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DORIS LESSING
loving proclivities is not only nonsense, it is in fact the mirror image of
"my wife is better than I am; women are better than men." Whether said
by men or women, it is a way of not actually looking at anything
clearly. Edward Hall, for example, author of
The Silent Language,
cited
the fact that American diplomats going to Iran under the Shah were in–
structed to reverse all the ideas that we have about the sexes. The men in
Iran, they were told, are sensitive, poetry-loving, weep, hold hands in
public, embrace, publicly suffer, and generally speaking are very weak
characters compared to the women, who have all the characteristics of
our men - who are strong and tough.
Perhaps we become what we are pushed into being or what we are
surrounded by. We are infinitely flexible. This whole way of looking at
people - black people, old people, young people, women, men - in
terms of what divides us instead of what we have in common is one of
the biggest mistakes we can make. What they don't have in common
tends to be something temporary and sociologically conditioned. For
example, my mother's way of looking at the world, my way of looking
at the world, my daughter's way of looking at the world, and the girls'
in their twenties currently living in my house - they couldn't possibly be
more different. It is because of the enormous changes made in society by
technology. We are very fluid characters and our positions are fluid.
Women have internalized the notion that they are inferior, and that
is why they talk about "positive discrimination." What this slogan means
is that women should be permitted to write badly and should not be
criticized for it. Voluntarily taking the role always allotted to them by
men: that of second-rate artists. Women are licensing themselves, because
of their long history, to be what men have said they are. I am not criti–
cizing women publishers. We have two of the best, for example, in
London - one is Virago and one is The Women's Press. I do wonder if
this pattern of separating men and women weren't so deep inside us,
could things have been done differently? Would they have been better or
worse? I don't know. The separation sometimes goes off into total lu–
nacy. At this very moment in England, an American feminist is running
around telling women that they shouldn't ever read any male writers.
This is a very terrible thing. Hearing of this kind of thing, many women
think, oh my God, I don't want to have anything to do with this. I'm
not a feminist! they say. They do not want to be associated with this
kind of nonsense.
I recently read a long and very solemn article by a woman, saying
that irony was a bourgeois thing and should not be used by women,
blacks, and the working class. Well, the first thing you know about this
woman is that she is a politico, because it is only politicos who prescribe
for whole groups of people what they should be doing. The idea that
