No need for men
Roy Kerridge Jdo not often go to the pictures, but last year I set a new record by going twice. The first time was in Southall, where I saw an Indian film, Suraj, a gorgeous spectacle of adventure, romance, colour and music. Made in Madras, Suraj had no English subtitles, which only slightly obscured the plot for me, as romance and adventure and the battle between Good and Evil are the same everywhere, Palaces, peacocks, flowers and princesses dazzled my senses. There were villains too, in- cluding an old hag who deceived a rajah by swapping babies. She was paid in gold and met with instant retribution when she drop- ped the coins into a vat. Out sprang a cobra which bit and killed her instantly. The hero, a bandit prince, could never be shown kiss- ing the heroine, but made up for this by kissing his faithful horse and elephant in- stead, whenever possible I walked out of the cinema, with its Chinese pagoda roof and gilded dragons, feeling a finer and a better man.
Some months later, when in Brixton, I was induced to see another film, Some American Feminists. Also in colour, this was a documentary featuring Kate Millett and some others whose names I forget, all talking about Women's Lib. Nearly all of them traced their conversion to this philosophy back to their university days in the Sixties, when they were involved in the senseless student insurrections they referred to as 'the Revolution'.
Flashbacks in black and white showed this Revolution: frenzied, - dangerous- looking young men in their prime of life hurled themselves in wave upon wave at equally tough policemen who beat them back with enormous swagger-sticks. Despite being well able to take care of themselves, the police looked shaken at fin- ding such ferocity in so unexpected a quarter. Somewhere behind their menfolk, egging them on with wild shrieks, were the future Women's Libbers.
Twelve years later, in colour once more, they looked tired, broken and bitter. The love affairs begun in '68 had gone wrong, and no wonder. Young men who had seem- ingly gone out of their minds, and lost all sense of discipline and morality, could not have been expected to make considerate, loving husbands. None of the American feminists seemed to remember their own childhoods — they were 'born again' from a baptism of fire and tear gas, and could only develop their philosophies from the false premise of student revolt. Once they had believed in free love, like their boyfriends, but their boyfriends had proved unfaithful and had deceived them. The Revolution had seemed to promise that its children would be a new kind of person. This promise was kept. Young men, veterans of the barricades, grew into very unpleasant people, surprising their mild `liberal' parents. Instead of remembering the pre-revolutionary idyll, when 'grown- ups' seemed stable and responsible, the American feminists simply concluded that all men were no good. A simple creed, which now sums up the whole philosophy of Neo-Feminism or Women's Lib.
'I used to think it was just my men who were jerks, but now I realise that all men are jerks!' one woman complained. Kate Millett and others, looking weary and pathetic, claimed that they had learned to live without any male companionship at all. Some spoke in faltering tones of the hap- piness they had found with lovers of their own sex. Lesbianism, it was implied, was the answer to life, and men should simply be left to their own wicked devices. Our own university wars have never equalled those of America, but our 'sexual revolu- tion' of the late Sixties has left each Sex disillusioned with the other.
There were few men in the audience, and as I trailed out among crowds of earnest, short-haired women, I felt sad that the ideals of youth, copied from America as usual, should be ending in literal sterility. Left-wing traditions had now evolved into `gay politics' by a tortuous route, from the road to Russia to a road to nowhere. Gay Lib seems the male counterpart of Women's Lib, and both, if successful in their aims, would lead to the extinction of the human race. Some Women's Libbers have thought of this, and believe the future lies in lesbian couples adopting children or becoming fertilised by artificial means.
Each new generation of Leftists believes it the last, avoiding 'conditioning' and creating a race of earthly gods. The latest
t1t t idea, that children should be brought up in a manless world, has this objection to it — that some of the children will be potential men themselves, or, in other words, boys. Boys are the flies in the feminist ointment, and as often as not they are told by their mothers that they are a doomed, useless race, and irredeemably evil. Resentful, they band together and tend, when older, to regard the fair sex not as companions but as prey. Thus it is that Women's Lib per- petuates itself, Many West;Indian women are natural or unwitting feminists, as their husbands or boyfriends often believe in free love without benefit of Shelley. Their problems should act as a warning to the progressive filmgoers who visit Brixton for its cinemas' Mothers denounce men fiercely to their daughters, who take up the chorus at an early age, and drive the boys in the family to sulks, tantrums and the feeling that as they are supposed to be so rotten they might as well be rotten. In their turn, these boys may be irresponsible, absentee fathers, and so the despairing or aggressive feminism c't the women continues down the ages. Now white intellectuals, inspired by American fashions, are jumping on the bandwagon. Considerate young men, who don't want 10 join the wolves, are often driven into 'gay politics' as the only fashionable alternative in a feminist world.
Upper Street, Islington, has become the fashion parade of the newest New Lefts, those 'into gay politics', male or female. Homosexual discussion groups abound there, the 'gay politicians', with their bald heads, beards and glasses, looking more like absent-minded professors than dab- blers in exotic vices. In the course of a short walk along this extraordinary street, I found a pub, The King's Head, whose prices were in old money, rung up on an or- nate gilt cash register. Instead of being a High Tory haunt, as you would suppose, it was a bastion of Libs, nuclear disarmament and anti-Thatcherism. A little further on was a Maltese dive where tough men sat playing cards, a villains' pub, a country arid, western pub and a feminist bookshop called `Sisterwrite'.
Here I found fresh confirmation that Women's Lib does not mean sharing and partnership between men and women, but the total abolition of men. Upstairs, to what was supposedly a research centre, I found a café. Pleasantly surprised, ordered a cup of tea. 'We don't serve meor all the feminists roared at me in joyous triumph. I reeled from the premises, looking in vain for an Indian cinema to restore InY, spirits. We too have our tales of princes and princesses, true love and derring-do. May we never emulate the poor American feminists and forget our childhoods in favour of our more turbulent college daYs. Let romance bloom, and let us leave the Libs behind.
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