Locker-room Legacies - Julian Barnes (copyright probably The Observer, probably late 1970s)

A WIDELY cultivated, politically liberal and largely honest acquaintance of mine remarked the other day, during a conversation about sexual equality, ‘I’m all in favour of women’s liberation: it puts a lot more pussy on the market.’ If he’d said, ‘I’m all in favour of blacks breeding faster than whites: it means we won’t run short of bus drivers,’ those present might have been shocked, or at least thought him striving for a jauntily subversive effect. As it was, there was a burst of complicit male laughter, and that hiss of relief at the voicing of a generally unspoken group truth. The women’s movement in this country, which ought to have produced the most far-reaching post-war social revolution, has so far failed with many classes and types of women: with working-class women, upper-class women, and middle-class conservatives; with those daunted by their own freedom, those already awed and tamed by men, with gold-diggers and outflanked hausfraus. It has been disgracefully trivialised by the Press, paid token homage to by broadcasting, betrayed by agitators for the ‘return of the feminine woman,’ and unhelpfully falsified by its more extreme package-thinker members. But it’s failed nowhere more spectacularly than with men — and in particular with educated, liberal-progressive men whom one might have expected to acknowledge its self-evident truths. Can you, for a start, name a single significant male contributor to the debate on women’s rights. Parliament has removed most of the legal and economic hobbles from women. A bit more tidying up, and they will finally have achieved theoretical equality: that is to say, they will have obtained the sort of official protection from discrimination that Catholics achieved after the Catholic Emancipation Act, or that blacks have obtained from the past decade or so of legislation. But no one can seriously claim that blacks are significantly better treated by whites in our society; and there’s little evidence either that men now treat women with significantly more fairness, kindness or understanding. Locker-room chat isn’t confined to locker-rooms; and it’s a more depressingly reliable indicator of what men really think about women than is their pillow- or table-talk. Its current tenor is also a sign that it will take more than a 10- or 15-year burst of polemic to establish in the averagely sapient man a gut feeling of sexual equality. It can’t, indeed, take less than a whole generation: gut feelings can’t be transplanted any more easily than guts, and sexual prejudices are dismayingly tenacious. So the generation of men whom one might expect to be flexible and sympathetic to the women’s movement — those, say, under 50 — are still, for all their libertarian reading, encumbered by the sexual attitudes implanted in their youth. The underground — and often the official — lore of their sex stated that men were dominant, aggressive, predatory, and promiscuous; and they reflexly take as universal facts the circumscribed values of their own adolescence. The sad truth is that, while for most women bed means love and sex, for most men it means love, sex and power. Women tend to philander from lack of love; men philander from a near-military sense of responsibility to their sex’s concept of itself, and as a constant, nervy testing of their own sexual power. And when it comes to power, and the renunciation of power, there is one sure rule: those with it don’t give it up unless and until it is forcibly taken away from them. The parallel with political power is direct. Who — except a freakish intellectual - has ever been argued into giving up political power when he doesn’t have to; and give it up, moreover, for the sake of an abstraction, a principle? The idea is ludicrous. So with sexual power: who would give it up unless he had to? Power is nice, thrilling per se; it brings privileges and the heady pleasure of dispensing largesse in one’s turn; it makes one bigger, better, wiser, stronger — doesn’t it? And then, on a cynical level, there is this subversive argument: since I won’t get any credit from most other men for behaving well and yielding up my power, why shouldn’t I continue to behave as I do now? In “The Female Eunuch” Germaine Greer remarked that women failed to understand how much men hated them. If hate sounds too polemically strong to be true, then try these words for what men do to women in their daily encounters with them: patronise, trivialise, colonise. In the old, traditional lexicon of sexual commerce, language reflected the power structure: there were no feminine equivalents for words like cuckold. In the sexual vocabulary of the seventies, there are no feminine equivalents for words like: ballbreaker, slag, cockteaser, score, nymphomaniac. Getting it right isn’t a matter of waiting for women to produce an answering vocabulary of contempt; it means waiting for the scorn, condescension and sporadic hate which generate that male vocabulary to wither away. It isn’t going to happen quickly.