Boris on Gender; Me on Gender and Politics

Boris Johnson is Shadow Minister for Higher Education of the British opposition party in Parliament. Recently he wrote an interesting article about gender issues which can be read here.

If you don’t want to read it, he is addressing issues relating to the frustrated sense of ‘no competition’ and ‘no quality’ felt by many modern women about the available male talent on offer.

I shall quote the aspects which I liked most and seem most relevant:

"I was half asleep in the front seat the other day, coming back from some exhausting tour of an educational establishment, and in the back seat were two twentysomething female graduates. They were talking about men, so I tried to focus, while keeping my eyes cunningly half closed.

One of them made the eternal feminine complaint. "All men are useless these days," she said. "Yeah," said the other. "The trouble is that they haven't risen to the challenge of feminism. They don't understand that we need them to be more masculine, and instead they have just copped out."

I am afraid that, at this point, I copped out myself, and slid into unconsciousness. But before I went under I thought, hmmm, this is interesting; and I think back to that conversation as I read that women continue their astonishing dominance of university admissions."

Boris Johnson then spends the rest of his article, after asserting his acceptance of feminism, reflecting interestingly on some possible negative consequences for the class divide in Britain of the disproportionate amount of women, relative to men, pursuing and obtaining higher educational degrees. While that was intriguing in-itself, it was the above quoted section that interested me most, and about which I was mainly thinking when I replied in this manner:

"A brilliant and fascinating analysis. Very thought provoking. Certainly we need a new masculinism, one that takes on board the noble feminist critique against male pompous, boorish oppressiveness, yet rekindles the fires of male self-confidence and assertion in the direction of something more sublime. I believe that a new type of spiritual, somewhat post-religious male is waiting in the womb to emerge. Yet this is a question more for culture in general than politics I grant. One cannot socially engineer such developments. Your suggestion about encouraging more male teachers is surely wise. And original, thought provoking scripts in soap operas are also a good idea.

It was always the original stance of the best feminism that men should also be liberated from their subjection to their own gender templates. The wimpy, mother's boy template is as traditional and conventional as the stern, bombastic, emotionally sterile one. Both should be transcended. I am imagining (am I wrong?) this was the type of man your fellow travellers wanted, and not just a retreat to a pre-feminist male.

It is interesting how a corrective to some of the misandristic tendencies in some feminist consciousness, which tend to think men just hopeless by nature, will actually serve the nobler sentiments of feminism and the wishes of these twentysomethings for a better type of useful man, Darcy or otherwise.

So, less sexist misandry from women also please, in combination with a new, more refined fire in men."

As I state on my MySpace Blog, which asks who you'd most like to meet (one presumes they ask in terms of famous of people?), I have written Morrissey and Boris Johnson. Perhaps because Johnson is a Tory, Morrissey may hate his guts, as he does I think all Tories, and most politicians, or so it can seem. As for Boris Johnson's views on the Mancunian Bard from Manchester, I have no idea, though Boris would have been in his formative years as a young man at Oxford when Morrissey launched his unique genius on the world. So possibly, as was I, Boris may have been susceptible to his melodious and evocative charms. No mention was made in Andrew Gibson's recent Biography of Boris of his thoughts on the Mancunian Shaman, however- not that there's any reason why there should have been, of course.

Boris Johnson's party, of which he is a high ranking member, and about whom it has been wondered if he will become its leader and so, by default, Prime Minister- were this party to win a General Election- is called the ‘Conservative Party’. Given the dramatic, revolutionary effect it had on British society when in power under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, it is legitimately to be wondered what exactly it is that it ‘Conserves’, but anyway.

As I see it, what it has traditionally been envisaged to conserve are things it has called family values, a belief in self-reliance, a limitedly interventionist state- except in matters relating to ‘law and order and defence'- and a respect for traditional British institutions, including Monarchy and the Church. If I might simplify, it was brought kicking and screaming into an acceptance of a range of developments that characterise the ‘modern era’; amongst which are: the mass male franchise extensions in the 19th century (paradoxically, to a degree, by one of its own leaders and Prime Ministers-Disraeli..who in a cunning fashion sought to outfox the middle classes by appealing directly to the working classes under their feet); the dominance of the House of Commons, our ‘lower’ chamber, over the House of Lords; votes for women and their basic legal equality; the existence of the Welfare State; the legalisation of the right of adult men to do what they like, sexually, with other adult men; and the forbidding of cold blooded state murder, in the form of Capital Punishment.

So, traditionally, it has represented that element of the collective political psyche famed for ‘foot dragging’, it might be said; for questioning and testing and finally sometimes relenting to, changes and developments in how society wishes to conceive or re-conceive of itself.

The nature of this party was changed, possibly forever, in the 1980s by its unconservative demolition job on Britain's manufacturing base; as well as by the general cultural assault on the subtle, implicit, somewhat all-pervasive instincts of deference towards ‘perceived’ sociological superiors which had earlier, for good and ill, so stereotypically defined the global image of the English Gentleman. Now, freed from the hard, physical, eminently productive industries of manufacturing, Britain is now dominated by service industries that deal in abstractions that want to make us feel good for spending money on what amount, often enough, to mere images, created by others and imposed upon us by others. Meanwhile, we import our actual products from China or India or elsewhere. Now, freed from the gracious habits of creating space for others by restraining our baser, insulting instincts, we have given birth to the triumphalist, epic Kraken of an hitherto restrained, or at least formerly shameful, animal malice. Now, it would be crediting your political opponent with too much respect, too weakly, to argue against him on his terms, or even seek to assume a common ground between you (common ground being something one might assume one shared with someone you trod the same soil and spoke the same language with, and with whom breathed the same air). Now others are either for you or against you. This dualism, reminding us of the defining Zoroastrian metaphysical error of our aeon, and the insane divisiveness, for example, of the Dead Dea Scrolls, has existed for a long time, of course. But it has got a lot more intense, I would suggest, since the 1970s, with the deconstruction of the post-war consensus and the rise of our new hyper-reality. Such a hyper-reality, enshrining ever-expanding material consumption (environment be damned), emotional aggression and sentimentality, and spiritual vacuity, is now the status quo in Britain and, one suspects, many other places too; a hyper-reality paraded with abandon in advertising, the media, popular culture and the gladiatorial arena that is Reality TV.

For these reasons, despite the fact that I want Boris Johnson to be the UK Prime Minister, since I see no other, more intelligent, more independent alternative –with a similar degree of humour and humanity- I shy away from calling myself a Tory (Tory by the way is the 17th century Irish term of abuse for the ideological forebears of modern Conservatives who wanted to preserve James II's right to ascend the throne. This term, however, though the original meaning of 'guerrilla fighter' or 'outlaw' be lost, is now embraced by Conservatives themselves).

Anyway, even if the Tories did atone, or are atoning, as some say they are, for their post 70s , consensus smashing past, and for their ultra-individualism – shorn of social conscience, borne on the wings of a shameless, predatory capitalism - I still don’t think I could call myself a Tory.

I wonder seriously if the age of the Political Party has passed. Maybe it should never have arisen. It offends me that Members of Parliament, whose loyalties should be to their consciences, to all of their constituents, to the welfare of the entirety of their country and beyond that to the health and peace of the entire world, are required to pay homage to an ideologically abstracted insitution, the Political Party, which is consciously partisan and divisive- which seeks power at the expense of other parties and which wants power as an end-in-itself, even when the time for it to relinquish power is echoing in the rafters.

In order to stand a realistic chance of getting elected as an MP–unless like Martin Bell you are already a celebrity- and in order, once an MP, to stand any real hope of being heard, prospective and sitting MPs must subject themselves to the dominion of these ghostly phalanxes.

Are we sure this is what our forebears envisaged when they wrestled, from the 13th to the 17th centuries, the executive power of the Realm out of the hands of the Monarch? Not that I seek the pompous, imposing divine right of Kings to stalk the land again, of course; but at least the King embodied, in his own person, the unity of the people, land and nation, however merely theroetically, however little this may have meant in practice.