Sorry, Cherie, but dads need to be heroes – not penguins!
OLIVER, ten, was snuffling as he stared at the screen, where a daddy emperor penguin stood steadfast in the sub-zero blast. In a voice like melted chocolate, Morgan Freeman explained how the mummy penguin had transferred a newly laid egg into his care and how he would stand there for two whole months, losing half his body weight, until she returned from the feeding grounds.
If he moved the egg from his special incubation man-pouch, it would roll on to the icy ground and split in the minus 60C temperatures and…
‘Stop!’ my son sobbed, as an egg trundled out from between a penguin’s feet and cracked open, frozen solid, never to make a hatchling. ‘I can’t take it any more.’
The March Of The Penguins DVD is still banned (too upsetting) in our house, but I thought of it when I read of Roger Clark, whose daughter Lisa had died of ovarian cancer. He travelled 8,000 miles to photograph penguins in her memory (twice, in fact: he photographed the wrong breed the first time).
Clark, like my son Oliver, was also overwhelmed with emotion at the sight of the birds who take it in turns to care for their chicks, which brings us to back from the frozen Pole all the way up to… Cherie Blair.
Now, Mrs Blair is back in the news because she thinks we should all be a bit more like emperor penguins when it comes to our chicks.
‘We shouldn’t be talking about mothering or fathering – we should be talking about parenting,’ she opined on Newsnight, ‘and we should allow couples to be able to organise a way of bringing up their children that suits both of them.’
Mmm. Much as it pains me to disagree with the learned QC and judge, I have something unfashionable to say on this subject.
I think mothering and fathering are still different; and – oh well, might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb – I think that men’s and women’s brains, as well as their bodies, are probably different too.
I bring this up because scientists in California, as was reported last week, are so terrified of being labelled ‘sexist’ that they ignored in drug trials the varying responses to tests of male and female brains.
Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, believed that deep within our psyches, long before we are born, exist certain fundamental preconceptions, preinstalled there like the calculator app on a new iPhone.
Fairy tales, most Disney movies, myths, all play on these persistent archetypes, that the woman is a saintly, nurturing, giving female; the male a brave champion, warrior, and so on. This, of course, annoys Cherie like mad. She says that we no longer ‘live in a mythical world where all women stayed at home and men went to work’.
Thank God, she’s right on that score, we don’t. But she’s wrong to say, as a result of this very welcome progress towards gender equality, that women should no longer be ‘mothers’ and men ‘fathers’, and apart from some minor biological details we are all the same.
Because we’re not. Never have been, never will be.
If we were, all the same, eh… how come I get lost every time I leave the house and lose at chess? My husband explains, to my irritation, that men have a better sense of direction and spatial awareness because ‘you women lurked in the cave, waiting for us menfolk to bring back sabre-toothed tigers for tea’. Then I hit him.
MRS BLAIR is right, however, when she says that the male does not give birth or suckle its progeny. But does she not see that this difference is exactly what makes the risks and sacrifices which the male, as opposed to the female, makes for his young (Roger Clark, 71, was warned by doctors not to do the trip to the Antarctic once, let alone twice) so much more affecting?
This is partly why Oliver found himself blubbing over March Of The Penguins. He saw, for the first time that, despite other people’s love and best efforts (as expressed by the heartbreaking fortitude of the daddy penguin, who had not even produced the precious egg), we are all born to die.
We are but a short time on Planet Earth, Cherie. To insist we must all simply be interchangeable, gender-neutral ‘parents’ is against nature, don’t you see? It also denies fathers the chance to be heroes, if only in their children’s eyes.