Horizon

The fact that someone has to designate a month pretty much says it all about how little progress has been made.

But what about our achievements in athletics and popular music?

If you're angling for another two months, forget it.

Why have these months at all? In the uk its just quangoes spending loads of public money--and usually administrated by women--preaching their agenda to an indifferent public. It's unfortunate, but the kind of finger wagging modern-dress socialism that you lot drool for just insults people's intelligence in the end. Take England, where it--and women I may add--have prevailed, big time: you get posters on the backs of buses and elsewhere asking in huge letters: HAVE YOU BEEN THE VICTIM OF SEXISM/RACISM/HOMOPHOBIA? Strangely, these are not offences to be found on the tongues of the ordinary people; the offences *they* talk about are crime, violence (and all the ancilleries of a demoralized society) and a third world medical and transport system (it'll be a hot day in January before we see friend Johann Hari noticing this in The Independent). And yet we see no posters asking have we been victims of any of these pathologies. No, we see posters and adverts advising us to secure our homes, ourselves and our valuables. This is the agenda of an uber-liberal, 'educated' elite in practise. Grown Ups here may see a pattern vis a vis these 'months' or hate weeks as Orwell lampooned them.

I get the feeling that English men and English women live on different planets. More so than men and women in the USA. Seems like there's a male culture and a female culture with divergent ways of speaking, making jokes, winning respect, and so on. Something to do with the history of segregation in both work and school, I'm guessing. Especially with words -- there's this male verbal pyrotechnics thing used to impress women while keeping them at an emotionally safe distance, and I get the impression English women are invited not to join it so much as to provide an audience for it.

But then a lot of U.S. women in my mother's generation, and even the Boomer generation, claim with something almost like pride that "I can never remember jokes." It's hard to understand -- why they can't/won't value the ability to tell a joke enough to make a point of remembering it, and why they say, in almost identical phrasing, too, "I can't remember jokes" as though it were an important self-defining fact. I have a feeling there's a clue about U.S. women's acculturation in this "I don't remember jokes" business. I *do* remember jokes, and I think it's because I was indulged in my childish attempts to impress people with words. A lot of girls aren't that lucky. They're taught to be audiences. Also to be Civilizing and Moderating Influences while the boys get to have all the irresponsible fun, and meanwhile the boys go on complaining about women being the restricting killjoys they were raised to become.

Y'know, if some men could realize that the things they most dislike about Women are actually products of discrimination, they might just maybe begin to realize that feminism is in their own interest. Injustice deforms society as a whole, not just the most obvious victims.

Why can't a woman be more like man
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square
Eternally noble, historically fair
Who when you win will always give your back a pat
Why can't a woman be like that

Why does every one do what the others do
Can't a woman learn to use her head
Why do they do everything their mothers do
Why don't they grow up like their father instead

One man in a million may shout a bit
Now and then there's one with slight defects
One perhaps whose truthfulness you doubt a bit
But by in large we are a marvelous sex

Why can't a woman be more like a man
Men are so decent, such regular chaps
Ready to help you through any mishaps
Ready to buck you up whenever you are glum
Why can't a woman be a chum

-Lerner&Lowe

MAB wrote:'I get the feeling that English men and English women live on different planets. More so than men and women in the USA. Seems like there's a male culture and a female culture with divergent ways of speaking, making jokes, winning respect, and so on. Something to do with the history of segregation in both work and school, I'm guessing. Especially with words -- there's this male verbal pyrotechnics thing used to impress women while keeping them at an emotionally safe distance, and I get the impression English women are invited not to join it so much as to provide an audience for it.'

Your construct doesn't ring true with me. I went to a mixed school where feminists prowled, but they just stood, mouth agape, looking at nature: some girls were civilizing influences, a smaller amount loud, laddish and lewd and of them a very much smaller amount who were two-fisted psychos who liked to fight boys and who were out screwing men and riding around on the back of motorcycles, while the boys were still looking for pubes.
Your language codes idea seems a, if you will, reductive exaggeration, a semi paranoid view of men as an organized stas, under cover in women's lives, putting them down in every way. You'd have to go a long way to find a woman outside of the loopier end of Mother Millettville who would give mental houseroom to this kind of claptrap.
'Boys get all the fun' is so manifestly wrong it's laughable: women going out on a limb with booze, drugs and sex and getting promoted and wielding corporate power is an everyday feature of British life. None of which seems to make them happy: there's a lot of emerging journalism about downshifting (living in a countrified area in a traditional wifely role) and about the health price that they will pay now they're living like men: more heart disease, cancers, depressions, alcoholism and stress related diseases.
One beady eyed feminist-lesbian's 'injustice' is another ordinary person's 'nature'. Women's brains are quite obviously different from mens, in *general*. What will you do when this is proved and the pluses and minuses of this are proved scientifically? Get into Christian rock music mode and deny natural fact? Most men--I mean outside of academia and the place where the Liberal Left roost--know full well that 'feminism' is not in their interests at all because, like most of the 'levelling, equality' drives its aims go beyond some illusion of absolute equality into what James Brown would call 'Payback'- ardent multiculturalists, gay rights campaigners, feminists, minority agitators all want to bash the western bourgeois they feel has wronged them, into little pieces. Seeing as I think western bourgeois life is much better prospect than the emerging alternative (which can be seen in England and parts of Europe) I know full well that saying right on to all these grudge bearing (not that I give their grudges much creedence) ideologues is not in my best interests at all.
As for 'keeping them at an emotionally safe distance', you don't seem to know much about men. Every man I know wants to be emotionally close with a woman sometime. Some have periods when they don't, but that's what you're arguing for the freedom for women to have (which here that HAVE got in any case) so it's sauce for the goose really.

Was partly thinking about female characters in novels like *Lucky Jim*. Mr. Amis' work is of course not a contemporary British novel but it has contemporary imitators. The common thread being that men seem to see women as an enigma: given to moods, becoming warm or cold without explanation, suddenly pairing up with skunks for no reason at all. Which suggests a certain lack of communication or maybe I mean empathy. If these suggestions in works of fiction have nothing to do with real life then thank heavens for that.

The other thing I wonder tho is why there seem to be even fewer UK women arguing literature and politics online than there are U.S. women. Anyone got an explanation for that?

Well, there are fewer UK women. Full stop.

There are also fewer academic opportunities for both sexes than in the States.

I'm surprised at that, because it now seems very easy to go to Uni, particularly if you wish to study something dumbed down and trendy, like Golf or Irish Cultural Studies.

As for the sexual politics thing in comic novels, well, they are comic novels, and as Amis got tired of saying, he wasn't Jim Dixon.