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Adultery is a European right for the seriously married
Adulterers all over greater Europe, but especially in Turkey, have been holding their breath in anxious apprehension; for quite some time it has looked as though the Turkish government, in its self-styled reform of the penal code, would make adultery a criminal offence.
Not only would this have been bad news for Turkish adulterers; it would also have been rather alarming for European Union adulterers, who faced the prospect of having, in Turkey, a new EU member which did not respect the inalienable human right, at least in Europe, to extramarital sex.
After all, Europe is the cradle of adultery, or at least of the cult of adultery; it was the southern European troubadours with their lascivious lute-playing and erotic poetry, directed at other men’s wives, who invented romantic love. Indeed originally romantic love was adultery: marriage was quite different and not romantic at all.
Things may have changed a bit since then, but even so, one’s cultural heritage is one’s cultural heritage, and one doesn’t want it undermined by a critical mass of newcomers who don’t like it. And if a country like Turkey, with its enormous population, not to mention its rather firm police force, were to become part of the new Europe, adultery might come under serious threat.
However, we can all breathe again. On Thursday the Turkish prime minister told the European commission that he would drop this inflammatory proposal, mindful no doubt of the fact, which had previously somehow escaped him, that anyone who attacks our universal human right to sexual satisfaction has absolutely no chance whatsoever of joining the European party.
One can imagine how it happened: his people may have been misled by the Ten Commandments, for example. Fortunately wiser councils have prevailed.
The Turks are not entirely alone in their condemnation of adultery. There are quite a lot of Europeans who disapprove of it, too. Melanie Phillips, my predecessor in this space, wrote a long and passionate piece last week arguing that adultery undermines society by breaking up families. She would certainly not support making it a criminal offence, but she does argue for public and private disapproval.
My own view is rather more traditional. I believe that it is divorce, not adultery, that breaks up families and society. Blaming adultery is simply to misdirect the finger of accusation.
Adultery need not lead to divorce. Adultery need not break up marriages. On the contrary, adultery traditionally has been a buttress against divorce, and could perfectly well continue to be so if people re-examined their undisciplined thoughts and feelings about it.
Adultery is the civilised way of dealing with the tragic fault line of marriage — desire. Marriage in the West usually begins with sexual desire, but while marriage is expected to last for decades, sexual desire certainly does not, whatever anyone’s expectations might be.
There may be some lucky couples whose marriage is conducted in a long rosy glow of undying desire, but my own rather amateur surveys and reading of novels suggest that for most people sexual desire for someone lasts anywhere from a few hours to about two years. After that, with any luck, love will have deepened in other ways.
Yet even so, evolution has played a very nasty trick on us: Eros is like a delinquent child; desire is totally anarchic, it defies married love and, and as George Bernard Shaw famously discovered when he questioned a lady of nearly 90 at dinner, it doesn’t seem to fade with time.
Love and marriage, according to the Fifties song, go together like a horse and carriage. If so, marriage is like shackling the precious carriage of children, family and home to a half-blind half-crazed racehorse, which is certain to career off course.
The traditional solution to this glaringly obvious problem was, failing extreme social repression or possibly the stoning of adulterers, to find a discreet way of gratifying sexual desires privately without upsetting the carriage.
It’s true that this solution was more often available to men, and to the rich — adultery tends to prosper with separate addresses and separate bathrooms. But when divorce was impossible, or very much frowned upon, adultery was less frowned on, and in a way less risky, because it did not usually lead to divorce.
The difficulty today is that divorce has become socially acceptable. Indeed, people often speak of it as something of a duty; for instance, if a man’s friends discover that his wife has been having a torrid affair they will urge him to divorce her at once, for that reason alone, even though it will break up his home and distress and impoverish his children, and he might not, truly, mind very much.
Besides, on the principle that all sexual passion fades, she would probably get tired of the boyfriend quite soon anyway. As someone said of sailors, they tend to come home with the tide.
That is only true, however, in a cultural climate where adultery is tolerated. In ours it is considered insulting, humiliating and totally unacceptable. Indeed a spouse who has been cheated on is despised much more than the cheat, because of the slur on his or her sexuality. That is largely because our culture is so absurdly sexualised.
Sex and sexual gratification are everywhere around us, in everything we see and hear. This gives us a hugely inflated idea of what is due to us sexually, and of how much our identity is based on our sexuality, our sexismo.
Not many things are new in any era of history, but I truly believe this is one. Sex has somehow replaced honour in our sense of ourselves. That has proved to be bad, and possibly fatal, for marriage.
Banning adultery, à la Turque, or stigmatising it as Melanie Phillips recommends, is not the solution. The solution lies in rediscovering the social importance of adultery, but only under certain conditions. There are, or ought to be, rules for adultery.
The first and last one is discretion, to avoid humiliating anyone or threatening the family. Never admit. Never tell. Never hint. The temptation to boast about sex must at all costs be resisted; it is not a very high cost, after all, for the privilege of giving in to sexual temptation.
The second rule, therefore, is to avoid asking too many questions. Turning a blind eye is a central virtue in marriage.
The third is loyalty to the marriage, and very public loyalty. Jeremy Irons, skirting round this delicate subject in an interview last week, said in describing modern marriage that “a modern couple give each other the freedom to flirt with new beginnings elsewhere”. How wrong that is.
Adultery isn’t about new beginnings — that’s homewrecking. Serious adultery is for the seriously married, at least in Europe.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 26, 2004 | Comments (1)
Mud, blood and the joy of chasing foxes on a horse
Sometimes, early in the morning, walking down our London street I suddenly catch the scent of a fox. That sharp, suggestive, overwhelming smell takes me straight back to the Dorset of my childhood all too long ago and to powerful memories of the acute joy of foxhunting.
People who have never followed a hunt cannot possibly imagine how deep that pleasure is, just as I cannot understand the joy of coarse fishing. For me it had little to do with killing a fox, though that must have been part of the elemental excitement and fear I felt, and that everyone seemed to share.
It had much more to do with the feelings, close to ecstasy sometimes, of becoming part of a beautiful and much-loved landscape, right there inside the hunting pictures that are only memories to me now, down in the mud and the crowded streams, scratched by the branches of dark woods, out almost flying over open country, hanging about in the wind and the rain under dripping hedges, jostling anxiously among bigger horses in front of an enormous fence, afraid of jumping but still more afraid of admitting it, with all the dizziness of a whole field of people together in full cry, the danger and speed, the romance of the hunting cries, and the strangeness of it, for all its familiarity.
Hunting reunites people, though only temporarily and ritualistically and fairly safely, with all kinds of profound and dangerous longings.
For years I somehow forgot about hunting. My brothers and I grew up and left home to lead urban lives, and the unmistakable scent of a fox, so closely associated with sharp hunting mornings, was something I never smelt again until quite recently when foxes arrived in Notting Hill. Now I catch the scent of those memories quite often.
I have even recently hung a fox’s head, or — as people used to say in my hunting days, and still do, for all I know — a fox’s mask, on the wall, and only partly to annoy any repressive guests. It is there because it has retrieved some intense memories for me.
This long-forgotten mask was given to me out hunting when I was about nine, just after a kill when I was first blooded, and my mother had it mounted on a wooden shield with the date painted underneath, as people did in those days.
I rediscovered it recently, clearing out her attic, and every time I look at it I’m reminded extraordinarily clearly of that bright cold day at Waterston with the South Dorset hunt, and my enormous pride in taking part in this atavistic ritual and in having a dab of blood on my face, and the bloody head swinging from my saddle as I rode home.
Today I feel rather differently. I would no longer want to hunt, partly because I feel that hunting was dying anyway, even without the moves to ban it. The saboteurs must have made it miserable, it has become too self-conscious for my taste, and the West Country is rapidly turning into suburb. Still, for many people hunting remains one of life’s great pleasures.
And what strikes me as hateful and disgraceful about last week’s vote to ban on hunting is that it is a ban on pleasure, for no good reason, or without a good-enough reason. This is the worst kind of destructive Puritanism — denying other people cakes and ale because you’ve never enjoyed them yourself.
The reasons put forward for banning foxhunting fool nobody. They are hypocritical or ignorant or trivial. No serious person can think the quick death of a few foxes matters as much as the prolonged torture of millions of factory-farmed chicken and pigs and cows. No animal lover can think it’s worth putting down 26,000 foxhounds for the sake of a few wild foxes.
No informed person can think that foxes are cruelly torn to death by the hounds; that happens after death, after one quick bite, and is much more merciful than being trapped or maimed by a gunshot. Only a hypocrite would ban foxhunting but allow the more proletarian pleasures of fishing, which is quite clearly a form of drawn-out torture.
Only a hypocrite would say it is all right to turn a blind eye to the distasteful ritual slaughter of millions of animals according to Jewish and Islamic law out of respect for those ethnic traditions, but that the ancient traditions of an old English ethnic minority must not be so spared. Some minorities are more equal than others, it seems, and there’s only one minority here that can be tyrannised by Tony Blair’s “majority”.
People on all sides seem to agree that the real explanation is class hatred pure and simply, or what you might call a different kind of blood sport; the Labour party (old and new) hates toffs and wants to tear them apart, and Blair feels he must let the socialist dogs have their sport or else they may get out of control, as blood-thirsty dogs do when their appetites are thwarted, and turn upon him instead.
Actually, as everyone ought to know, there are plenty of people who hunt who are not toffs at all. But even supposing all foxhunting men and women were indeed toffs, what then? What good would it do any of us if a few toffs were deprived of a pretty much harmless pleasure? If the horrors of 20th-century socialism and communism have taught us nothing else they must surely have demonstrated that there is absolutely nothing to be gained and a great deal to be lost by punishing and robbing people just because you don’t like the cut of their gib.
My new colleague Rod Liddle once notoriously spoke out against the Countryside Alliance demonstration in London, denouncing “the belch-filled dining rooms of the London clubs”. He makes my point exactly. Surely there can be nothing uniquely offensive about an upper-class belch? Perhaps Liddle has not stopped to consider what fills the atmosphere of the nation’s pubs and bingo halls.
And even if somehow the upper classes belch differently from the lower orders, surely we are a nation now committed to celebrating diversity and the rights of minorities to pursue their ancient traditions, including belching, without fear or favour. Belching is after all considered polite in some of our newer British ethnic minorities.
Toffs can, I admit, be tiresome. They can be patronising and rude and even when trying to be charming they quite often, perhaps unconsciously, display an extreme sense of entitlement that is irksome. One needs to feel quite full of oneself to deal happily with a roomful of toffs.
This annoyance is not relieved by the fact that quite a lot of them, as well as being titled and rich, are often tall, good-looking, clever and slim, and even rather nice. People who are not toffs may prefer to think otherwise but they are deluding themselves. None of this amounts to a reason for despising toffs, or affecting to despise them, still less for persecuting them.
Now when I smell a fox I will remember, instead of hunting in green and pleasant Dorset, the stench of political hypocrisy and the painful tearing apart of British traditions of tolerance and civil liberty.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 19, 2004 | Comments (0)
We preach baby worship but practise baby farming
We have got used to the idea that buzz words are weasel words; they tend to mean just the opposite of what they should. We have come to accept that when politicians and public figures talk eagerly of choice and consultation they mean bullying with only the most transparent pretence of listening to anyone else.
The same goes for buzz phrases. “Spending more time with the family” — now one of the most weaselly phrases in the language — means anything but. The departure of Alan Milburn from Tony Blair’s government last year to spend more time with his children was a particularly shameless example of buzz speak.
One can only wonder what the Milburn “kids” think of their father’s change of heart as he returns to the cabinet after just a year. Who knows? They may be quite relieved that after this year’s experience he is prepared to spend much less time with them.
Yet the buzzing continues; considering the large quantities of paternal egg on Milburn’s face, it almost defies belief that Andrew Smith, on being edged out of office by Blair last week, could bring himself to say that he, too, wants to spend more time with his family.
I find it equally astonishing that Cherie Blair should have acquired the buzz reputation of a devoted mother. No doubt she is convinced she deserves it. Yet she is supposedly a high-powered QC and spends a lot of time accompanying her husband to a great many official and unofficial events. She does quite a bit for charity, she travels a lot and as if there weren’t quite a few obstacles already between her and spending any time whatsoever with her kids, she has written a book that she is now busy publicising and she has just put herself on the books of a public speaking agency. She has also embraced the time-consuming role of ambassador for London’s bid for the 2012 Olympics. Are these the acts of a devoted mother? Hardly anybody seems to find this odd. On the contrary, received wisdom has it that ours is an extraordinarily child-centred society, with role models such as Cherie and Tony and their holy family. Britain is supposedly a nation of baby worshippers, obsessed with its “kids” and longing for more time with them.
As usual the opposite is true. We spend less and less time with our children. We are more and more prepared to hand them over to other people, we have allowed the state to encroach more and more on family life and last week it emerged that the government is about to nationalise parenthood and family life altogether, so that we have to spend almost no time with them at all.
Last Wednesday Charles Clarke, the education secretary, announced a brave new scheme of “wraparound educare” for all, in his chilling expression. He recognises that working parents need not only education for their children but childcare, too, and he proposes to provide it at school. “Educare”? What kind of talk is that? “We need,” said Clarke with earnest confidence, “to create a universal one-stop service for parents”, and he has committed the government to offering school and social care for children for 10 hours every day round the year, including the school holidays, from infancy.
Given travel to and from school, this could well be an 11-hour day away from home for many children. St Bede’s primary school in Bolton is already open from 7.30am-6pm for 51 weeks of the year, providing breakfast, after-school clubs and nursery services for children aged from six weeks to 11 years. From six weeks old means hardly out of the womb. This is baby farming. What else can you call it? Why not hand babies over at birth and have done with them as our forebears used to do? Why not hang them up by the swaddling bands on a hook in some stranger’s hut? We live in a society where people talk of baby worship and practise baby farming. We talk of community and busily undermine the family. I wish I were surprised that there hasn’t been a public outcry over this, but I’m not.
This might perhaps not be so shocking if all schools were temples of plenty, peace and joy. After all, some children really do enjoy some boarding schools. But state schools are not always such havens. Parents all know that there is a serious shortage of good teachers and there are not nearly enough to give proper individual attention, even during the present short school day.
We know teachers are under-trained, under-paid and demoralised, constantly dropping out or taking stress leave, constantly being replaced by substitutes. We know they often can’t keep order and that bullying is a grave problem in most schools, as is violence in many. We know that too many nursery carers are in every way inadequate in numbers, in training and in continuity of care.
We know schools have vending machines selling junk food and drink that make children obese. We know that most school meals are rubbish and that children are allowed to choose the unhealthiest food.
Last week the shares of Compass, the world’s largest caterer, fell by 25%, partly because of unprofitable school meal deals with British education authorities, some of whom budget only 42p-44p per school lunch.
Yet it is to these huge, unhealthy, crowded, ill-run, under-staffed institutions and to a succession of strangers that the government expects us — and not just exceptionally needy parents — to consign our babies from infancy.
If you applied to a pedigree dog society for permission to buy one of its animals and explained that you would be sending it out for care for 10 or 11 hours a day to a kennels down the road — a bog-standard kennels in fact — it would show you the door as an unfit owner. Wraparound educare is not good enough for a valuable dog or even for a pedigree cat.
Yet we solemnly think it is good enough for our children, or at least the government does. And it is taxing us more and more heavily so that it can give us our money back in dribs and drabs and allowances and credits here and there to pay for the ferocious cost of this baby farming, so we can then go out to work for the privilege of neglecting our own children.
“Children,” as Clarke said, “are our most precious asset. How we nurture, care and support them in their early years is a fundamental test of whether a society values individuals and believes in opportunity for all.” How true, for once, how true, whatever he may have meant.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, September 12, 2004 | Comments (0)
