To maintain our meaning structure we need the people around us, not just friends and family but society generally, to confirm who we know ourselves to be. Lacking such confirmation, and lacking the self-confidence to confirm ourselves, we feel threatened with annihilation. If we believe that we cannot change ourselves or society, the threat of annihilation can become so great that we turn to the most desperate of defences. We destroy our body in order to survive as the person we know ourselves to be. Many young men have said to themselves, ‘If I can’t live as a man I’ll die as a man.’
Meanwhile women were now required to enter the competitive workplace but still exhibit the old necessary attributes of femininity and beauty. This was a daunting task, and to relieve their anxiety many young women took up smoking, a slow form of suicide. Educated young women, holding responsible positions and competing successfully with men, smoke for the same reasons that schoolgirls of limited education, ability and opportunity smoke. Smoking is a way of denying the fear of annihilation. These young women believe that to be allowed to exist they must be attractive; that to be attractive they must be slim; that smoking dulled their appetite and made them look sophisticated and in control. Unfortunately, nicotine is more addictive than heroin, and thus many women who have lost their youthful slimness find themselves trapped in an addiction which, even if it does not kill them, wrinkles and yellows their skin. In our society the old, if they are noticed at all, are not regarded as attractive.32
Although the roles for men and women have changed, the methods of child-rearing have changed very little. Consequently, many girls and boys are still finding that the best way of surviving their childhoods is to become traditional women and men.
My garden borders on one side a row of large Victorian houses which have been turned into a hotel used by the council to house homeless families. My garden wall is topped by a trellis where jasmine and clematis grow riotously. A great profusion of growth developed on the hotel side of the trellis and, with this weight on one side, the strong autumn winds pushed the trellis away from the wall. I took my garden shears and a roll of plastic bags into the hotel garden and began cutting back the bundles of intertwining branches.
The garden was empty and all was quiet. Then there was the sound of a woman’s voice raised in anger. She was yelling, ‘Stay in or get out! Just close the bloody door.’
I could not hear anyone reply, but the woman screamed at this person, ‘I don’t care what you want. Get out.’
A door slammed. Round the corner of a hedge came a fair-haired boy of about six. Although the day was chilly he had no jacket on. He saw me and headed straight at me. ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
I described what I was doing. He eyed my shears enviously. ‘Can I have a go?’
‘Wait till I’ve cut some more, then you can do some cutting while I put all this stuff in these bags.’
He waited impatiently while telling me about some fantastic garden where he cut things down, and then grabbed the shears as soon as I offered them. He clipped a few pieces and for one moment I thought he might prove to be actually helpful, but his interest soon waned. He tried out bigger and bigger branches and, even though his attempts were unsuccessful, kept boasting to me how great he was at cutting things down. ‘I’m the best at this,’ he said. ‘Aren’t I the best cutter you’ve ever seen?’
Ordinarily I would not have agreed, but, knowing that he needed some help in recovering from the onslaught his mother had made on him, I said that he was doing an excellent job.
A little girl of about four was watching us from a balcony. She was the daughter of a couple I had taken to be Kosovan refugees. She never attempted to speak English but her mother would struggle with a few phrases when she and I exchanged pleasantries over the wall. The little girl came down the steps from her flat and stood watching the boy, who had now lost all interest in my task and was wandering around the garden trying to cut down different kinds of unlikely branches. The little girl’s gaze inspired him to greater feats of strength, all unsuccessful, but which he passed off as brilliant.
As all women know, the duty of watching a male while he demonstrates his prowess in some masculine endeavour is a tedious one, and we soon find more interesting things to do. The little girl came over to see what I was doing. When I tore a fresh black bag off the roll and opened it, she reached out her hands, grasped the top of the bag, and held it up in exactly the position needed for me to put the greenery into it. It was precisely the kind of help I needed. Obviously she had done this many times before. Perhaps she had held the plastic bags open when her parents were hastily packing a few possessions as they tried to escape from what seemed like certain death.
The little girl helped me gather the last scraps of greenery and we both stood back to admire a job well done. By this time her mother had come out on to the balcony and was watching us. Now I come to the saddest part of the story. I was very sorry for the little boy, and I was sorry for the women who, one day, would bear the brunt of his anger against the mother who had so humiliated and threatened him, but now I tried to convey to the little girl’s mother how clever and wise her daughter was. I wanted her to agree with me, but she did not. She believed that it was wrong to accept praise, and praise for her child was to be negated just as she would negate praise for herself. Moreover, she had to teach her daughter womanly modesty. ‘No, no,’ she said, and with her hands she pushed away my words. Secretly she might have been proud of her daughter, but neither I nor her daughter were allowed to know this. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘it was nothing.’
Girls and boys are brought up differently, but the message each gets is the same. As you are you are not acceptable. You must become what your parents want you to be.
Girl babies are not all that different from boy babies. True, there are anatomical differences, and some researchers say that boy babies are more active than girl babies, although other researchers say that adults see in babies what they expect to see, but all babies come into the world as themselves, curious about the world, and wanting to act upon it, but for little girls it is not to be. Neither is it for little boys.
Every society, every family, has very clear ideas about what is masculine and what is feminine. There is considerable overlap in these ideas throughout the world, even though practices vary. Orthodox Jews and Muslims regard women’s hair as something dangerous which can snare and incite a man to sexual fervour, the expression of which he is not responsible for, while in most Christian countries virtuous women no longer have to keep their hair covered. (My mother was one of the last generation of women who felt it a necessary modesty to wear a hat. She and I battled over whether I should wear one. I prevailed, but only after considerable humiliation whereby I was told that it was impossible for me to be properly dressed because my head was so big that no hat would fit me.) However, the idea that women have to keep themselves covered and/or secluded because their sexuality is a danger to men is common to all cultures. Even in countries where women are allowed to leave their homes unescorted by a man, it is the custom that if a man who is attacking and raping women has not been caught by the police, it is the women who are instructed to stay at home, not the men.
The fear of women’s sexuality is based not simply on the belief that the woman may passively, simply by her presence, arouse a man to passion, but on the belief that she may use her sexuality in an aggressive, assertive way. A feminine woman is not assertive. Little girls are taught this with great efficiency; they are taught and shown that assertive, aggressive women are not loved or even liked. Nowadays a woman can appear to be strong and assertive, but there is still an expectation that she will not go too far.
Going too far means being so strong, assertive and clever that the woman robs men of their rightful status. When, in 2000, the A-level results in the UK showed girls doing much better than boys, these girls were not allowed to enjoy their success publicly.