Sob sisters and scolders
Julie Burchill
HELL HATH No FURY: WOMEN'S LETTERS FROM THE END OF THE AFFAIR edited by Anna Holmes Robson Books, £999. pp. 375, ISBN 1861056885 Without meaning to come the Big I-Am, I've got issues with the whole premise of this book, which probably stem from my very healthy level of self-esteem. I mean, once we're out of our teens (when admittedly I spent rather too many nights pining after a dreamy 19-year-old Oxbridge undergraduate called Max, of all the naff admissions) is there really any sentient female who genuinely whips herself into a lather when Whatsisname bails out, and before Thingy appears? To paraphrase some smug old sod, a man is only a man — whereas a gram of coke is a kick.
Of course, I know that a lot of adult women seem upset when they get the heave-ho, but a big bit of me actually thinks they're putting it on. This is usually for one of three reasons: a) Secretly they're lesbians but don't want to be, and laying on the my-mandone-left-me-woe-is-me shtick with a trowel strikes them as a cunning way to seem extra-hetero, even as they're really hugging themselves with glee that they don't have to do the dirty, dreary deed anymore. b) As a way to bond with other women. You'd be amazed the lengths modern broads will go to in order to do this, though search me why; bonding's for glue, not girls. See obvious beauties such as Michelle Pfeiffer saying, 'I'm not pretty — I look like a duck.' Similarly, to be seen suffering at the hands of a man is another way of what anthropologists call 'stepping down in the dominance hierarchy' — though what sort of cretin would ever want to do that?
c) To bring some drama to lives which, quite understandably, they find flat and boring, the cream of the joke being that if this sort of broad put a third of the energy into her work that she puts into her weeping, she'd be living the life of Reilly in no time. Think about it. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned? — I don't think so! For the simple reason that men want/need women more than women want/need men — fact. Men pay women for sex; women would rather spend their money on shoes. Men often kill women who leave them; women, at worst, cut the crotch out of men's trousers, a gesture which even though castratory is also done for comic effect — quite a thing to pull off, and certainly not a combo which indicates murderous fury.
Then there's that experiment which proved, kinkily but conclusively, that while men's eyes dilate when shown photos of naked women, women's eyes dilate when shown photos of naked babies. Admittedly with me it would be the other way around, but then, as we're always being told, I'm a bad mother and thus a freak of nature. And, anyway, to come ambling back to my point, even I, who like sex with men a great deal, can't imagine ever getting into a state if one left me. Yes, on one hand you'd no longer be having sex with the person you loved, but on the other hand it would free you up wonderfully for having sex with a whole lot of people you might just as easily fall in love with. To put it crudely, when one pair of legs closes, another opens, like doors.
Anyway, back to the book. Like all malingering media hounds faced with doing a review, I went straight to the index to check for my own name and on not finding it went to the contents page instead. must confess that my blood ran cold when I saw the name of the late Kathy Acker in the list of featured correspondents, remembering the Christmas Day long ago we had a thorough snog in a dark corner of my then mother-in-law's house, and I attempted to push the feeling on by sending her a New Year billet-doux along the lines of 'So, are we going to do it, or what?' In response, if you can call it that, I was lucky enough to receive a 'modern art' postcard of a chump with two heads with the line from a Smokey Robinson song, 'A taste of honey is worse than none at all.' I moped around for weeks — well, days — after, veering between feeling a) cheerful, because I was a taste of honey, apparently, and b) mis, because I was obviously not wanted here, snog or no snag, honey or not. Eventually I pulled myself together and got a crush on someone else; good job I didn't write something along the lines of 'Eat me, bitch!' or I could have ended up here. bunch of cows huddled together, licking their wounded udders. Yuck! It's hard to know which lot are the worst, but just to help us they're divided nicely up into manageably loathable categories. Are the scolders worse than the sobbers? Are the senders of letters even sillier than those who go to great lengths to write the perfect note and then sit on it, only hauling it out of mothballs decades later in order to present it to a blithely unaware public? The straightforward mentalists who admit that their letters are genuine, or the nambypamby bunny-boilers who 'made it up' for use in a novel? yeah, right!
Of course there are some well-written letters here — most of them from the 19th century. But at the end of the day, however well-composed the note, if a fully-grown lady allows herself to lose her composure over a man, then she is making 12 types of fool of herself. And goodness knows I say this not because of any basic objection to washing one's dirty linen in public; indeed, since leaving my starter husband some 20 years ago I have regularly limbered up for the day's writing with a few simple dissing exercises. But the point is, I do so for the cheap laughs, pure and simple. And that's the rub; men should not be dissed in fury but in fun — and preferably for pleasure and profit. Anything else, and a lady looks like a victim rather than a viper — and that's so not a good look.
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