Mary Kenny
Back in the 1960s, Clive James, novelist, memoirist, poet, TV performer and critic and all-round hilarious Australian lad, memorably said: “Of course I’m in favour of the [contraceptive] pill. It puts more crumpet on the market.”
Clive didn’t say “I’m in favour of the contraceptive pill because it could help maternal health”…or “…because it empowers women in the control of their fertility”, advancing the more ‘responsible’ evaluations of this new pharmaceutical. He put it in a chuckling Ozzie laddish way: it made girls more available.
Did he not speak the truth? The pill did make women more ‘available’. The seducer’s argument was henceforth: “There isn’t any reason now to say ‘No’!”
Not that we should see male-female relations just as a Victorian cliché of “male seducer” and “female victim”. Plenty of women availed of the newfound liberation to do just as Simone de Beauvoir had urged women to do – live like men. And on the more positive side, the contraceptive pill did bring more focus onto the subject of female fertility, and doctors subsequently took gynaecology more seriously (until the advent of the pill, gynaecology had been regarded as having low status among medics).
Resonance
Yet Clive James’s famous sally found much resonance with those who knew the field. There was “more crumpet on the market”, and Hugh Hefner, the late founder of Playboy, followed up with the aperçu that henceforth “sex is about recreation, not procreation”.
Are these analyses, coming straight from the guys who celebrated sexual liberation, so very different in substance from much of what Bishop Doran was indicating in his recent speech marking the anniversary of Humanae Vitae? He was pointing out that women were now more often expected to be compliant to male demands.
He might have mentioned the phenomenon of the New Yorker short story ‘Cat Person’, by Kristen Roupenian, which went global overnight because it chillingly illuminated contemporary relationships: a young woman doesn’t particularly want to have sexual relations with a guy she is dating, but she goes along with it anyway because of a kind of cultural inertia – it’s what you’re expected to do.
As a late friend of mine observed in the post-pill age about sleeping with a boyfriend: “It seems so disobliging not to.” The notion that this was a hugely meaningful act had gone.
Small wonder that “sexual consent” classes are now required. Or that 70% of female students experience sexual harassment according to a study at Galway university. Indeed, almost every group feels under pressure – men and transgender people too complain of sexual harassment. There has to be a link with the notion that there are now no consequences to ‘anything goes’.
Minister Simon Harris’s response to Bishop Doran seemed to me unreflective and superficial, but then not a lot of politicians seem capable of more analytical thinking. Perhaps they should go off and have a word with Clive James.
(PS: ‘Crumpet’ was the printable version of Clive’s celebrated quip.)
Silver lining in many ways
Old gals who played hockey in their schooldays (“bully one, bully two…”) will have been delighted by Ireland’s women’s hockey victory last weekend – a silver medal in the World Cup Final, as never before attained.
Historically, hockey was a minority sport in this country. It was, according to an older Connacht former sportsman, (half-jokingly) regarded as “hurling for Protestants”.
That’s to say, the game was, in the past, restricted to the North and the Dublin area, and seldom played outside of these regions.
The convent schools took it up as a healthy pursuit, but it was considered more genuinely Irish for girls to play camogie.
Hockey’s status as an all-Ireland sport now makes it all the more diverse, surely.
