There’s nothing wrong with leaving a sick partner
Women’s kindness is used against us
Danielle Epstein’s story is a sad one; last year she was in the process of buying a house with her boyfriend when he was diagnosed with a brain tumour, underwent a serious operation and had to learn to walk again. He wasn’t the only one who walked; Miss Epstein did also, and not just down the road where she could keep an eye on him, but all the way to sunny Thailand. She said in her defence: ‘I felt like the most awful person, leaving somebody because they have cancer, but it was damaging my mental health and it wasn’t helping him… I couldn’t sleep or eat, I was having panic attacks and was on so much medication to sort myself out I just couldn’t function.’ But that’s not the end of the story; Miss Epstein is to run in the London Marathon in her ex’s name to raise money for the charity Brain Tumour Research. She said ‘I felt so helpless watching all this unfold – I knew I had to do something’ while her ex, Jelle Fresen, commented ‘I will be there on the day to cheer Danielle on. I think it’s incredible what she’s doing – I’ve got so much respect for her discipline and perseverance.’
We live in an age where a healthy level of self-respect in women is reviled as selfishness
What a lovely man! And what a sensible woman. Inevitably the cry-bullies of social media have been wishing seven sorts of damnation on her. But in my opinion, she’s done the right thing. Of course my own history as a bolter might influence my feelings; I spent a sizeable part of my youth abandoning husbands and children in pursuit of my own selfish desires, at least according to some of my colleagues in the press. And though there’s always more nuance to life events than a headline about being Britain’s Worst Mother (the Daily Mail) can communicate, it’s roughly right. My selfishness means, according to received wisdom, that I should have ended up guilt-wracked, regretful and alone. But I’m not – and I’m basically an OAP (albeit a YOLOAP) now. So when’s it going to happen?
It’s interesting that what is often called selfishness in women is easily forgiven in men – seen as part of their natural make-up, even. Though women initiate most divorces, they are six times more like to stay with seriously ill husbands than men are with wives in a similar condition, according to a study published in the journal Cancer which took the examples of 500 patients with brain tumours. I’m not saying that these men are monsters – they may be simply acting sensibly in their own self-interest. My sister-in-law Charlotte Raven in her excellent book Patient 1 describes her husband deciding to leave her when she was diagnosed with a terminal condition; she understood that she had been difficult to live with when enjoying perfect health and would now be an even less appealing prospect. But sometimes male selfishness does make monsters; those who murder their entire families – often when their wives dare to leave them – and those ‘suicide pacts’ in which mostly the men miraculously survive. One of the reasons I’m very much against ‘assisted suicide’ is that women are particularly prone to ‘not wanting to be a burden’.
We live in an age where a healthy level of self-respect in women is reviled as selfishness, which is weird when you think that we’ve had four waves of feminism. This is largely down to woke ideology – the most misogynistic western credo since Catholicism, which may explain why Ireland has transitioned so seamlessly from being bossed about by one set of men in dresses to another. To every other oppressed group, woke says ‘RIOT!’, to women: #BeKind. A friend told me: ‘I was buying my children clothes and I noticed so many items that say Be Kind – all in the girls’ section, none in the boys’ one. It’s like indoctrination.’ If you get raped, don’t report it because that would be ‘carceral feminism’. Don’t be a ‘dinosaur’ who ‘hoards rights’ – let men take everything from toilets to trophies away from you. Smile as you are erased, Transmaid, until only your rictus Cheshire Cat grin is left of you. Of course, it’s not just women who are called upon to bend the knee to the tyranny of #BeKind; Dominic Raab lost his job basically because a few posh men complained that this rough son of immigrants looked at them funny. But the anger and abuse which was meted out to the Suffragettes back in the day is indistinguishable from that aimed at Terfs by the trans rights activists – the same sexualised fury of male anger at uppity women.
To signal their virtue (and to keep their jobs) many sneaky women now identify as ‘empaths’ – I’m not just kind, I’m super-kind! It’s the most pathetic kind of pick-me posturing – Josephine Bartosch put it well in the Critic:
For women, being seen as being ‘kind’ is a form of social currency. We gain status by being unkindly kind – by ripping into others when they’re seen as insufficiently emotional. To put the truth above another’s feelings is a social sin that we are rarely allowed to get away with. Given these brutal “be kind” rules, it follows that a greater number of women than men may see a social advantage in calling themselves ‘empaths’.
I’d wager that the empath brigade is well represented in the below-the-line bed-wetters now demanding Danielle Epstein’s head on a plate. But I wonder how many of them have parents in care homes? I volunteered in one once and I’ve never been so sad in my life. The vast majority of the old ladies had been married, widowed and had grown-up children – who they rarely saw. Sometimes they would seek me out at the reception desk ‘to hear a young voice’ – I’m not young, but my voice is – and, even more heartbreakingly, to listen to the automatic doors to the street opening and closing so that they could feel connected to the world outside. The brilliant artist Miriam Elia illustrated this sad situation in her book We Do Lockdown in which the mother says ‘Oh no, we can’t see Grandma’ and the child points out that they haven’t seen her since last Christmas anyway.
The anger and abuse which was meted out to the Suffragettes back in the day is indistinguishable from that aimed at Terfs by the trans rights activists
But I don’t blame people for putting their parents in care homes, either; I’d just prefer it if young women weren’t demonised for leaving sick boyfriends when people who outsource parental care are quite acceptable. Looking after people who are frail in any kind of way is difficult; one of the things people say in an effort to help destigmatize mental illness is that ‘You can’t catch it’ but that’s not strictly true. The Mental Health Foundation estimate that the primary carers of the mentally ill suffer widely from depression, with around 70 per cent of them having poor physical and/or mental health. For years I was the primary carer for my son Jack, who would go on to commit suicide, and it’s the only time I’ve ever felt the need to take anti-depressants – my GP told me that this was par for the course. Those who can retain their equanimity through such a trial – one thinks of John Lydon, whose wife Nora recently died – are rare. Though his self-sacrifice was admirable, Age UK estimate that 68 per cent of caregivers are women.
That feminine compassion can be exploited; when it happens, kindness ceases to be something lovely and becomes something between complicity and stupidity. The Canadian track and field champion Linda Blade, author of Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport, put it well: ‘Our patience is being severely tested – we are beginning to realise that our kindness as women is being weaponised against us.’ Seeing the savage swathe of depression, anxiety and self-harm hurting the #BeKind generation of girls, I believe that what the world needs now are a few more females who put themselves first – yet by their very daring to be disliked, they make the world a better place for females yet to be born. So I’ll be sponsoring, not slandering, Danielle Epstein when she goes the extra mile for a man she – quite rightly – refused to sacrifice her health and happiness for.
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