Times caption: Sir Salman Rushdie dismissed any suggestion of a crisis in modern masculinity (ADRIAN SHERRATT / THE SUNDAY TIMES)
A piece in yesterday’s Times:
Sir Salman Rushdie has criticised the “bleating” suggestion that men’s lives have become tougher.
The novelist dismissed any suggestion of a crisis in modern masculinity. “All this bleating about how hard it is for men, I don’t have time for. It’s much more difficult to be a woman,” he said. “The patriarchy is alive and well.” [J4MB emphasis]
The author of Midnight’s Children, a Booker Prize winner, said that he had always created strong female characters. “Sometimes they’re horrible, sometimes they’re almost monstrous. They’re not feeble. Sometimes they tear people’s heads off. Looking back at my books, a lot of my favourite characters have been female.”
Referring to Brexit, he said that Britain was hankering after a fictional “golden age”. “This whole tragedy that this country is going through is based on, in part, a nostalgic idea of British identity that is a fiction,” Sir Salman, 71, added. “It ignores that it was based on the exploitation of a quarter of a planet.
“The idea this would be a wonderful country if all these inconvenient foreigners were not here: it’s xenophobic but also unworkable. The hospitals would close, the schools would close, you wouldn’t be able to gather the harvest. Literally you couldn’t have a hospital in London if you were to kick all the foreigners out.”
The Satanic Verses author will speak at the 12th London Literature Festival, at the Southbank Centre, tomorrow.
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Justice for Men & Boys 