DOMESTIC DUTIES

I am a list maker.  Not working the nine to five routine I get more done if I start the day by scribbling down the tasks I hope to accomplish before opening a bottle in the evening.  Sometimes I cheat and write down tasks I have already completed which makes me feel I have got a head start.  Many of these jobs are fairly banal:  you never tick off ‘Earn a million pounds’ or ‘Conquer the world’, while ‘Do the ironing’ or ‘Weed the garden’ may be uninspiring but at least you get them done.  Whisper it but I quite enjoy ironing while  making my shirts wearable being a curiously calming activity in a busy life.

This is not really the done thing for a bloke, to admit to enjoying - or even being competent at - domestic duties.  “Oh, I can’t boil an egg,” says some man proudly even if he has just come in from stripping down an engine.  What he means, of course, is that he won’t boil an egg, leaving that to his partner, who looks on indulgently as her man scrubs the grease off his well-toned muscles.  There is – or was - a kind of conspiracy of incompetence when it comes to men doing housework.  Charles Dickens, who had very traditional views on gender roles, draws a picture of a man trying to treat his wife by buying and cooking dinner on her birthday but failing completely and causing her far more work than if he had left well alone.

Yet most domestic tasks these days are just one step up from falling off a log.  So it makes sense for men to take on a bigger role in household tasks if women are working to earn money. The trouble is that sense has little to do with sex.  When Julie Burchill said that she could never fancy a bloke who did the housework you could almost hear the sound of brooms being dropped and ironing boards put away as a legion of new men realised they would never get laid again if they did what millions of feminists had been badgering them to do for years and played their part in running the home.   

I was brought up in a house with two working parents, my mother becoming a schoolteacher when we were old enough to allow it at a time when out of the home childcare was not readily available.  She felt it was her duty to take care of domestic matters as well and sometimes found combining both responsibilities overwhelming.  So my father learned cooking and carried out a reasonable share of domestic tasks with varying degrees of competence.  We survived.

The trouble was that deep down my mother considered the kitchen her domain and was always hovering over the cooking which my father was perfectly capable of completing on his own.  Human beings are territorial and do not like to give up areas where they have had control.  One thing that struck me when I saw the film The Quiet Man was how Mary Kay Dannagher (the part played by Maurenn O’Hara) was insistent that theirs could not be a proper marriage until she had control of the kitchen and all her ‘things’ – including her dowry - had been delivered by her brother.  She had no desire for a job outside the home that Sean Thornton (John Wayne) was providing for them because she saw her status as coming from her role inside it.  She was not a real woman until she was a proper housewife.

This may not play well with modern feminists but it made perfect sense at a time when running  a house involved more than turning a dial and flicking a switch.  The introduction of microwaves and washing machines has made those domestic duties far easier and consequently less worthy of respect than they were in the days of Mary Kay who worked hard every day of her life but never had a paid job to go to. 

This territorialism rubs off on me.  I know how to load and turn on a washing machine (one of the many jobs just up from log-falling off) but if my partner tells me to use a particular detergent or setting I automatically obey her without question.  I cook dinner many evenings yet I find it embarrassingly difficult to wear an apron simply because it seems unmanly although my daughter made me one specifically to protect those very shirts which I have just ironed. 

We all draw the line somewhere and not always at a very rational point.  I can clean and iron those shirts and sew on a button or two and cook the dinner but I cannot imagine myself knitting a pullover.  I could not regard myself as a real man if I was clicking away with those needles.  

Talking of clothes, I was travelling with a girlfriend some years back when we stopped for petrol.  It was her car so she filled up and paid.  In those days the attendant came out ot the car for payment and, making conversation, he said that it was usually the bloke who took care of this.  He meant it in a friendly rather than contemptuous way but I felt a complete failure in my duty to get the two of us from A to B at my own expense.  The next time we were in the same situation, I got our of the car to make myself look useful and as the nozzle was brought over to the petrol cap it sprayed me with petrol and made my suit stink.  I should have worn an apron.

THE M-WORD

Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning:  I am not in favour of decriminalising or in any way sanctioning the practice known as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and want to see it ended as much as anyone.  My problem is with the use of the term used to describe it which I also think should be stopped.

Why?  By any stretch of the imagination cutting off a piece of the body which nature endowed us with, often using an unsterilized razor blade in an unsanitised environment, is a pretty unpleasant and dangerous operation particularly when inflicted on a girl of thirteen, typically the age when it occurs.  Yet an estimated 60-70,000 women have had their clitoris removed illegally and without their informed adult consent in Britain and a whopping 200 million worldwide.  This is not a small problem.

And how many successful prosecutions have there been for FGM in Britain?  A big fat zero.  One doctor was charged by the Crown Prosecution Service for performing a surgical procedure which took place during an operation.  He said that what he had done was necessary for the woman’s well-being and the jury took around half an hour to acquit him, which is just about the amount of time they needed to leave the room and take a vote.  We are making a lot of noise about this problem but not preventing it from happening.  It shows no sign of going away even if The Daughters of Eve are doing a lot to combat it and support victims.

I notice from their website that Daughters of Eve still use the word ‘mutilation’ and this is what is exercising me.  They do not realise – or acknowledge - how strong peer group pressure can be on peoples’ behaviour.  Imagine you are a mother who is being pressured to give up your daughter for, Ok let’s call it FGM.  You are certainly female, Moslem and almost certainly from an African or Asian background which means you are already suffering from three types of discrimination and marginalisation in a predominantly secular/partly Christian society where men still make most decisions and white men have more power than those with darker skins and women less than men.  Your community might frown on you going to work or driving a car and pressure you into wearing clothing that covers at least part of your head and face. 

Then you hear some light-skinned well-meaning car-driver come along and use the word ‘mutilation’ to describe a practice which has been carried out in your community for centuries and which is being proposed for your sexually immature daughter.   You hear tales about women being groomed and exploited by predatory males and are naturally anxious to keep her as far as possible from this fate.  You are assured that the operation will help to keep her away from bad influences and that it is your duty to submit her to it.  Who you gonna listen to?  The people you are surrounded by every day or those who breeze in and tell you how to lead your life before disappearing back to their own distant communities. 

This is why I think these same light-skinned well-meaning people are so wrong in using the M-word.  Talk to a lawyer and he or she will tell you just how difficult it is to get a conviction in a British court even when the evidence against the accused is strong because one of their colleagues is so smart at undermining such evidence.   You are hardly likely to have a video of an operation taking place, no witnesses will come forward because they would be ostracised by their community and so a wall of silence ensures that we continue to disapprove of a crime which we seem to be completely unable to prevent.  

Moreover, it cannot be a crime to be the parent or guardian a girl who has had her clitoris removed.  You are prosecuted for what you have done not for who you are in a free society.  The thought of police officers inspecting the genitalia of girls at school to ensure that their sexual equipment is complete does not bear thinking about, having shades of Nazis getting suspected Jews to drop their trousers to see if they have been circumcised. 

This is an area where feminism and multi-culturalism are in conflict and it is interesting that feminism has won hands down.  If it was a form of tattoo or hairstyle that was being practiced no-one would be getting exercised about it but try to barge into a woman’s sex life and you are asking for trouble.  And surely his is a woman-on-woman issue.  Most modern men are so desperate to show how good they are in the sack that they want above all else to preserve the evidence.  I am quite certain that removing the instrument of female sexual delight would not be possible without the complicity of the mothers, grandmothers and aunts of the girls affected.   They have got it into their heads that this is the way to preserve and protect their daughters and we have to convince them otherwise.

This will not be easy but neither is it a completely hopeless cause.  The sledgehammer of the law, however, is probably not the best instrument to use.  We need education, education, education to quote a phrase.  Any teacher will tell you that you have to be careful what language you use if you want to get through to people and the M-word is surely standing in the way of us making progress.   Forget for a moment what we think about clitoris removal.  We need to get through to that triple-discriminated against black Moslem mother and she will switch off the moment she hears someone using the word mutilation.  Let’s cut it out.  

Edwin Lerner

Go to http://www.dofeve.org/ for more on 'FGM' (until we find a better name).

My other blog is:  diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com         

    

LADY JANE

Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra on the tenner
(to be issued in July)

You have surely heard of Jane Austen but maybe not of Caroline Criado-Perez who led the campaign for more representation of women in public life.  As a result, we will soon be seeing that rather mousy portrait of Jane by her sister Cassandra on the new plastic £10 note which, as they last two to three times as long as the old paper ones, will be for quite a while.  The British government gave Criado-Perez an OBE for her campaign while a bunch of morons hassled her on Twitter with death and rape threats.

What is it with men who threaten women with rape and murder?  Like many Englishmen I am routinely rude to friends and polite to strangers.  I usually tell people from abroad that, if we are rude, it usually means we like you but that they should be suspicious of the super-polite.  It means they either hate or are out to cheat you – or both.  Banter, the usual excuse of morons, can work if you know someone well, but to threaten total strangers because you disagree with their views?  Grow up, guys.

Rape threats are from another world to that of Jane Auasten, where the worst thing that happens is Emma Wodehouse making a catty and cruel remark to the nice but dim Miss Bates. Jane led a sheltered life without husband, lover, job or home of her own.  Born the daughter of that pillar of the establishment, a Church of England vicar, she must have been aware of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the wars against Napoleon (which her brothers were involved in) and the ending of slavery.  So what did she write about in her six novels?  The importance of finding a husband with five hundred pounds a year and all his own teeth, of course.  Let’s get our priorities right here, girls.

She never found this man except in the books.  There was Tom LeFroy who would have fitted the teeth qualification but did not have the five hundred a year and was quickly whisked away by his family to marry into money.  Then there was Harris Bigg-Wither, who had the five hundred and more but whose name seemed to sum up his character.  She accepted him but, after a sleepless night, decided that she did not want to wake up next to a Bigg-Wither for the rest of her days and opted out, thank goodness.  Otherwise we would not have had more than one or two of those novels, especially Persuasion, my favourite and her last book.  It is set mostly in Bath the city where she had been brought by her parents when her father retired.  They moved from the Hampshire village of Steventon where the Austens took part in amateur dramatics and listened to Jane’s early attempts at writing.   This dried up in Bath where there was an endless round of irritating social events but no chance to write. If brother Edward had not come into money she would never have been able to go back to Hampshire to live in Chawton where the writing came back and that squeaky door which warned her that visitors were coming was never oiled in case people should discover that she had a mind of her own and was using it to write.

Only two other women have been depicted on British banknotes.  The first was Florence Nightingale who took to her bed and became a professional invalid in her later years after she returned from the Crimea so she could manage her campaigns more efficiently without having husband and children to look after.  Elizabeth Fry, however, was the very model of a modern multi-tasker giving birth to eleven children while running her prison reform campaigns.  When Churchill replaced Fry on the fiver there were no women on our banknotes apart from the Queen, who would not even have made it if she had had a brother.  As I wrote in my last post I think you need to earn equality rather than have it granted automatically, but there are surely enough high-achieving women to mean we never go without one on our money again.

Can we call Jane a feminist today?  I think so, despite the dependence on men.  Most of the males in her books are actually pretty two dimensional.  You never hear them talking to each other about anything except hunting and shooting.  There is none of that interior life of the man which you get in George Eliot’s Lydgate or Ladislaw, two men who want to change the world.  Austen’s heroes just want to hold on to their five hundred a year.  It is interesting that Maryann Evans felt the need to use a man’s name when she wrote.  She was born two years after Austen died and there were more opportunities for women in Victorian times but it was still not the done thing to think too much if you were a female.  The Bronte sisters, that other trio of female writers, left the question hanging by using the names Curer, Acton and Ellis Bell, which matched their initials but left their gender uncertain, male or female take your pick. 

Jane Austen made the best of limited circumstances, the only employment opportunity being as a governess, the role for impoverished gentlewomen like Charlotte Bronte.  She never put her name on her books which were written ‘By a Lady’.   Read all six and you can call yourself a ‘Janeite’, like me.  There is little curiosity where the five hundred a year comes from as long as it keeps the beast of poverty at bay.  Austen is concerned with virtues like loyalty and decency which we associate with the more feminine side of our natures.  There would have been no point in putting a male name to her books because there could never be any doubt that they were written by a woman – or ‘a lady’ if you prefer.

(Thanks to Wendy Hammerston for much of the information on Jane Austen which she gave in a recent talk.)

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

BLACK AND WHITE

I remember the first time I saw a black actor portraying a white character on stage.  It was in Stratford-upon-Avon, the play was Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and the lead role was taken by Adrian Lester who had won his spurs playing the likeable conman Mickey in Hustle.  It was a modern dress production with tanks and machine guns and the largely white audience was far too polite to wonder how a medieval king of England ago could be black.

More recently I went to see The Convert at the Gate Theatre in London.  A young African woman becomes a Christian to escape a forced marriage to an older man and adopts the name of Esther.  She embraces the faith but finds that it does not live up to its promises and is unable to overcome the unchristian racism of the people who introduced it.  There were no white characters on stage and the cast of seven were all portrayed by black actors. 

This somehow seemed right.  It was a small theatre where you could almost touch the actors and the presence of a white performer representing a black person would have seemed incongruous.  Not that it was likely to happen.  On the way to the theatre I had read about a demonstration organised to protest about the use of white actors to represent Chinese characters on stage.  Then the daughter of Michael Jackson caused a jokey satire about her father and Elizabeth Taylor taking a road trip together to be pulled by Sky Arts because he was portrayed by the white actor Joseph Fiennes.  Jackson himself seemed to got hrough life becoming progressively whiter and the casting of a swarthy looking white like Fiennes may have been an ironic comment on this process, but we will let that pass. 

So we are now in the ludicrous position where black actors can portray white characters while white actors cannot take on non-white parts.  With oscarssowhite so fresh in the memory you need not weep too much for those poor privileged white thespians unable to show their versatility by portraying people of colour.  My concern is more that we are in danger of ghettoising non-white actors in a way that might in fact inhibit them from moving into mainstream parts.  As Lester showed, there is no reason why black actors cannot play parts once reserved for whites, so why prohibit white actors from portraying black people?

Coleridge invented the term ‘suspension of disbelief’ to represent the imaginative leap we make when watching a play.  Our conscious minds know perfectly well that the person on stage is not actually the King of England, Prince of Denmark or Empress of Egypt but, if the actor representing that character does so convincingly, we put that knowledge aside and enjoy the play. This works in the theatre but not on film.  If Lester rather than Kenneth Branagh had portrayed King Henry in Branagh’s film version of the play it would not have worked as we would been unable to accept the discrepancy in a medium which demands a higher level of realism.  This is why I tend to avoid films which use intrusive CGI effects.  As soon as I see the join and realise that the exploding spaceship or collapsing building has been created by a technician on a laptop I lose interest in the whole process. 

Why would I find it difficult to watch a play about black Aficans in which one of the characters is portrayed by a white actor?    The answer must be that there is still an element of racism in the way we look at actors on the stage and that I am not immune from this.  I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept a black man portraying a white man – or a woman portraying a man, as Fiona Shaw did when she played Rchard the Second, another historical impossibility that worked on stage.  Yet I might not sit comfortably in a theatre in which a white person is portraying a black one. 

We all know that this happened frequently in the days before black actors decided that they were not going to take it anymore and brought to an end the days of blacking up in the late and unlamented Black and white Minstrels Show or, to go back to Shakespeare, the time when great thespians applied dark make-up to portray the moor who kills his wife.

Ah yes, Othello, the elephant in the room of transracial casting.  It is inconceivable that a non-white actor could portray him these days, yet it seems a shame that a fine white actor like Christopher Ecclestone would not be allowed to step into this role without causing such an uproar that a staging of the play would be effectively impossible. 

Now I know that black actors, still finding it hard to gain a foothold in the acting profession are not going to be particularly sympathetic to some white bloke who says that they cannot have exclusive access to Othello.  This is the one serious role that is ours, they say, and you are trying to take it away from us for the skae of a theoretical racial equality which does not exist in the real world.  Forgetaboutit.

Yet we do not insist that Shylock is portrayed by a Jewish actor any more than we insist that Macbeth is portrayed by a Scotsman even though anti-semitism still exists.  Jewish actors are supposed to be able to overcome prejudice while black actors are not expected to overcome racism.  Isn’t this ultimately a bit patronising, our thinking that if you are black you cannot be expected to compete on equal terms with white actors?  My late mother was a great supporter of the Fair Trade movement but it always left me a bit uncomfortable, the idea that businesses based in the third world would always need some extra help from us because they could not be expected to compete on equal terms.  There is a fine line between giving someone a helping hand and thinking them incapable of helping themselves.

This is why I think that racism will not be truly dead until it is considered utterly unremarkable for a white actor to play Othello – just as a black actor portrays King Henry.