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Don’t upset ‘the Sisters’

Scared of sexists? Try upsetting the feminists

Sarah Vine

Wednesday, 19th September 2007

How the author came up against censorious feminists

Many aspects of the female condition are not ‘fair’. Always having to put the loo seat down before you go for a pee, for example, or dealing with a frankly psychotic set of hormones, or not being able to get your partner to gestate a baby for you while you fly off on a series of vitally pressing business trips. Overall, however, I am more than happy with my chromosomal lot in life — especially since I am fortunate enough to live in a wealthy, secular country such as Britain where psychopathic religious zealots do not (as yet) prevent me from driving a car or threaten to kill me if I wear the wrong clothes.

Sure, we need to bridge the pay gap; and yes, we urgently need to do something about anomalies such as women’s pensions (women are in effect paid less than men, since to qualify for the full state pension you need to have spent a minimum of ten years in employment — apparently raising the next generation of taxpayers does not qualify as ‘work’). But the truth is that women and young girls in Britain today have opportunities our grandmothers could only have dreamt of — and which plenty of women in less enlightened parts of the globe today are denied.

This is because, apart from a few pockets of resistance, the battle for recognition has largely been won. I am not saying we must down weapons altogether; but there is definitely a solid truce in place. And this in itself presents a uniquely new opportunity: to re-claim our femininity, once rejected because of the restrictions it imposed on us; and to do so on our own terms.

Let me explain. It used to be the case that for a woman to succeed in a male-dominated working environment she was obliged to act like one of the boys. In my own experience, of newspaper journalism, the females who succeeded were the ones who had bigger balls than the boys.

They were not just as tough, they were tougher; they were not just as foul-mouthed; they would have made Bernard Manning blush. They played the game, and they played it brilliantly; but even when the ball was on their side of the net, the court still fundamentally belonged to the boys. The price of success was not just a loss of the feminine; but a screaming, bolt-upright-at-three-in-the-morning horror of it.

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