Will they cut too deep?

Alf Young
George Osborne didn’t learn from Ireland before. Will he learn now?

Also on this page:

Bob’s People

Those awful chefs

The all-too-
accurate logo

Alison Prince
How Creative Scotland is hostile
to the essential nature of art

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The Midgie
A full and unqualified correction

Where is this lavatory?

Islay McLeod
launches an SR competition

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Rear Window
James Shaw Grant on second sight

The Cafe

John MacLeod

Yes, Rose Galt (SR 303), no doubt men should weep. However, I’m tired of harpies maintaining that the only significant oppression which goes on in the world is directed by males (all of whom are, whether explicitly or implicitly, defined as evil) against females who are all assumed to be victims.
     Typical of the feminist rantings is the poster which comes my way each year asking me to promote ‘Zero tolerance’.  ‘Zero tolerance of what?’ you may ask. Zero tolerance of domestic violence by men against women. Why not zero tolerance of all

     Female genital mutilation? Yes, but who perpetrates it against whom? It’s women who, in the more primitive societies, almost universally carry it out and women who want it carried out in most of the societies in which it’s practised and in the multiplicity of different forms it takes. And did Rose forget to mention the male genital mutilation which is forced on unwilling male children in many countries, including the majority of male infants in the United States? Tut, tut! How careless of her!  
     And lest she be in any doubt about the matter, perhaps she should conduct a survey of American women as to their view of the desirability of male genital mutilation.
     Economic oppression? Was Rose not once president of the Educational Institute of Scotland? Exactly what proportion of primary school teachers in Scotland are male? How does the proportion of qualified male primary teachers seeking a permanent post compare with the percentage of qualified female primary school teachers seeking a permanent post? Why are Scottish schools failing our male children? It couldn’t possibly be related in any way to the fact that the vast majority of teachers are women, could it?
     And the most obvious measure of all and closest to home – how does male life expectancy in Scotland compare to female life expectancy? Or is male life expectancy shorter just because males are inferior beings not worth cluttering up the earth with?
     Sorry, Rose – people should weep about oppression wherever it occurs, against whomsoever it occurs and no matter by whom it is committed. Denigrating men in general is scarcely the best way of addressing problems – real or perceived – experienced by some women.

Sin and celibacy

Jill Stephenson

German woman with condom

Cardinal Winning wished that small families were ‘a bit bigger’ (SR 302). The Catholic church would like men and women to have large families voluntarily, because they genuinely want them. If they do not, however, they are put under severe pressure through the church’s instruction that the use of artificial methods of contraception is a sin (probably a ‘mortal sin’).

     There’s always abstinence, attempts at which used to cause intense misery in some Catholic families. Some resorted to twin beds to try to avoid temptation, but often the result was that only one of the beds had much use.
But there is an alternative: Vatican roulette, as the ‘rhythm method’ of ‘natural fertility control’ used to be called. Why it is permissible for couples to choose their days for having procreation-free intercourse according to temperature charts, which is a pretty artificial way of behaving, but not to use reliable artificial contraception, is not clear (to me as an agnostic, anyway). Perhaps it’s because reliable contraception tends to work.
     These dilemmas are not merely a curiosity – one which, apparently, most Catholics do not take seriously. They are indicative of the church’s attitude to women. I heard someone say (on radio) recently that women had been liberated from housework by the washing machine, and that this enabled them to pursue a career. Certainly the washing machine (and the fridge and freezer) have played a role in this. But there is no factor more important in allowing women the ability to choose to pursue advanced education and/or a career – or simply to take a job to earn money, or even just to play sport or engage in recreations on a regular basis – than fertility control. Without it, women were, and are, condemned to arbitrary pregnancy in their youth and into middle age.
     The ‘big families’ so admired by Cardinal Winning and the Catholic church were in the past not the whole story. A woman who brought up eight children was likely, before the First World War particularly, to have had a great many more pregnancies. Miscarriages and still births – to say nothing of covert, illegal abortions – accounted for a significant proportion of a woman’s reproductive experience.

The Catholic church is misogynist. Its clergy consists of celibate men and its hierarchy of celibate old men.

     In the Soviet Union, the dire lack of reliable contraceptives meant that abortion – in some eras legal and in some not – was the chief means of birth control. There were also the children who were brought to term and born who died in infancy. In Germany – a highly advanced country – in 1905, one child in every five who was born alive died in the first year of life. That’s a lot of pregnancies. And rates of perinatal maternal mortality – the death of mothers in and soon after childbirth – were such that it was only with medical advances around 1900 that, in the developed world, women began to enjoy greater life expectancy than men. Before that, men’s life expectancy was greater, largely because of the risks to women associated with childbirth, and particularly with frequently repeated childbirth.
     The woman who had perhaps 20 pregnancies of one length or another during her reproductive life – between the ages of approximately 20 and 40 – was washed out by her 40s. She was an old woman who, in her youth, certainly had had no time or energy to spend on personal aspirations. To those who regarded motherhood as women’s pre-eminent occupation, that was doubtless fair enough. It is true that women were also discriminated against in terms of educational opportunity, and that reforms in this area made a massive difference to women’s chances of aspiring to any kind of achievement. But the fact remains that women were not able to take full advantage of these new opportunities until they could reliably control their fertility.
     The Catholic church is misogynist. Its clergy consists of celibate men and its hierarchy of celibate old men. Whatever some lay Catholics breezily say about disregarding church teaching on contraception and about how a softening of Vatican attitudes on clerical celibacy and homosexuality is desirable, even necessary, they have no input into church policy. There is no sign of the Vatican mitigating its hardline policy on these and other subjects. On the contrary, the church’s vociferous opposition to the ordination of women as priests – which Pope Benedict has disgracefully called an evil comparable with child abuse – is a clear symptom of its misogyny. But nothing illustrates it more than its attempts to deny women reproductive freedom.
     The Catholic church is not the only religious institution that is misogynist, and it is not the worst offender. There is, as far as I know, no Catholic religious police who punish women who do not dress according to the prevailing religious code, as there is in some countries where Islam is the state religion. Catholics do not call for women to be stoned to death for adultery. Catholic women can leave their homes without a male chaperone. Female genital mutilation is not a Catholic practice. So it could be worse – and in some places it is.
     On the other side, those of us who favour a wholly secular society (whether or not it is the Pope’s allegedly ‘aggressive’ one) are charged with being selfish. As Cardinal Winning said, again quoted in SR, ‘She kept talking about numero uno. That’s the one that matters now’. Surely there can be a middle way between that kind of self-obsession and the subordination of personal aspiration to a religious doctrine that has aimed, if recently rather unsuccessfully in developed countries, to keep women in a state where they are child-bearing machines with no life beyond their family (and their church).