Am I alone in thinking that the sight of a wrinkly, grey, washed-out, middle-aged Janet Street-Porter is enough to make readers desert a newspaper in droves? Or perhaps readers of The Independent like the sort of ageist, sexist poison Street-Porter penned in her column last week on the news that Gordon Brown was to be a father at 54?
“Am I alone,” she inquired, “in thinking that the sight of a wrinkly, grey, washed-out, middle-aged man holding a tiny little pink thing in a nappy is faintly disgusting?”.
Well, yes; I suspect you might be, Janet.
Today’s man, of course, can’t win. Resist new-man metrosexuality and he’s a caveman; push a buggy and he’s cynically trying to usurp a woman’s role. Janet’s icy world view is just the tip of the iceberg of role confusion that has been bobbing around the choppy waters of feminocracy ever since women won the sex war. The treaty’s been signed, but the old campaigners just can’t stop shooting the prisoners.
Here’s a bit more of Janet (to remind Times readers why they read a grown-up newspaper): “Men are very good at pretending they can take over what has hitherto been considered women’s territory, and being broody is now a male prerogative.” It is?
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“Being a dad in middle-age has become another status symbol that reinforces just how macho and desirable you are. It says, I don’t have any problems with my equipment, no prostate problems for me, no need for Viagra in our house!” It does?
Now, I have no idea if Janet, 59, has any children, but whether she has or has not shouldn’t colour anyone’s view of her work, any more than an employer should doubt a woman’s commitment and fire her because she becomes pregnant. But likewise, how dare anyone — as she does — question a man’s desire to have children with his partner on the ground that he has a job that renders him too busy to offer 24-hour childcare?
We can rest assured, Street-Porter tells us, that “for every elderly father-to-be, in the background there will be a woman with bags under her eyes, doing all the hard work”. There sure will: the Bulgarian nanny. This isn’t a gender issue, it’s a class thing.
If there’s a problem in a woman’s world, for a certain type of woman it’s bound to be a man’s fault. Take the response to the extract in The Times last week from Microwave Man’s eponymous new book, in which our hero opines about the self-delusion of women who have affairs with married men.
Seven women wrote to say: “Of course there is a very large number of lonely, single women who lack the self-respect or clarity of purpose to walk away from an exploitative relationship with a married man, just as there is a huge pool of men who take advantage of this.”
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“Exploitative”, “take advantage” . . . funny how some women choose to be strong-willed and independent only when it suits them. And, if there’s a second edition, this quote from the sisterly seven is going on the cover: “The bleakest, most offensive piece of prose we have read, outside the field of race hate literature”, which “crosses the line from polemic into violent sexual pornography. It makes you sound like a low-rent version of the Patrick Bateman character in American Psycho”.
Blimey. Wait till they read the chapter about my fantasy seduction of an un-dead Andrea Dworkin, conducted while discussing the merits of chemical versus manual exfoliation and arguing the pros and cons of disposable nappies.
Microwave Man (Penguin, £7.99) is published on Thursday, January 26