'We never really meant women were evil, just ... different': oh please.

This was a rant I wrote in response to the Church of England’s decision not to ordain women as bishops:

Unfortunately what has happened is a typical Anglican paper-over-the-cracks exercise that has got stuck at the fudge stage. I love the Church of England for its fudginess as a rule, but really this is going a bit far.

Someone triumphantly remarked that you can’t find any Bible quotations to support women priests.  Silly.  Quotations will only ever give you one snapshot (that’s why arguing using them never gets anyone anywhere).  What you need is to get a sense of the wholeness that the dialectic is tending towards (sounds a bit vague I know, but ...) I mean, all right, Jesus didn’t care for convention, didn’t he? He positively wanted to turn things upside down, exalt the humble, send the rich empty away ... If you asked him ‘now, these people on whom you have breathed, and sent them to preach to all nations and lay on hands and forgive people’s sins, what sort of people do these have to be? I suppose they have to be men, to start off with ...’ I think he might just have laughed incredulously and said ‘you still don’t get it, do you?’

You notice in the Gospels that almost every time he’s actually having a conversation with someone and responding to what that person is saying, as opposed to lecturing them, it’s a woman. The only times he seems to change his mind are when he’s confronted by a woman – his mother at the marriage at Cana, the Syro-Phoenician woman who comes out with the line about dogs and crumbs, and arguably Martha at the raising of Lazarus. No way did he regard women as spiritually incapable.

Now of course anti-women-priests types will say ‘no of course women aren’t spiritually incapable, there’s just this one thing that is special to men – Jesus was a man, God is a Father, there must be some essential way in which a male priest can represent him while a female cannot.'  Unfortunately, then, their only logical position is that males are made 'in the image of God' in some fuller way than females - not what Genesis says. 'God made man in His own image, male and female he created them.' Now you can perfectly well believe in a God who would create a two-tier human race - Muslims do, and I don't suppose the idea comes very hard to Calvinists as they actually believe he created some to be damned, which is a lot more extreme! But it doesn't sound like the Christian God to me. Would the God who supposedly inspired his mother to say 'He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek' then go on to say to her whole sex, 'No, I didn't mean you lot, you can stay where you are'?  If the Incarnation is to have no knock-on effects for women, how does it make sense? Women are fobbed off with Mary: 'okay, one of you carried God in her womb, one of you is higher than the seraphim, but be content with that, the rest of you can shut up, stay out of the sanctuary and go on making the coffee'. Huh?

Anyway, they can't have it both ways. Either they should come clean and admit that they think women are something midway between true human and animal, or they should admit that women, too, can be representatives of God on earth.  This ‘equal, but with different roles’ stuff is a lame negotiating position adopted much too late to be in any way convincing.  No one can explain, if priesthood is special to men, what exactly is spiritually special to women.  Motherhood?  But male Christians have always been pretty condescending about that, at best, unless it’s virgin birth. Fatherhood is reckoned much more spiritually valid.  Mysticism?  Ah, but you have to be sceptical about these hysterical women.  Asceticism?  Now male asceticism can be dignified, but female asceticism is much too much like a mere morbid exaggeration of what women are all too prone to do anyway – placate or disarm the stronger sex by masochism: look how little space I can take up! Look how few demands I make! Look what a VICTIM I am (and as for that nasty sex, I never liked it much anyway ...).  Male-priesthood defenders may try and turn the argument around by saying, well, being a priest is all about service and sacrifice and that’s why men have to do it, women do it in their everyday lives already. Well, then, if the Christian thing is to balance out gender roles, shouldn’t women get some real authority somewhere to make up for their sacrificial excess? Preferential role as teachers and preachers, maybe?  Never saw it happening ... a lot of this stuff is just bare- faced opportunism.

To argue for equality in the priesthood is not 'modern political correctness' (and in any case, where did the dogma of equality come from if not from Christianity? You won't find it in any culture that hasn't been Christian). It's simply Bible logic. Nor does it matter that the Church has been doing things differently for 2,000 years. For one thing, the idea of the spiritual equality of women has always been around, bobbing up at awkward moments. It's time for it to stay up. For another, has not the Church spent more than half its history holding out for the absolute necessity of some things that Anglicans now consider positively harmful, e.g. a celibate clergy?  Didn’t it take most of two thousand years to decide that slavery was unacceptable in any circumstances?  Hey, the Church is a work in progress. It was never guaranteed to get everything right all the time. Most of the time it just got on with it, with far less agonising about eternal destiny versus passing fads than now.

But it can’t be said either side comes out of this argument well – it gets so polarised – the shrill, moral-high-ground-grabbing, manipulative misrepresentations of the pro-lobby or the elephantine scriptural literalism and thinly veiled misogyny of the more vocal antis (and they’ve finally learned how to do the politicking too, by the looks of things).

Funny thing is, the church is in effect probably already largely run by women – the indispensable tea-makers and flower-rota-fixers, the mumsy organising matriarchy that runs rings round the poor old parish priests. My nightmare would be that the opening of the priesthood to women would result in all those types actually getting into the saddle and taking over the whole show officially as well as unofficially! (After all, being a priest is such a nice job for a married woman, a touchy-feely, second-income, people-person kind of job...) The men, of course, would find it unbearable and desert in droves, then we’d have the first ever all-female, truly matriarchal Church. Ready for that, everyone? The cliqueiness, the gossip, the backstabbing, the non-speakers, the victim points, the conflict avoidance, the covert bullying ... My hope is that getting real, recognised responsibility on merit, rather than having to get it by stealth and as part of a competition for male attention, will eventually flush out all this sludge and women will stop behaving this way, but it’s a slow process, much slower than the men going into a sulk and refusing to do any job that NASTY GURLS are allowed to do ...

And my daughter added:

‘God is (in my opinion) a genderless spirit who was described as male by the patriarchs who first wrote about him, and Jesus wasn’t a woman because he was realistic – he struck a blow for the humble and meek by being born a normal carpenter’s son instead of a prince or whatever, but he knew he needed to be an able-bodied, mobile and basically respectable person if he was to have the freedom to get around spreading his message. In a male-dominated society, that meant being male. A female Jesus probably wouldn’t have got very far. Also: fifty-fifty chance. Maybe he just *happened* to be male.

Watership Down

Watership Down: the amazing rabbit Odyssey from the 1970s, and yes, it works.  How shall I count the myriad pleasures this book has given me in the intervening years?  The heart-in-the-mouth story-telling power, to begin with, as one exciting climax is piled on to another.  When I first read it, my favourite character by far was the dashing Bigwig, and my favourite chapters were the ones in which, like some World War II secret agent, he infiltrated the hostile warren of Efrafa to arrange the does’ escape.  I still think this section is a masterclass in how to tell a story: the mind-bending claustrophobia, the lowering threat, the way in which the best-laid plans go astray and have to be replaced by inspired improvisation, the apparently hopeless last stand and last-minute rescue ... brilliant!   On growing up, however, one learns to appreciate the organizing genius alongside the lone hero.  Hazel’s steep learning curve as he cajoles and co-ordinates his motley crew of rabbits, suiting his tactics to their characters, and finally becomes their recognised chief, is absorbingly depicted.  The third of the leading trio, Fiver, I’m not quite so sure about.  I always found his prophetic visions a tiny bit contrived: whether any modern, rational writer can really ‘do’ mysticism is moot. But in the narrative context these doubts are easily swept away.

The in-depth descriptions of the natural world seem to hold up the action at first, but on further readings are relished as providing the solid underpinning of reality for this apparently whimsical tale.  The epigraphs from poetry and prose that open every chapter are a joy in themselves, incredibly well chosen, and anchor the book without pretension in the great sea of literature. For instance, the Threarah, a one-rabbit distillation of the Establishment, whose equivocal leadership is wholly inadequate to the challenge he faces, is introduced with lines from Henry Vaughan’s Eternity that are almost more telling in this context than in the great original poem:

‘The darksome statesman, hung with weights and woe,

Like a thick midnight-fog, moved there so slow,

He did not stay, or go.’

The gem-like stories within the story, the rabbits’ creation myth and legends of their folk hero, El-ahrairah, the Prince with a Thousand Enemies, are endlessly apt and resonant, ranging from uproariously funny to deeply serious, as when El-ahrairah confronts the ‘Black Rabbit of Inlé’, the embodiment of death:

‘The Black Rabbit drew his claws along the floor.

‘”Bargains, bargains, El-ahrairah,” he said.  “There is not a day or a night but a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla his life for his Chief Rabbit’s.  Sometimes it is taken, sometimes it is not.  But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.”’

And now the pleasure has been multiplied by being able to read the book aloud to my own children and see its language pass into family parlance – especially the bits that convey the rabbits’ touching conviction of their own centrality in the universe, the ‘Great Indestructibility of the Rabbits’.  ‘You must realise, Lord Frith, how important they are and not interfere with their beautiful lives.’  ‘Oh, Frith on the hills!  He made it all for us!’ And the ever-popular ‘Hoi, hoi, u embleer Hrair ...’  

In interviews since Watership Down became a world bestseller, Richard Adams has been at pains to downplay the ‘political allegory’ and ‘symbolic meanings’ read into the book and to emphasise the spontaneous, storytelling aspect, and he is right.  Adams the artist, letting his patterns emerge by feel, is far better than Adams the conscious thinker.  This is clearest in the treatment of the female rabbit characters.  The emphasis on male adventure to the almost complete neglect of females has earned him a lot of adverse criticism, understandably when you come to passages like this:

‘The kind of ideas that have become natural to many male human beings in thinking of females – ideas of protection, fidelity, romantic love, and so on – are, of course, unknown to rabbits ... they are not romantic and it came naturally to Hazel and Holly to consider the two Nuthanger does simply as breeding stock for the warren.’

This makes it sound as if, for Adams, the only possible male approaches to the female are pedestalization on the one hand, or dehumanization (derabbitization!) on the other – you are either a shining ideal, or you are ‘breeding stock’.  Fortunately, things look up as soon as he introduces any actual female characters.  When Bigwig goes undercover in Efrafa, he is far more concerned with the reliability of the does as fellow conspirators than with their ‘breeding’ qualities.  The undoubtedly eugenic Nelthilta almost betrays the whole attempt with her big mouth (in a subtle touch, Bigwig admires her ‘spirit’, not quite realising that she is an immature version of himself – Bigwig the way he used to be before the wide world taught him better).  On the other hand, Hyzenthlay, although on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is Bigwig’s real equal in courage and intelligence:

‘Bigwig realized that he had stumbled, quite unexpectedly, upon what he needed most of all: a strong, sensible friend, who would think on her own account and help him bear his burden.’

Notice, too, that Hyzenthlay is less prone to uncritically accept the culture of her warren than are the males.  She neatly analyzes an Efrafan’s face-saving, conformist behaviour for Bigwig’s benefit.  ‘But you’re an Efrafan,’ objects Bigwig.  ‘Do you think like that too?’  To which Hyzenthlay wryly replies, ‘I’m a doe’.

Actions speak louder than words in Watership Down – and to those who are against the very idea of a male-dominated quest narrative, I would gently say that storytelling is many thousands of years old, while gender equality is in its infancy.  It may be a long time before stories catch up, and it’s a bit unfair to expect individual authors, like Richard Adams, to pull it off all at once.

What I find as disturbing, or more so, is the treatment of art and what we usually think of as civilisation.  The rabbits’ tales emerge from the ‘collective unconscious’ in a very Jungian way: handed down from one storyteller to another but with no identifiable authors.  During its travels the rabbit band arrives at a luxurious warren where the stories of El-ahrairah are considered old-fashioned.  The rabbits here go in for experimental poetry, and have also discovered the concept of visual art (‘shapes’ made with stones in a wall, meaningless to our heroes).  But this artistic development comes at a terrible price: it emerges that the warren has lost control of its fate, being fed and protected by a local farmer who sets snares around it for a constant supply of rabbit meat.  These rabbits’ advanced culture is merely a distraction from their helpless state.  Does this mean that Adams thinks that a tribal society is natural and best for humans, and that civilisation is literally a ‘snare’ and a delusion, in which our vital survival skills are atrophied by the social and technological defences we have set up for ourselves?  If he did, I would think him seriously mistaken – but in fact I think that is only one position in the complex dialectic of Watership Down, belied by Adams’s revelling in the depth of his own literary culture. 

This aspect of the story, however, was taken up with enthusiasm by the conservative journalist Christopher Booker (in The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade).  For him, Watership Down was a protest at the way our technological civilisation dehumanises us while despoiling nature – though a protest that was likely to stay on the level of fantasy. ‘It is all very well to dream of getting back to a simpler, more natural world where we might once again become fully human.  But in the conscious, outward world, the truth is that we are still doing almost everything we can to ensure that we are travelling self-destructively in the opposite direction.’  Well, as a mere ‘doe’, I have to say that Booker’s notion that we might be more fully human in a state of raw nature fails to inspire me, and indeed strikes me as false and sentimental in itself.  Humans are technological animals by nature, and the ‘drive to subject nature to our own use and comfort’ – when it results, for instance, in hospitals and libraries – is far from self-destructive, ignoble or lacking in compassion. 

Again, Adams is a more subtle storyteller than all this might imply.  The rabbits themselves are not averse to technological experiment – an old pallet that floats across a river, for instance – and human intervention more than once has a positive, rather than a destructive effect in the story.  The rabbits, of course, are human, more than anything else in their tricksterishness, their adaptability, and their playfulness.  It is more than anything the sheer spirit of play, of thought-experiment, something that would be lacking in ‘mere’ nature, that suffuses Watership Down with joy rather than doom.