From Desigual to equality of opportunity.

I wore my Desigual skirt to the Italian class yesterday.in the previous class the name of the Spanish company had come up in something we read and one of our number said she had never heard of it. She said so in a kind of sneery voice that implied that if SHE had not heard of it, then it could not be all that good. Judging stuff before you have seen it! Really!

So I decided to show her an example. Typical of one type of Desigual style, the black skirt is covered with embroidered flowers and butterflies in a range of bright colour. I still don’t know what she thought of it. She was very noncommittal. But then, I am pretty sure that Desigual is not her style at all.

Our Italian teacher would wear it though. She likes a bit of flamboyant wear! We agreed, however, that Desigual stuff is rather overpriced. You have to look out for sales and discounts.

Earlier in the day, my daughter and small granddaughter had been round for breakfast. Grandma’s cafe opens on a Tuesday morning almost without fail. Limited clientele and limited menu - toast, scrambled eggs, coffee, orange juice - but the limited clientele keep coming back for more. After breakfast we read books and did jigsaws, the usual sort of stuff. The small person examined the embroidered flowers and butterflies on my skirt, and the multicoloured satin trim at the bottom of it and came out with a judgment. Taking a moment to decipher her still occasionally unclear statement, we realised that she had said, “Grandma is a princess!” There you go!

And now I want to know who has been filling the two and a bit-year-old’s head with nonsense about princesses! Someone must have been reading her stories with the stereotypes in. On the other hand, her favourite games include sliding toy cars down the ramp of a toy garage. And her favourite companions at the moment are Thomas the Tank Engine and other small locomotives, all of whose names she knows!

Equal opportunities and non-gender-biased play for all!

Later in the day, after the Italian class was over, I walked from Ardwick back to the centre of Manchester and went to the Briton’s Protection, the pub where a friend of mine organises a book club on the last Tuesday of every month. It’s perhaps a good job there were not many of us last night we were fighting for space with a regular meeting of the Green Party, who also seem to meet on the last Tuesday of the month (or perhaps they meet every Tuesday), and with football fans, stopping off for a drink before going to watch United play.

We were discussing “The Stepford Wives” by Ira Levin, a science fiction / thriller / dystopian / satirical / moral lesson story about a society where the wives cook and clean onsessively and keep themselves beautiful and immaculately turned out ready for when their husbands come home. Of course, it turns out they have all been turned into robots by their scheming and very clever husbands. If they are so clever, we wondered, why would the husbands prefer beautiful robots, even beautiful sex-robots, to proper wives who could be equal companions to them? Mind you, they go to the Men’s Association so frequently that they probably don’t feel the need to converse with their womenfolk. 

Just in case we didn’t believe in the sex robots but, our group leader sent us something from the New Statesmen, to the effect that, “Rather than being a solace for lonely men, sex robots are becoming a tool for misogynists to take so-called revenge.”

And there I was, naively thinking sex robots were the stuff of stories.

So maybe the Stepford Husbands were just getting their own back on their too-independent wives.

We also discussed the question of whether Stepford Wives exist in reality. Are there women who genuinely want to spend their time being the ideal housewife, cooking and cleaning nonstop, enthusing over the best brand of soap powder? Well, I know one or two who just want to be stay-at-home mums, which is on the same spectrum but maybe does not include living in an Ideal Home magazine.

 We concluded that whether it be husbands who turn their wives into robots, or wives who really, truly just want to be “homemakers”, it demands a certain level of income. “Stepford Wives on Benefits”! “Stepford Wives visit the Foodbank”! These titles lack a certain something!

Upper middle class problems clearly!