FEMINISM

 

                                                    What's the point of a

                                                     Movement that's stuck 

                                                     Standing static

                                                     Knocking down the glass

                                                     Ceiling and building on an attic.

                                                                                                               Len Pennie

History seems to bear out the notion that global movements tend to start going off the rails almost as soon as they gather speed. Much Irish blood over many many years was shed, for example, in pursuit of Irish independence, only for a newly freed Ireland to put itself in the hands of the Irish church, a regime almost as repressive as the British one it had just sloughed off. Ireland broke the ceiling that shut it off from daylight, and then proceeded to build on an attic. 

The same could be said for communism: Karl Marx made the observation that Feudal societies tend to evolve into Capitalist ones, and then eventually resolve into Socialism. The movement is from power for the few to power for the people/ (Just for the record, it was not his aim for anyone to shuttle this process along. He was just saying.) But Communism as it developed  (largely by a bunch of men) quickly turned into a hell scape of oligarchy where the people had next to no power. 

Going further back, Christianity started off as a non-militant movement all about loving your neighbour as yourself, a sort of Peace, Love and Tie-Dye of its day. Its leader, this man named Yeshua, became a bit of a cult leader in his day, probably not something he really wanted to be and which eventually came up against the Roman Empire. Twenty years later, a well-educated Jew, by the name of Paul of Tarsus, who did not live in Israel, nor did he speak its language, somehow took charge of the Jesus movement and turned it into something entirely different: a sort of cross and guilt cult that evolved into the mainstream religion celebrated today. Love the Lord your God with all your heart transmuted into Amazing Grace. 

You can probably see where this argument is going, but first let me say that I consider myself a feminist and have throughout my life stood up for women and tried to forge a way forward out of the patriarchy's hold on the last, say, five thousand years. I feel nothing but proud for the way women wrested themselves free from a global culture formed for and by men. When I was a teenager, I was told by a male teacher that I was really clever, head and shoulders above the rest, and if I worked hard, I might even one day become a secretary. Yep. I had never heard of feminism in my rural Scottish upbringing, but I hope the steam coming out of my ears gave my teacher something to think about. Because I never for once thought of slipping into some meagre career in service of the male hierarchy. I saw myself as a writer, and that's what I have become. The heroines in my fiction are strong, self-motivated people who give domineering men short shrift. 

Now, I am 65. The women's movement has changed a lot during my lifetime. The first impulse of women on the way out of the patriarchy, was to take the "successful male" model for themselves. Anything you can do, I can do better, has sort of become the motto and rallying cry. So women traded in their aprons for busniess suits and showed the world that there actually was no fuzz in their brains (a fact that the American voter is very slow to appreciate!) They ran corporations and broke glass ceilings. And that was great. It was, except that this freedom they garnered wasn't really free. It had been built by and for the structures of the male psyche. The Lakotah word for a hermaphrodite means, literally, "wants to be woman." And this version of feminism you might call "wants to be man." But why would you? You're woman, with a whole different psyche, one that nurtures and draws others into that ancient and sacred  symbol of the circle. It's a psyche much less likely to become toxic; it might save the world yet. But not along the track it is currently on. Anything you can do.....

It's hard. The idea of woman, which had been for so long in our evolution regarded as sacred in itself, the life-giver, the heartbeat of the earth, the wise woman, was brought under a new ceiling of shame. Man, as is his want, colonised woman, and from there took over leadership of everything our communal life depends upon: politics, economics, philosophy, the arts, the sciences, medicine. The medicine women, the elders of old, the weavers of stories, the healers and midwives were shunted off into the realm of the "old wive's tale." 

If this all sounds anti-man, please believe me, it is not. I have a male partner and a son. As a heterosexual woman, I have a natural gravitational pull towards man. Of course, when I talk about "men," I don't mean every single instance. I mean what is generally so about the sex. It is generally so that men have been behind any war you can bring to mind. It has to do with their general territorialism. It is easier to train men to kill, because their brains have the ability to compartmentalise, to see the enemy in the "enemy box," dehumanised and a threat.  The trajectory that leads away from the sacred circle runs along the lines of an ever tightening ego-circle. The way women are, they would be much more likely to connect with the enemy, to draw them in and negotiate. 

So, individual men are not the problem. But the patriarchy is, and the women's movement hasn't always had its specs on when evaluating how much that mindset still plays out in our lives. Motherhood, for instance, the stay-at-home mum, is still regarded with derision, as though if women had anything going on in their brains, they would do something more productive. Women, after a century of fighting for their rights, are still taking men's names. Go figure. And these days, its the worst of male sexuality that the liberated female has brought to live in the attic. The anthropologist and mythicist the late Joseph Campbell talks about the role of the "vision quest" in more "primitive" societies to lift that male psyche out of the individual ego. As Campbell points out, there's nothing like that in the west. The normalizing of pornography in western culture is Exhibit A. In this thinking of the male ego, you can bypass a women's humanity and use her on a page or screen as an object of desire. She may have been horribly abused all her childhood. She may have been sex-trafficked. But for what that adolescent ego demands in the moment, she fits the bill. 

I know, I will be counted an old un-liberated fuddy-duddy for thinking that feminism has gone off the rails. I know I will be told that any judgement against what a woman wants to do is a form of anti-feminism. I know this, because I have been told it.  I am far from being a wise woman myself, but perhaps the young ears can hear and maybe consider that woman has so much more to offer than an other version of man.  The wise women in Native American tribes formed the councils, out of which the "chiefs" were elected. It was a check and balance system. As DH Lawrence put it, it was those that were "hen sure" keeping an eye on those who were "cock sure." But the first act of the liberated "cock sure" was to make sure the hens were kept in the hen house. These days, a hen house with an attic.

Woman power is entirely different from ego power. The sacred circle is profoundly spiritual and wise and is capable of envisioning a whole new world. We don't need business suits. We need to break down the structure that holds these vehicles of detachment as prizes to be earned. We don't need  the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world with her shelves of dildos and vibrators. Anything you can do, we can do...yes, but we can do it entirely differently.  A shift needs to happen, an attic needs to be dismantled. I hope we can glimpse the vision of the wise woman in her sacred circle before she glides off the page. I hope we can run our fingers through the indentations she made in the sand, and reclaim the sky. 

LITERARY PC

 The opening two lines of my recently published novel, Mrs. McPhealy's American, read thus: "Every village has its idiot. Locharbert in Scotland had three." 

Now readers seem to have one of two reactions to this. On the one hand, people will tell me, "You had me in the first two lines!" These readers think this is a funny observation. On the other hand are the readers who are offended that I would make reference to "idiots" at all. These readers dismiss the book before they have even started. Claire McDougall, author, is to be relegated to Coventry, a highly occupied zone these days. So, let me give my defence for opening my book this way.

First of all, I am not pulling the notion of a village idiot out of thin air. It's an age-old concept. From time to time, I see someone wearing a T-shirt that has the following written across the chest; Your village called. They are missing their idiot. I find that mildly offensive, I have to admit. It is distasteful because the intention there is to cut another down. However, it is made in jest. It is teasing, not something used much in American culture. When I first came to the USA, I would "tease" someone, only for that person to take what I had said as a serious accusation. For instance, to a woman concerning her overbearing husband, I might say, "Don't forget to put the arsenic in his tea." I could easily say this in front of him, because it is said as a joke, and that's what jokes are for. All jokes hold an element of truth, otherwise they wouldn't be funny. The jester to the kings and queens of old fulfilled this function: nudging a person in power towards a truth through the vehicle of laughter is a vital role. something we could surely use these days in this climate of deadly serious and polarising politics. 

When I handed the script for Mrs. McPhealy's American to one editor, she warned me that some readers might find this opening reference to idiots unacceptable. I refused to take it out, however, because I don't see it that way. But to appease her, I quickly followed those two lines with a phrase that rebranded these three idiots as sages. Anyone who has gone to the trouble of actually reading my novel, cannot come away with the feeling that my aim was to denigrate these three brothers in a small Scottish town. On the contrary, these characters are my Greek chorus. It is they who know what is really going on in the town. All the history and undercurrent of the town has filtered down into these three, and I use them to tell the reader what is really so, especially when appearances would suggest otherwise. In other words, they are a literary device. And I use the well worn metaphor of a village idiot to set it in place.

There you have it. As with so much of the cancel culture we live in, it helps to widen the lense and not throw out the baby with the bath water, to use another metaphor. In my own country, I have this problem with women who won't countenance the great Scottish poet Robert Burns anymore, because he was a fabled womaniser with a slew of illegitimate children who once penned the memorable line about "fucking [a woman] until she rejoiced." Harvey Weinstein, his accusers bellow! No, I say quietly. The man was born in the mid-eighteenth century. Largely because of Christianity, women at the time had little agency. Robert Burns gave them them some.  I wouldn't have wanted to be married to the man, but he also wrote this beautiful line, "but to see her is to love her, and love but her forever; her nature made her what she is and never made another." Again, the context matters.  I'll be the first to admit that Burns had his flaws, though he was not a fraud, but if we were to dismiss him for not fitting into the mores of toady, we would rob history (more particularly Scottish history) of some great literature. And it's not as though we are incapable of balancing two contradictory impressions. 

To get back to Mrs. McPhealy and the idiots. They shall remain, because they represent this point. They may be lacking in what scholars would regard as intelligence, but my precise point is that there is more to a human than his or her IQ score. As I have written in other books, that kind of intelligence is highly overrated and has got humanity into some serious pickles. The quiet knowing that I write about in my book is far more the measure of the man. And definitely more the measure of the woman.