Why I despair of today’s women
Barbara Broccoli -3rd from L (Shutterstock)
Hurray for Barbara Broccoli, executive producer of the James Bond movie franchise. She recently announced that there would be no female Bond. Not now, not ever. Naturally, women have been clamouring for this sex swap for a while. But Broccoli suggested that if it’s a female secret agent they are after, they should create one of their own. An eminently admirable stance.
Apart from anything else, look at the risible travesty that is the current female Dr Who, a tiresome social justice warrior promulgating all the BBC’s favourite woke messages, from LGBT rights to open-border immigration. If kids were interested in all that holier-than-thou preaching, they’d read the Guardian. Well, at least 007 is safe.
It seems to me that some women nowadays have become altogether too aggressive, not to mention myopic. I think actresses are the worst. On the one hand, we aren’t even supposed to call them actresses anymore, but actors. This is clearly to signify that, as the equals of men, they can share that traditionally male term. But on the other hand they make a very BIG distinction between themselves and males: i.e. that women are, as a matter of course, always the victims and men the perps. That women tell it straight, while men are inveterate liars.
I blame this on the vast juddering bandwagon of the #MeToo movement. This is a movement of real value. But now, generally decades after the event, shedloads of women are piping up about an assault by some ghastly predatory man, which has left them scarred. They refer to themselves as “survivors”, for all the world as though they’d lived through a lengthy abduction by Al-Shabaab, when, on closer inspection, all that many of them had “survived” was a grope of their breasts and slobbering smooch by a drunk at a party. Grow a spine, honey. Enough already with being the professional victim.
But now that women have got the bit between their teeth there’s no stopping them. The latest news is that outraged French women are protesting against the fact that Roman Polanski’s latest film, An Officer and a Spy, has been nominated for 12 César Awards, France’s version of the Oscars. It must be a very impressive work. But as far as les femmes outragées are concerned, the great French-Polish director is a fugitive child rapist and mustn’t be thus honoured. True, in 1978 he fled the US before he could be formally sentenced for unlawful sex with 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. But Geimer herself, now 56, publicly forgave him long ago, stating that the episode was best forgotten and he shouldn’t be punished. In any case, surely the key point here is that the creative accomplishments of a film-maker, writer, artist, etc should not be judged by their private morals. Because if you start doing that, where do you stop?
France’s strident feminists obviously beg to differ and — unsurprisingly — the brouhaha over Polanski has brought out into the open a few other women who claim to have been his victims. One rather expects actresses and models to be a bit dippy and easily led, to jump on bandwagons and parrot fashionable mantras. But to hear an otherwise intelligent writer, someone with undoubted brain power, spout blatant nonsense is less expected. Not long ago I was listening to a Radio Four programme about women crime writers, and a well-known member of that breed, Val McDermid, was asked her opinion on why women are so adept at writing crime fiction. Openly gay McDermid said it was because the genre centred on violence, and women had a better understanding of violence than men — they knew it from the inside, whereas men only knew it from the outside.
Oh, really? Did she honestly believe that men, who have, since time immemorial, fought and perished in bloody wars, had no visceral knowledge of violence? Her words put me in mind of the terrified young men of the First World War who poured out of their trenches to kill or be killed, perhaps having to bayonet the guts of other terrified young men in order to survive. Meanwhile, back in tranquil Blighty, upright ladies in flowery hats who might well have swooned at the sight of blood handed white feathers — a symbol of cowardice — to those men who hadn’t yet volunteered. So Val McDermid, you may be a whiz at crime writing, but please spare us your fatuous inside/outside theory.
I do despair of womenfolk sometimes.
