Fay Weldon - What Makes Women Happy

Go to Norway and Sweden and notice how the restaurants are full of men. Few women eat out. Yet in theory these are super-equal societies. The women, one supposes, can only prefer to stay at home. These all-male meals – tables for four, six, eight, ten, more – tend to be silent, grim affairs. Men like to sit side by side, silently, metaphorically locking horns, and don’t seem to have nearly such a good time as women do. But they do seem to get happier as the evening progresses, not the other way round. Life gets better, not worse. It isn’t fair.

Nothing’s fair.

It’s unfair that some people like sex a lot, some very little, some not at all. The capacity for pleasure is not doled out equally or fairly.

(It is probably a good idea that people with equivalent levels of sexual energy partner one another, if they want the union to last. People need to wear each other out in bed. Three times a day, three times a week (the norm) or once a year – so long as both are suited, what’s the worry?)

Mind you, the easy-orgasmers, the lucky 20 per cent, are not always popular with others. The papers this morning were in a state of outrage about Sandy, a feckless girl of 19 who went on holiday to Spain leaving her three children in the care of a 15-year-old. When summonsed home by the police and the media, she refused to go. She was having too good a time, she said. She had her photo taken burying her head into the bare chest of a semi-naked waiter. I bet she had orgasms at the drop of a hat. She knew how to enjoy herself. She was not anxious. She did not feel guilt. She well and truly broke the ten-minute rule. She stretched it to a whole week of drink, drugs, sex and ecstasy before guilt set in and she flew home. That’s one way of doing it.

The fight for gender equality is bad for the looks. It makes no one happy, unless you find some reward in struggling for a justice that evolution failed to deliver. It will just develop your jaw, wrinkle your brow beyond the capacity of Botox to unravel, muddy your complexion so much that no amount of Beauty Flash will clear it, and in general do you no good.

Fight for political justice by all means – join the party, reform and re-educate. Fight for domestic justice – ‘Your turn to clean the loo’ – if you must, though personally I don’t recommend too much of it, it’s too exhausting. But do not fight for physiological equality because it does not exist.

If you have a period pain, you have one. Accept it. Don’t fight it. Sit down. Take a pill. A male voice raised is impressive; a female voice raised creates antipathy. Accept it. You are not trying to be a man. You are proud to be a woman. Do not shout your enemies down at the client meeting – leave that to the men. Get your way by smiling sweetly. The end is more important than the means.

Accept that for women happiness comes in short bursts and the ten-minute rule applies. For men it can last as long as a football match before they realize they’re late picking up the child from school.

So is the sum of human happiness greater for a man than for a woman? I suspect so. Lucky old them.

Be generous. You can afford to be. At least you occupy the moral high ground, and they know it.

It’s quite nice up here these days. Women can look out over the urban landscape and know they are nicer than men, more co-operative, more empathic, better at communication, better at getting to university and better at getting jobs. Women multi-task – everyone knows. They can do many things at once. Men tend to do one thing at a time. If a woman loses a sock she finds another which will do just as well; a man continues the search until he has found it (albeit in the bin where he threw it), by which time the train has gone and the meeting has begun.

Women abjure the idle languorousness of sexual contentment and get on with things. Women leap out of bed after sex to feed the cat and wash out their smalls so that they’ll be dry by morning. Men just go to sleep gratified and satisfied, happy that all is well. (Though if it’s not his own bed he may well want to regain it before falling asleep. ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ he says. Oh yes!)

Women worry in advance. They search through their bags for the dry-cleaning ticket before they even get into the shop. Men wait until they’re in there and then hold everyone up.

Accept gender differences, don’t deny them. That way you make the most of what happiness nature did allow you as a woman.

Evolution has allowed you an intellect that’s pretty much the same as the male’s.

(Though the male bell curve when it comes to IQ is a little more flattened than for the female. That is to say there are more males at the extreme ends of the spectrum – extreme intelligence, extreme lack of it – which is why you get more male double-firsts at Oxford than female and more males held in police cells overnight than females.)

Evolution has also allowed you an aesthetic appreciation equal to that of the male. There are as many men as women listening to flute concertos at the Wigmore Hall, as many men as women wandering round art galleries.

(Nature might slightly favour the male when it comes to creative activity – men’s books may be ‘better’, if less readable, than women’s, their paintings fetch more in the art market, and so on – but that claim would take a whole book on its own to discuss.)

The traditionally female qualities of caring and nurturing, sharing and co-operating were not always seen as admirable. Inside the home a woman did them for free; outside the home they commanded low wages. Society favoured to male virtues: dismissing and disposing, self-control and a stiff upper lip. But then women, released by technological advance from the domestic drudgery required just to keep the children alive, have used their new power brilliantly. Theirs are the qualities now most valued in Western society. Forget the old male values of never apologizing, never explaining – they’re out-moded. Presidents weep, prime ministers apologize, monarchs explain. To have to accept your genetic make-up, the femaleness of your body, its irritating habit of keeping menstrual time with the moon, is not so bad a fate. These cosmic forces are too great for you to take on single-handed anyway.

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