding about the subject has been imported from America. And since nursing is likely to be even more important to most of us than rape, we should be careful that American ideas about humanistic nursology are not allowed to distract and madden our own so far excellent nurses.
Humanistic nursology is an idea difficult to grasp - possibly because it is meaningless - but I have been sent a glossary of its terms by an American surgeon.
'Humanistic nursing' (is) a theory and practice that rest on an existential philosophy, value experiencing and the evolving of the 'new' and aim at phenomenological description of the art-science of nursing viewed as a lived intersubjective transactional experience. 'Community' means two or more persons struggling towards a centre. 'Between' means the realm of the intersubjective'.
Perhaps all this mystification is what makes their health-care costs so huge. We have been warned.
The Sunday Telegraph | | Comments (7)
Aging of a sage
WE may be rather short of saints and sages in these godless days, but there is always Dr Germaine Greer. She seems to have turned into some kind of Holy Fool, sent to teach us moral truths by preaching nonsense and prancing about in funny costumes.
Her latest antic is to leap on to the youthism bandwagon, with straggly hair, schoolgirl shorts and a badly-tied school tie, and rage about what a drag it is growing old, doubtless to give us some ideas of how to do it gracefully. At least I think that is what she was up to in her maddening film last week, for the BBC series Without Walls. She first got into this particular act a couple of years ago, when on the menopause bandwagon - that was when she first started promoting the idea of growing old disgracefully and deliberately turning into an old crone.
What a heroine of our times she is. She is absolutely typical of her generation and mine - a generation which has for more than a quarter of a century been the most fashionable age group to belong to. She has been full of energy and ideas, and has had the dedicated egocentricity to believe that whatever is happening to her - sex, drugs, infertility, the menopause - is the central concern of the day.
It was the same with the baby-boomers: whatever interested us dominated the media. How irritating this must have been to older, and younger, generations. Now Germaine Greer is discovering that there is nothing very 'with it' about getting old, and her strangely favoured generation finds itself going the way of all flesh. She is outraged to feel, like King Lear, that age is unnecessary, and that each generation is pushed aside in the end by the one behind.
I have recently felt a lot of sympathy for the generation before Dr Greer's.
Their youth blighted by the war, they put up with being patronised by their trendy and self-satisfied children. They listened modestly to our lectures about how irrelevant and repressed they were - why did they, I wonder? Then quietly and without complaint they moved into old age, equipped only with the props of stoicism and gallantry: these virtues are called 'denial' these days, of course. At the sight of Germaine Greer, dressed like a schoolgirl vieille fille and embarrassing a few public-school boys about her sexual appeal, they could be forgiven a little schadenfreude. To the rest of us she looks, and is, a bit of a caution.
REVENGE is a terrible temptation for a writer. What a joy it would be, I imagine, to expose the people one loves to hate in deathless prose - it would be deathless retribution as well. And even if the prose were not entirely deathless, even if it were just a couple of hundred pages of confessional autobiography, how delicious it would be to confess to someone else's sins, especially her or his sins against oneself. All grievances, all tears and humiliations, could be returned with interest - no, with whips and scorpions, and one could adjust one's own role according to taste. There is the added temptation that one would probably write at one's best about a deep-rooted grievance. And there is another: that most writers have very little to say, and are sooner or later forced to ransack their supposedly private lives.
However, this temptation should be resisted. Penelope Mortimer should not have ratted on her former husband, John 'Rumpole' Mortimer. I daresay her kiss-and-teller is absolutely fascinating, and he may have been quite frightful for all I know, though he has always seemed very charming.
Did he really manoeuvre her into an abortion and sterilisation, while having an affair with someone else, who then became pregnant? Did he really call them Penny One and Penny Two and, if so, was that kind? Isn't he a bit of a Bollinger Bolshevik anyway? And haven't we heard all this before in Penny One's novel, The Pumpkin Eater, which was made into an earnest Sixties film?
I suppose it might be quite entertaining to know, especially as it is none of our business.
But there is a very simple rule about this kind of thing. There is only one excuse for public betrayal in print, and that is genius. Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Saul Bellow and John Updike can get away with it, for the greater good. The merely talented cannot: the product does not justify the pain. The trouble is, writers being the egomaniacs that they are, how would they know that they were not geniuses? Perhaps John Mortimer takes my view. At least he has not ratted on Penny One in print, as far as I know. As she herself has complained, she hardly makes an appearance in his autobiography. Perhaps that is the sweetest revenge of all.
SPEAKING of Johns, I was very saddened by the news recently that the great English name of John is on the way out, and will soon become as rare as, say, Cedric. People are very odd about names. It does seem to me quite perverse to call a little English girl China - there is at least one at my son's school. You might as well call her Porcelain, or Pottery, or even Cutlery, if you wanted to be downwardly mobile. I do understand that it is a version of the snobbish name India, used by English families that are too grand to be ashamed of memories of Empire, or else Mountbatten wannabes. But China really does not hit quite the same high tone.
The saddest example I have come across was a deprived white seven-year-old on a west London housing estate. All his delinquent friends kept shouting, 'Look, man' at him. When asked why, they replied that Lookman was his name.
Still, one can always say that things are worse in America: some very popular names in the Southern states are now Comfortcare, Navel, Nicey Horsey and Cigarette.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 17, 1993 | Comments (0)
Forget the bombshell - spot the home-wrecker
MP Bill Cash's glamorous new PA has needlessly raised a forest of eyebrows, says Minette Marrin
LOUISE HOBKINSON is a young, blonde bombshell who turned a lot of heads and raised a lot of questions at the Conservative Party conference as the constant companion of prominent Member of Parliament and Euro-rebel Bill Cash.
The most obvious question is answered by the fact that she is his personal assistant. She may have a stunning figure - and have modelled stockings and leather bikinis - but this has not prevented her from graduating in business studies, Italian and French. She is well qualified for her job and Mr Cash's wife, Biddy, approves of her. But this has not forestalled the other obvious question, currently all over the tabloids: is it sensible to let your husband hire a secretary who looks like this?
Blonde bombshells have a bad reputation as secretaries, not without some cause. For one thing 'secretary' and 'personal assistant' have traditionally been euphemisms; for another, men do tend to fall in love with their secretaries or with women who work closely with them (for some unfathomable reason this is particularly so in the House of Commons).
However, I don't think this has anything to do with glamour. Lots of secretaries or personal assistants who are not at all glamorous succeed in having affairs with married men - Sara Keays, for example, is not at all good looking - and many succeed in detaching them from their wives. Equally, many pretty women do not, and would not, walk out with their employers.
What the anxious wife needs to do is spot not the bombshell but the home-wrecker. This is a difficult art, since home-wreckers come in all guises, but generally speaking, unless your husband is rich or famous, pretty women present the least threat.
A really good-looking woman will probably have the confidence to aim at something better for herself than a second-hand husband and all that crushing child support. The question to ask is not how attractive the secretary is to your husband, but how attractive he is to her. With any luck, the good-lookers will be moving on.
The home-wrecker may well be less than pretty, and therefore alarmingly realistic about life, and probably ruthless or manipulative. She will undoubtedly have a certain sexual magnetism which is difficult for another woman to spot.
Science has yet to reveal the secret of the great sexual power of certain plain women, but it may have to do with subconscious sense of smell and with pheromones, which are the holy grail of the perfume industry. It might be wise to get an experienced male friend to stand close to the suspect secretary and report back on his sensations. Most importantly, she will have the main virtue that you lack.
HOWEVER, for all the fuss about the seductive secretary, the boot is really on the other foot: it is just that women have been very discreet about this.
The truth is that wherever they work, most women have far more opportunities than most men for erring and straying.
Women who work at home have endless encounters during school and office hours and those who go out to work only add to their chances. The average male is stuck with a very small pool of talent - the typing pool, probably - but the average woman's eye can rove from the aerobics instructor to the interesting new librarian to the children's football coach - all people with whom she has regular contact, rather like office friendships only much, much freer.
You can change your aerobics class, after all, but it's difficult to change your job, or your secretary.
The Daily Telegraph | Friday, October 15, 1993 | Comments (0)
Easy way to be hated
IIN 1066 And All That, that memorable survey of English history, there is a memorable distinction. Things are said to be either Wrong but Wromantic, or Right but Repulsive.
As well as being memorable, this distinction is often all too true, not least in politics. Although the Left was never right, the Right (though right) is frequently slightly repulsive. And to see young Conservatives baying for blood and birch at their ludicrous party conference meeting was indeed a repulsive sight.
The Left has usually held, if not the moral high ground, at least the sunlit uplands of feeling pleased with itself. This is rather distressing for those of us who are, when one comes Right down to it, Rather Right-wing. For people of my generation, the youth of the late Sixties and Seventies, Right-wing was a term of abuse, and it is still used that way, even among many of those who work for the so-called Tory press and in the wider Establishment. Left-wing still has connotations of compassion, however quixotic, whereas Right-wing has connotations of callousness, intolerance and repression. That is why I became very angry when I heard last week that a very correct female member of the glitterati had been denouncing me contemptuously as Right-wing - still, better denunciation than oblivion, I suppose.
What I resent, I suppose, is the unwillingness on the part of the correct to imagine that the motives of anyone on the Right could be very much like their own - a desire for more prosperity and more freedom and more justice for everyone. They perversely believe that not only our arguments but our hearts are all wrong. Paul Johnson once astonished me by saying that one of the pleasures of English life was that people of hugely opposing views could enjoy each other's company. I do not think that is so any longer, not in my generation. Political animosities are quite fierce: the correct celebrity who angrily criticised me clearly takes deep personal offence at incorrect views. In my experience it is mainly on the Left that you really find intolerance and repression. I think this is Wrong and Repulsive, but partly the fault of the other side: the Right has always been rather bad at presenting itself as civilised, even when it is - in my generation that is the challenge for Michael Portillo.
ONE of the main concerns of the civilised, libertarian Right, whatever the politically correct may say, is with individual freedom, otherwise known as civil rights. One of these civil rights is equal treatment under the NHS, regardless of the sort of life one leads. There would be the most furious liberal outrage, for instance - and quite right too - if someone suffering from Aids were denied treatment on the grounds that he had indulged in sex.
Doctors, very properly, do not take this attitude, and regularly treat all patients with sexually transmitted diseases with the greatest care. From the good doctor's point of view, illness is innocent. Sex, recreational drugs, overeating, boxing, stress and vegetarianism can all make you ill, but doctors and nurses are there to do their best with the pitiful material of humanity.
However, smoking, for some reason, falls into a different category; smokers are rapidly becoming unpersons. What else can we make of the case of Denise Bannister, who, moments before her fertility operation, was told that the consultant would not help her to have a baby because she is a smoker - a helpless addict with a habit of 15 a day? The monstrous injustice against Denise Bannister is not without precedent. There was Harry Elphick, who was denied tests for heart disease because he was a smoker, and died. And then there is a mother of four children who has just been refused a hernia operation because she is a smoker. And in September there was the astonishing case of Anthony Munday, a little boy of four, who was about to have two teeth extracted at Thanet General Hospital when the anaesthetist called the operation off because the child's mother was a smoker. Instead of sedating the son, the doctor harangued the mother, humiliating her in front of staff. And all this despite the fact that the evidence about passive smoking is still inconclusive.
I've always wondered about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance. I'm afraid it is much more likely to be eternal boredom in dreary town halls, dull pressure groups and tedious committees. I for instance find it quite difficult to take an interest in smoking, which I find unattractive. But I try because the puritanism (and the hypocrisy) that represses the freedom to smoke will soon turn against some other pleasures. There will be a rally tomorrow morning at the House of Lords to press for Equal Treatment in the NHS. I hope the Aids lobby will be there to support a persecuted minority like themselves.
I THOUGHT lawyers were supposed to be good with words. The Law Society has just made a rule that forbids discrimination within the profession on grounds of race, gender and all the rest. Yet at the same time it is requiring solicitors' firms to set targets for recruiting from ethnic minorities - a practice surely commonly described as positive discrimination. I know I have not been trained in legal language, but it hardly needs that to see that between forbidding discrimination and setting recruitment targets there is an awkward conceptual abyss. Positive discrimination, which is compulsory, is discrimination, which is forbidden.
This is illogical and insulting to all concerned. I share the prejudice (if it is one) that lawyers are a cliquey and exclusive lot and ought to try harder, but not like this. Perhaps they are so used to distorting meanings that they have come to think that the language of Catch 22 makes sense to the rest of us.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 10, 1993 | Comments (0)
Books: Nose to mouth creases nostrils
Look in the mirror and abandon hope. Every secret of our natures is written on our features, according to Lailan Young, the author of The Naked Face: The Essential Guide to Reading Faces (Century, pounds 9.99).
How wide, for instance, is your philtrum - that little vertical groove between the bottom of the nose and the top of the lip? The truth about your sexual appetites is engraved here in flesh. The average width at the widest point is half an inch - anything less means a substandard libido, anything more is cause for self-congratulation.
The philtrum tells many other secrets, supposedly. If it is shallow, crooked or bulging at the sides, the owner's destiny is bitterness, self doubt and mid-life crisis. And if it measures one inch or more vertically, the owner will live to be 100.
Every mole has a meaning, in this scheme of things, every hair, every proportion and every curve of lip and ear. Lines (as above): leadership.
Rough bushy beard: excessive seminal fluid. Cleft chin: conceit. Wide oval nostrils: self-satisfaction, weak will and conservatism (above).
All this is simply a jumble of popular prejudice, from ancient Chinese folklore to Arab erotica, with a little psychology thrown in. No attempt is made to offer scientific explanations, or any evidence, for these preposterous claims, which in a serious book would cause serious outrage.
As a popular book - and sure-fire best-seller - it may be a harmless bit of fun. On the other hand, 19th-century ideas of criminal degeneracy, and the physiological measurements made by Nazi eugenicists, cast a dark shadow over this kind of nonsense. It leads too quickly to evil and baseless discrimination, like the belief that a squint in the right eye is a sign of a deeply malicious person, as Lailan Young claims.
Yet this book is offered as a guide to such discrimination, when making choices about people - 'a hidden edge in human relationships'. Not all nonsense is harmless.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, October 03, 1993 | Comments (0)
Groping isn't raping
THREE years' prison for 15 seconds, or pos sibly 10, or possibly six, of sexual importunity - this is very rough justice, if it is justice at all.
Angus Diggle, now immortalised as the naked solicitor clad only in lace cuffs and a green condom, has been astonishingly harshly punished. Even his victim is shocked by the length of his sentence. If this were to catch on, half the Establishment - no, three-quarters - would have done quite a lot of time in jail, and certainly a few men I know: I have more than once been in a Diggle situation, with some now respectable figures, though fortunately before the era of green condoms.
The Diggle situation is one of considerable ambiguity. The woman may offer no sexual encouragement whatsoever, yet the situation itself may be easily misunderstood, especially by a drunk and inexperienced nerd. When a woman invites a comparative stranger (the judge's words) to spend the night in the same room, a man who is obviously drunk, and then removes all her clothes, she takes a considerable risk that he will misunderstand her motives. (He might ignore her, for instance.) And one of the reasons for misunderstanding is that sexual negotiations are often so subtle and ambiguous; that can be part of their interest. 'Vorrei e non vorrei' as Zerlina sings in Don Giovanni, as she is being seduced - 'I would like to and I wouldn't', and everybody is aware of this, whatever hard-line feminists may say.
What's more, it is still slightly compromising for a woman to accept very expensive hospitality from a man, especially from a man she hardly knows.
This may be nasty but it's true - a lot of people operate along those conventions and it's childish to imagine otherwise. And there are so many conventions - our sexual freedoms have emancipated us, for better or worse, from any common rules. Hence some disastrous six seconds. Or 10, or 15.
A brief grope is not in the same league as rape. It is an assault, certainly, and a crime, whatever the extenuating circumstances. But it is a very minor crime indeed compared with the real outrage of rape proper. And to call it attempted rape is to confer on it a horror that is inappropriate.
We suffer in this country from a new American import - a nave obsession with date-rape, which is becoming ludicrous. I suspect that the pathetic Angus Diggle has taken the rap not so much for what he did as for this new and dangerous confusion. We need a change in legal terminology.
IT has always seemed to me, when watching nurses at work, how very inconvenient their uniforms are - inconvenient, that is, except for those who want to stare at their knickers as they wrestle with the bed-ridden, or for those who want to put a hand up their skirts. So I'm all for nurses designing new uniforms for themselves - who better? I can't share their widespread preference for tunics and trousers - they seem a tiny bit track-suit-and-trainers to me - but it is clearly practical.
However, if I had the job of revamping the nurses' image, with a view to comfort, hygiene and avoiding sexual harassment, I would concentrate on their heads. It's not that their caps are ridiculous. It's that nurses' hair always looks awful - frizzy, fringed, sticking out in all directions and trailing down behind, only half-restrained with ill-placed slides and grips.
My childhood fantasies about nursing centred on girls' comics where young student nurses lived in terror of a ferocious matron - her demise was a terrible loss to nursing - and the constant anxiety about having a single hair out of place. Today nurses all seem to be afraid of the risk of having a single hair in place. It's very untherapeutic, and extremely unhygienic - think of all those trailing fronds dangling over those open wounds. (I admit that I spend a lot of time and money keeping my own hair messy, but then I'm not primarily interested in avoiding germs and sexual harassment, like nurses).
Messy hair means - or should I say signifies? - many things, all unsuitable for these wonderful women. It means a lack of Nightingale self-discipline and routine, a lack of commitment to hygiene, and finally sexual licence. I am afraid so. At the first lecture I attended at university, the Yeats scholar Professor Tom Henn explained that abundant, loosened and curly hair was a sign of sexual invitation - that was why everyone wore their hair long and messy in the sexy Sixties. If you want to turn people off, and look coolly professional, you need to tie your hair firmly back, or cut it off.
But the nurses posing in the new uniforms have even messier hair than before. Perhaps nurses, like the rest of us, are slightly ambivalent about this sort of thing.
EVERY time I turn on the radio I seem to catch some New Age traveller complaining fashionably about the way mainstream society is prejudiced against them, and resents them living on social security. I don't feel this prejudice against gypsies proper, who were rather a glamorous element in my childhood in the West Country, and moved around in small, faintly romantic-seeming groups, dealing in horses and rabbits and selling beautiful wooden clothes-pegs. But I do feel quite irked by the self-righteousness of the bogus New Age wannabes. One woman described her habit of parking her camper in any pretty, isolated country spot that took her fancy, near a stream if possible, and unspoilt woods. 'We're not interested in money,' she kept saying. 'We just want to have the right to live in a beautiful, peaceful place.' What is this, if not a desire for the wealth that most people cannot aspire to, and are too honest to grab?
