January 22, 2009

Chris Cork discusses how platonic relationships between men and women lead to a healthier society

Growing up in the west, going to school, then college and workplace, the other half of humankind that was not male — women — was ever-present. There were women who were friends at school, at least two of whom are still in touch albeit at the distance of cyberspace; and women who became friends through the various jobs I had over the years. They were friends, not girl-friends, which is a different order of relationship entirely. With female friends I may exchange handshakes, a kiss on the cheeks in European fashion or even the occasional hug, but there was and is no sexual aspect to the relationship. Nothing that could be construed as ‘scandal’, to use a euphemism common here.

We would meet socially, quite often go out for a drink together and even away on holiday, just the two of us alone together — and we remained friends. Neither party wished things any different and the vast majority of the women I am close to in my life are simply...friends. One of them is among my closest of friends and the likelihood of our friendship ever being other than that is vanishingly remote — she is a nun. They are of all ages and professions, young (well…perhaps not so many of them young these days) and old and of a range of colours, races and creeds. A few are Pakistani, one of them close and happily married to another Pakistani — and all in all my female friends are a significant part of my social and emotional landscape; here as well as elsewhere in the world.

Early on in life I learned acceptable and appropriate behaviour towards women. What touching and where was ‘allowed’ and what not. What words to use with women — and what not. How to be polite — we put great value on politeness, us Brits of a certain age — the nuts and bolts of social behaviour, the etiquette of the gender relationship. ‘Ladies first’ going through doors, giving up a seat on a bus for a woman who would otherwise have to stand and all the other tiny pieces of learned behaviour that go with having a harmonious and equitable relationship with the opposite gender.

In my adolescence I assumed that these were universal values. We humans tend to do that; assuming in the absence of evidence to the contrary that the rest of the world thinks and acts as we do. Or should, in the event of finding this not to be the case.

Travel and cross-cultural working gradually stripped away my layers of cultural arrogance, and I learned that not everybody does things the way I do. Moving ever eastwards, I noticed that there were ever fewer women around; at work, in the street or socially. It always felt somehow strange, this absence of half the human race, and I wrestled with the internal conflicts of being a man who has always valued women and tried to treat them with respect and decency; and moving into a world where women were owned, property, and repository of that nebulous quality the ‘honour’ of the man and the family — was not easy.

The eastern man-cultures became the place where, perhaps paradoxically, I have spent most of my working life over much of the last twenty years. The values I grew up with are still there, and with them a hardening sense that there really is something fundamentally wrong with gender separation as practiced in some eastern cultures. I have listened intently and with my politically-correct receptors at full strength, to the innumerable arguments for the practice; about how it protects women, preserves the role of a woman as wife and mother, how much safer it is for a woman in a segregated society. Then I have laid those arguments alongside the realities of child brides, forced marriage, gang-rape, honour-killing and acid throwing. The wholesale destruction of an education system simply because it educated girl-children. The discriminatory legislation, the gender imbalances and harassments in the workplace and, most tellingly, my day-to-day interaction with other men and some women and hearing what they have to say for themselves on the matter.

Talking to women about friendship with men is difficult in Pakistan but not impossible. The women I interact with (who may not be representative) are mostly quite clear that they would consider having a male friend who was not Pakistani, but that few of them would seek or want Pakistani men as friends. Digging underneath the layers of culture that overlays everything and looking at the psychology of learned behaviours the women in my unscientific survey were mostly of the opinion that Pakistani men were short of good manners, saw women almost exclusively as commodities to a greater or lesser degree; and had difficulty in conceptualizing a cross-gender relationship outside the family that was not in some way sexual. For their part the men I talked to had a not dissimilar view in many ways. Women were ‘unknown territory’ for many. Outside of the workplace — and often within it as well — the men I spoke to saw no social value in friendship with women and most freely admitted that they had never had a woman friend, did not want one and saw no reason for men to ‘be friends’ with women anyway.

Of course I may have got all this completely wrong, misread or misheard. Gender separation may be more a natural state of affairs than my own preference for something a little more integrated. But there is one powerful argument that says perhaps I have not got it wrong. It can be summed in a single word… ‘development.’ Nations do not truly develop unless women are part and parcel of the process at every level, from basic social interaction to professional relationships to voting to sharing jobs in the home to sharing the childrearing to whose turn it is to feed the cat. I value women not because I ‘own’ them, but because of the added value they bring to every part of my life, and will have joy in their friendship till the day I die.