DECEMBER 2024
This month, inspired by two fairly recent TV shows, I find myself drawn back to a favourite topic. The first show is Spanish and is called Machos Alfa, which doesn’t need a translation, does it? It’s a comedy and improves as the writers get to know their characters and become bolder with their subject matter. Even so, I was surprised when one of the male leads, having just been unfairly sacked, decides on the spur of the moment to claim that he’s a woman. I think he actually says, “I feel like a woman.” Now, I don’t know where you stand on the idea that your gender is whatever you decide it is at any particular point in time, but I still find it surprising that so few people ask what “feeling like a woman” actually means.
As someone who has always regarded himself as a man, I used to think that only a woman – by which I suppose I mean someone of the female sex – could know what it feels like to be one. This is obviously an issue for me (though hardly a serious one) since I have female characters and I often write from their point of view, but I think the question leads to a curious contradiction in the feminist thinking I grew up with.
The first of the two conflicting ideas was that men and women were essentially the same (away with all that “different dominant parts of the brain” hogwash!), which meant that women were therefore perfectly equipped to do all the jobs traditionally associated with men; and the second was that with more women in positions of power – in both the public and private spheres – things would improve because they would bring “female values” to the job! (Initiatives like the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp at the cruise missile site in the early eighties seemed to support this argument, while people like Thatcher were regarded as exceptions to the rule who had been “forced” to be tougher than the men around them in order to triumph in a “man’s world”, despite the fact that many of her male colleagues commented on her particularly “female” style of management!)
But if women and men are essentially the same, what we’re talking about here are simply values traditionally associated with women, which would presumably be lost if girls were brought up in exactly the same way as boys. Alternatively, to make the world into a better place, instead of girls learning not to cry and how to compete like boys, one option would be to bring up both boys and girls as if they were girls! I guess that’s where the trend to scrap competition in schools (and stop everyone from playing football!) came from. Thus, feminism wasn’t about changing women at all; it was entirely about changing men. The logical conclusion would be the disappearance of the concept of “female values” and the proportion of women and men in power would become irrelevant in terms of the way things were run. (It would still matter to ambitious women and men, of course.)
Unfortunately, there’s another problem. It’s highlighted in a second series I’ve just enjoyed watching, this time from Argentina and entitled Envidiosa. It features a female protagonist who is nearing forty and desperate to get married – but to the “right kind of man”. Aha! She has a great relationship with a guy who lives nearby, you see, but he’s just not marriage material. Why not? I think we can summarise it in one word: status. And now that I cast my mind back, even the – quite radical – feminist friends I had when I was young fit this pattern: they either married men with a higher professional status, or they stayed single and seemed to find it harder and harder to identify candidates who were up to scratch. Men, in contrast, seem to continue settling down with women they find attractive, and vice
versa, irrespective of their backgrounds, money in the bank or career prospects. (Some of us also like it if our partners continue to laugh at our jokes.)
I would go as far as to argue that most men who seek status – power and money – do so at least partly because we think we need to in order to attract women. And while I sympathise with the women who get stressed out trying to be the perfect wife and mother and have the perfect career, I feel that the last of those requirements is a case of those women putting pressure on themselves. I find it hard to believe that their parents, partners and kids expect it of them. The pressure on a man to “succeed”, on the other hand, probably comes from every living generation in his family – not to mention elements of his partner’s family! And it lasts until he’s ready for the scrap heap, which can turn retirement into a serious challenge for men who have learned to define themselves in terms of their job and status. (This also applies to women, of course, my own mother being an example).
So, has anything changed as a result of the feminist wave that seemed to be sweeping through the Western world in the seventies and onwards (affecting a tiny minority of the global population, if we’re honest)? Would it be unfair to say, in summary, that women these days have higher expectations and are a bit more ambitious, while men aren’t as spoiled as we used to be but are considerably more confused than when we were boys?
Whether instinctively or because of the way we were brought up, I think most men still identify with the males of different species beating the crap out of each other to attract a mate in the Obama-narrated series Our Oceans. And I certainly don’t see many of the female sea-dwellers saying, “I prefer the quiet one in the corner who’s looking on with that is-this-really-necessary? expression on his face.” And while I have every respect for men who aren’t happy with the traditional male role assigned to them, I’m still not clear what anyone deciding to “be a woman” really means to them or anyone else.
All of which kind of leads to my current favourite fictional couple Zeb and Joplin (he’s a geek and she’s a tough guy) and book news, so let’s go there quickly before I sign off or you fall asleep. The bad news is that A Martian Ending, the fourth novel in the series, is going to be delayed until the start of February (perhaps with an advance review copy out there in January). It’s probably not a bad thing. You’ll have all the books you acquired over Christmas to read. Anyway, it can’t be helped; I’ve discovered that my editing team have lives. Good for them! And it’s given me the chance to take Zeb and Joplin – fresh from their trials on Callisto – on a trip to Neptune with what appears to be a deadly cargo! Murder mystery in space! Another freebie for you in March or April!
Meanwhile, here’s a sneak peek at the cover for the upcoming Martian novel:
