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Milburn locks hospital doctors in the NHS house of bondage
Governments do not own people. At least they are not supposed to, not in the free world. Governments should not own people's futures, direct their careers and decide when and where they can work. People should be free to decide those things for themselves.
For one thing, they tend to do it better. That might seem obvious, after so many decades of despotism and statism. But somehow it isn't. Statism dies very hard. Like Dracula, it needs a stake driven through its bad old heart, but in this country there doesn't seem to be quite the will to do it.
The Health Secretary's pronouncement last week on hospital consultants is a perfect example of the unthinking statist mentality of this Government. Alan Milburn announced a proposal that would ban new consultants from working in the private sector for seven years after their first consultant appointment.
In other words, he wants to lock young consultants into the NHS; he wants to imprison them entirely in the state sector, without the option. Admittedly he is offering what some have called golden handcuffs. However, anyone doing the sums involved in his new contract will realise these handcuffs are in fact made of base metal: many young doctors would lose a great deal of money wearing them.
That is one of the many things wrong with this proposal. There are plenty of others, and the British Medical Association is understandably furious. But the worst to me seems to be the astonishing underlying attitude. Mr Milburn speaks about doctors as if they were some sort of public commodity to be shuffled around, as if they were the property of the state and have indeed been bought and paid for. "We put in a huge investment in training these people," he said last week, "and we have to get maximum benefit for NHS patients."
Of course, it costs a lot of money to train a hospital consultant, much more than it costs to train - if that is the word - someone in leisure studies or gender awareness. Perhaps it would be right to expect consultants to repay some of the cost of their training, pro rata, and therefore to repay more than other students.
But, if so, it should be left to them to decide how to pay; the Government could offer them the option - so long as it were an option - of paying in further time spent working for the NHS, although, by the end of their training, they will already have spent many years serving the NHS.
The point surely must be that the state does not own people, just because it (or rather the taxpayer) pays for their education. That is a most crassly utilitarian view of education and of people. Not even this Government could think it right to force other sorts of graduate to work in state schools, and only in state schools, for a certain number of years.
But by New Labour's logic, "a huge investment in training these people" means they also ought to get "maximum benefit" out of all the rest of us. I can see it now: I'd be marched off to Holland Park comprehensive to teach second-year citizenship and remedial English. Actually that could be one way of paying off my ancient student debt - I am in favour of the Government's recent suggestions along these lines - but it ought to be voluntary.
This is a very convenient moment to be nasty to doctors; the public fury at the Alder Hey scandal, so irresponsibly inflamed by ministers to distract attention from other NHS disasters, makes consultants an easy pre-election target. There has never been much sympathy for highly paid private consultants, with their smart cars and rich patients, and hardly anybody cares that they earn nowhere near as much as lawyers, accountants or businessmen. Fewer still know what long hours private consultants also devote to the NHS.
So there probably are votes in suggesting to Leftists that "our" doctors should be hauled back out of their greedy private practice to help save "our" NHS, while at the same time suggesting to Middle Britain that they will be properly rewarded.
But there is no long-term future in these proposals. They treat doctors like state functionaries, like public property. They are demeaning and demoralising. Clever people will stop wanting to be doctors; they will go elsewhere, or do other things. Applications to medical schools have fallen by 15 per cent in the past three years. We will have to raid Third World countries for doctors for our Third World hospitals.
The underlying problem is the undead statist view of medicine. The NHS was conceived in a statist era as a state monopoly. Everything, from hospitals, nurses,
X-rays, records, wheelchairs, body parts and even patients themselves, belonged to and were entirely controlled by the state; only the doctors saved some of their independence, which Mr Milburn would now like to grab back.
But a National Health Service does not need to be a Nationalised Health Service. It could be both national, for everyone, as of right, and also independent of the state. Denationalising the NHS would improve it out of all recognition; there is a huge amount of informed opinion and evidence for this view.
Yet no politician dares say it. The Conservatives, who ought to think it and probably do, are too scared. This is a moment, with so very little to lose, for Tories to be brave and actually say the supposedly unsayable - real integrity is one of the few luxuries of a truly hopeless position.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, February 24, 2001 | Comments (0)
I wish I could have known at 17 someone like me today
Minette Marrin describes how severe clinical depression drove her father to suicide, her mother to despair and how she has fought her own battle with the illness since childhood
Depression killed my father, it ruined my mother's life and it has consumed a lot of my time and me, one way or another, ever since I can remember. What I wish, looking back, is not only that people had known more about depression, and about brain chemistry; but also that people had been willing to talk about the condition.
Now, it seems to me, people talk about it too much, and too carelessly, and use the word so loosely that it has become almost meaningless; that is almost as bad as not talking about it all. What my parents suffered from, I now know, was severe clinical depression. In my father's case, it drove him to kill himself in 1953 - without any obvious reason - when still a young man, abandoning a wife and young children. In my mother's case, it drove her to despair, made worse by grief and loss. She struggled against it extremely courageously all her life; I saw her death in 1998 as a liberation.
In my case - I cannot speak for my brothers and sister - depression has come mildly and intermittently, by comparison. Sometimes it appears so insidiously and so ambiguously that I feel unsure whether it is just one of the ordinary sadnesses of life, or one of the extraordinary ones, or whether it comes from bad genes and bad brain chemistry. I haven't wanted to believe that there is anything wrong with me; at other times I have been in little doubt.
Either way, depression has been on my mind, so to speak, for many years. At times it has wasted much of my energy, because it is tiring trying to hide it and tiring trying to fight it. It took me a very long time to recognise it; longer still to believe that my mother suffered from it and to convince her of it; and even longer to understand it, in as far as I do, and to acknowledge it in myself, in as far as I do.
Like my mother, I think of it almost as a guilty secret. Even if it is not guilty, it might be better kept secret, even now. But secrets usually make themselves known, and usually to the children in the story. Perhaps that is as it should be.
When I began, as a young child, to wonder about my mother's sadness, most things were denied. We were not told, and I did not discover until I was 17, that my father had killed himself. It was too bad to admit and, besides, it had been in another country. My mother never spoke about it and was desperately upset, particularly for us children, when I found out by chance in the late Sixties.
As a child in the Fifties and early Sixties, I sensed what everybody felt: mental illness was for other people. It was not only a disgrace but also (it seems to me now, looking back) a failure.
It could even be a crime; suicide was still, absurdly enough, illegal in the Fifties. People who were mentally ill - or, as we said then, insane - lived in loony bins; there was an enormous one near us in Dorset, and the inmates used to be let out to walk alone, and in silence, along an old Roman road across the top of the Downs, with their hands always clasped behind their backs, as if they were prisoners. Though not necessarily bad, they were certainly mad and dangerous to know, or so I thought then.
My mother's resistance to the idea that there was something wrong with her was very strong, as was mine. In my admiring eyes, she was all powerful, without weakness. And, after all, she had a great deal to be sad about. She was widowed and lonely and isolated, and her fourth child, delivered early at a time of shock, had been born with brain damage; people's response to my sister in those early years would have been enough to turn anyone into a misanthrope.
Even though I didn't then know about my father's violent death, my mother's deep gloom seemed as justified to me as it did to her; no explanation was needed. Besides, she didn't like to talk about her feelings; people didn't, and wouldn't let others.
Most people didn't hold with "trick-cyclists" anyway, though by a curious irony my mother had (or could have had) a much more sophisticated view: she had read some classic psychiatric and psychoanalytical texts as an undergraduate and young wife, perhaps under the influence of our American father. Our bookshelves at home in Dorset still held volumes of Adler, Freud, Krafft-Ebing and Melanie Klein, and some of my father's medical text books. As a teenager, I came to read them, too.
It is difficult now to remember how powerfully my own thoughts and feelings were influenced by hers, and how hard I found it to see her predicament except as she did. Children can hardly avoid complicity of this kind, and it is difficult for them to disentangle themselves, as I found. But over the years, in the Seventies and early Eighties, various of her children persuaded her to accept various kinds of treatment.
Some of it helped, but the old-fashioned anti-depressants then available had unpleasant side effects, and didn't seem to work well for her. It is true that those early drugs emptied the loony bins of chronic depressives, and set thousands of them free, but the pills did not suit everyone. Depression could sometimes be relieved, it seemed, but not removed.
It was not until many years later, after a long and often comical trawl through psychiatric theory and therapeutic practice, through medical news and fashionable psychobabble, that I read some time in the Eighties of a new American anti-depressant, like no other. I bullied my mother, she bullied her GP and she must have been one of the first people in this country to receive Prozac on the NHS. She took it until the day she died.
Though not as triumphantly liberating from this vale of tears as death was, Prozac did at last free my mother from the worst of her depression. It came too late, perhaps, to undo much lasting harm, but I believe it gave her a new life, and something of her old self back; the last years were probably some of the best.
My own acquaintance with depression was something I never discussed with her; at least, not after I had left university. She knew that at university I was sent to a psychiatrist, like every other girl on my corridor; in progressive circles it was intensely fashionable to be neurotic in the late Sixties. Besides, I had just run my bicycle into the back of a stationary lorry on Magdalene Bridge in Cambridge and knocked myself out. This was considered so stupid that it could only have been a suicide attempt, though the truth is that I was very short-sighted, bicycling with an attractive boy and too vain to wear glasses.
In the psychiatrist's office, wearing my glasses and reading her handwriting upside down, I noticed that she had written only one word, "alienated", on my notes. I despised her immediately: "alienated" was one of the buzz words of the day. You could hardly claim to be an intellectual if you weren't alienated.
She also gave me a large dose of the old-fashioned anti-depressants, which made me so ill that I avoided both drugs and psychiatrists for almost 20 years, despite what I now realise were extended periods of genuine clinical depression. It was only out of desperation that I later pressed both upon my mother.
After that first adolescent episode, I never again spoke to my mother about my own gloom. For a long time, I didn't speak to anyone else very much, either. That is partly because I didn't know what to make of it. For if she had an obvious cause for depression, I certainly did not. It is true that I had had some disorder and early sorrow, suddenly losing our father and our home in America, but it is also true that we had an almost idyllic childhood in England. Since then, I have been exceptionally lucky in many ways, so much so that it is embarrassing, as well as implausible, to admit to depression. Yet this miserable thing always seemed to be lurking, to be lying in wait.
Half the time, I was uncertain of what it was, or of whether there was anything unusual about it, anyway. There is a miserable confusion and ambiguity surrounding this shapeless thing. It was only many years later, to my great relief, that a doctor I trust showed me a textbook list for the diagnosis of depression.
It is quite simple. You have to suffer from so many of the symptoms on the list, persistently, for so many weeks, consecutively, without any other better explanation, and then you know. That is it. You can give it a name. By themselves, the symptoms do not seem remarkable; they could form part of any ordinary life, sometimes - tearfulness, loss of concentration, loss of interest in life, loss of sleep, disturbed appetite, anxiety, overpowering sense of meaninglessness, self-loathing, inability to feel pleasure, or even to seek it, reclusiveness, withdrawal, indecisiveness, thoughts of death and so on. I was in doubt for years.
When in doubt, the adolescent tendency - so long drawn out in our culture - is to find someone else to blame. That was the fashion in my teens and twenties, and therapists of every kind were turning in righteous anger on families, particularly on mothers, in a sub-Freudian frenzy. Like most adolescents, I was tempted to do the same, but it was not long before I began to see that this view of mental illness was merely a theory, and a very ill-founded one at that, picked out of a ragbag of psychoanalytic theory and socialist aspiration.
My enthusiasm for Freud soon gave way to disillusion with the circularity of his argument; as for the exotic woolly-mindedness of post-Freudian theory, it seemed either comical, or shocking, depending on my mood. I will never forget my contempt for the unthinking cruelty of fashionable therapists such as R D Laing, and their followers, who blamed the extreme illness of schizophrenics on their cold, unloving mothers; by the Eighties, it was known that there was an immensely important genetic factor in schizophrenia. Even in the Sixties it seemed obvious to me that nature had a part to play in mental illness, as well as nurture.
The frivolity of talk merchants still angers me. One I consulted in the Eighties, at one of the best-known psychotherapeutic insititutes in London, refused to tell me what discipline he followed, even though I explained that it meant a lot to me to know, as I had read a great deal in the field. In fact, he said hardly anything at all, sitting there impassively in the conventional beard and sandals; but at last, after several sessions, when I said how ashamed I was to feel so bad, and to complain, when I had no real troubles, not like the real miseries of the Vietnamese boat people in the news, he solemnly replied: "You are a boat person."
I can't say that this man singlehandedly turned me into a biological determinist; I had had tendencies that way all along. But he finally made me despair of the talking cure people, good or bad, amateur or famous.
There are some kinds of depression that talking cannot touch, just as there are some kinds of therapist who are impervious to common sense.
I don't mean that talking is worthless; besides, it can be fun. The cartoonist Mel Calman used to say that one of his favourite activities was
sitting in the Patisserie Valerie with a young woman, eating cream cakes and discussing her depression. I used to like it as well, because he was such good company, but I found his approach too Viennese.
He seemed to think that the human condition in general and family life in particular make deep gloom unavoidable, but that talking (and cream cakes) take one's mind off it, or take it off one's mind.
I was very relieved when, at about the same time in the 1980s, it was beginning to be commonly acknowledged that there was almost certainly an important genetic factor in depression, as well as in schizophrenia and many other disorders. It fitted so well with my own impressions. So, too, do the more recent theories about the physiological impact of environment, suggesting that the brain can somehow be engraved with early misery - not just hardwired, but rewired for sorrow, so to speak. Meanwhile, enormous progress in brain science brought forth Prozac and all the other, later SSRI drugs. These drugs do not merely alleviate depression, they stop it. I cannot understand why it is conventional now to decry these drugs and sneer at people for taking "liquid sunshine". They may be relatively crude, and may be abused, but for those who really need them, they are a lifeline. They might have saved my father. I cannot think of them without the most immense gratitude.
Even now, I would rather not admit that I, too, have taken several courses of Prozac, or of similar but more recent drugs. But I think it is worth admitting and talking about. I wish I could have known at 17 someone like me today. It is true that there have already been many other people who have been braver, and who have written eloquently of their own depression, and its treatment. Mostly, though, they have been people who have suffered from very serious, suicidal depression, or manic depression, and have been acutely ill and taken into hospital.
Much less, I think, has been said about the lesser forms of intermittent mild to moderate depression, which I have known. Mild to moderate depression does not tend to drive people to suicide, nor even necessarily to drink. Unlike serious depression, it lacks a dramatic quality that might help to identify it. While it has people in its grip, it does not stop them doing things, but it stops them doing anything well, or with pleasure. It is the enemy of promise, of love, of sex, of fun and of a sense of humour; it makes people stupid and dull and mean, it makes them reclusive, forgetful and slightly paranoid.
Depression does not always depress; sometimes it agitates and overexcites, and makes people painfully anxious. It can make them quick to tears, or to sudden foolish anger, but it can pass almost unrecognised. It can pass for normal, because it is so difficult for anyone, particularly for the sufferer, to see where personality shades into pathology. It sounds like the self-pity of someone obsessed with her own feelings; at best, it seems like the dreariness of someone born, in the wonderful Irish expression, a couple of drinks behind. It invites dislike. It is, in its own dull way, a waste of life and time.
Since the first appearance of Prozac, however, I have been full of hope. However imperfect such drugs are, however little they are understood, and whatever their side effects, they can be little short of miraculous. New, improved versions will certainly follow. Even better is the prospect of genetic engineering; before long, it may be possible to identify and correct genetic tendencies towards depression.
Only someone who has not felt depression could fail to welcome that. Depression has no meaning, no value, no useful connection with talent or intelligence. It is romantic sentimentality to say that depression is the reverse side of creativity. Genetic engineering will take away the fear of passing on bad genes, the fear which made me reluctant to have children of my own, and which makes me watch them anxiously. As a teenager, I was saddened by Philip Larkin's famous verses:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Now it seems that science is going to prove Larkin wrong, in this respect at least. The ordinary and extraordinary sadnesses of life cannot be avoided, but I do believe that depression can be destroyed and will in the end be defeated.
The Daily Telegraph | Tuesday, February 20, 2001 | Comments (0)
How can we speak French when we can't even speak English?
The German and French ambassadors to the Court of St James's have just delivered, in the pages of The Spectator, an eloquent rebuke to the British, for our failure to speak foreign languages. At the same time, they have issued a most tactful, diplomatic invitation to us to tell them what we think. How unwise. For one of the things I think, and will now say, since they ask, is that it is all their fault. All the fault of foreigners, I mean.
Foreigners tend to be very stuck up about their ability to speak English. I admit that they tend to speak it extremely well, and that they must have worked very hard to do so; all the same it is extremely irritating for anyone who has made a similar effort to learn to speak German or French, or whatever, to find that they almost always insist on speaking English. This seems to me very unsporting. How can they expect us to learn to speak their languages better, when they always insist on speaking ours?
Of course we understand, in our self-deprecating way, that it is much more important for them to speak our language than it is for us to speak theirs. For us, it is merely an interest, a fascination with their cultures: for them, it is bread and butter, no matter what they may feel about Anglo-Saxon attitudes. We don't like to insist on this obvious fact, and we tactfully say that it is all to do with the American imperium, not the British. But the sad truth is that an English-speaker can get by almost anywhere in the world without speaking a word of any other language.
Meanwhile foreigners, if not simply showing off, seem very anxious to improve their English by practising it on us; it seems mean to stop them. So I suggest to the ambassadors that, if they want us to speak their beautiful languages, they should actually let us have a go, and stop trying to dazzle us with their exquisite English.
The other thing they might consider is that the British get very tired of being told that they are afraid of making fools of themselves in speaking a foreign language, in other words, are too arrogant and vain. I think the British, though indeed vain, quite like making fools of themselves; at any rate, they are far less deeply conventional than most Europeans, and far more prepared to be thought odd. What they dislike is rudely forcing their hesitant French, say, on someone who would prefer to speak English.
A major problem, from the British point of view, is that most European foreign languages are unnecessarily difficult; sometimes the grammatical refinements are positively silly. Why, for example, is a young girl neuter in German? And why isn't a wife feminine? Why have masculine, feminine and neuter at all? It seems merely to cause confusion, and clearly not only to foreigners. All these cases and agreements and subjunctives are a long series of traps for the unwary. One cannot help suspecting that these complications have developed for the specific purpose of silencing foreigners.
Contrariwise, there is so little English grammar that anyone can say almost anything with a reasonable chance of getting it roughly right. I don't suppose Europeans will consider simplifying their grammar in a spirit of harmonisation; I did notice that the French seem to have decided to drop the cedilla, but I am afraid that may not make much difference. Still, it is a step in the right direction.
Of course, foreigners are not entirely to blame for our failure to speak their languages. The finger of blame should really be pointed at the British education establishment. For years, education ideologues have been working away to destroy all the disciplines on which learning, and learning a language, depend - constant discipline, learning by rote, repetition, rules, grammar, an insistence on spelling, regular homework and tests.
All that has been cast out. As a result, many British state school children can now barely write English, let alone any other language; there's nothing xenophobic about our inarticulacy. In the interests of equality, the educationists long ago abandoned the fascination of what's difficult. They now aim, in Tony Blair's ludicrously silly phrase of this week's grand announcements for education, at Excellence For All.
If our Prime Minister is so illiterate that he cannot immediately see the absurdity of that phrase, and its ignorant egalitarian contradiction in terms, if he has such a tin ear for language that he cannot hear it, how can the wretched victims of state schooling expect to deal with foreign refinements of meaning?
In fact, Mr Blair appears to speak passable French. That is because, when he was a schoolboy, the basics were well taught at all good schools. All Oxbridge candidates had to do Latin to O-level, which was much harder then and is a perfect basis for learning languages. For that reason, a great many British people of our generation do in fact speak more than one European language quite well, when we can get a word in.
Now, even in private schools it seems, languages are appallingly badly taught; current language acquisition theory seems completely misguided - it aims very low and misses. My son spoke better French at seven than he did at 13; after five years of French lessons he had been reduced, by modern methods, to boredom and inarticulacy.
The British are being reduced to inarticulacy in all languages, including their own; I am afraid that the Europeans, and their education systems, are following all too closely behind. These seem to me to be precisely the kind of questions ambassadors ought to be raising; vielen Dank, et merci beaucoup.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, February 17, 2001 | Comments (1)
When little girls wear make-up, they send out sexual signals
No one can seriously imagine that children are innocent, in the sentimental sense of the word. As Ivy Compton-Burnett said: "I wonder who thought of the innocence of children. It must have been a person of great originality."
Of course, children are not and never have been guileless, harmless or sexless little creatures. They are, however, immature and defenceless, and they do need protection. That might seem to be something we all take for granted these days, at least in rich societies.
The Western world is child-obsessed, preoccupied as never before by the countless subtle risks of child-rearing and the awesome responsibilities of so-called parenting. Contemporary hysteria about paedophiles might seem to be further evidence of our obsession with the need to protect children, and particularly with the need to protect them from the sexual interest of adults.
Yet the curious thing is that, for all this protestation, we protect children less and less. We neglect them, handing them over to creches, childminders and underpaid au pairs; we leave them, all too often, to come home to empty houses and to bring themselves up.
Moreover, so far from protecting young children from adult sexuality, some people actually seem keen to launch them into it, long before their time. Others, if not positively anxious to turn their little girls into pre-teen jail-bait, do little to stop it, or to protest at the commercial forces driving their misguided little moppets in that direction. There is a strange inconsistency in all this; it is hardly surprising that children and teenagers are confused.
This week there has been a great deal of fuss about the magazine Mad About Boys, which is aimed at girls between nine and 12. It deals with clothes, make-up, dieting, fashion and even with dating, as in how to "look delish for your first date".
For once, I think the tabloid harrumphing is justified. The way that this magazine exploits and excites little girls is despicable. All the same, there must be a willing market for this kind of stuff. That is to say, there must be parents who will give their children money to buy it.
And there are parents who let their infants buy make-up from the Glitter Babes range, sold by none other than Boots. One nice middle-class mummy interviewed last week said she had already taught her four-year-old daughter Poppy to use moisturiser every day. There are even successful beauty parlours for children, including a mobile service called Mini Makeovers, so that pre-teen nymphets can be taught how to tart themselves up, or down.
Children may not strictly speaking be innocent, but there is none the less an innocence that is being violated by all this. I am not only talking about little girls being smothered with slap, or being pushed into professional baby beauty contests, where they totter about, mincing and lisping in a ghastly parody of their mothers' sexual fantasies.
I mean something much wider, which affects boys, too. I mean the increasing sexualisation of society, to use a nasty neologism for a nasty, newish thing. In more and more of what they do, children are being enticed into the world of adult sexuality. With that world come the many anxieties surrounding sex - about weight and shape and fashion and pulling power, and with those preoccupations come the opportunity for others to excite and exploit them. It is a rape of childhood.
Make-up is clearly about sex. People may not want to believe it: they may call it "grooming", or say that little girls love to play make-believe with mummy's lipstick. Maybe, but the swollen red lips, the widened eyes and the flushed cheeks produced by careful, adult make-up are not intended only to be beautiful; they are also intended to provoke sexual interest, by mimicking sexual interest. That is why it looks so disturbing on children, or ought to; it is odd for someone well below puberty to be giving off such signals, and dangerous, too, because they only partly know how powerful they are.
Much more importantly, most pop music is explicitly about sex - it is one long mating call. The dancing that pop music inspires is the most obvious kind of overt sexual display. I often wonder why people do not feel more inhibited about it.
The kind of dancing usually seen in this country is not the most alluring kind of sexual display, but in its all too often crude and unco-ordinated way, it is unmistakably simulated sex, the bumping and grinding of a third-rate hooker.
It is very odd to see tiny children doing this, often rather better than adults, with (I imagine) little idea of how suggestive it is, or of what. I was astonished when my three-year-old son won a disco dancing competition in a local park, to which some other people had taken him; he was as sinuous and snake-hipped as the alarming Michael Jackson, whom he must have seen on television.
It seems very sad that children should be pressed into seeing themselves, and being seen, as sexual creatures long before they are sexually developed. It seems wrong that they should be introduced, years before puberty, to the adult neuroses about body and food and clothes and status that go with sexual maturity. It is wrong that they should be confronted in their immaturity with forces that even adults find overwhelming.
Childhood ought to be a time of freedom from all that; if it isn't, there is no point in our pretending that we protect our children, or even care about them very much.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, February 10, 2001 | Comments (5)
What men want - now that's an interesting question
The question of what women really want is obviously important, and possibly rather mysterious, but we have all heard a great deal too much about it for years and years.
Vast mountains of books, acres of newsprint and cacophonies of airwaves have been devoted to the supposedly dark continent of women's desires. You might have thought the public was beginning to get a little bored, but it seems not. Hollywood is betting a lot of money on the lasting power of this obsession, with a new, much-hyped film starring Mel Gibson, called What Women Want. Apparently an electric shock gives him the power to read women's minds, and discover what they really want, which is, of course, Mel Gibson. How unbelievably tedious it all is.
What I want rather more than Mel Gibson, and I am after all a woman, is to know What Men Want. I don't suppose there would be any mileage at all for a film of that name, at least not in the respectable market. But if one likes men, or is married to one, or is trying to bring up sons, it would be useful, as well as interesting, to understand more about what they want. It is certainly rather mysterious at times, to anyone who refuses to take the conventional view that men are simple creatures of crude and largely regrettable desires. Unfortunately, this view has prevailed for a very long time.
I remember with sadness the day my young daughter angrily told my baby son that it is men and boys who do all the bad things in the world and hurt people; out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, and out of the playground, come the received ideas of the day. I have seen with disbelief the Schadenfreude expressed by women now that boys seem to do less well in exams and in school. It is hardly surprising that so many young women find it difficult to find partners and fathers for their children, preoccupied as they are with their own requirements and with men's shortcomings. In the interests of "gender-peace", as the right-minded put it, I think women would do well to give a lot more thought, at last, to how men feel, and what men get out of relationships. For too long the emphasis has been too much the other way.
A wild over-reaction in the opposite direction has long been overdue. Sure enough, it has come, and, sure enough, from the United States, the land of wild extremes. An enterprising young American woman, Laura Doyle, has just reinvented herself as what she calls The Surrendered Wife, complete with eponymous how-to book, and turned herself into an industry to promote the idea, with websites and seminars and thousands of gratefully surrendered wives across the land. I had been busily ignoring her, thinking that she was no more remarkable than the dotty American celebrity who taught that the secret to marriage lies in greeting the homecoming salary man in nothing but a tiny frilly apron. But I was wrong. Laura Doyle appears to be having a surprisingly big success; her book is a bestseller and will be published here in March.
The subtitle of her book is A Practical Guide to Finding Intimacy, Passion and Peace with a Man. That sounds all right, but The Surrendered Wife is in fact a terrifying creature. What she must surrender is everything: she must never criticise, correct or argue with her husband; she must always be sexually available and enthusiastic, or at least once a week anyway, no matter how she feels; she must always flatter, indulge and praise; she must never complain or nag or try to control him, and she must apologise if she does; she must let him drive for miles in the wrong direction without uttering a syllable other than "you know best, dear"; above all, she must surrender the household finances to him, even if she knows he's not very good with money. The miraculous result will be an Ideal Husband - caring, sharing and competent.
Why do Americans have this extraordinary urge to throw themselves over the top, guns blazing? And to believe such preposterous things? The wild exaggeration of American feminists - remember the Society for Cutting Up Men and the female separatists? - is merely the obverse of loony overstatement like this. It conceals the rather irritating fact that there is a certain something in it. I don't want to sound like a surrendered wife, but I have been married for more years than I like to admit, and I have slowly learnt that there is a lot to be said for tact, flattery and giving in whenever remotely possible. It is known as compromise. And as my husband has repeatedly and wearily asked, why not try charm? Men (and women) blossom when they are encouraged; they wither in the face of criticism and angry demands. Frankness in marriage is overestimated. So is complete honesty; many truths are unconstructive, just as many victories are hollow.
Having to give in so much seems very unfair, especially if it is very one sided, but the question a woman needs to ask herself is whether she wants justice or whether she wants a man about the house, for one reason or another. The same applies, incidentally to men. There are lots of reluctantly surrendered husbands around, pussy-whipped to kingdom come, who have clearly decided that peace is worth a high price. There is always one who takes, and one who gives in, one who insists and one who surrenders; in good relationships it is not always the same one. This has nothing to do with being male or female. It has to do with power. What all men and women want in relationships is power; we ought not to need an American how-to book to explain that in order to gain one kind of power, it might be wise to surrender another.
The Daily Telegraph | Saturday, February 03, 2001 | Comments (0)
