Do You Think You're Clever? (12 page)

(English, Oxford)

What a strange question this is! The first part about the fictional nature of the Bible seems intriguingly provocative. The second part about whether it’s ‘chick lit’ seems simply bizarre. It’s hard to imagine anything less like chick lit than the Bible.

The term chick lit apparently came into being in the later 1980s on American college campuses as a way to describe the female literary tradition – presumably authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontës and so on. But in the 1990s it acquired its present tag as new women’s fiction, targeted at ‘chicks’ (young white women) about ‘chicks’ (hip, contemporary, fashion-conscious, career-driven, sex-obsessed young women). No one in the Bible remotely fits
that bill – except perhaps Samson’s paramour Delilah, and John the Baptist’s nemesis Salome. Women generally have a very subordinate role in the Bible, and are immoral when sexual, like Lot’s daughters, and wicked when ambitious. Even though sympathetic, strong women do appear in the Bible, they are stoic rather than determined, maternal rather than seductive. The Bible is a 2,000-and-more-year-old collection of books written mainly by men living in a very traditional society. There is nothing at all chick lit about it even by the furthest stretch of the imagination. Mind you, it does have enough incest, violence, bestiality, murder, betrayal and special effects to satisfy the most demanding horror movie fan …

Whether it’s fictional or not is a much more interesting question. Most church authorities long ago conceded that not every single word is literal truth. Only a minority of more fundamental Christians, for instance, believe that God literally created the world in seven days with all the creatures of today fully formed. The Bible stories are, for many believers, metaphors rather than actual fact. But that doesn’t necessarily make it all a fiction. Movies like
Braveheart
and
Schindler’s List
are entirely imaginary, yet are based on real historical characters, while movies like
Titanic
and
Pearl Harbor
place fictional characters within real historical situations. Even stories like
Harry Potter
blur fiction and fact, using real locations such as King’s Cross station then adding imaginary details like platform 9¾. In fact any history, where it tells a story, however closely
based on real events, tends to blur history and fiction – with the historian filling in the blanks here and omitting other details there. Moreover, there is often an irresistible temptation to colour the events of the past to make a good story, or reassess their impact with the benefit of hindsight. Many historians have tried to avoid this ‘Whig’ history, but it’s almost impossible to be entirely objective unless you simply present historical documents. So even if the Bible has fictional or metaphorical elements, that would not necessarily make it a fictional work.

The New Testament is essentially about Jesus and his life, and the events that followed. It’s mainly written in the form of Gospels and Epistles.
Gospel
is a word meaning ‘good news’ while
Epistle
means ‘letter’ and this gives a clue to the intention, at least, of the writers. They do not present themselves as authors intending to create a fictional story, but as reporters and correspondents spreading a news story or giving an opinion piece. Their stories are not told in the breathless matter-of-fact style of modern journalism, nor are they, we might guess, cross-checked for factual accuracy – though we have no way of knowing this; the Gospel writers may have been rigorous in checking their sources for all we know.

Yet the Gospels, at least, are often meant to be based on reports of eyewitness accounts or, at least, rumour and hearsay. Even if it’s merely hearsay and turns out to be utterly meaningless (or even invented by some mischiefmaker), it does not turn the Bible into a work of fiction
– simply a very flawed piece of reporting. The Bible writers wanted us to believe that these events really happened. Jesus is presented as the true Son of God, who really did live on earth, not as a fictional character. The things characters in the Bible say are almost certainly not verbatim records, but they are probably intended as plausible versions of what they might have said. So even if the dialogue is largely fictional, it does not make the Bible a fictional work – more a docu-drama that is taking (maybe undue) liberties with the smaller truth, with, the authors might claim, the intention of revealing a larger truth.

Historians have found almost no other historical sources to cross-check the Bible and verify its story. Yet little has been found either that denies its story. Recent archaeological finds have shed light on its history and suggest that some of the people and locations featured are real, and some of the events described really happened. But that may make it no truer than
Braveheart
, or even stories about King Arthur or Robin Hood. That’s why some Bible scholars argue that the Bible is not meant to be an accurate historical document, but rather a work of literature and theology inspired by historical events and stories. It’s a question of faith how much you believe is literal truth.

(Classics, Cambridge)

As long as there are women alive, so will feminism be, since there will always be a woman’s perspective on every
issue. But the term ‘feminism’ has particular connotations. It originated in France in the 1880s and was introduced to Britain in the 1890s to stigmatise those campaigning for women’s rights, but it was widely adopted by the women’s movement only in the 1960s and 70s when ‘Women’s Liberation’ or ‘Women’s Lib’ acquired too many negative overtones, associated with strident public demonstrations and notoriously ‘bra-burning’. So when
Time
magazine famously asked ‘Is feminism dead?’ in 1998, they were not necessarily asking if the women’s movement was dead but if it was true of the 1960s and 70s brand – the feminism of women like Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinem and Sheila Rowbotham, the feminism that introduced the notion of sexism and the sex war. This phase of feminism was campaigning not just for women’s rights to be recognised but for men’s entire attitude to women to change.

It’s usually the funeral rites for this particular brand of feminism that
Time
and many subsequent questioners have asked are due. Just as the Suffragette movement lost its momentum in the 1920s once votes for women were achieved, so the high-profile feminist campaigns of the 1960s and 70s seemed to have run out of steam by the 1990s as they achieved many of their goals. In the UK, the Equal Pay Act of 1970 was introduced to mandate equal pay for equal work, regardless of gender. Then the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 protected women from being discriminated against in employment, vocational training,
education, the provision and sale of goods, facilities and services, premises and the exercise of public functions.

By the 1990s, it seemed, women were beginning to take it for granted that they would be accepted in the workplace and might reach the top of their chosen profession (although the picture has not actually proved quite so rosy). Sexism was widely regarded as a term of abuse. Abortion on demand was enshrined in law in many countries. And maternity leave was becoming more and more generous. What’s more, younger women were throwing off the apparently drab, dungaree-wearing, bra-burning intellectual feminism of the 1970s to have fun with ‘Girl Power’, epitomised in the media by the Spice Girls – sassy, fun, in-yer-face and openly sexual in a way that would have appalled the older generation of feminists who hated the portrayal of women as sex objects.

The writer of the 1998 piece in
Time
, Ginia Bellafante, pointed the finger of blame, too, at Camille Paglia’s 1990 book
Sexual Personae
, in which she argued that female sexuality was humanity’s greatest force and that it was up to women to realise its power. Bellafante lamented that in the wake of Paglia’s highly publicised proclamation of female sexuality, feminism was melting away in a welter of self-indulgent sexual and romantic confessions, in which a woman only had to proclaim she enjoyed sex – or complain that her love-life was bad – to be lauded by other women for expressing a woman’s perspective. Bellafante lamented too the popularity among women of
Ally McBeal
and
Bridget Jones’s Diary
, both of which portrayed the apparently self-indulgent emotional life of 30-something single women – examples, Bellafante felt, of the dead-end into which feminism had strayed.

A report by sociologists at Cambridge University published in 2008 seemed to confirm that things have moved on even further since the 1990s and that many women are beginning to reject feminism. It isn’t just that many women dislike the label ‘feminist’, which seems to have the same dry, hidebound, rather insulting overtones as the expression ‘politically correct’ – another product of 70s politics. It’s as if many women are actually doubting some of feminism’s core values. The Cambridge report suggested that support for gender equality had peaked in the 1990s but is now in decline. Back in the 1990s, over 50 per cent of women thought it was right for women to work rather than look after children; now it’s barely 40 per cent (under 40 per cent in the USA). According to the study’s leader Jacqueline Scott, professor of empirical sociology, ‘When it comes to the clash between work and family life, doubts about whether a woman should be doing both are starting to creep in’.

Then a few months later, a report in the
British Medical Journal
led by Professor Jay Belsky suggested that more than twice as many children who were in day-care for more than twenty hours a week were insecure compared to those cared for full-time by their mothers. A recent government report found that toddlers spending more than 35 hours
a week in day-care were prone to be more aggressive than their non-nursery peers. It seems more and more women admit to enjoying pornography and are happy to embrace pole-dancing as a form of exercise and self-confidence boost – something that would have horrified an earlier generation of feminists. The emphasis has shifted away from a general political movement, it seems, to self-help. The only battles a woman has to fight, it seems, are not with society but with her own self-esteem.

There are certainly some women (as well as smug men, of course) saying that we are now in a ‘post-feminist’ era. Some women say the idea of feminism is irrelevant in a society where gender equality has, apparently, been achieved. Others such as Naomi Wolf say that they are post-feminists because they are taking charge of their own future rather than putting it in the hands of a political or academic movement. Indeed, they want to shake off the stigma of being labelled a feminist. The ‘glass ceiling’, the invisible barrier that seems to prevent women being promoted above a certain level, is just that, they say – glass, which can be easily smashed by a determined woman.

Yet there are many women who believe that feminism is far from dead. Even if well-to-do white women in the West are having doubts about where it should go, women around the world still face far too many problems. Back in the 1990s, some women argued that feminism should move on from the second wave of feminism – the feminism of the 1960s and 70s which campaigned for equal opportunity
at work (the first being the suffragettes who campaigned for the vote) – and begin what Rebecca Walker (bisexual African-American daughter of
The Color Purple
author Alice Walker) called the third wave.

The third wave, they argued, should not seek to drive every woman towards the white middle-class ideal of the supermum, but should allow all kinds of different directions, which included non-heterosexuals and women of colour. Authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards wrote in
Manifesta
that: ‘We’re not doing feminism the same way that the seventies feminists did it; being liberated doesn’t mean copying what came before but finding one’s own way – a way that is genuine to one’s own generation.’ Some of these third-wave feminists are willing to embrace female identity in whatever shape or form it takes, including sex-work. What matters to them is challenging oppression. Critics of the third wave, especially those among the older generation of second-wavers, suggest that it lacks focus and cohesion. But third-wavers argue that they are simply adapting feminism for their generation, the generation of hip-hop, pop culture, consumerism and the internet, not Kennedy, Vietnam and Woodstock.

Many of the battles feminism fought in earlier decades have indeed been won, and the feminists of the 1960s and 70s have every reason to be proud of their achievements. Yet all around the world, there is still much to do before women really are treated equally to men. Women still rarely achieve the highest roles in politics, for instance. The UK’s Margaret Thatcher and Germany’s Angela Merkel are still the only women to have become leaders of major Western powers. Women are still in a small minority as elected representatives at both local and national levels. And a scan of the faces at the UN shows just a handful of women among a sea of men. Moreover, average pay levels for women remain significantly below those for men. In many countries, the difficulties women and girls face are much worse, ranging from enforced circumcision and enforced marriage to sexual exploitation and barred access to education and careers. Until all these problems are solved, feminism even as a solely political movement can never be dead.

(Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge)

Of course, there’s no way you can answer this question easily unless you have a few basic facts, and even then you’d only be able to make rough estimates, not accurate calculations. And yet with those few basic facts, you can make a pretty good stab at the answer to what at first seems an impossible question. For a little more on the value of estimates to apparently impossible questions, see ‘What’s the population of Croydon?’

Whatever the answer to this bovine hydration question is, you know it’s going to be very small. The number of cows on the planet has increased dramatically in the last
few decades as more and more people around the world turn to meat and dairy products. There are now about 1.3 billion cows on earth – that’s one cow to every four or five people. So the percentage of water in a single cow of all the water in just cows alone is much less than a billionth of a percent, or 0.000000001 per cent.

Most people know that the human body is largely water – about 70 per cent by weight – and the chances are that other mammals have pretty much the same water content. You could guess that the average cow weighs about 500 kg, which would mean it contains about 350 kg of water – that is, about 350 litres. So that’s easy enough.

It’s much harder to come up with an estimation of the volume of water in the world. The best way is probably to ignore all the freshwater, ice and atmospheric moisture (which is less than 3 per cent of the total) and concentrate on the volume of water in the oceans. Assuming that about three-quarters of the earth is covered in water, you can work out the area of the oceans from the formula for the surface area of a sphere, which is 4 times pi times the radius squared, or 4
×
r
²
. The radius is about 6,400 km. Squared that’s about 41 million. Four times pi is about 12.5. So the surface area of the earth is very roughly 500 million square kilometres. Three-quarters of that is about 360 million square kilometres. The oceans are probably about 4,000 metres deep on average. So the volume of the water in the world is 360 times 4,000 cubic kilometres – that is, 1,440,000 cubic kilometres, or 1,440 million billion litres.
So to work out the percentage of water in the cow, we divide the volume of the world’s water by the volume of water in the cow and multiply by 100. The answer is about 0.00025 billionths of a percent, or 0.0000000000025 per cent.

Although this is an entirely academic exercise, the connection of cows and water is an important one. Raising cows for beef is incredibly demanding in terms of water. Not only do cows drink a lot of water, they consume food which takes a lot of water to grow, and slaughtering them and processing the meat takes a lot of water, too. It takes on average nearly 5,000 litres of water to produce just one quarter-pound beef burger – 1,000 times as much as for the same weight of wheat. So if you were to eat just two burgers a week for a year, it would take half a million litres of water. If just one in ten of the world’s population ate the same number of burgers as you, then you’d need 300,000 billion litres of water to produce the beef for them. That’s a huge proportion of the world’s freshwater – not far short of a fifth! This is why some people worry that we are in for a major water crisis if beef consumption goes on rising as it is now.