The Conspiracy to Delude Ourselves

The Conspiracy to Delude Ourselves

The World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap Report findings telling us that gender parity is over 200 years away and yet women have come so far in the UK in the last 25 years.   I laughed when I read Lesley Bruce’s play Keyboard Skills last week.  It was first staged at The Bush in 1993.    Here is a speech made by
Miss Gainborough
“May I have your attention for a moment ladies.  This morning I came across this volume (The Female Eunuch) in Room 4.  It is fashionable now, I know for a certain type of young woman, to want to focus on the shortcomings of men.  I advise all of you against this.  It’s not that I doubt their case.  Oh, certainly not.  I have served countless managing directors in my time whose tasks I could have carried out appreciably better myself.  Indeed I declined the proposal of a weekend in Venice from one of them. …..Our claim to civilization remains fragile.  Women know this.  And they also know men.  They know that men feel strong if they think themselves revered but that a weak man will soon turn brutish.  Ideals of excellence and leadership can have a value, even when they are illusory, as long as we maintain the consensus not to tell.  This is a foolish and irresponsible book.  Not because it isn’t true but because it is and the truth deserves to be handled with more care…… It undermines the necessary conspiracy of our species to delude itself.”
We are in the middle of big changes  where we want to adjust men’s behaviour and attitudes to women and question how much we women have been responsible for our attitudes and our desires to be desired.

Secretaries