ABOUT MEN, ABOUT WOMEN

(From the “Times”)

It took a long time for the reality of sisterhood to become an important part of her life, but novelist Amanda Craig has now finally found true pleasure in the company of other women.

It is something of an embarrassment for a feminist to admit, but until fairly recently I didn4 like women very much. Of course, you can be a socialist and detest large segments of humanity, but it doesn't involve quite the same degree of doublethink, because feminism is as much about sisterhood as it is about emancipation.

The trouble is that my sister and I simply don't get on, so I got off to a bad start with women. Growing up in a family in which the dominant species (including the cat) was female and frightfully bolshy made it hard to understand why our sex was supposed to be oppressed.

Nevertheless, I grew up believing that men were the slugs and snails - untrustworthy, egotistical, ruthless, bullying and vain – whereas women, of course, were sweetness, co-operation and light.

The odd thing was that this never matched up to experience. Of course, boys were often pretty awful - I remember being tied to a football post by my pigtails by a couple, who then aimed shots at me - but I also remember that after I boxed their ears we got on tremendously well. I quite understood what a temptation waist-length red plaits presented, and they quite understood that I wasn't someone they could treat like a Barbie doll, so it was pax all round.

It was the girls who were bloody. They would pretend to be friends, then sneak your little secrets to the class. Where boys had a highly-evolved code of warfare, girls would get you into a hairlock, and neither of you, sobbing with pain, would let go until a teacher or parent interfered. (Years later, when I read Konrad Lorenz's comparison in On Aggression of the ways in which wolves and doves fight, I recognized it all.) I never joined girly gangs because I despised the way they were held together by the desire to conform to the lowest common denominator.

Yet all through my teens I had this dream of finding my great best friend, that other girl with whom to discuss everything from Playtex to Plato. Zilch. At university, I had a brief friendship with two women, based largely on a shared passion for clothes and the fact that we all had boyfriends elsewhere. We were widely believed to be lesbian until, in a farcical series of events, one of them went off with my boyfriend, and the other thought I'd seduced hers.

After that, I stuck to men. Women, I thought, were trash. Professionally, I was fed up with offices in which female cooperation was based on-swapping gynecological details rather than merit; fed up with women who paid lip service to ideals of networking and supportiveness while stabbing each other in the back; fed up with the feminine mind. Conversations about feelings rather than thoughts struck me as pointless, and lunches seemed to consist of one long whinge punctuated by malice.

Men, on the other hand, were much more fun. Quite apart from the mild frisson of flirtation, they understood that what I wanted from a friendship was serious gossip, intellectual debate and good food. Even if they never wrote thank you notes for dinner parties, and took years to notice a new haircut, they were endlessly entertaining.

Their satirical perspective on life, their maneuvers and power struggles seemed much more convivial and professional. I learnt a lot about the way men think - so much so that the male characters in my novels are far closer to my real nature than the female ones - and was never bored or disappointed. To this day, I can think of only one man on whom I would like to dance in hobnailed boots, as opposed to a dozen women.

But the trouble with men is that they reach a certain age and stop. They get frightened by responsibility and change, and bottle out into conservatism just as women begin to alter out of all recognition. Biologically, the new and wonderful incarnations open to women - and their attendant patches of leisure – are not open to them. During the past five years, so many women whom I had dismissed as silly, bitchy and dull have blossomed into enchanting personalities, rich in eccentricity, sense, kindness and courage. For the first time, I understood what (besides sex) men see, in us (or do they?).

The habit of commiseration which so annoyed me in my twenties has become a lifeline now we are all exhausted by work and child rearing. The malice has gone out the window. For the first time we are trying to help each other.

TEXT 6

Read the text. Analyze the status of women in the UK. Speak on:

a) women in political and public life of the country;

b) women in paid employment;

c) “women’s lib” in the UK.

A. H. Halsey is emeritus professor of social and

administrative studies at Nuffield College, Oxford.