Jackie Danicki

Bearing in mind what I wrote yesterday, here’s India Knight (someone I know personally, and for whom I have in the past had lots of nice things to say) in today’s Sunday Times, writing about how women supposedly now die earlier than men because we all binge drink, smoke like chimneys, and work our tails off:

You work your guts out and panic about having a family. Encouraged by the sisterhood, who place professional success above all else — a position that is so babyishly defensive that it is doomed to failure, as well as being completely pathetic — you delay having children until you are sufficiently far up the greasy pole.

You finally produce a child or two stupidly late (dangerously so, according to research last week: having a child beyond the age of 35 is now officially Not a Good Idea) and thus double your workload by trying to combine work and childcare, to say nothing of the other domestic pursuits. You spend the best years of your life haring around like a blue-arsed fly, permanently exhausted and harassed. You feel guilty if you prefer the office to the nursery and guilty if you don’t.

You have the sneaky feeling that this isn’t quite what you had in mind for yourself and the equally depressing intuition that it may get worse before it gets better. So you drink like a teenager, even though you are middle-aged. And you smoke. Ditto. You are increasingly prone to all sorts of exciting cancers. Oh, and now you’re statistically going to die younger, too. Seriously — what’s the point?

I have the sneaking suspicion that when Ms Knight says “you,” she actually means “I”. She has been writing columns for years that detail her drinking escapades, the fact that she’s a heavy smoker, and recently of the trauma of giving birth as an older mother (she’s 40) to a baby with health problems. Now, all that guilt she feels is being projected onto Britain’s entire female population. Nice!

Her conclusion from all this - and I’m not just talking about the bit where she takes the government to task for giving women the freedom to make stupid decisions - tells us volumes about Ms Knight’s outlook on life:

Equality is a complete crock as far as women are concerned and these figures prove it.

That is because when people like India Knight talk about ‘equality,’ they do not realise that ‘equality’ often just means dragging lots of people down to the low levels inhabited by others. She herself writes as much in this very column. But try explaining to these same people that ‘equality’ is not what it is cracked up to be, and they react as if you just said that you thought Hitler had the right idea.

There is a time and a place to whinge about the fact that life is difficult and involves hard work. My favourite time for this is as soon as I get in the door in the evening and spot some domestic job that I feel needs urgent attention, at which point I have a five minute rant about how I shouldn’t have to come home from the office and immediately start on Job No 2. (If Antoine chooses this moment to point out that there would be no problem if I had remembered to arrange for the cleaner to come round, the five minutes may extend to a full twenty.) But after I’ve had a bit of a vent, I can carry on in the full knowledge that - as the French say - C’est la vie.

There is something pathological in this insistence from feminists and female newspaper columnists (alas, Ms Knight is not the only one) that it’s down to the government to protect us from ourselves and our choices. Speak for yourselves, darlings - preferably to a psychiatrist.

Filed under: Life