Somewhere in the middle of a ridiculously regressive show that I watch sometimes, a newly married woman wakes up before her husband. She peeks at him and quickly whips out her make-up to fix her face before she wakes him. A happy marriage on American television.

I can understand wanting to look pretty for one’s partner, but makeup at all times??? What happens when you grow old together? Grey hair, wrinkles, sagging breasts, enormous bottoms, stretch-marks, bent backs, chin-hair and a hundred other signs of age will creep up. Does that make you not beautiful any more? Would it be unsurprising if the guy wants to ditch the weathered piece of a once ‘hot’ wife for a fresh young thing?

I know it sounds perfectly awful when I put it that way, but it does seem like the logical conclusion. I don’t understand how anybody hopes to avoid body-hair, morning breath, flatulence, fluctuating weight, and bad hair and skin days in a marriage. There will be illnesses – throwing up and worse – that the delicate man with delicate tastes will have to see you through. Bare lips are surely miniscule in comparison to everything else that comes.

And while we’re on the subject of women wanting…no, needing to look perfect all the time, why is it that the same women also feel obliged to be very kind about the way their partners look? What kind of idiot gets waxed, plucked, scrubbed, cleaned, toned, moisturised, bejeweled, beheeled, painted and sometimes even zapped with a laser for a fat smelly badly dressed twit? I mean, in the good old days, men were expected to ‘provide’ and women were expected to look pretty enough for a rich man to own. Now, the women still need to look the pretty trophies and the men…well I still don’t understand what their function is supposed to be.

The ugly old bum sitting on his couch and living off his mother still feels entitled to a beautiful woman. Except post-women’s lib, he feels free to tell her to earn and pay for her own make-up.

These past few months

I have a new job in a new city. New books have been read, new genres are being approached, and for the first time since high school, I am at an institution in India which actually challenges and stretches me.

A bipartisan effort has been made to bully a women’s reservation bill past the lines of sulking men in the Rajya Sabha. Although I have no idea at all about what impact the legislation will have on women in this country, I am so very proud of the female politicians who got together, across party lines, to see it though. Hats off to the sisterhood!

After mourning a lost relationship and its attendant lost dreams, I have found my way again. This time it really is MY way. I am doing work I enjoy in a place I enjoy among people I enjoy. I don’t feel derailed anymore.

One person I love is much happier than I thought and one person I love is much unhappier than I thought. The former I celebrate, and the latter I shall try and fix.

All in all, despite all the killings, banning of mosques, suicides and global warming, the world looks and feels like a better place.

Jeanette Winterson: I wanted to use myself as fiction and fact

Wonderful article in classic Winterson-style.

Excerpt:

When I published Oranges I was 25. Mrs Winterson said bitterly: “It’s the first time I have had to order a book in a false name.” So I knew I had won the story war between us, even though the name that I am known by, Jeanette Winterson, is itself a cover story for the other person, named but not known, the other self who was put in the crib by one mother and lifted out again, in a new version, by another mother.

What else could I be but a fiction writer?

Read the rest at the Times website.