Wigging out with the 'sensible' sex
3rd March, 2007
|
"Women do not have midlife crises," pronounced the greying man from behind a steak sandwich. "They are too busy and too sensible and they have nothing to have a crisis about." Had he not been my father and had I not really wanted to snaffle half of his sandwich, I would have snotted him. This notion that females must remain the functioning adults of the species should have been dead and buried a generation or two ago. And yet we still haven't established any social equivalent to the sports car and the bimbo.
When women suddenly go bananas and upturn perfectly respectable lives, a great search for the reasons ensues. When men go bananas, we accept that men are children and some of us cannot be expected to keep it together. Had Simone Warne behaved the way Shane did, would we have been as forgiving? At a time when the sexes have more in common than ever, we are ignoring a vast body of evidence that shows women do have midlife, quarter-life, one-third life and generalised crises relatively often. But those mind explosions are hidden under the search for meaning. We as a society attribute the base reasons to infertility, self-doubt, bastard partners, postnatal depression, economic uncertainty or some long-repressed and well-hidden personal demon. We rarely just shrug and say: "Yeah, she lost it." Some women are beginning to voice this. There's a small but growing genre of literature that would seem to be the natural successor to the chic-lit books of the 1990s and the feminist-awakening tomes of the 1950s and '60s. In Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel attempts to find ways to keep long-term relationships firing. Her basic premise is that you probably can't succeed all the time. Depressingly honest, but Perel doesn't advocate giving up, just giving way sometimes. And that would appear to be the emerging tone of the next wave of feminism (which itself is such an unpopular word that the philosophy needs rebranding. Women now old enough to begin their midlife breakdowns don't identify as feminists - they don't appreciate being lumped under any single label). What Perel and her contemporaries are beginning to voice is the idea that you can fail, and that failing is normal. Or even that failing doesn't make you a failure. Perel's argument applies to relationships, but Lois P. Frankel applies much the same thought process in Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office - an unpicking of common female career mistakes. Like Perel, Frankel doesn't suggest not making the mistakes, just recognising them. She doesn't even suggest there's a magic formula for overcoming them. Marrit Ingman's Inconsolable and Therese Borchard's The Imperfect Mom both explore the depths to which women can be plunged by parenthood. Ingman's book doesn't even attempt a glossy spin or a happy ending - her subtitle is "how I threw my mental health out with the daipers". The idea that there may be no happy ending - or at least that endings are impossible to know and pointless to manufacture - is something women have been reluctant to acknowledge. Truth is, no one gets it right all the time. Most of us do our best as often as possible, but it's not always a comfortable fit. It'd be nice to think we're entering some new phase in which women are going to be as okay with their fat, broke, sad, guilty bits as men tend to be. It'd be nice to think women would allow themselves a sports car or a motorbike or a himbo or a shaven head. But I fear it may be a long time off. Because my father (may my mother embark on a personal campaign of carnage soon) is probably right: they're too busy and too sensible. |
