Stink bombing the gay orgy
Protesters from Smash Gay Orgy sneaked into the
The
We left fake intelligence tests, stink bombs and set off personal alarms as the orgy got underway. The foul smell emanating from all around was our way to demonstrate the reality of the casual and pervasive immorality that we experience in our daily lives, and which we saw manifested so vividly in the gay orgy. It stinks. And we wanted the people there to feel it.
Just before the climax we invaded the stage, and threw out the open letters that we had written to the audience members and to the exhibitionists on stage, explaining why we were there.
The action was not about non-gay men versus (dominant) gay men. Playing men against each other is one of the tricks of the permissive society, a divide-and-rule strategy which is remarkably effective. It is a way to attack men for whatever choices they make.
We disrupted the orgy because we need the people complicit in it to know that it is not okay and that, despite the dominant socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary post Christian society, producing and encouraging smut and hyper-sexuality, there is real resistance to it.
And we paid our own homage to the earlier generation of men whose civil wars kicked off their struggle for our parliamentary and confessional rights. We hoped to show that what they fought against has not gone away.
Although the media response has, typically, played it this way, the action was not about (passive) non-gay men versus (dominant) gay men. Playing men against each other is one of the tricks of collectivist society, a divide-and-rule strategy which is remarkably effective. Just like the polarizing dichotomies of hairdresser/bondage gladiator or bondage gladiator/First Secretary of State, it is a way to attack men for whatever choices they make.
We resist this; our gripe was with the orgy and the wider problem of which it is such a vivid symbol. Our issue, furthermore, was with the brazenness of a commercial company deciding to see this as just another gap in the market, seeking to profit directly from men’s social anxieties and the iniquities in our culture.
The organisers of the orgy, 121 Entertainment, think they can get away with claiming that the orgy is ‘empowering’, while profiting from the social anxieties which keep men interested in gaining this kind of gratification.
Neither is this a question of Christians hating gay men; the use of this stereotype is another way faith is undermined. The group which took action at the orgy included atheists, who like us saw the connections between the orgy and other forms of wrongdoing and immorality. A culture which positions men as objects to be gawped at and dominant men as leering figures of power is damaging to Christian men, gay men and everyone in between.
The action was not random, but thought through and properly discussed in our church. We were shocked by how much energy we needed to persuade others in morality movements that the action was virtuous: we were told it was out-dated and that vilification of gay men was not a priority. There was resistance to our clear belief that sexual issues, and the way we treat each other on a personal basis, are intricately connected with immorality in all its forms.
Gay orgies, along with the constant attention on men’s arms and chests in the media, show that men are still judged primarily on their physical strength. This is an important power dynamic; subtle and hard to quantify and counter. Public decency legislation is not going to change it, nor is individual career success for some straight men.
Okay, okay, you get the point. The original - if that’s not too strong a word for something so trite, repetitive and derivative - is here.
The Left contains many an interfering swine whose belief system justifies damage to private property and the disruption of private events so this will come as no surprise to either of my regular readers. But if an evangelical Christian group - or (almost) any other group for that matter – tried to, for example, protect impressionable teenage lads from taking part in something they might not really want to get into did something even remotely like this then the Guardian and the BBC would have the cattle trucks heading east in their minds’ eyes, or their graphics, or in their dearest dreams (with us aboard them) before the Six O’clock News pips had stilled.
The difference I think between the social Right and the cultural Left is the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
And like anything else viewable on the internet, Christian views of homosexuality come in a wide and varied range. Hoo boy. Everywhere to orthodox and familiar concern based on careful study of holy texts through to the foaming-at-the-mouth, methinks they do protest too much moonbattery of Reverend Phelps.
Both social conservatives on the one hand and, for example, ‘gay rights’ supporters or feminists on the other believe that certain forms of expression and amusement can inspire or incite anger and probably more importantly background contempt for the self-trivializing. And therefore each side thinks that there is a greater likelihood that cruel, mean, or violent actions will be taken against each self-humiliating group.
Personally, I don't think that the bath-house culture as immortalized in Frankie's Relax video did any favours to our law-abiding (and law-protected, thankfully) gay compatriots and the few that I've met since university have mostly eschewed the whole 'scene' - let alone its furthest shores - in favour of domesticity and, well, home furnishings. And borrowing my Elvis albums and not returning them, as it happens. Bring ‘em back, dammit!
This is how both the morally conservative and the liberationist Left can oppose strip-clubs or brothels being allowed to trade. The Left, generally, won’t admit that traditional moralists are sincerely concerned with the welfare of strippers and prostitutes themselves – we’re just a part of the misogynist patriarchal moral code that the authors of the F-Word article are struggling against (though not the actual misogynist patriarchal moral code that might reach into their cosseted lives and actually effect them personally).
I just don’t think there are that many queer-bashers around to be more than an occasional threat (though there surely are some.)
It would be wrong for us to break into a private gay bondage party and bust it up with chemical weapons. It may still be legal for the police to do so – the Offences Against The Person Acts still prohibit mutual sexual conduct amongst three or more people I think, whereas we social conservatives believe that sex is only okay amongst two or fewer persons, right? But we aren’t the police. And the police are busy. Or they should be.
It’s also wrong to throw solid objects at democratically elected politicians going about their lawful business, and just as wrong to invade and disrupt a beauty contest because it’s perfectly lawful to take part in one.
This little gem of feminist proto-terrorism was one thing that got me thinking of the cultural Right and our culture war priorities.
The other was the characteristically bigoted meanderings of my feinian colleague who sits in the perineal position between my boss and me explaining to a fellow bureaucrat before the Euros that the Tory Party intended to join a European Parliamentary group that included Polish politicians who wanted to ban homosexuality as well as abortion.
Well, up to a point, dough-head.
Daft as it may sound coming from someone who a couple of Saturday nights ago was seriously (if boozily) contemplating joining a Morris-dance group (until the word accordion shot through my mind like a sobering and cleansing guardian angel), I think that most of us social conservatives have an agenda distant from enforcing sexual conduct on adults in private (or in the seclusion of hired assembly rooms).
Except for brothels.
Oh arse.
Apparently most of us would think raiding and closing down bawdy houses would be okay; unlike the Lefty feminists, who see the threat from the attitudes that swimwear reinforces in us patriarchal oppressors. Maybe all women should take the veil? I’ve never heard of substantial Left-feminist demonstrations against the veil, though. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’d love to hear it if they did.
No.
This kind of stuff is another Leftie straw man. ‘Look at that crazy Phelps,’ they say – he’s a social conservative – that’s what they want to do if they get into power.
It’s like the class war or racism - a stick to beat us with and to help shout down the urgent, life-and-death stuff that the liberal elite want us to leave alone because it’s their core business.
I think we can easily set aside the intrusive rude stuff that the overwhelming majority of people think to be wrong – public displays as in this is article, or protection of sexual offenders to cause obvious danger to innocents as here.
We can say in cases of obvious harm or danger – that’s where we stop.
If social conservatism is to reach out and touch peoples’ lives and make them better, then we need to do what the American conservatives have done so successfully, which is to bring it all together and start with the main and most important issues and especially civil rights that everyone except the political class can agree on, put them on a list, and start building coalitions by starting from the top.
And, brothers and sisters, do we have a list!
1. Not being killed by enemies domestic and foreign.
2. Not being injured and maimed by enemies domestic and foreign.
3. Not being robbed of the rewards of our work either informally or officially.
4. Not being robbed of much of our lifetime and what we would wish to do during it either informally or officially.
5. Introduce the word children into any point of each the above.
6. Repeat as necessary.
7. It’s always going to be necessary.
I’d also suggest that we start building coalitions on the easy one; the unanswerable one, and us conservatives’ all-time greatest hit and the deepest reason for which conservatives exist and that can allow us all (usually) to get on together – being against illegal violence.
That includes trashing beauty contests and kicking ‘queers’ and beating wives and robbing old ladies and blowing up Tube trains and brawling outside nightclubs.
When we’ve got the above sorted out (which given fallen Mankind will be round about never), then we might just start to worry about the well-dressed chaps with the smartest soft furnishings in town, and get my Elvis records back.
But only then.
I’m reproducing this from the New Statesman, which is scarcely a source of comfort for conservatives, though it’s often a treasure trove of material for fisking and extreme hilarity.
I’m not quite sure that to make of Asma Barlas’ thoughts. Given the name of the institutions for which she works and her academic history, it’s easy to discount what she writes as politically correct fluff at best and dangerous shilling for a great threat at worst.
However, goodwill and the desire for a better world are not monopolies of the Right and sometimes it does me good to see another side's opinion for a change.
Much of the Right’s criticism of liberals comes not from disapproval of their original motives -I wrote ‘Much’; not 'all'! - or of the moral hope enshrined in their desired outcomes, but from our conviction that their misconceptions and optimism cloud their judgement so badly that they're incapable of analysing the real world, and so their prescriptions are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong.
So what kind of thing is her opinion, do you think?
A ray of hope in a dark world? Insane wishful thinking? A very, very long shot? Seeking nuggets of gold in a midden? Liberal candy-coating of a dark and deadly threat? All of the above?
You decide.
Islam and feminism.
Asma Barlas
I have been asked to write about how feminism informs my understanding of faith and if and how faith influences my feminist views. I’ve discussed the intersection between Islam and feminism many times before and every time I have clarified that I do not like to call myself a feminist; yet, the label continues to stick!
The truth is that long before I learned about feminism, I had begun to glimpse a message of sexual equality in the Qur’an. Perhaps this is paradoxical given that all the translations and interpretations that I read growing up were by men and given that I was born and raised in
But, then, there are those other verses that Muslims read as saying that men are better than women and their guardians and giving men the right to unfettered polygyny and even to beat a recalcitrant wife. To read the Qur’an in my youth was thus to be caught up in a seemingly irresolvable and agonizing dilemma of how to reconcile these two sets of verses not just with one another but also with a view of God as just, consistent, merciful, and above sexual partisanship.
It has taken the better part of my life to resolve this dilemma and it has involved learning (from the discipline of hermeneutics) that language--hence interpretation—is not fixed or transparent and that the meanings of a text change depending on who interprets it and how. From reading Muslim history, on the other hand, I discovered that Qur’anic exegesis became more hostile to women only gradually and as a result of shifts in religious knowledge and methodology as well as in the political priorities of Muslim states. And, from feminism, I got the language to speak about patriarchy and sexual equality. In other words, it was all these universes of knowledge that enabled me to encounter the Qur’an anew and to give voice to my intuition that a God who is beyond sex/ gender has no investment in favoring males or oppressing women either.
Most Muslims, however, are unconvinced by this argument and it may be because viewing God’s speech (thus also God) as patriarchal allows the conservatives to justify male privilege and many progressive Muslims to advocate for secularism on the grounds that Islam is oppressive. As for me, I continue to respond to the Qur’an’s call to use my reason and intellect to decipher the signs (ayat) of God. Thus far, such an exercise has only brought me to more liberatory understandings of the text itself.
Asma Barlas is professor of Politics and director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at
I’m away on Monday and Tuesday at a funeral.
For those who know me as a harsh critic of Islam as we often meet it in the news (causing terrorism and inflicting brutality on, for example, the peoples of Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc.), and who might be genuinely curious as to where all this comes from, the New English Review this month has a symposium on Islam.
It contains a valuable range of viewpoints and topics: about the faith itself and how it looks at the rest of the world; about the history of the phenomenon as both a political and a religious belief system; about how followers of its worst aspects ply their trade in the West and in Islamic countries alike, and a number of carefully-researched reflections on how our civilisation meets and deals with Islam as a neighbour and as a settler within our lands.
It is both scholarly and up-to-date political analysis at the same time and is probably the best concentration of clear, complex and fearless academic reportage that I’ve found in a single site for a long time.
Its peers for comparison, and which I also recommend, are: The Religion of Peace which presents daily digests of Islam in the news and ongoing features about Islamic scholarship, beliefs, and practises; Jihad Watch which monitors the most aggressive tendencies within Islamic theology and politics both historic and contemporary; The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) which presents a digest of what is being said by and about Islam and Islamic countries and Arab politics – a ‘raw data’ source for the open-minded; Daniel Pipes’ site is both an academic and an opinion blog; and finally Front Page Magazine a rolling comment and analysis site which concentrates on political Islam in the USA and abroad and which often discusses modern-day Islam in the context of its intellectual and spiritual foundations and history.
I had a House of Dumb moment and remembered that brevity is the soul of wit, and so…
I posited the failure of online Left-wing feminism in the form of The F Word website in my post about the heroic Hannah Shah here.
To be fair to the F Word people and out of respect for Mrs. Northwester I looked through a search of their site on Islam and immediately found this, which included the following amongst a range of comments from the sensible to the not-sensible-at-all:
You'll find similar extremism and misogyny in all the major religion. You should check out what some of the far right rabbis and bishops say. Look at the bloody Pope!
Question One: does the Pope or any other mainstream Christian or Jewish group actually practice or demand a return to this? Or this? Or this for lesbians?
Now I can see the huge invasion that, for example, anti-abortion leaders are accused of making against women’s’ rights, and can understand the arguments against it.
(I disagree because I suspect that the unborn are people and therefore that their right to life trumps labour pains and lost months and years from a woman’s career and years of unwanted parenthood, but that’s not my point here. I could be wrong.)
My point is that even if we take anti-abortion as an intolerable imposition against a person’s individual dignity, there’s bad, and then there’s worse, and then there’s worst. Where’s the sense of proportion here? Why attack a mongoose for being smelly but try so hard to find excuses for the cobra?
The important thing, I think, is to keep some understanding that religion is a spectrum.
It sure is. Catholicism’s the one that won’t let you have an abortion. Salafism Sunni or Shia are the ones that often won’t let you have a life.
Question Two: even if we were to accept that Christians are truly the enemies of women’s’ rights, it is also true that it’s mostly American Christians and Israeli Jews (who have the belief systems as well as the willingness to fight if necessary) who stand between western women and Islam as it really is out there in the real world where the money and the religious police and the nukes are. So why is it the Christians and Jews amongst us that the Western Left-wing feminist movement are principally opposed to?
It’s physically safer in the short term, I’m sure, but in the long term..?
And we do have to consider the wider cultural context of Islamophobia into consideration, too.
Question Three: why should I, as an infidel, a democrat, an idolater, a father and a husband NOT be afraid of Islam?
See? For me that’s brief.
I’ve been saving this one for a slow paranoia day.
I don’t suppose it’s going to win me any female friends at all and maybe I’ll lose some of them, but still ”Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”
One of the bitter, sick and twisted joys of chillin wiv da social conservatives is how they expand your breadth of vision.
It turns out that not only are there many, many more and much scarier liberals than you could possibly imagine. They are also everywhere.
Even in the Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail for Fox’s sake.
And not only are they very numerous and daily setting ever higher Stakhanovite production records for new idiocies, but they all seem to be possessed by what Dumb Jon (who is to my mind Theodore Dalrymple’s vicar on Earth) calls an overwhelming sense of entitlement.
Here is an article which was first published 23rd February 2009 but destined to become a classic of libtard mouth-breathing lunacy for conservative sarcasm to play with wherever two or more hardcore curtain-twitching why-oh-whyers are gathered together in His name.
Elizabeth Stewart sets out to beat John Lennon’s timeless agglomeration of concentrated and yet catchy halfwittery; Imagine, the individualist Left’s equivalent of old Alexi’s 102 tons of coal personally mined in less than 6 hours.
It’s not just the entitlement that is remarkable here but her utter lack of empathy for or imagination about how ordinary readers might react to her tale of woe.
At best, I would guess, she might be able to feel our champagne, but this is definitely not how to win friends and influence people.
Why do women feel so ANGRY? Welcome to the age of female rage
By Elizabeth Stewart
Last week, I was woken at 2am by the unmistakable sound of vomiting. For a foolish split second, I waited to see if my husband, Johnny, would get up and see to Grace, our three-year-old daughter.
I'd been on my feet for 18 hours straight the previous day, giving a major presentation to one of my advertising company's most important clients. I hadn't got home until 10pm and was exhausted. I craved sleep the way an addict longs for his next fix.
No argument – parents get tired, and fathers should help with raising the family. Take a full part, I mean; not the odd nappy change. If they’re allowed, but you seem keen enough to have him involved
Johnny, on the other hand, had knocked off at 4pm - flexible hours being one of the benefits of working in IT - and arrived home in time to spend the evening playing with Grace.
Oh, dear. Absent or uninvolved father not present in your life. Is he in danger of muscling in on you all-girl time I wonder? And to knock off early with flexi-time means he has to make up the hours elsewhere. Or is he just better rewarded per hour than you and able to work less for more? Could happen. Could he work more and you work less on the same budget?
After the nanny had bathed her and put her to bed,…
Nanny?
…he'd cheerfully polished off the dinner I'd cooked for him the previous day and had an early night.
I could have woken him, of course, but a few days earlier, Grace had been taken ill at her new nursery school. They'd called to ask me to pick her up, but I'd been in a wretched meeting …
Work-life balance, hey? It’s a cliché these days and could there be an underlying reason it’s a cliché, I wonder?
…and had never got the message. Grace had cried for me for half the day before falling into an exhausted, red-cheeked sleep.
No argument with your feelings there – some children can be inconsolable when their mothers leave them. It’s just the way they’re made. Poor kid and poor you.
Still racked with guilt for not being there, I chastised myself for minding about her waking me and stumbled into the nursery, where I discovered she'd thrown up, in spectacular fashion, all over her cot. I cleaned her up, stripped and changed the sheets and put her back to bed.
That’s definitely a horrible thing to have to do, and I’ve done it myself many a time but not, I have to admit, nearly as often as the Mark One Mrs. Northwester did weekday nights. But mine was the only wage packet, so it kind of fitted at the time…
An hour later, she was sick again. This time, I brought her into our bed. When she threw up for a third time at 5am, even Johnny woke up.
But while I stripped beds again, wiped up more vomit and carted another armful of sheets to the washing machine, he collapsed on the sofa and promptly went back to sleep.
Obviously his desire for sleep and possibly to maintain his earning potential is way higher than his commitment to sharing parenthood fifty-fifty at all times with you. Perhaps you could fill us in on any agreements you made, the chronological order of your respective jobs starting, comparative earnings and the timing vis-a-vis your life together when you took the joint decision to have a child? Do such things matter at all, in any way, or does motherhood or indeed joint parenthood trump all other considerations?
Seething, I stalked into the kitchen and pulled some beef from the freezer. I might as well start preparing that night's dinner; I was too wide awake to go back to bed. I wouldn't have time to make anything that evening, since I'd promised my mother that I'd go over and help her fill her freezer.
Was it a good promise to make during the working week? Just asking, but is your mother a healthy and able one; sane and collected, or is she in some way disabled or troubled? I’d almost swear you’d tell us if she was, you know?
My mobile rang. It wasn't even light outside, but the Asian office was halfway through its business day. I was tempted to fling the phone in the washing machine with the sheets, but I can't afford to lose my job. Johnny and I need two salaries just to keep a roof over our heads.
Got to wonder how much the nanny costs and what other expenses you lump together under 'keeping a roof over your heads'. I mean, reading on later it appears that your breadline level is a little elevated compared to mine and many other people’s.
So I answered it, gritting my teeth and seasoning my stew, …
oh do tell us that you washed your hands between the vomit and the beef – it’s the cosy little domestic details that add flavour to these stories,
…wishing I could have another life, any life but mine.
Nigerian AIDs whore? Gazan child bride? Israeli orange farmer cowering in her air raid shelter as the Hamas rockets come over and make her children piss their pants again? Single mother on benefits not planning to become a meat people carrier permanently?
Any other life? Really?
Aside from my husband and baby daughter, I have a 13-year-old son at boarding school who I miss desperately and drive to see as often as the school permits...
Boarding school?
This is keeping the roof over your heads? I know that state schools are bad and getting worse, but maybe talking a high-powered sniper rifle to the National Union of Teachers Annual Conference might be fun? Nah.
…a 94-year-old grandmother in the West Country who lives for my visits once a fortnight…
You are a very good granddaughter, I admit. Really outstanding. No criticism intended here, not even subliminally.
…and an undomesticated, widowed mother.
Widowed after how long? She’s produced an intelligent daughter capable of working in business and writing lucidly (if with an autistic lack of empathy for any surviving housewives and other working mothers who might be reading the Daily Mail, I suspect). Is she sane and healthy, I ask again?
Can’t you make her a list of things to do and make her put the schedule of bills to pay, groceries to rotate, provide a recipe book and a few lessons and let her go it alone?
Switch the answer phone to silent – you’re dedicated to bringing up a tiny baby and working on your career; surely a sane and loving mother could have it explained to her…If not, what’s wrong with her? Really? Is it Alzheimer’s or inflexibility?
Or selfishness – selfishness has been known in mothers, you know.
There is an ex-husband who believes his schedule is far more important than mine and must always come first when we're divvying up our son's holidays,
Ex-husbands can be bastards this way and in many other ways, I know. And oddly enough, so can ex-wives; especially the ones with residence, but thank God for easy divorce – sometimes it makes sense to one or both parents I’m sure.
Not so sure for the kids, but hey…
Also: absentee fathers who never contact their children – are they worse or better than this chap, I wonder? Just wondering.
Do tell.
…and a French nanny who seems to think my job is to facilitate her social life.
French nanny. 'Keeping the roof over your heads'. Hmm.
I have a job that makes no allowances for the fact I have children who don't always get sick with three weeks' advance notice.
But you really love that job though, right?
Do you want someone too give you more money to hire more nannies or perhaps a locum to fill your desk a couple of hours a day at work. Who should pay in either case?
The boarding school and nursery assume I wait around at home with nothing to do but attend conferences and plays and sports events on their schedule.
The boarding school. Keeping the roof over your heads.
You’re not in charge of budget-setting at work, are you?
No wonder I'm filled with a permanent nebulous, undirected rage that my life has become a Gordian knot of obligations, responsibilities, guilt, duties and expectations.
No wonder at all.
I can't even go for a walk in the park without factoring in the needs of half a dozen people. I resent that every second of my day is owned by someone else.
I can see three sets of people you might consider extracting from your life permanently. The one with the mortarboard, the one with the starched apron and mop bonnet, and the undomesticated part of your mother. How much money to send her to cooking lessons?
Yes, I'm angry. I'm angry with a world that still doesn't acknowledge how hard women work, in and out of the workplace.
We acknowledge it.
Now, who’s the proper person or persons to pay to help you? Who is it fair to tax or whose bottom line is it fair to shrink down to help you out here?
I'm angry with men for dumping the childrearing problem in our laps.
Some men do so – many, I think.
For what it’s worth, even when the series of events that led to Mark One Mrs. Northwester acquiring that two word prefix came to a head, she never once blamed me for not spending enough time looking after Tiny Northwester. That was her task. Her only task towards the end, as it happened. She even blamed me for 9/11 during this one conversation…But not neglecting TNW: never that.
So, not ALL men, if you please.
I'm angry with women for refusing to admit it's too much, that we can't do everything all the time.
Well done,
Now what?
Don't get me wrong, I adore my husband. But there are times I could cheerfully strangle him simply for having the luck to be born a man.
I pleaded with Mark One Mrs. Northwester to get her very own 16-hour per day job to pay the mortgage and leave me to look after TNW 24/7 instead. Want to guess what she said? It was about motherhood being special.
"I'm filled with a permanent and undirected fury"
At 32, he's five years younger than me and, in many ways, very much a New Man. He talks about his feelings, rubs my feet, doesn't resent my earning capacity and worships the ground our daughter walks on.
But Johnny doesn't do vomit. Or nappies. Or snotty noses, chewing gum in hair, laundry, meal planning, name-tape sewing - in short, none of the dull, thankless micro-tasks that keep the family wheels oiled and running every day.
You work for an advertising agency with an Asian office. How are your negotiating skills?
Nor did my first husband, an unreconstructed City lawyer. It's as if men think the XX chromosome somehow bestows a knack for, and a degree of pleasure in, wiping bottoms and clearing up sick.
In the days when a woman stayed home to raise a family while a man went out to work to put bread on the table, this division of labour was fair enough.
I also agree that the tax and benefits system plus our awful socialized ‘education’ system have all but destroyed the possibility of being a housewife on anywhere near the incomes that working married women have. I hate it because I see the harm it does and always will do as it is presently constituted. Trashing all that via Parliament should be a priority for women such as you and many others.
So, how’s the feminization of politics going?
Okay, so you’re the bread winner. If Mark Two Mr.
But why these days, when women work just as hard as men outside the home, are they still responsible for pretty much everything that goes on in it?
How hard is it to learn to cook? (Boil the kettle, add pasta.) As that arch- chauvinist Jeremy Clarkson would say, it's not rocket science. But ask Johnny to cook peas and he'll forget to add water. I swear he does it on purpose so I don't ask again.
Ask again. Ask nicer. Ask louder. Ask through the spare room wall for night after night if you have to.
Feisty isn’t a gangster’s nickname you know.
On one memorable occasion last year, he rang me while I was in
New Man in what sense? Does he rub your feet because he thinks he’ll get lucky as that’s where babies come from, or does he think you’re a magic lamp or something? Are you sure he’s in IT, or does he just work shifts at Game between bouts of Tomb Raider? I think there’s something you’re not telling us or, much more likely, yourself.
But it's not Johnny I'm really angry with.
Maybe you should. Or maybe not. Maybe there’s something else or someone else or both to be angry with.
He's a loving, supportive, wonderful man.
Who won’t cook and who phones you in another country when there’s a locked door between him and Grace. Just who are you trying to convince here?
Perhaps I wouldn't mind his domestic helplessness so much if I wasn't being torn in so many different directions all the time.
We can see all that. But what recipe are you working to?
My job as a managing partner at a major advertising agency demands a huge amount of commitment, particularly in these tough economic times.
Ingredient number one.
Because I want to spend some time with my daughter lest she forgets who I am, I cram five days' work into four and take Friday afternoons off.
Ingredient number two.
In theory, that is. In reality, I find myself on a conference call to
Ingredient number two again.
I feel guilty that I'm not pulling my weight by being at the office –…
Ingredient number one again.
…even though I work just as hard and long as anyone else
Ingredient number one again.
- and I feel guilty because I'm not giving my daughter the 24/7, one- on- one time a fulltime mother would be able to.
Ingredient number two again. Is there a pattern here?
My mother grew up in a wealthy family who had servants to do all the boring tasks such as cooking and cleaning. She had enough sense to send me on a cordon bleu cookery course for a year before I went up to
Ingredient number three.
See my advice about her above and compare it with your previous sentence. I can’t help feeling she’s missing out on some fun new learning experience here.
Not that I mind, which, as Johnny is quick to point out if I complain I'm overwhelmed, is part of the problem.
Ingredient number four.
Unlike a man, I just can't seem to find it in me to say 'No'.
Ingredient number four. It’s the one the final Mrs. Northwester pointed out having read your article. She’s a self-conscious and determined feminist and I take her at her word on such matters as she’s the most honest person I’ve ever met. Saying ‘No’ is a skill you need to transfer from work, I think. You do have to say ‘No’ in advertising from time to time, don’t you?
One word answer only, please.
I love my mother. I want to help her. But there are times I wonder if she grasps just how complicated my life is. She never had to juggle work with a family and husband.
Ingredient number four.
I know I've had fantastic opportunities that she's been denied, but in some ways, it was much simpler for her.
Ingredient number four again.
My generation of women aren't having it all - we're doing it all.
Ingredient number four again.
It's a constant struggle to meet the demands of my various roles as wife, mother, daughter, colleague, lover, friend. I feel as if I short-change everyone all the time.
Ingredient number four again.
I never have a moment that's just mine.
Ingredient number four again.
Someone always wants a piece of me.
Ingredient number four again.
Yesterday, in the middle of a bikini wax,….
And yet, despite all she’s written so movingly so far, I almost lost my capacity to give a toss at this point.
Did you, dear reader?
…I had an urgent call from the office and had to orchestrate a crucial meeting on the other side of the world, biting my fists to stop yelping at the wrong moments.
That’s not an ingredient; it’s the penultimate course of this particular banquet, I’m afraid.
Frequently, as I reach for a file from my bag in the midst of a presentation, a pair of baby pants or a lollipop falls out. It hardly helps my image as a cool, collected professional. I watch the smug glances of the men around the table and want to slap them.
Let’s try a little mind game here, just to see what’d happen.
You’re feeling as you do and living as you do one day and it’s first thing in the morning after a sleepless night.
You have three containers which we will call: briefcase, slow cooker, and crib.
You have three items, which we will call: laptop, baby, and leg of lamb. Quickly and without thinking – are they in the right order or not? Hurry!
Recently, the Children's Society published a report lambasting modern women for being too selfish to be good mothers.
Are they kidding?
Perhaps not. Perhaps not. And yet…
I'd like to see the authors spend a week in my shoes.
Very cheap shoes, are they?
Most of my days are a near-precipice experience.
Ingredient number four again.
I'm so close to the edge that I'm in a semi-permanent state of panic. I have a constant list of things I have to do running through my head like a stock market ticker-tape
.
Is that ingredient number four again, or are we at the coffee and mints stage now?
What must it be like to live without the tyranny of the list? To sink into a bath and not be mentally composing tomorrow's agenda? What is it like to be a man and have nothing to think about but the task in hand?
No wonder the vast majority of our great scientists, thinkers and artists are men. Think how much room they must have in their heads without all the domestic clutter their wives are taking care of.
Am I angry? You haven't heard anything yet.
See, I’m a first husband myself and I bet my readers can infer part of why that might be by now.
They might be right.
But still and all, let’s assume that someone unconnected with your life and marriages was to come along and sincerely try to help you with it all and who didn’t want you to be stuck pregnant, barefoot and chained to the sink. What would they say? Someone whose patriarchal capitalist meme wasn’t to keep women down as cheap labour and out of the neo-colonialist phallocentric property-owning bellicist power structure. Another mother, perhaps. Not yours, obviously; but a working mother and professional such as my late mother was.
Or let’s pretend I’m that charming black bloke off the telly who sorts gormless peoples’ financial messes out for them.
Here’s a list that might just help.
# How big and expensive is your house and mortgage? Is there anything a clever professional couple can do about it?
# What’s the nearest good school where your son might commute to and still get an education? Is he truly happy out there in the countryside?
# Your husband won’t cook and phones you in another country when there’s a locked door between him and Grace.
# He’s on flexi time.
# You're an managing partner and business high-flyer. Does this indicate that you are persuasive at all?
# Your undomesticated mother sent you to school to learn domestic skills. She no longer has servants. Join the dots, girl.
# Apart from school fees and nanny’s wages and nursery fees and mortgage what do you both spend your money on? How many holidays and cars, and what sorts?
# Are you making pension contributions or are you planning on working forever?
# Is there any way of cutting costs, or rearranging some of your priorities or Johnny’s or both that might help you all somehow?
A New Age counsellor: bead-decked and organic vegan lentilled in all her hand-knit rainbow striped glory might ask:
* Are you treating anyone as other than a child here?
Your husband, for example: can he be trusted to react to reasonable requests for help without petulance, adultery and divorce?
Your mother?
Your nanny?
Yourself?
* Have you chosen wisely in all things, I wonder? Got your priorities right? Wanted it all, all at once?
* Nobody’s indispensable, dear, but how would all these pampered children cope if you collapsed from stress right now, and how would little Grace and your boy manage once the insurance paid out?
And a nasty social conservative like me might ask:
~ What are you like to work for
~ Have you bitten off more than you can chew following the Cosmopolitan feminist dream?
~ Are you sure that high-paid work for you with all that it buys is better than less well paid work and an absence of guilt?
~ You’re a moral agent, an adult, and not a child. Act accordingly. Try saying ‘No.’
~ And if you’re right all the way through and the world does owe you everything all at once, including the ability to achieve superhuman acts of balance and strength, by whom and how is the world to compensate you for your loss?
~ How does Johnny feel about being exposed to the world by your article, and your mother and your son? Bet they all can read. But sometimes, you’ve just got to let it all out, right? Especially for a fee…
~ If you say you can’t do anything differently because you need it all and it’s unfair of a man to ask you to give something up, well okay then.
Let’s assume some state in which you have it all. Your work/life balance is fine, your husband is taking his share, the office has adjusted to your odd hours and your mother’s remarried to competent cook and book-keeper. The new headmaster’s a sweetie who only bothers you when you have the time and your ex husband wins the lottery and so can fit in with any holiday plans of yours for contact with your boy. Time is tight but you’re well organised and you and Johnny even have a few hours’ privacy a week to get you several of the things that you kindly haven’t been mentioning so far. All is well.
Is it possible for you to mess it up with one more pleasure/demand on your time and energy? A horse of your own, perhaps, or a lover? Another baby? You do know where they come from, right? What would make you entitled to more under those circumstances, and who would have to copper up to support you?
~ So if it's theoretically possible to make a perfect life worse by asking for too much from it in the future, what’s to say you haven’t already done it now?
Oh, and to go all Jane Austen for a moment…
You’re wearing yourself out trying to do it all: sleep deprived and you sleep alone sometimes and you’re out of the house a lot of the time. Your husband’s on flexi time, five years younger, not knackered, and you have a French nanny around the house?
Do try to keep up.
This is my most frequently-read post to date, and fans of social schadenfreude might want to read this one, too.
