What will women gain from all this squawking about sex pests? A niqab
BEHOLD my proposed new autumn look for women in politics. The black, I think, is flattering and it radiates an air of cool unapproachability. No Minister would put his hand on the knee of anyone dressed like this; indeed, he’d have trouble finding her knee, or anything else.
Well, isn’t this what you want, all you squawking flapping denouncers of groping men and ‘inappropriate’ jokes?
You have lots in common with Militant Islamists on this subject.
They, too, believe that all men must be assumed to be slavering predators.
And these beliefs lie behind the severe dress codes and sexual segregation which modern liberals claim to find so shocking about Islam. Yet on this, it turns out that you agree with them. Any male action, any form of words you choose to disapprove of can and will be presumed to be guilty because, well, men are like that. The culprit will be ruined for ever.
Are you all off your heads? Do you have no sense of proportion?
The country is in the midst of its biggest constitutional crisis for a century, and wobbling on the precipice of bankruptcy. The welfare system is about to melt down. And you think the most important thing in your lives is a hunt for long-ago cases of wandering hands, or tellers of coarse jokes? Yes, you do.
You have lost all touch with reality, and future generations will laugh at you. Alas, you are in charge now.
Take this, for example: Michael Fallon was one of the worst Defence Secretaries in history. The Army is a skeleton, the Navy dead in the water, largely motionless and stripped of its most basic capacities. The former head of the Navy, Lord West, is reduced to writing to the newspapers to try to point out the dangers, because nobody will listen.
But was Mr Fallon made to quit over that? No. Neither the political class nor their pals in the media class care about such things. He was driven from office because he is alleged not to be safe in mixed company.
In a way, this is very old-fashioned. Personally, I am a Victorian prude, though I try to keep it under control. I am still secretly shocked by coarse words, especially used in front of women or children. I am dismayed to see on public display, on TV and in the street, and in normal conversation, things and events which would once only have been available to shamefully seedy men in shady back-street shops. I don’t want to watch other people having sex.
I also experienced the 1960s and their aftermath, and saw the dreadful, often tragic things that happen when men and women abandon the old rules of fidelity and constancy, and wrongly imagine that total freedom leads to total happiness. Since then, I haven’t been able to see why the wonderful new equality between men and women, which is one of the great changes for the better in our age, had to be mixed up with the militant destruction of marriage and the traditional family. I still don’t.
But many of those who claim to seek female equality have another, much fiercer objective. They actually see men as the enemy, the ‘patriarchy’, to be overthrown by all means necessary, and replaced by a feminised society. They also see marriage as a machine for oppressing women. Their objectives moved a lot closer last week.
This is why many of those who said they wanted equality also sneered at restraint and manners. They claim now that they want the restraint and the manners back (though the suspicion lingers that much of the current fuss is aimed mainly at making all men look wicked and grubby).
But where are such restrained manners to come from in our liberated society? They were part of an elaborate code of courtship and respect which was learned by example in the married family, and has now completely vanished. In our post-marriage free-for-all, why should we expect either sex to be restrained? All that’s left is the police or the public pillory of Twitter.
It was that old code which allowed us, unlike the Islamic world, to permit the happy mixing of men and women without black shrouds, veils and ‘no-touching’ rules so strict that they even rule out a male-female handshake.
NOW it’s gone, what are we to do instead? I am angered by the public denunciations now taking place, not because I believe or disbelieve them (how can we know?) but because they make trust impossible. Andrea Leadsom, whose own bid for the Tory leadership was destroyed by what I still think was the unfair twisting of her words, should know better than to engage in such things.
Wise men at Westminster will in future go about with chaperones, record and film all conversations with the opposite sex, require women to sign consent forms before meeting them, and certificates of good conduct afterwards. Nothing else will keep them safe from claims that they momentarily applied ‘a fleeting hand’ to someone’s knee.
Or there is always the other solution, the niqab, the burka and the segregation of the sexes. But sanity, the best remedy of all, is obviously unlikely to return any time in the near future.