It's a Don's Life (2 page)

Sex in the sculpture garden

25 May 2006

The traces were undeniable. We were peering at one of the most famous Roman portrait sculptures in the world, discussing with
art-historical intensity the provenance, the marble and the tooling. Then someone had the nerve to point out that on its cheek
and its chin were the faint but clear marks of two bright red lipstick kisses.

The sculpture in question was the colossal head – known as the ‘Mondragone Head’ – of Antinous the young lover of the emperor
Hadrian, who died mysteriously, Robert-Maxwell-style, in ad 130 after falling into the river Nile. So distraught was the bereaved
emperor that he flooded the Roman world with statues of his beloved, made him a god and named a city after him. There are
more surviving statues of Antinous than of almost any other character in antiquity (many from Hadrian’s own villa at Tivoli).
They all share the same sultry sensuousness and the luscious pouting lips that characterise the ‘Mondragone’.

His usual home is in the Louvre, where he ended up in 1808, courtesy of Napoleon. But we were in Leeds, where he has come
to be star of an exquisite show at the Henry Moore Institute which opened today. This has drawn together 14 of the many Antinous
images, a little gallery of beautiful boys who have travelled from Dresden, Athens, Rome, Cambridge and elsewhere. One of
the show’s themes – appropriately enough – is the question of what makes a statue, or a body, desirable. What is it to ‘want’
a work of art?

The erotic charm of sculpture has a long literary history. Back in the second century ad, the Greek satirist Lucian told the
story of one young obsessive who contrived to get locked up at night with Praxiteles’ famous statue of Aphrodite at Cnidus.
The young man went mad; but the indelible stain on the statue’s thigh was proof enough of what had gone on. Oscar Wilde picked
up the theme in his ‘Charmides’ – an engaging piece of doggerel, in which the hero smuggles himself into the Parthenon and
‘paddles’ up to Athena’s statue.

Until today I had never quite imagined that this was anything other than a literary conceit. But the evidence was before my
eyes.

The assault on the ‘Mondragone’ certainly did not happen in Leeds. The curators there were as gobsmacked as anyone to discover
the tell-tale marks. But at some point between Paris and its unpacking at the Henry Moore, some latter-day Hadrian – man or
woman – had given it a couple of real red smackers. In jest, in irony or in passion, we shall probably never know.

It couldn’t have happened to a more appropriate work of art than this surrogate of imperial desire. Presumably it’s much what
the emperor Hadrian himself had in mind.

Big Brother at uni

6 June 2006

Living in a student ghetto in a student city can make you feel horribly middle-aged. It’s not so much their extravagant –
or extravagantly revealing – clothing, that you could no longer get away with yourself. Actually I rather like the annual
summer display of belly buttons down King’s Parade. And it’s not their youthful argot either. Even I find myself saying ‘uni’,
when I mean ‘university’.

What is most dispiriting for us old liberals is more ideological. It’s the way the students have come to take for granted
all the things we fought against and lost. They can’t imagine what life would be like with a nationalised railway or free
eye-tests; and they can’t think what a second post would actually be for.

But even more alarming is that most of them have entirely bought into the idea of a surveillance culture. Show them a gloomy
bike shed, a leafy path or a picturesque bend in the river, and there is nothing that your average Cambridge undergraduate
would like to do more than install a CCTV camera in it.

They say it makes them feel safer. And I suppose that you can’t entirely blame them for not bucking the general trend. Ever
since that macabre CCTV image of a pair of kids walking off with a toddler set the police on to the killers of Jamie Bulger,
CCTV has had a peculiarly unchallengeable status among the British public as a crime detection or even prevention device.

Whether it is really effective or not is quite another matter. When my own faculty was broken into for the usual haul of laptops
and data-projectors a few months ago, the police didn’t even bother to look at what might have been recorded by the camera
trained directly at the front door. ‘Wouldn’t be a good enough image, luv.’

All the same, the majority of the population is, I suspect, rather proud that we have more CCTV cameras per head than any
other country in the world – even though a glance at most foreign newspapers suggests that, from the outside, it looks like
a very odd enthusiasm for a liberal democracy.

And it’s on those civil liberties grounds that I have always found the students’ embracing of CCTV such a puzzle. I wouldn’t
mind it if they said, ‘Look, we know what the libertarian arguments are, but on balance we think that it’s worth the risk.’
But in fact these highly intelligent young people (and half of them Amnesty members) just look blank when some old grey beard
like me warns darkly about the dangers of surveillance. If anything, they’ll mutter the stupid mantra that you have nothing
to fear if you’ve done no wrong. How could this be?

I was beginning to blame the usual suspects – viz. they must have been taught this at school – when confirmation of these
suspicions arrived by an unexpected domestic route. My son appeared at home, just before some big exams, having lost his backpack
with all his notes. He seemed remarkably insouciant. (I wasn’t.) But sure enough the next day he came home, the backpack found.

What he had done was go to the school CCTV controller clutching his school timetable – and so he could be tracked through
the day. There he was entering the French lesson with the backpack, and here he was coming out of it without. Hey presto,
it was found in the French room.

This, I realised, must be a wizard procedure repeated over and over again in schools throughout the country, as disorganised
adolescents get re-united with belongings thanks to the CCTV cameras. If Big Brother has always helped you find your lost
property, no wonder you have a softer spot for him than I do.

Tampons for Africa

13 June 2006

But, uncharacteristically, on Monday they missed a trick with a pious little item on sanitary protection in Kenya.

It was indeed tear-jerking stuff. There were interviews with young girls who missed school, even dropped out of education
entirely, because they didn’t have pads. They couldn’t bear, they said, to go to school with blood on their clothes. So there’s
a campaign – backed by NGOs and Kenyan women MPs – to get sanpro (as the trade calls it) given out free in schools, and to
get the world’s women to donate their surplus.

To start with, it all sounded pretty compelling. But soon it was clear that a lot of questions were going to remain unanswered.
What, for example, did the women of Kenya do before the prospect of Western sanpro was trailed before them? There were a few
dark references to dung and lack of hygiene. And my mind raced to the idea of menstrual exclusion and the wonderful prospect
of women all menstruating in the menstrual hut together, doing their school work and having a great time – until some well-meaning
anthropologist came and told them they shouldn’t buy into these ideas of pollution. Who knows?

In this case it was hard to resist the conclusion that they might once have had some reasonably effective local method of
dealing with the bleeding. But now these poor girls were sitting there worrying about making a mess on their skirts – and
waiting for a supply of commercial pads that would never quite meet the demand.

More to the point – who is actually making this sanpro for Kenya? Was the campaign looking to build local, and locally owned,
pad factories? Or to develop hygienic, reusable and eco-friendly methods? No, the idea seemed to be that we should airlift
in the products of the great multinational companies, who already make a mint out of menstruating first-world women.

A quick trawl of the web shows that the business world has already spotted the African continent as a burgeoning market for
top price sanpro. It recognises that there is a certain difficulty in ‘enlarging the consumer base’ and that ‘lower income
groups are less likely to purchase sanitary protection’ (a market research triumph, for sure). But then, if you can get us
to buy it and donate, you’ve made the profit anyway.

The case of Zimbabwe is horribly instructive, There is a pad crisis there, too. Why? Because Johnson & Johnson moved out of
the country in 1999 when the economic going got rough and they have been forced to import from South Africa.

I thought that we had learned from the ‘baby formula for Africa’ débâcle. But, even if on a smaller scale, this looks like
much the same story.

Comments

Mary, your ‘menstrual hut’ fantasy might have been fine 100 years ago but we’re talking about modern girls going to contemporary
secondary schools trying to get a professional education. The idea that these aspirations have been foisted upon Kenyan girls
by ‘anthropologists’ is insulting. We’re not talking about girls sitting round in villages grinding mealies while their menfolk
hunt lions. These are girls who have to take the crowded public mini-bus to school, who wear uniform as they walk down city
streets just like the girls you see in Cambridge ... Oh, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a subversive feminist. I’m an African
man.

BOMAN’GOMBE

Mixed messages?

16 June 2006

The dust has quickly died down after St Hilda’s announced ten days ago that it would be admitting men. The last ‘all-girls’
college in Oxford (as most reports patronisingly put it) finally relented and opened its doors.

I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the news. There could after all be a knock-on effect on my own cherished single-sex Cambridge
college. And besides, it was hard to follow the logic of why letting men into St Hilda’s would improve the educational opportunities
of women.

But worse were the arguments that came out on either side of this debate. ‘Pro-mixers’ tended to heave a sigh of relief that
this quaint anachronism had at last been done away with. The supporters of single-sex colleges, I’m afraid, did little better.
Here, they said, was a place where women could be cherished outside the nasty, competitive hurly-burly of a man’s world.

Wrong on both counts. Women’s colleges are not havens of refuge for those that can’t hack it in mixed company. And as for
the accusation of anachronism – they are probably better equipped for promoting women’s opportunities into the twenty-first
century than most other institutions.

This isn’t the place for the PR about why my college offers a marvellous opportunity for clever women. Enough to say that
it serves its students well because it is part of the wider university community, not a refuge from it.

Most good teachers advising their sixth-form students have got this message. It’s only occasionally now that I visit a school,
chat amiably to some engagingly articulate and forthcoming potential applicants to Cambridge and then find my eye drawn to
a solitary soul in the corner – well-scrubbed, dressed in sub-Laura Ashley and quiet as a mouse. ‘That’s Deirdre,’ says the
teacher. ‘She’s thinking of applying to Newnham.’

True, Deirdre may turn out to be really smart underneath (especially when she’s escaped from the orbit of her more self-confident
but less clever classmates). But you see what I mean.

So why support women’s colleges? Aside from all the advantages for undergraduates, there are some very solid institutional
reasons. The idea that women’s colleges are a strange Victorian anachronism, while the rest of the university is ‘gender normal’,
is frankly bonkers.

For most of its 800 years, Cambridge University has been a ‘boys’ institution. Women only got degrees here after World War
II (they took the exams much earlier, but didn’t get the piece of paper). Now there is a huge and sincere campaign to change
this – but there’s also centuries of history to work against. Look around the portraits hanging in any college dining hall.
With the exception of the occasional matriarch benefactor of the sixteenth century, they are all men.

The raw data are themselves an indication of the current problem. The latest ‘Equality and Diversity’ progress report records
that there are just 46 women professors in the university, as against 404 men. To be fair, that was an increase of nine women
professors on the previous year – but then again the number of women ‘Readers’, the next rank down, fell by two. To put it
in an entirely personal way, for many of my 20 something years as a University teacher in Cambridge I was the only woman lecturer
in a Faculty of about 30 men.

The University is certainly on the case. My own heart sinks at some of its initiatives. The idea that there should be at least
two women on every University committee is a noble gesture, but it presages a lifetime of administration for me, while (some
of) my male colleagues are let off the hook and get some thinking time in the library. What we really need is a place within
the university where women are not just present in single figures but have a critical mass – and that is, of course, the women’s
colleges.

Until things change, most women teachers at Cambridge are likely to be ambivalent about their careers. I have found it a wonderful
place to work (otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed). But, like all of us, I bear the scars of a bloke-ish institution.

My favourite (and somewhat self-inflicted) scar is this – and it must be typical of many women’s experience here.

When I was pregnant with child number one, I was the ‘meetings secretary’ of the University classical society, the Cambridge
Philological Society. This involved attending meetings three times a term and, in Victorian style, reading out the minutes
of the last meeting. (‘Professor X read a paper on “The digamma in archaic poetry”’ or whatever). With ludicrous heroism,
and loathsome self-advertisement, I turned out to do this chore less than a week after the baby was born. Never was I going
to let the guys say that giving birth interfered with duties to my subject.

For the next term or two, I went on with the job. But at the end of a teaching afternoon (the meetings started at 4.30) I
needed desperately, and uncomfortably, to go home and feed the baby. So I would read the minutes and, once the lecture had
begun, I would slip away.

Ten years later, I had long resigned the ‘meetings secretary’ role, and they were looking for a new candidate to fill the
post.

‘It’s a drag,’ I said to one of my colleagues. ‘You have to turn up for every meeting.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You were the lazy one who used to walk out before the lecture had even finished.’

I had got no kudos at all. Quite the reverse.

It had been pointless heroism on my part. But the jibe would never have happened at Newnham.

Comments

In the physics department of my undergraduate university, the door of the ground-floor women’s toilet had clearly read ‘MAIDS’
at some point in the past. The actual label had been removed, but its shadow remained etched into the faded wood. I’ve come
to think of this gone-but-not-forgotten sign as a metaphor for the progress women have made in academia over the past few
decades ... The corresponding men’s toilet, by the way, was located directly opposite the mechanical workshop, and was labelled
‘REAL MEN’.

AARDVARK