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PARTISAN REVIEW
Not least depressing is that this kind of thing was thought of by the
Cruel Sisters as
political
action.
The other day a group of women on one television channel were
complaining about men's rudeness to them, and on another a woman was
saying that all men are slimebags.
Could we have foreseen this efflorescence of crude stupidity? Yes,
because every mass political movement unleashes the worst in human
behavior and admires it. For a time at least.
It
certainly hasn't been easy to be a feminist these last thirty years.
Now Englishmen, if possible an even more embattled subject than
American men: Englishwomen perennially sit around complaining about
Englishmen. They don't really like women, they don't really like sex.
Englishwomen go searching for true love among their compatriots but
then often find it with men not English. It is not unknown for
Englishwomen to take themselves abroad to find lovers, "just to remind
myself that I am still a woman." Which hints at the real trouble, which is
really a lack not of the thump thump of sex but the approaches to it. But
surely these unromantic Englishmen are only the counterpart of the sis–
terly, comradely, straightforward women who, if they knew how to use
female wiles, would despise them?
They are homosexuals, comes the plaint; it is because of those all-male
schools they go to. But I think Englishmen are the most romantic men in
the world, and this is precisely because of their incarceration in boys'
schools, aged seven, to sob their hearts out for mummy night after night,
with their heads beneath the bedclothes. There is nothing like early child–
hood deprivation for creating people (men and women) who fall drastically
and repeatedly for out-of-reach loves. Some spend their lives with their
romantic imaginations inhabited by unobtainable loves. Yet when they are
at last matched, they are the best lovers, the most intelligent, and-most
important-the funniest. What is wrong with Englishmen is not that they
hate women, or even do not like them, but that their impressionable years
were spent entirely with males. Life in a male public school is harsh. "If you
have been in English public school, then prison life, or being a hostage, is a
mere bagatelle"-we have heard this again recently. And if public schools
are less brutal and bullying than they were, these places are still, above all,
hierarchies and structured like armies. Mter years of growing up in a nar–
row slot of humanity, at first desperately homesick and then learning
emotional coldness; of finding some kind of warmth in sex with other boys
or in intense emotional friendships...they escape to romantic love with
women, powered by memories of the destitutions of their childhood and
adolescence. And they grow older, marry or not, and there is always some–
thing missing, and it is the companionship of men. Women married to
