Philobiblon

It is said that those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. Salon is looking at a magazine for opt-out mothers, who formerly had high-flying careers – this year’s “great, definitive trend” for women according to well, just about every major news outlet – and finding its articles seem designed for women “desperate for a ray of positivity in what sounds like their hellish daily lives”.

One chart called “Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda” compares, “just for fun,” what CHOs are obligated to do during the holidays vs. what they would actually like to do. Among the required tasks? “Do all the shopping for my entire family and my husband’s relatives,” “Buy a new dress for my husband’s company party,” “Cook endless batches of cookies” and “Put the decorations away and clean the house on New Year’s Day.” Among the things that CHOs would like to do are “Sit in front of a cozy fire drinking wine,” “Buy a whole new winter wardrobe” and “Send my husband to the bakery.”
Another table listing “20 ways to amuse yourself on a bad day” includes suggestions like making “pancakes in the shape of those really nice Jimmy Choos you used to wear before you had kids,” and affixing “a smiley face sticker to your forehead, because frankly, it’s the only smile that’s been on your face all day.” (You have to sit through the Salon advert for that link.)

The article includes an interview with the editor who keeps answering desperately that this is all meant to be a joke, that it is merely tongue-in-cheek.

It sent me looking for a passage from Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, a book that should be compulsory reading for every high school student (or at the very least the girls):

“Husbands were rarely discussed, but they were always in the background. They were usually brought up to illustrate some absurdity or some construction:
‘Paul likes his coffee strong, so I make it strong and water mine.’
‘Norm refuses to eat pork.’
‘Hamp will not touch a baby’s diaper. Never has. So when they were little, I couldn’t leave them with him at all. That’s why I toilet-trained them so early.’
No one ever questioned such statements, asked why Natalie or Mira didn’t simply insist, or Adele make the coffee the way she liked it and let Paul make his own. Never. Husbands were walls, absolutes, in small things at least. The women would howl and cackle at their incredible demands and impossible delusions, their inexplicable eating habits and their strange predjuduces, but it was as if they were de black folks down to de shanty recounting the absurb pretensions of de white massas up to de big house.”

An essay question: compare and contrast this passage with the words of Erika Kotite, editor of this new ornament to the newstands, called Total 180! –

One of the feature stories for the next issue is called “My Husband Is a Single Man Who Happens to Have a Family.” I mean, I’m sure you found from reading the magazine that we’re trying to be humorous. I don’t know how to put it, but men, as we know, maybe even biologically are able to focus on one thing at a time. Women juggle. The fact that I stay home and watch my kids gives my husband the freedom to not wear that pager because he knows I’ve got it covered. When we’re both home we share. But we had to have that discussion many times, about having shared duty. It’s the same thing women talk about all the time, that their husband doesn’t clean the house or doesn’t do this or that. A man will step over the bag of garbage to get to the beer in the fridge, and a woman will pick up the bag of garbage as soon as she walks into the kitchen.

(I also just love the infantilising, pink-dominated design of the magazine website. Nothing like publishing for grown-ups as though they were 10-year-olds.)

Soho now is the haunt of tourists and theatre day-trippers, swanning advertising executives and swooping shoppers. But it was not always thus. For centuries this area was home to some of the poorest and most desperate people to be found in London and it was a measure of increasing civilisation that in 1931 what are now known as the Marshall Street Baths were opened to “improve the health and wellbeing of the local people”. There were two swimming pools, slipper baths for those without facilities at home, a public laundry and a child welfare centre.

It is no praise to our age that this wonderful facility, built to the highest of artistic and structural standards, has stood derelict since 1997, its fate undecided. But that has provided an opportunity for its use for a unique performance, Deep End, by Corridor, a group that specialises in site-specific events.

The visit begins with a “health and safety” briefing from an officious clipboarded man in a reflective vest, who tells you, in a patronising tone, how developers plan to again make this structure great – mostly with (no doubt astonishingly expensive) apartments, and with one small part restored for public use.

Then you plunge into the building’s past, for an experience that covers all of its history, and seduces all of your senses. At the top of the gorgeously sculpted, gold-railed staircase, you listen as far below, water drips slowing into a galvanised bath that sits in the foundations of the workhouse that occupied this site in 1854 when John Snow in nearby Broadwick Street identified the well that caused a disastrous cholera outbreak. READ MORE

A weekend report suggests that about 20 per cent of women in the UK keep a weapon by their bed to defend themselves against intruders. Now these sorts of surveys can be pretty dodgy, but even if the figure is half of that it is a worry.

Firstly, because in the extraordinarily unlikely event of them encountering an intruder who attacks them, the odds of the weapon being turned against them must be very high. Ditto in the rather more likely event of them being attacked by a domestic partner.

But beyond that, it suggests a level of fear that can only be described as pathological.

Sarah Barker, 42, a nurse who lives in Manchester, won’t sleep unless she has barricaded herself in her bedroom with a stepladder. “When my next-door neighbour is away I use something heavier – my bookcase in fact – because there would be no one to hear my screams. I’ve always done this. To me it’s completely normal.
“When I get home at night I check every room, even the shower, the cupboard under the stairs and the wardrobes,” she said. “And while I’m checking one room I’m keeping an eye on the others in case someone slips out of one and hides in another.”

For a small child to worry about bogeymen in the wardrobe is one thing; for a grown woman to do so is another.

The fact is that crime in the UK is declining, and the risk of being attacked in your home by a stranger is probably about the same, if not less, than being struck by lightning. Yet women are putting time, energy and even changing their life because of fear of crime.

Why? Certainly the media has to take some of the blame – all of the sensational reporting of crime that goes on.

But I suspect there’s something deeper going on. I used to live in Australia beside a widow in her late 50s who lived in a veritable fortress, and if she visited me for a late afternoon coffee I had to walk her the 50 yards home because she was too frightened to be out on her own. She had been widowed a couple of years before, after nearly 40 years of marriage in which she’d taken no responsibility for her life. She didn’t know what a chequebook looked like, had probably never been in the house on her own at night. Suddenly she was on her own, and she had concentrated all of her fears and uncertainty about being alone on the “risk” of being attacked by a stranger.

More and more women are at all stages of life living on their own. Nothing wrong with that – but what I suspect is causing the problem is their lack of experience at doing this, the lack of preparation they have received.

I can trace the end of my fears to being 17, and going to “revise for the HSC” (equivalent of A levels) in an isolated family holiday house, probably a mile or more from any other inhabited dwelling, although situated on a main (for Australia) country road. It was an old rickety house, the walls rattled and shook, one night the garage door blew open with a tremendous crash, another time two biker men in full leathers came down the driveway (they were lost and wanted directions); at times I was terrified. But I survived, coped with it, and after that being on my own held no real fears.

But I suspect – cossetted and protected by their parents – large numbers of women never have such an experience. They go from home to a university college or shared house, then into live-in relationships(s), then perhaps in their 30s or 40s or 50s find themselves living alone for the first time. All of the general amorphous fears that raises become concentrated in one, comfortably external concern – an intruder.

So, if you’ve got a daughter, for the sake of her future, don’t be over-protective, encourage her to do things on her own – go camping maybe, or on holiday on her own, or walking on her own. You’ll be equipping her well for the future.

And if you are alone, and frightened, ask yourself what are your real rational fears, and which are the irrational ones? Then try to put them in perspective, and take sensible steps to deal with them. Improve the locks if that is the right thing to do, but don’t leave an enormous knife in your bedside drawer.

Today’s splash headline:
Toxic cloud chokes south
Oddly enough, I’m typing, not suffocating …

Had a small whiff of petrol smoke about 5-6pm last night. That was it.

New arrivals in Bangkok are easy to spot; after a day or two in the city they’ve got a dazed, bemused look, and move slowly, hesitantly. This Bangkok-itis is an extreme form of the culture shock that many tourists experience in foreign lands.

There are two factors that make it particularly acute in the Thai capital. First, so much of the environment seems familiar – glass-and-steel office blocks, modern cars, familiar fast food restaurants. Yet it is also so foreign. Underneath the office blog might stand a baby elephant, its owner begging for funds. Amidst the modern cars zip scores of death-defying motorcycle taxis, their riders’ bright jackets clashing with the mini-skirts of the high-heel-shod women perched precariously side-saddle behind them. Then they’ll be the shrine on the corner thronged with fortune-tellers.

Bangkok is where east meets west, modern meets traditional, the past meets the future. And while often they’ll stand in stark opposition, they’ll also blend to produce astonishing new hybrids.

The visitor who seeks easy answers might turn to a guidebook, and for some of the more obvious sights get a sentence of two of explanation. Or they might turn to a scholarly historical study, explaining temples and sculptures. But Philip Cornwel-Smith’s Very Thai: Everyday Popular Culture is the first book that I know of to try to explain Thailand as it is today.

This is a prodigiously illustrated (by the photographer John Goss) text, accessible, but informative enough that even people who’ve lived in Thailand for decades will find plenty they didn’t know.

Of course I was aware, having lived in Thailand for almost five years, that trucks were usually heavily decorated, particularly in their upper parts. But I didn’t know that these works were designed to placate the journey spirit, Mae Yanang, or that each cab represented the sacred Mount Meru. The frequent inclusion of Western film stars in these images in no way interferes with this.

But it might take the first-time visitor a while to notice these, being too distracted by more disconcerting sights, such as the kathoeys (lady-boys) who can be seen at work and play around the capital without the locals batting an eyelid. (I used to live in the African rag-trade district of Bangkok, Pratunam. A kathoey was an otherwise entirely ordinary staff member on one of the stalls. When Africa met Asia at work, there was frequently some cultural confusion.)

Cornwel-Smith explains the understanding of gender and sexuality – so different from the West’s – that underlies the phenomenon:

Thais make a distinction between gender – a public identity to be kept riab roi (proper) – and sexuality, which remains undiscussed, unrestrained. Thai society tends to regard sexual urges – at least for males – as natural and requiring plentiful, but private outlets. Hence polygamy, once banned, resurfaced through minor wives and the fancifully themed playgrounds of the sex industry. With women’s virginity still a commodity to be guarded, kathoey have offered a non-disruptive outlet for single males.”

This acceptance has helped to encourage Thailand as a destination for medical tourism of a specific king – gender-reassignment surgery. Up to 1,000 operations are thought to have been done on foreigners each year. And many kathoeys have taken up the practice.

Yet after centuries of a place in Thai society, new conflicts have emerged. Following the recent morality crackdown by the Shinawatra government, the rights of kathoeys have become a political issue, Cornwel-Smith reports, quoting Thanyaporn Anyasri, 2002 “Miss Queen of the Universe”, who said: “I want to be the world’s first transexual prime minister so I can legislate laws that promote homosexual people’s equality.” He then quotes a representative of a Buddhist foundation saying that since every person has gone through innumerable reincarnations they are likely to be kathoeys at some point in the future, so should think about equality now.

After contemplating all of that, the first-time visitor might need a drink and a nice meal. If they’re very brave, that might include the “prawns of the air” (grasshoppers), deep-fried whole and sold from street stalls, and some Red Bull – one of the few Thai traditions to really make it big inter (internationally). Cornwell-Smith will explain too why there might be tiny pink tissues on table, and for afters a pudding so sweet it will set your teeth on edge.

Many more aspects of Bangkok, from the skin-tight police uniforms (the government was keeping up with Western fashion in the Sixties, but then got left behind) to the numbers of dogs roaming the streets. There are also sections on Thai music, festivals, decor, gardens and much more.

If you’re the sort of visitor to Thailand who just wants to swan down Khao San Road and then lie on the beaches, you won’t need to buy Very Thai. But if you want some great stories to tell about the country – not just accounts of what you’ve seen but explanations for the curiosities and complexities – then this is an essential book.

Declaration of interest: The author used to commission writing from me when he was editor of Metro (then Thailand’s answer to Time-Out) and I was a writer there. Online from that time I have an article about Khunying Supatra Masdit (billed by some as most-likely to be Thailand’s first female prime minister) and a piece about the Maldives. They’re not the paradise you think.

As the Queen of Scots walks to her execution in Schiller’s Mary Stuart, she breaks off to confront the Earl of Leicester, the man who has vacillated in his affections and allegiance between her and Queen Elizabeth. Mary spits at Leicester: “You chose the hard heart, not the tender one.”

That might sum up the central conflict in the play, which pits two visions of womanhood, and queenhood, against each other, and the world of men in which they must operate.

Phyllida Lloyd ‘s production, transferred from the Donmar to the Apollo, makes the most of this magnificent conflict, putting the women in period dress and the men in modern bureaucrat uniform of suit and briefcase. The women are at centre stage, literally in the spotlight, but they are buffetted by waves of men seeking through flattery, through blackmail, through trickery and even sometimes force, to turn them into mere puppets. READ MORE