The knowledge passed from mother to daughter should be a beautiful thing, but often it’s ugly. The undertow of what women pass on is to stop us going under. “Ask who it is,” I tell my teenage daughter, before she answers the door, “especially when you are on your own”. I don’t say anything more. I don’t want her to think everything is a threat. I just want her to be “sensible”.
Bad stuff still happens to sensible women and I speak as an insensible one. God knows I wonder about the times I didn’t fight back or say anything, because of fear, tiredness or wanting to be considered “fun”. All of this has been put down to experience. Them’s the breaks. You live with the past. You live with the present. Where shall I sit on the tube to avoid being targeted? Where can I walk? Must I smile at the idiot innuendo from an optician when I get my eyes tested? Must I continue to work in places where men are humoured by women far cleverer than them?
Now, in these days of competitive bad sex, some younger women are speaking openly about this. And it chills my generation to the bone because we had to repress so much, and maybe we are envious that they won’t be shamed by it. That they expect something better. We did once, too, but sometimes some of us wanted a quiet life, even though we didn’t know how to have it.
Nigella Lawson, who has hardly had a quiet life, addressed this when she spoke at the weekend about how, in shunning overtures from men, women of her generation “were always told we mustn’t make a man feel bad about anything”.
It’s not you, it’s me, we learned to say. It’s not you who must get out of the way/not rape me/give me a pay rise, it’s me who shouldn’t be here, who shouldn’t have got in the car with you, who shouldn’t have been asking for it. Modulated subservience is still considered something to aspire to. Look at how Meghan Markle is being domesticated into it as women twice her age curtsey before her. Airlines are still marketed with female air crew as flying geishas. The ultra-groomers of Instagram and YouTube police femininity, teaching niceness, cleanliness and sunniness as top female virtues.
All of this is in denial of the discourse of “safety” that young women have to internalise. Don’t walk that way, don’t answer back, stay together, I always say to my girls. Some young women learn self-defence, so that when the attack comes they may kick and run. My eldest daughter gave me a list that had been circulating at college of what rapists go for. Apparently, they like ponytails, since they can be grabbed.
What lies beneath Nigella’s comments is fear of what some men do. Dead women, after all, are not just the stuff of nightmare but the centrepiece of much popular fiction. There is, indeed, cultural acquiescence that the rape and murder of women is entertainment.
Recently, I was on a foreign trip with a photographer who had been on a “hostile environments” training course, learning what do to if kidnapped in a war zone. I listened to the instructions about how to kick your way out of a car boot or through a windscreen, marvelling at all this advice, which is way more dramatic than anything I have told my daughters. But I felt sad, too. I realised how I had tried to prepare them for the hostile environment that, for girls, is everyday life.
Ukip may be imploding, but the forces that drove it haven’t gone away
The implosion of Ukip has got many people through the misery of dry January. The demise of a party with racist policies led by would-be badger strangler Henry Bolton, who has left his wife and new baby for a girlfriend who has made racist remarks, has filled us with joy. No one knew who he was before this jaunt. What happened to Paul Nuttall and the woman Farage Judas-kissed?
Unfortunately, none of this means the forces that drove Ukip have gone away. The toad that is Aaron Banks lurks in the background. Farage seeks headlines by suggesting both a second referendum and that he will start another party. In this period of drift, no one knows when the next election will be and Labour is not exactly making a concerted effort to court that vote. But it will go somewhere. The idea that all of this has been incorporated back into the Tory party … well, I am not so sure.
The Ukip leader in waiting seems to me to be Jacob Rees-Mogg. He is, after all, “a character”, still fighting with the French people of a previous century. His antediluvian social attitudes – anti-choice, stronger enforcement of immigration rules – are surely in line with Ukip and he is as much a man of the people as Farage ever was. Surely he could take a spin as leader, since it’s hardly a job for life, more of an unsupervised work placement.
The relationship between Ukip and the Tory party has utterly skewed the political landscape. This is why the joke doesn’t feel very funny. The focus on “personalities” obscures what is really going on and, though it pains me to say this, we still need to take Ukip, in whatever incarnation it appears, very seriously indeed.
A face made of stories
So rarely do we see a woman who does not acquiesce to the male gaze that we want to stand up and cheer when we do. Frances McDormand is stunning in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The director, Martin McDonagh, said he wanted her to be like John Wayne or Marlon Brando. And there she is: righteous, angry, grieving, murderous, maternal. Everything is there in her mobile “rubber” face, as she calls it. And, yes, I am aware that the movie has been criticised for its treatment of black characters as vehicles for the white characters’ moral arcs. Nonetheless, McDormand deserves every award she is getting.
A tiny movement around the mouth and McDormand shows you that her world has changed. It’s everything. To Botox that away would be a sin. This is a face made of stories. Stories that we need to see.
