The unhealthy planet
Rumina Sethi

Gender on Planet Earth
by Ann Oakley. Polity, Cambridge. Pages 291. £ 20.

GENDER on Planet Earth is an unusual book dealing with the link between social problems and the abuse of women. Ann Oakley, the author, bemoans why environmental degradation, crime, family or gender are treated as separate issues around the world. She wants to know why are they not studied as effects of one another or as members of "our collective citizenship of the planet."

The book is based on a number of personal narratives which will find parallels in many of our experiences: Oakley writes, for example, of a man and a woman dining together in a smart restaurant. The "moment of truth" is confronted when the woman pays (despite her male companion’s protests) with her credit card but the waiter hands over the receipt to the man. I would like to add that waiters, in fact, seldom ever place the bill in front of a woman; they always address the man.

History is full of narratives of male dominance. Seeing the headlines of a newspaper about tales of male pursuits left Virginia Woolf aghast; Gustav Mahler, the great composer was so allergic to the presence of another human being that his creativity depended on his isolation. Even his wife was expected to cater only to the practical needs of his existence and was required to give up writing music after they were married. Years later after her death, he had therapy sessions with Freud to recover from his "guilt."

One of Oakley’s narratives is about the bicycle and womenkind (she herself rides a cycle in London) and contrasts her speed-stopping slowness with shiny sports cars. In a fascinating account of negotiating traffic on her no-nonsense but highly marginalised cycle on London roads, Oakley describes the road-hog, a savage sports car, as a "successful sperm" which shoots past with "dramaturgical acceleration." She tries to connect the small minority of women-riding-bicycles with the large number of men-driving-cars by admitting to having a membership of two minority groups: women and cyclists: "denied space in the centre of the road, I’m confined to its margins, where my relative invisibility then proceeds to confirm the principle that roads are for cars."

A disturbing book, self-critical to the point that the author writes three fictional book-reviews and publishes them in the first few pages, and excellently documented, Oakley does not desist from describing all kinds of major and minor crimes against women, from the near absence of women in making governments, laws, wars, money and even history to their victimisation by rapists, male "flashers" and domestic violence.

Explaining why men are violent in a chapter entitled "Manslaughter" (which she reinvents as "man’s laughter"), Oakley aptly cites Hannah Arendt’s much-quoted aphorism: "Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely the other is absent. Violence appears when power is in jeopardy." All the gender violence in society, explains Oakley, is unfortunately regarded as an inevitability, so deeply has violence become part of our human sensibility.

"Sick to Death of Women," another chapter, explores the beginning of feminist theory: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique found an English counterpart in Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. Thus began the first wave. The use of the word "wave" is also suspicious: do we use this marine metaphor because the sea is feminine or because women’s ongoing empowerment is akin to an "engulfing tidal wave"? This chapter is informative, although in a Western context, and elucidates the politics behind the Equal Rights Act of 1963 in America, seven years before UK, which resulted in the appointment of some women in American polity, a consequence of Eleanor Roosevelt’s exhortations to the President than from JFK’s personal humanism.

In the 1970s there was a backlash, as Susan Faludi has argued, and the media was bored with "all that bra-burning." It was time for women to show that they did not exist as a homogeneous category.

One of Oakley’s interesting researches on the Foot and Mouth Disease and BSE is found in "The Rape of Mother Earth." BSE was largely the result of feeding cows to cows or what is known as intensive farming practice. UK and other European countries legally allow animal by-products such as blood, poultry, offal, feathermeal and tallow to be fed to farm animals.

The process of skinning cows for human consumption is described in such chilling detail that it would make anyone give up meat eating forever.

Oakley finds parallels between the earth as a producing mother and woman as a bearer of children as Vandana Shiva has done in the Indian context. She also has statistics to show that women consume far less meat than men and that if it wasn’t for men, they would hardly cook meat at all: "Meat eating is a measure of a virile culture, so vegetarianism is equated with emasculation and femininity," such is the sexual politics of meat. Vegetable, being a "second-class food" inevitably gets associated with "second-class citizens." After all, the phrase "beefing-up" is entirely the opposite of "like a vegetable" which suggests passivity and listlessness.

As Petra Kelly, a Green Party MP, has written: "There is no essential difference between the rape of a woman, the conquest of a country, and the destruction of the earth. The his/story of the world records the gender of the rapists, conquerors and destroyers."

Oakley has recognised Ladakh as one place largely untouched by science, technology and globalisation where nature is treated with respect and women are given high status. Such organic landscapes ought to serve as reminders of what we once used to be.

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