I HAD A BIT of a “this-is-the-modern-world!” wake-up call the other day, and though it made me laugh I’m sure it would strike the censorious freaks at the Daily Hell, say, as a terrible symptom of our unnatural, self-serving, pleasure-seeking times. My friend — in her twenties, posh, cute, clever — asked me if I knew what the bad side-effects of this new sexually transmitted disease were meant to be. When I answered that I thought it might render one infertile, she didn’t so much as miss a beat: “Yeah, but what about the bad effects?!”
While my working-class sisters are still popping out the puppies at a young age — and in the light of their snootier sisters’ reluctance to, isn’t it time we thanked them rather than called them names? — educated young women are showing a marked reluctance to breed. As my friend put it: “I wouldn’t want to hang out with an adult who screamed, cried, threw up, tried to maul my tits and never paid for a round of drinks — why should I make an exception just because they’re short?”
To an increasing number of what would once have been the nation’s stock of prime breeding material, distaff division, there’s leading a fulfilled life — and then there’s having children. And the news this week that testosterone levels are lower in men who are fathers (33 per cent less than married non-fathers, 44 per cent less than single men) is hardly going to make men — already being accused in some quarters of being commitment-shy eternal adolescents — gung-ho about reproducing. It’s not exactly a great offer, is it? “Have a baby and get castrated!”
The castrating family! It’s always struck me as a piquant paradox that the very thing that people say sex was designed for — procreation — is the thing that most renders people, well, sexless. See childless lovers in restaurants and you know they’re having each other three ways before breakfast on a regular basis; see parents, and you know the last lot of genitalia they saw was when they were changing a nappy. Maybe that’s what Mother Nature does to new parents; puts them off sex so that they don’t connect their babies’ bare bits with doing the nasty, and therefore besmirching said tot.
“We were always Mum and Dad and not husband and wife. Children do tend to take over.” Ulrika Jonsson said something like this with breathtaking frankness of her recent separation from her husband, and I’ve got an inkling that part of the reason that she’s currently getting such stick from female hacks is that by telling her truth, she’s somehow thought to be blowing the gaff and letting the side down; ooo Ulrika, how could you, now it’ll be even harder for us girls to trap men into sexless shams of marriages!
Of course no one can blame the little bundles of fun for this — they never asked to be born. (Though, by making it all the way to the darkest interior rather than doing the decent thing and giving up, you might remotely accuse sperm of voting with their feet.) No, it’s without doubt the parents’ fault for believing that true lust must inevitably lead to making a cute little copy of oneself (the ego!) and then finding out belatedly that baby sick isn’t necessarily the greatest aphrodisiac known to man.
Of course there are always exceptions that prove the rule — marriages in which having children makes the parents even bigger, nastier sex machines than before; reader, I married him, the second time around! But on the whole, seeing as how the optimum time for divorce is a year after the birth of a second child, and in the light of recent debates about paternity leave, perhaps we should ask if even more time getting in each other’s hair (along with the baby sick) is what new mothers and fathers really need — and whether the funds involved wouldn’t be better spent on proper nursery care, thus giving parents time to be people rather than drones.
Sweden is often held out as a model, but I remember being quite shocked years back when my Stockholm friend Cristina described the phenomenon of the Velour Daddies to me. “All the new fathers get the paternity leave and they’re dressing up in these velour tops because it’s easy to wipe the sick off. And then after a few weeks the women are looking at them, with the sick and the velour, and thinking: ‘This is not what I wanted!’ And then they are sneaking off to f*** the Finns who come over the border, who are all drunken and wild!”
This isn’t a sexist stereotype either; men are notorious for abandoning their mousewives for the office vamp, which I guess proves that no matter how many Cath Kidston cushions one scatters around the nest, there will always be those who find rough, animal sex more interesting than cooing over the contents of a potty.
Just one more thing; though I believe these findings, I can’t help thinking that the boffins who went to such trouble to establish the tragic testosterone levels of fathers were part of a tradition I think of as “Stirring Science” — not stirring as in exhilarating, but stirring as in muck-raking. In the tradition of the Race And I.Q Row and the Gay Gene Scandal, exactly what use will telling fathers they’re sexless wimps have? Why, it’ll make them desperate to prove the findings wrong, of course, by frantically going out on the pull! Watch out for a massive rise in the divorce stats next year, and this time don’t blame feminism or binge-drinking — blame the men in the white coats.
If you avoid the past tense, it only leads to present tension
IT USED TO BE top of the Second Division of my horizontal pleasures — lying in bed of a weekday morning, having seen my husband off to his daily slog, aware of the working world going about its sensible grown-up business and knowing that I had all the time in the world to idle the morning away listening to Melvyn Bragg chewing the fat with a posse of clever little historians on Radio 4. I felt as though I had the best of both worlds — wasting time while broadening my mind. Not to mention my behind.
But now I have only to hear those famously nasal tones introducing Professor This or Historian That and it no longer heralds a swoon of self-congratulation; rather, my hand shoots out and puts a stop to the proceedings forthwith. And the reason for this is because of a development that is both as trivial and as irritating as a piece of grit in the eye: that is, historians who use the present tense when talking about historical events!
Some people gripe about trendy vicars, but in my experience, they’re generally quite good fun. Religion, after all, is a living thing, and it’s generally about the present and the future if it’s any good. When it’s about the past, like Roman Catholicism or Islam, it’s a right old malicious, moribund mess. History, by definition, is not a living thing — no matter how many jeans historians wear, battles they reconstruct or Ancient Roman orgies were are invited to eyeball. Get over it, let it go, move on!
Interestingly, I say this not as an anti-history go-getter like Henry Ford; why, my relationship with the books of A. J. P. Taylor during the bleak years in my early twenties when I was married alive in Billericay, Essex, was so intense that I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if my ex-husband had named him as co-respondent. But the point is that AJP loved history enough to let it be history; he trusted it and his talent enough to know that we would still be enraptured with not a reconstruction or an orgy in sight.
The latest ruse in the misguided rush to make history trendy is the cause of my present tension. Is there anything sillier than hearing a historian breathlessly report that “Diogenes is living in a barrel . . . Alexander’s coming to see him, and he’s blocking his light . . . Alexander says there’s no one he’d rather be than Diogenes!” for all the world as if he was Our Man On The Spot With The Breaking News From Baghdad?
Though admittedly it can be comic; as a fervent anti-Papist, I was delighted to turn on Radio 4 this week and hear someone say something like: “The Pope is now ceaselessly having to deal with the fervour which threatens to unseat the Church.” Imagine my disappointment when they added: “After all, it is 1247!”
