In the eighth decade of her life Fay Weldon, one time high-profile feminist author and playwright, the child of divorcees, mother of an illegitimate child, briefly a prostitute, twice-divorced herself, has arrived at this view of her sisters:-

The novelist and commentator told an audience at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival that women were no longer as romantic as they were a generation ago, to the detriment of their happiness.

Weldon, 75, argued that having been liberated by the Pill in the 1960s women were paying the price of trying to behave like men. “Our generation fell in love all the time,” she said. “We sacrificed everything.  Now women are much more practical and hard-headed.  However, in the pursuit of professional, social and domestic fulfilment many women are failing to accept that, hormonally and physiologically, they are programmed to experience life differently from men,” she said.

“I think we need to make the most of being women as women, not aspirational men.  The assumptions we all make now as to what comprises a good relationship are upside down.  The differences between men and females are what we should be celebrating.”

This is progress, meaning anti-progressive.  It’s not that Weldon doesn’t retain some penchant for the old sexual politics.  She still emits the regulation moan about unfairness.  But now it is addressed at Nature’s haughty dispensation.  Or perhaps her recently discovered God’s.  She is a believer in hormones and physiology ... biology ... those differences we are, in fact, bound to “celebrate”.  She has turned her back completely on the Lonely Old Bag’s profession that men and women are differentiated solely by social power.

We selfish pigs, rats and louses of the oppressor group tried to tell her all along, of course.  When Western Woman is denied the fundamentally higher morality of her biological interests, as expressed through the demand for fidelity and a romanticisation of sex, she is truly disarmed and powerless.  Not a She-devil but a whore pimped by the Pill and politics.

This is how Weldon described it to Guardian journalist Stuart Jeffries:-

“I’m not actually advocating doing what you want.  We are moral beings.  Most of our mental and indeed moral pain comes from the conflict between socialisation and our species nature.”

Well, we cold climate pigs, rats and louses of the sociobiologically-aware oppressor group tried to tell her all along, of course.  Her socialisation is, at bottom, also Darwinian.  Both sides, socialisation and species nature, obey their respective strategy for survival.  The unbridled, high ‘r’ appetite of Homo Africanus is only ever moderated, never quelled, by the restrictive, high ‘k’-strategising Homo Out-of-Africanus.  All Weldon is telling us is that this very European dilemma has not yet been resolved by Nature.  The evolutionary trend, conducted in evolutionary time, is towards “k”, intelligence, low sexualisation.  But since 1963 we have been tampering with this.  Homo Africanus has been rocket-boosted, superficially at least, by chemistry and liberalism.  Nonetheless, it has been quite enough to bring the European psyche into conflict with itself, and women and children have been the ones to pay the price.

But perhaps that’s just too much Nature for an old leftie like Weldon.