When Christopher Hitchens wrote about White Male Privilege

“I seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman” — Hitch-22

This statement, in the final pages of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, was confounding. In the previous 340 pages Hichens had shown zero interest or effort in empathising with the women who crossed his path, or in imagining life without his unacknowledged (but painfully conspicuous) privilege. By the time I’d reached these words, I’d followed Hitchens from boarding school to Cambridge, Oxford and eventually New York, struggling to reconcile his shallow approach to women with that rigorous self-reflective critique he’s so famous for. It hurt my brain and my feelings.

I now know (after rants to various friends) that this is old news, and that I should really save my outrage for something more culturally relevant (but Lindy West already did Love Actually). I guess I’d been living under a bit of a rock. The glimpses of Christopher Hitchens that had made it to my little corner of Melbourne were generally anti-religion, pro-Iraq war, with a sprinkling of distaste for Winston Churchill. I didn’t always agree with them, but I thought they were smart. Hitchens out-logicked and out-argued almost everyone he came up against. I’d watched his opponents shake with rage and frustration as he rallied and smirked. And as I started Hitch-22 I found the same smarts, the same hypnotic energy, as he knitted abstract ideas into something solid and comprehensible.

I hadn’t heard what everyone else apparently knew, but no-one bothered asking about: the women thing. My cup of english breakfast and the warm afternoon sun were inadequate protection for such a horrible jolt. That awful reminder that some people can’t see your brain for your boobs and that the world has missed out, and continues to miss out, on the voices and work of women, of people of colour, of people with disabilities, of the LGBTQI community, because our intellectual elite never stopped to ask where they were.

This post started with me copying down Hitchens’ descriptions of women out of pure astonishment.

beautiful, magically beautiful face, adorable (x2), cynical witches, bitches, fiesty, Hitch-proof, haggard, brave (ok, so that one’s alright) tempestuous, glamourous and loquacious, wife of….

I considered making a comparison with descriptions of men. But honestly, that would be so much harder than it sounds. There are just too many descriptions of men. Too many men. And the description of their character, work and attitudes are too detailed to allow easy comparison with the brutally short list above. Male friends, writers and rivals are described in passionate and often loving detail. They are woven into Hitchens' life story as influencers and collaborators.

Women are much harder to find. In a book about his life, his wives, one and two, are conspicuously absent. In a book of so many rich characters, Hitchens' mother, Margaret Thatcher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Susan Sontag are the only women who rated more than a passing sentence. Others are dismissed with the lazy (infuriating, ridiculous and sometimes cruel) cliches that made it onto my list.

While I kept getting distracted, and pinching myself, wondering how this could possibly be happening, Hitchens made it clear that he wasn’t losing any sleep over it. When confronted with a similarly conspicuous absence in the exclusive Bloomsbury group, it was like Hitchens was speaking directly to me.

“There were no women, or no regular ones, and nothing was ever said, or explicitly resolved, about this fact.”

And that’s it, that’s all the discussion it’s allowed. A man who spends his life, and these pages, rigorously interrogating ideas and challenging people to reconsider the beliefs they take for granted, refuses to waste his breath to explain the absence of women in this circle. Whether it was intended as such, it feels like a pointed snub. The same absence in his memoir, equally conspicuous, goes unacknowledged, uninterrogated, unjustified.

But not unexplained.

Hitchens gives us this explanation indirectly, in a diagnosis of the modern “Left,” and once it’s out there, so many things fall magically into place. In pinpointing for us the moment he thinks the Left sold out, Christopher Hitchens articulates, perfectly and with passion, White Male Privilege.

“…we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves.”

After all this, when Hitchens says he “seriously would like to know what it was to be a woman,” it drives me crazy. It feels like a ruby slippers kind of deal. If he’d listened, or if he’d taken just a minute to question the reason he wouldn’t listen, that white male monopoly on ”experience and sacrifice and work,” I can’t help thinking his giant brain would have found a way.

Then I could have sipped my tea in peace, free from nasty jolts, and without reading about the glamorous, tempestuous, loquacious and hitch-proof wives of Christopher Hitchens’ friends.