Dialogue: Women need to play the victim

I have been amazed at the number of females over the years who have told me that they think it's a wonderful idea to oblige doctors to ask all their female patients if they are being abused at home.

It says a great deal about the degree to which women like to see themselves and their sisters as fragile creatures who need to be helped, saved, perhaps even protected as a species. But we'll get to that in a moment.

For now, I want to tell you a rather crazy, relevant little story. I had this nice, totally camp doctor once who made it an absolute prerogative to set five minutes aside in every appointment for a wee chat about my home life, mental health and so forth.

This poor man meant well enough, and God only knows he deserves a few points for that. The problem was that he was so keen to find problems, so desperate to strike out for deep and meaningful territory and so irretrievably programmed to do so that he inevitably missed the real tone of every appointment by a rather monumental margin. Needless to say, this led to no end of blunderings, galloping howlers and flaming mutual embarrassments.

I'll never forget the first time it happened. "Is everything all right with your life?" he asked me, his face the living picture of gravity and concern as he teed off this aspect of the afternoon. It was nice of him to ask; still, it was hard not to wonder where the desire to do so came from. There seemed no cause for the good doctor to feel pessimistic about my personal circumstances.

Quite the reverse. This doctor had in fact just fitted me out for a diaphragm which he knew was shortly to be in keen service during a two-week romantic holiday which - oh, happiness - my then-boyfriend had offered to finance.

Frankly, there was absolutely no aspect of my life at that point that could not be counted as a major triumph. I thought I was probably up for an ovation, rather than compassion. Alas, the applause never came. Instead, my 15 minutes of glory were spent trying to prise this do-gooding limpet from my person.

The point of this story is that almost every female of my acquaintance thought the bloke in question was a fabulous doctor.

Indeed, this was the reason why I chose him. I was overseas at the time and didn't know which doctors were good and which were not, and so picked one whom everybody apparently endorsed. I couldn't understand for the life of me why they recommended him when I first clapped eyes on him, but the penny slowly began to drop.

Women liked him because he indulged them and let them play the victim for a few minutes at the end of every session.

Even women who should have known better - and, indeed, did know better - couldn't resist taking the opportunity and then deluding themselves into believing that the opportunity was somehow liberating.

None of which particularly matters in the greater scheme of things. It is just kind of fun sometimes to think about the degree to which women today wish to be ill and wish to be somehow excused from taking charge of life.

Illness is certainly the obsession of choice for the contemporary female autobiographical writer. There is something almost comic about the extent to which the best-known of them go to top each other's tales of affliction. Which is why I've started to follow these people with such interest.

None of them ever die, either - they just head out in search of more symptoms. Elizabeth Wurtzel, America's most famous Generation X illness memoirist, followed up her famous piece about depression, lithium and Prozac with an unintention-ally hilarious piece about her addiction to Ritalin, speed and (if my memory serves) a whole bunch of unidentified substances that her self-destructive impulse - an impulse she is almost in love with - compelled her to snort off the carpet.

Lauren Slater, though, is my personal favourite right now. So far, she's written four books about her precarious mental state (she takes time between breakdowns to plug her books on chat shows) and I understand that she is about to branch out into physical illness. It would be funny (well, it is, really) if it wasn't so pertinent to the dialogue we're presently having about domestic violence.

It seems that women need to play the victim - even those women who should appreciate being well.