"WHAT it really should have been unearthing," wrote my colleague Angela Long recently of a BBC Panorama programme about the alleged consequences for children of working mothers, "should have been the real scandal of the number of families totally abandoned by their fathers and the near impossible task of getting men to pay the maintenance ordered by the courts."
And she asked: "Where was Dad? Was he working? Had he left them? Not a mention to disturb the thesis that all kids need in this rotten world is dear nurturing Mum at every turn." She assures us she turned the programme off in raging irritation.
I trust she will manage to finish this column before raging irritation overwhelms her again; the point, surely, is that she is missing the point. Parents are not interchangeable ciphers who have equal appetites and aptitudes for child rearing, which so many men are then unaccountably able to wriggle out of.
No male zeal
If their appetites for such duties were identical, would not men attend to such duties with the same conscience driven zeal that women do? They do not. For men are different from women - crueller, more violent, more ambitious, more selfish, more sexually predatory, more imaginative, more insane, more unstable, more creative, and more wicked; oh, much, much more wicked.
The woman who abandons her child is so extraordinarily unusual that nowadays she is regarded as a victim, and deserving of treatment and care. The man who abandons his children is merely doing what men have done through the ages. Referring to some apparent trend in the United States this week's, I take it - to blame mothers for all that ails societies, Angela asked: "Does it not seem odious that women should be made to carry, along with the briefcase and the pack of Pampers, a super overdose of guilt? ... We get down to some basic issues here. Men have struggled in from the office (or the field) at 7 p.m. for centuries and nobody got hysterical that the children didn't have Daddy around to mend the Dinky truck in the middle of the afternoon."
Odious, certainly changeable, probably not. Expecting a scattering of well intentioned, well educated middle class men, probably with beard, sandals and a baby sling, to be as caring towards their children as are the children's mothers is one thing: expecting the generality of men to behave according to the new rules of parenthood is the equivalent of commanding tigers to be herbivores.
Want, wish, wail or gnash your teeth in anger, but it will change nothing. Men by force of, law can be obliged to accept women in the workforce - in Ireland, in the teeth of the direst opposition from the trade unions, and through a driving gale of inertia from Dail Eireann. But laws do not reform nature and a full generation after the nurture nature debate was begun, the argument has been won. Nature wins.
The natural order
You can see nature express itself in a nursery - the girls cooperative, gentle, seeking consensus; the boys task driven, aggressive, loud. Listening to the news from Britain last week, about the prison/hospital for pederasts, in which there was a vast trade in pornography, and to which a child was taken by a former patient to be used and abused as the inmates chose, two things struck me: one is that there are no circumstances, there could be no conditioning, no brainwashing, which could make a group of women behave like that, no matter how perverse they might individually be; and the other, that there is evil in this world and its primary vector is male.
There are, to be sure, evil women - Else Koch, the sexually voracious concentration camp guard; a Hindley; Rosemary West - but almost without exception they have dabbled in their homicidally sexual hobbies in the company of like minded men, Women rarely behave with real, life threatening cruelty and, if in the company of other women, it is never for sexual pleasure.
Throughout history, women have killed male prisoners in war, often castrating them first - most recently in Europe when communist ELAS women in Greece castrated and killed captured RAF pilots in 1945. But those deeds seem merely symbolic of the oppression of women in the society concerned, in which the rage is expressed on the unfortunate enemy. It is not done for pleasure and certainly does not begin to compare with the vast history of a sexual abuse and murder of women and children and other men, by men.
All the evidence at our disposal tells us of the differences between men and women. Men are taller, stronger, braver, faster, deadlier and driven. If what are nowadays called the caring professions were left to men, there would be no speech therapists, no physiotherapists, no child minders, and patients would have to heave one another off the bedpan. If engineering projects, from standing stones to Operation Manhattan, had been left to women, there would be no Newgrange, no nuclear fission threatening life on this planet.
Men never allowed women to do that, is no doubt the reply. But is it not striking that men were able to withhold that permission, or that there is no record anywhere of women seceding from male society and embarking upon projects of their own, in the way that men have repeatedly seceded from society, though often with their women helpmates?
On your Horse
The Cossacks seceded; the Pilgrim Fathers seceded; the Mormons seceded; the monks of Tibet seceded; the hermits of Sceilig Mhicil seceded. All of them removed themselves from society which they disliked and created a male governed society of their own, with their own architecture. Women became nuns, but within male governed churches and no doubt inside male designed and male built convents.
Yes, men no doubt often are beasts. So why do women not secede? For no matter how cross it makes feminists and women journalists, most men, will never be as parentally conscientious as women. It is nature, and since Original Sin, nature has not been nice.