The Macabre Dance: a Contemporary Woman meets a Contemporary Man

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices. [Voltaire]

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The wicked woman is but a child grown strong. [paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes]

Contents

Chapter 1: The Woman

Chapter 2: The Man

Chapter 3: The Iron Fist in the Velvet Narrative

Chapter 4: The Steward of the Culture

Chapter 5: The Brute Reality of Facts

Chapter 6: The White Knight and His Damsel

Chapter 7: Do Bicycles Need Fish?

Chapter 8: O Brave New World

Chapter 1

The Woman

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The sleek elegance of the twenty-first century machine cruised effortlessly along roads which had first been laid for the horse and cart. The heavy clouds overhead, threatening imminent rain, robbed the night of any moonlight. The headlamps of her car illuminated the winding English country lane with a powerful beam of man-made light, giving her a channel of visibility through the inky obscurity of the darkness beyond. The summer hedgerows were overgrown and narrowed the road, which would’ve left barely enough space for two cars to pass had there been any oncoming traffic. There were no streetlights but there was a fading white line down the centre of the broken tarmac. The driver straddled the line and swung the vehicle smoothly around the curves in the ribbon of road.

BMW had promised her a driving experience of luxury and innovation, and they had certainly delivered. The gesture-controlled dashboard regulated the air-conditioning to insulate her from the temperature outside. The driver’s seat, with its choice of massage functions, was more relaxing than an armchair. The precision engineered turbo engine and eight-speed gearbox was so acoustically muted that it didn’t intrude upon the crystal clear audio system that was currently rapping out some Grime tracks. It was a genre of music that she was listening to for the first time.

Grime had been recommended to her by some of her students. She’d bought an album by someone called Ida Grindsman in the mistaken belief that the name referred to a woman. Having played the CD she now knew that it didn’t. The main voice was black and very male. But music didn’t mean much to her except insofar as it reflected the ceaseless progression of multiculturalism. The mainstream arts were merely a manifestation of the current state of urban street culture and, as such, they gave an indication of where society was headed. On the track that was playing at the moment Ida Grindsman was going on at length about an attention whore who was so juiced by a badboy that it was easy to shoplift the pooty. The whole album was all pretty much like that. She tried to ignore the dubious lyrics and mercifully she couldn’t understand most of them anyway.

Charity Habib drove with her manicured hands on the wheel and her mind on something else. Rural roads were fairly empty this late in the evening and she treated the public highway as if she owned it. She expected that nothing would get in her way so her thoughts were elsewhere. Her memory was chewing on the irritation she’d felt at the conference that afternoon when McKenzie had stood up and started waffling on again about boys being disadvantaged at every level of the education system. He blamed it all on what he called the feminised pedagogy. He kept claiming that student-centred learning was actually girl-centred learning. That was his pet phrase, he used it all the time. Misogynist prick.

It was the umpteenth time that she’d had to sit through his comments from the floor at a conference. He was never an official speaker, of course, because no one would have invited him. But the organisers took the view that they couldn’t very well stop him from paying his fee to attend these events. Had it been left up to Charity she would have blacklisted him. It was frustrating that nobody had found a way to shut him up when he intervened in the Q & A to bang his drum, as always, about boys being failed by the system in comparison to girls. Fortunately he was a lone voice but Charity was disgusted by the way that other delegates seemed to feel that they had to pay lip service to his male rantings. As if anyone else in the conference hall really gave a damn.

She cast the memory of him out of her mind. It had been a good day, McKenzie notwithstanding. The conference had provided more than just the usual networking opportunities. The government funding body had formally announced three years further financing for the Women’s Academic Initiative and the ring-fencing of funds for the Women’s Proactive Intervention Coalition. Reassuringly, this proved that consistent funding could be achieved through both Labour and Conservative governments, so it didn’t matter who was sitting in the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, the work could continue uninterrupted. Charity hadn’t been seriously worried, after all there’d never been any problem with the renewal of their funding in the past, but it was satisfying to have the security of their future confirmed.

Unfortunately, the international picture wasn’t quite so rosy. An American colleague had spoken to conference about the increasing shift toward distance-learning degrees which were studied online. The vast majority of female applicants were still favouring the on-campus experience, but male applicants were switching to online degrees in alarming numbers. Not that Charity would object to the disappearance of male students from campus, in fact she would welcome it, but financially it could be a disaster. Distance-learning required far fewer teaching staff and the Americans were in a panic over the possibility of academic redundancies and the downsizing of many departments.

When a survey of potential male applicants had been conducted, seeking an explanation for this mass exodus of men from on-campus courses, the reasons they’d given had been atrociously dishonest and misogynistic. Outrageously, they had claimed that the American university campus was now so sexist against men it wasn’t safe for male students to study there. They’d said that the compulsory induction lecture on Teaching men not to rape was grossly insulting. The alleged insult, apparently, was that it implied they were all rapists unless given instruction in how not to be.

Charity’s lip curled contemptuously as she thought about this. Surely it had been established through decades of rigorous feminist research that, without re-education, men who were products of western rape culture were almost certain to commit rape. The statistics were horrifying. How could these survey respondents fail to understand that? Did these men seriously wish to deny young women the protection needed to keep them safe on campus?

Something else to which these misogynists objected was the emphasis in the curriculum on the political imperative to oppose patriarchal oppression. This was a mandatory element that, quite rightly, featured prominently in all lectures and seminars. Yet the men in the survey not only baulked at this, they objected further to the course requirement that white male students must take personal responsibility for patriarchal oppression by acknowledging their own white male privilege.

The American colleague had been close to tears during her presentation of these deplorable survey results. But it hadn’t stopped there. The respondents had also declared that the practice of having male students branded as rapists without legal trial was a violation of due process. Charity found this assertion to be particularly bizarre since a scrupulously impartial panel of university authorities sat in judgement over charges of rape whenever a female student accused a male student. These panellists were all thoroughly grounded in feminist research on rape culture, and so they had far more expertise on the crime than anyone in the judicial system. However, the survey respondents seemed to believe that this wasn’t good enough. The campus had become systemically hostile to male students, according to these rape apologist pigs.

Online education, they said, could avoid most of these injustices. That was why so many men now preferred to take their degree via distance-learning. The American colleague had reported, in a state of some distress, that the vile Internet crew of the men’s movement had joined in to encourage this new development, saying that male students were able to start their own men’s rights groups online without needing to get permission from the university authorities or the students union. It was better in so many ways, they said.

Charity’s fingers gripped the wheel more tightly as she recalled the conference presentation. She hadn’t been pleased by the reaction of the largely female audience either. They had all found it sadly disheartening and displayed a noticeable lack of righteous anger. But Charity had seen the important lesson to be learned. She had resolved to ensure that no such challenge to the current university system should be permitted to exist in the UK, even if it meant eliminating most of the distance-learning provision in higher education. She had always been a believer in taking a firm line.

The shiny BMW swept along the country roads, with the low growl of its engine and the secure tread of its tyres eating up the mileage effortlessly. The lonely fields and stretches of woodland flashed by invisibly on either side in the darkness, anonymous and mysterious. She had driven these roads many times before but she felt no curiosity about the abandoned farmsteads and disused barns that she passed by at speed. They were merely the relics of another culture and another era. For Charity the past was something to be defeated. It contained all the social injustices and gender iniquities that she had fought all her life to overcome. The human lives which had once been lived in these derelict agrarian buildings were not to be dwelt upon, they were to be set aside. She looked back upon history with repugnance and the sooner it disappeared from her rear view mirror the better.

Charity drove over a level crossing without slowing down, the wheels drumming over the rails, then decelerated for a right turn. As she increased her speed again she continued musing on the highs and lows of her day. It had been significant for Charity in a personal way because she had made a fairly momentous decision. After vacillating on the subject for at least a year she had finally made up her mind. She would definitely not be getting her eggs frozen. She had thought that perhaps she might like to keep her options open in case she wanted a child in a few years time. But the conference workshop on reproductive rights had decided the question for her.

The speaker at the workshop had clarified very graphically how cryopreservation was primarily a methodology for men to control women’s reproductive choices by imposing a technological dependency upon them. Charity had felt this point strike deep. There was something about the thought of her female biology being held captive within masculine science that made her feel very uncomfortable. It would be as if her future babies were being imprisoned by male technology. It was an ugly thought. Charity would never give birth now. Besides, what was the point of biological birth when there were so many children from the war zones of the world who needed homes in the West?

Charity had been flirting with the possibility of motherhood ever since her divorce. Ironically, her husband’s desire for children had been one of the things which had broken up their marriage. She’d had objections to childbirth which he had failed to understand. But when the marriage ended, and she’d found herself single again, her attitude had changed. The thought of a child had been much more appealing. It was hard to explain these things. She and her daughter would’ve been a family. But not on the patriarchal model. It would’ve been a human bond that Charity could’ve forged into a truly empathetic and caring relationship. With Charity in sole charge of a loving female companionship, the union between mother and daughter could have been perfect. She had become sufficiently excited by the idea to look into the possibilities, but there’d been problems.

There would’ve been major difficulties in scheduling her maternity leave properly, for the next two years at least. Besides which, even paying for private treatment, there was likely to be a lengthy delay in receiving intrauterine insemination. The waiting list for donated sperm at a clinic was inconveniently long, due to lack of donors, and as far as she could tell there was inadequate quality control of the semen. Charity didn’t want any old rubbish from the spewing of some random donor’s wrinkly bollock sack. She would’ve preferred, and indeed expected, the contents of each scrotum to be vetted to eliminate the inferior material.

As for getting semen direct from the source, so to speak, that wasn’t a serious option. The one time she’d broached the subject of sperm donation to a male colleague, Andrew from the sociology department, he’d let her down badly. He was the only man of her acquaintance that she judged to be something approximating genetically fit, but the idea had never got passed an initial enquiry. She’d only asked him about his views on sperm donation in a generalised manner, being careful not to reveal her specific personal interest because she was merely testing the waters to see if he had any objection to the notion in the abstract.

To her disgust he’d said that he would never even consider donating sperm to a female friend who wished to start a family because in law he’d be financially responsible for the child even though he had no rights regarding the child. Charity had asked him if he would feel differently were the woman to guarantee that she would not call upon him for financial assistance, but the insulting brute had then expressed the opinion that no such guarantee could be trusted. Not when the law gave her the power to make a claim on him regardless of what she’d promised in advance.

Charity had been outraged. What a misogynist shit. And he was someone she’d viewed as being less offensive than the common run of men. Well, it just proved once again how there was still so much hatred of women, even in middle-class academic circles. Sometimes she thought that there was no cure for men. In any case, after today’s conference workshop she was as averse to the idea of procreation as she had been in her youth. She was glad that she hadn’t pursued the matter with Andrew. She never would again; with him or any other man.

The stylish BMW passed through the small village of Fallow on the Moor, a remote collection of renovated habitations in the countryside. It was geographically located somewhere between the neighbouring hamlets of Old Drowsy and Little Snoring. And if those weren’t really their names, they certainly should have been. Charity didn’t bother to take her foot off the accelerator. Even if the village hadn’t been shrouded in darkness there would still have been nothing to see here.

Nothing stirred in Fallow on the Moor during the working week because the former locals couldn’t afford the price of property in this area any more. The farming industry was dead in a ditch. The pub had closed down permanently. This was retirement country and the playground of those who could afford an escape out of town. The village only came briefly to life at the weekend. This late on a Friday night there were a few electric lights burning behind the minimalist drapery of the eyelet curtains, these being the current trend in designer window treatments.

Charity was nearing the end of her three hour journey. Not before time. She felt prickly and irritable. The collar of her blouse was chaffing the back of her neck. £79 for high quality cotton and it still wasn’t comfortable. She should have bought the same style blouse in satin but Charity couldn’t help thinking that there was something erotically suggestive about satin, no matter how plain the garment, so it wouldn’t do for work. How annoying it was that she constantly had to constrain her own behaviour and choices in life just because she had to be careful not to incite the Neanderthal reactions of men.

The notch-lapel single-breasted blazer and skirt combination she was wearing had earned her displeasure too. In the shop she had liked the way that the navy wool-blend with the discreet pin-stripe was tailored at the waist, but she’d caught a few women at the conference looking askance at so politically conservative a body image and now Charity thought that perhaps the skirt-suit had been a mistake. She doubted that she would wear it much in future. That was £300 wasted.

Her annoyance was prompted by more than these sartorial disappointments. Charity was hungry. She had stopped to buy groceries at a motorway service station but she hadn’t eaten there, disliking the proletarian atmosphere of those places. They were no better than those supermarket cafés where a section of the store had been fenced-off from the shopping aisles and behind the partition grey-haired pensioners ate their full-English breakfasts at lunchtime. Charity despised those supermarket cafés and the old folk who seemed to be their entire clientele. They were a last dying echo of a soon-to-be extinct culture and good riddance. How could anyone prefer this modern replica of the greasy spoon when contemporary society had been so enriched by multiethnic cuisine? Some people never learned, but they would die off before too long and that would be that.

Yet she was too tired from driving to cook this late in the evening, so the groceries she’d bought could wait until tomorrow. For tonight she would stop at the Sindh and get a takeaway. The Sindh biryani restaurant and wine bar was the only nightlife that could turn a profit in Fallow on the Moor. It was a blessing on occasions like this. Charity took the car down through the gears as she approached the restaurant and parked outside.

Fifteen minutes later she came out of the takeaway with a carrier bag containing her favourite, a moderately spiced Basmati rice and chicken tikka, dum cooked in the traditional Indian masala, with a side dish of raita. Getting back into her car she drove off and immediately turned off to the left. The immaculate BMW rumbled slowly down a narrow lane which led to the small cottage that was her second home. She lived in an apartment in the city for three and a half weeks of the month but she tried, work permitting, to get away for the peace and quiet of a long weekend at least once on every page of the calendar.

The leafy canopy of the Beech trees on either side of the lane closed overhead which created the romantic impression that the car was moving through a kind of tunnel of foliage. She was almost home. Her cottage was a sturdy structure in granite and thatch nestled amid the woodland. It was a former churchwarden’s house and as a well-preserved example of an early nineteenth century dwelling, albeit one that had been extensively modernized, it was the only piece of English heritage that she valued.

The church that had once been associated with the churchwarden’s house was a hundred yards further up the road toward the village but these days it was open barely twelve Sundays in the year because it shared a vicar with five other parishes, none of which had a congregation large enough to warrant a member of the clergy all to themselves. The handful of the faithful were all over sixty years of age. The church of Fallow on the Moor might face closure soon and go the way that the village pub had gone. But that wasn’t of any concern to Charity. If god couldn’t keep his own house in order, it was no business of hers.

There was a straggly and unkempt privet hedge that was the boundary of her property. The gap in the hedge had no gate. As she drove onto her own land she thought for a fleeting moment that she saw a light in a window of the cottage, but