I have got to stop reading books that precipitate existential crises. Apart from anything else, I don’t have the time – even for the reading, really, never mind the crises. But I have been immersed in the feminist journalist Victoria Smith’s new, brilliant tome, (Un)kind. It looks at what is really being asked of women and girls in the name of “being kind” and here I am again, curled up in the foetal position on the sofa, re-evaluating, reinterpreting and recalibrating.
I was raised, very firmly, to Be Kind. My mother was – is – a proud matriarch. This is not quite the same thing as being a feminist, though it provides lots of the same results, and I would certainly recommend it to any woman in place of being neither.
But it did mean that she raised her daughters in accordance with generally accepted social standards, without much interrogation of what they might mean for them specifically.
Along with most of my generation, and like every generation of girls before that, I was raised to put others first, to efface myself, to put my own wants and needs last and make sure the people around me were as content as possible before I attended to whatever my own plans were.
This, certainly in the abstract, is no bad thing. If we all learned such a lesson at our mothers’ knees, the world would undoubtedly be a more harmonious, co-operative and happy place.
The problem, as Smith lays out for us over the course of a dense but compelling 300 pages, is that we don’t all learn it – or certainly not to the same degree. When I think back to my primary school days, for example, and run my eye over the 30 or so children to whom our teacher was attempting to impart knowledge, it is easy to see which sex had been indoctrinated with the need to keep quiet, and which sex had never been expected to heed the stricture that children should be seen and not heard.
The boys shouted, scrambled and filled the room with their boisterous presence. The girls shrank further and further into their seats, trying to make up for the time and attention the noisy little scrotes were taking up.
On and on we went thereafter, through shifting iterations of the same principle as we got older. Be kind to boyfriends – they always mean well, the ways of men are often just different, rougher than women’s. (To be fair, this was never, ever a view that my mother herself had any truck with.)
Be nice and be quiet in your first job, and you’ll get your reward when people see how hard you work and how well you get on with everyone. Don’t assert yourself – or “be bossy” as it was, and is, generally labelled. You don’t want to get a reputation for stridency any more than you’d want to get one for sexual availability or being good at maths. Put others first, especially your family once you have your own. Who are you to be asserting yourself anyway?
Now that the family I have includes a son, I see with ever-increasing clarity how uniform, how consistent these messages were as I grew up. Every social signal for girls (and women – it’s not like there’s a cut-off at 18 and you’re suddenly initiated into a new world of equality; what a waste of the patriarchy’s hard formative work that would be), every film, TV programme, advert and adult reinforced the message of diminishment.
Naturally, I instinctively set to work reproducing this method of rearing when I had my son. It doesn’t work. Boys look back at you, baffled by the dissonance of what you’re saying. The world is telling him otherwise – that boys are entitled to take priority, take up as much space as they wish, express themselves first and freely. The allure of that message is strong and ultimately, I suspect, though he is still young enough for me to have some sway, irresistible.
Mother’s Day is an excuse for our selfish relatives to absolve themselves of guilt
Read MoreIf I had a girl, I would consider it a vital maternal duty to act as a bulwark against the tide of messaging that still threatens to sweep the female half of the population onto a rocky promontory of self-denial.
I would tell her to put herself first, because few others will. To prioritise her instincts, not subdue them – they will help keep her safe in a world more full of predators than she can currently know. To take up space – it will likely still be less than the man next to her, and less than she deserves.
To run fast and run far from any man who thinks he doesn’t have to be kind to his wife or girlfriend, that he doesn’t have to temper his tongue or his actions because it is her duty to absorb his rudeness or his blows.
But I have a son. And I have a duty to him too. And that is to work perhaps even harder to stop him being gathered up by a tide that wants to sweep him away to a nicer place for him, but a worse place for us all. Including – and I am just realising this as I type – me. And I think… I think I think, maybe, that that… that I… matter too?
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