How to Be a Woman Read online

  And – just as with winning the lottery, or becoming famous – there is no manual for becoming a woman, even though the stakes are so high. God knows, when I was 13, I tried to find one. You can read about other people’s experiences on the matter – by way of trying to crib, in advance, for an exam – but I found that this is, in itself, problematic. For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who – against all the odds – got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero – Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc – and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed. Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful or – most crucially of all, for a teenage girl – simply uncool. Few girls would choose to be right – right, down into their clever, brilliant bones – but lonely.

  So whilst How To Be a Woman is the story of all the times that I – uninformed, underprepared, fatally deluded as to my ability to ‘style out’ a poncho – got being a woman wrong, in the 21st century, merely recounting experience doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Yes, an old-fashioned feminist ‘consciousness raising’ still has enormous value. When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.

  However, whilst chipping in your six penn’orth on what it’s actually like – rather than what we pretend it’s like – to be a woman is vital, we still also need a bit of analysis-y, argument-y, ‘this needs to change-y’ stuff. You know. Feminism.

  And this is where the second problem arises. Feminism, you would think, would cover all this. But feminism, as it stands, well … stands. It has ground to a halt. Again and again over the last few years, I turned to modern feminism to answer questions that I had but found that what had once been the one most exciting, incendiary and effective revolution of all time had somehow shrunk down into a couple of increasingly small arguments, carried out among a couple of dozen feminist academics, in books that only feminist academics would read, and discussed at 11pm on BBC4. Here’s my beef with this:

  1) Feminism is too important to only be discussed by academics. And, more pertinently:

  2) I’m not a feminist academic, but, by God, feminism is so serious, momentous and urgent, that now is really the time for it to be championed by a lighthearted broadsheet columnist and part-time TV critic, who has appalling spelling. If something’s thrilling and fun, I want to join in – not watch from the sidelines. I have stuff to say! Camille Paglia has Lady Gaga ALL WRONG! The feminist organisation Object are nuts when it comes to pornography! Germaine Greer, my heroine, is crackers on the subject of transgender issues! And no one is tackling OK! magazine, £600 handbags, tiny pants, Brazilians, stupid hen nights or Katie Price.

  And they have to be tackled. They have to be tackled, rugby-style, face down in the mud, with lots of shouting.

  Traditional feminism would tell you that these are not the important issues: that we should concentrate on the big stuff like pay inequality, female circumcision in the Third World, and domestic abuse. And they are, obviously, pressing and disgusting and wrong, and the world cannot look itself squarely in the eye until they’re stopped.

  But all those littler, stupider, more obvious day-to-day problems with being a woman are, in many ways, just as deleterious to women’s peace of mind. It is the ‘Broken Windows’ philosophy, transferred to female inequality. In the ‘Broken Windows’ theory, if a single broken window on an empty building is ignored, and not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may break into the building, and light fires, or become squatters.

  Similarly, if we live in a climate where female pubic hair is considered distasteful, or famous and powerful women are constantly pilloried for being too fat or too thin, or badly dressed, then, eventually, people start breaking into women, and lighting fires in them. Women will get squatters. Clearly, this is not a welcome state of affairs. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wake up one morning and find a load of chancers in my lobby.

  When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in 1993, his belief in the ‘Broken Windows’ theory led him to implement the ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy. Crime dropped dramatically, significantly, and continued to for the next ten years.

  Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives – I want a Zero Tolerance policy on ‘All The Patriarchal Bullshit’. And the great thing about a Zero Tolerance policy on Patriarchal Broken Windows Bullshit is this: in the 21st century, we don’t need to march against size zero models, risible pornography, lap-dancing clubs and Botox. We don’t need to riot, or go on hunger strike. There’s no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even a donkey. We just need to look it in the eye, squarely, for a minute, and then start laughing at it. We look hot when we laugh. People fancy us when they observe us giving out relaxed, earthy chuckles.

  Perhaps they don’t fancy us quite as much when we go on to bang on the tables with our fists, gurgling, ‘HARGH! HARGH! Yes, that IS what it’s like! SCREW YOU, the patriarchy!’ before choking on a mouthful of crisps, but still.

  I don’t know if we can talk about ‘waves’ of feminism any more – by my reckoning, the next wave would be the fifth, and I suspect it’s around the fifth wave that you stop referring to individual waves, and start to refer, simply, to an incoming tide.

  But if there is to be a fifth wave of feminism, I would hope that the main thing that distinguishes it from all that came before is that women counter the awkwardness, disconnect and bullshit of being a modern woman not by shouting at it, internalising it or squabbling about it – but by simply pointing at it, and going ‘HA!’, instead.

  So yes. If there is a fifth wave, then this is my contribution. My bucketful. A fairly comprehensive telling of every instance that I had little, or in many cases, no idea … of how to be a woman.

  CHAPTER 1

  I Start Bleeding!

  So, I had assumed it was optional. I know that women bleed every month, but I didn’t think it was going to happen to me. I’d presumed I would be able to opt out of it – perhaps from sheer unwillingness. It honestly doesn’t look that much use or fun, and I can’t see any way I can fit it into my schedule.

  I’m just not going to bother! I think to myself, cheerfully, as I do my ten sit-ups a night. Captain Moran is opting out!

  I am taking my ‘By The Time I’m 18’ list very seriously. My ‘Loose [sic] Weight’ campaign has stepped up a gear – not only am I still not eating gingernuts, but I’m also doing ten sit-ups and ten press-ups a night. We don’t have any full-length mirrors in the house, so I’ve no idea how I’m doing, but I imagine that, at this rate, my boot-camp regime will have me as slender as Winona Ryder by Christmas.

  I’d only found out about periods four months ago, anyway. My mother never told us about them – ‘I thought you’d picked it all up from Moonlighting,’ she said, vaguely, when, years later, I asked her about it – and it’s only when I came across a Lil-lets leaflet, stuffed in the hedge outside our house by a passing schoolgirl, that I’d discovered what the whole menstrual deal was.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ Caz says, when I come into the bedroom with the leaflet, and try to show it to her.

  ‘But have you seen?’ I ask her, sitting on the end of her bed. She moves to the other end of the bed. Caz doesn’t like ‘nearness’. It makes her extremely irascible. In a three-bedroom council house with seve
n people in it, she is almost perpetually furious.

  ‘Look – this is the womb, and this is the vagina, and the Lil-let expands widthways, to fill the … burrow,’ I say.

  I’ve only skim-read the leaflet. To be honest, it has blown my mind quite badly. The cross-section of the female reproductive system looks complicated, and impractical – like one of those very expensive Rotastak hamster cages, with tunnels going everywhere. Again, I’m not really sure I want ‘in’ on all of this. I think I thought I was just made of solid meat – from my pelvis to my neck – with the kidneys wedged in there somewhere. Like a sausage. I dunno. Anatomy isn’t my strong point. I like romantic 19th-century novels, where girls faint in the rain, and Spike Milligan’s war memoirs. There isn’t much menstruation in either. This all seems a bit … unnecessary.

  ‘And it happens every month,’ I say, to Caz. Caz is now actually lying, fully dressed, under her duvet, wearing Wellington boots.

  ‘I want you to go away,’ her voice says, from under the duvet. ‘I’m pretending you’re dead. I can’t think of anything I want to do less than talk about menstruation with you.’

  I trail away.

  ‘Nil desperandum!’ I say to myself. ‘There’s always someone I can go to for a sympathetic ear, and a bowl full of cheery chat!’

  The stupid new dog is under my bed. She has got pregnant by the small dog, Oscar, who lives over the road. None of us can quite work out how this has happened, as Oscar is out of those small, yappy types dogs, only slightly bigger than a family-sized tin of baked beans, and the stupid new dog is a fully grown German Shepherd.

  ‘She must have actually dug a hole in the ground, to squat in,’ Caz says, in disgust. ‘She must have been gagging for it. Your dog is a whore.’

  ‘I’m going to become a woman soon, dog,’ I say. The dog licks its vagina. I have noticed the dog always does this when I talk to it. I have not yet worked out what I think about this, but I think I might be a bit sad about it.

  ‘I found a leaflet, and it says I’ll be starting my periods soon,’ I continue. ‘I’ll be honest, dog – I’m a bit worried. I think it’s going to hurt.’

  I look into the dog’s eyes. She is as stupid as a barrel of toes. Galaxies of nothing are going on in her eyes.

  I get up.

  ‘I’m going to talk to Mum,’ I explain. The dog remains under my bed, looking, as always, deeply nervous about being a dog.

  I track Mum down on the toilet. She’s now eight months pregnant, and holding the sleeping one-year-old Cheryl whilst trying to do a wee.

  I sit on the edge of the bath.

  ‘Mum?’ I say.

  For some reason, I think I am allowed only one question about this. One shot at the ‘menstrual cycle conversation’.

  ‘Yes?’ she answers. Even though she is doing a wee and holding a sleeping baby, she is also sorting out a whites wash from the washing basket.

  ‘You know – my period?’ I whisper.

  ‘Yes?’ she says

  ‘Will it hurt?’ I ask.

  Mum thinks for a minute.

  ‘Yeah,’ she says, in the end. ‘But it’s OK.’

  The baby then starts crying, so she never explains why it’s ‘OK’. It remains unexplained.

  Three weeks later, my period starts. I find it to be a deeply uncheerful event. It starts in the car on the way to Central Library in town, and I have to walk all around the Non-Fiction section for half an hour, desperately hoping it won’t show, before Dad takes us all home again.

  ‘My first period started: yuk,’ I write in my diary.

  ‘I don’t think Judy Garland ever had a period,’ I tell the dog, unhappily, later that night. I am watching myself cry in a small hand-mirror. ‘Or Cyd Charisse. Or Gene Kelly.’

  The bag of Pennywise sanitary towels my mum keeps on the back of the bathroom door has become my business now, too. I feel a sad jealousy of all my younger siblings who are still ‘outside the bag’. The towels are thick, and cheap – stuck into my knickers, they feel like a mattress between my legs.

  ‘It feels like a mattress between my legs,’ I tell Caz.

  We’re playing one of our Sindy games. Four hours in, and Caz’s Sindy, Bonnie, is secretly murdering everyone on a luxury cruise ship. My Sindy, Layla, is trying to solve the mystery. The one-legged Action Man, Bernard, is dating both of them simultaneously. We argue constantly over the ownership of Bernard, even though he actually belongs to Eddie. Neither of us want our Sindy to be single.

  ‘A horrible, thick mattress,’ I continue. ‘Like in The Princess and the Pea.’

  ‘How long are they?’ Caz asks.

  Ten minutes later, and six Pennywise sanitary towels are laid out, like a dormitory, with Sindys sleeping on them.

  ‘Well, this is lucky!’ I say. ‘Like when we found out that a Brussels sprout looks exactly like a Sindy cabbage. See, Caz – this is the bright side of menstruation!’

  Because the sanitary towels are cheap, they shred between my thighs when I walk, and become ineffective, and leaky. I give up walking for the duration of my period. My first period lasts three months. I think this is perfectly normal. I faint quite regularly. I become so anaemic my finger- and toenails become very pale blue. I don’t tell Mum, because I’ve asked my question about periods. Now I just have to get on with them.

  The blood on the sheets is depressing – not dramatic, and red, like a murder, but brown, and tedious, like an accident. It looks like I am rusty inside, and am now breaking. In an effort to avoid handwashing stains out every morning, I take to stuffing huge bundles of loo roll in my knickers, along with the useless sanitary towel, and lying very, very still all night. Sometimes, there are huge bloodclots, that look like raw liver. I presume this is the lining of my womb, coming off in inch-thick slices, and that this is just how visceral menstruation is. It all adds to a dreary sense that something terribly wrong is going on, but that it is against the rules of the game to ever mention it. Frequently, I think about all the women through history, who’ve had to deal with this ferocious bullshit with just rags and cold water.

  No wonder women have been oppressed by men for so long, I think, scouring my pants with a nail-brush and coal-tar soap, in the bathroom. Getting dried blood out of cotton is a bitch. We were all too busy scrubbing to agitate for the vote until the twin-tub was invented.

  Even though she’s two years younger than me, Caz starts her periods six months after me – just as I’m starting my second one. She comes crying into my bedroom, when everyone else is asleep, and whispers the awful words, ‘My period’s started.’

  I show her the bag of sanitary towels, on the back of the bathroom door, and tell her what to do.

  ‘Put them in your knickers, and don’t walk for three months,’ I say. ‘It’s easy.’

  ‘Will it hurt?’ she asks, eyes wide.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, in an adult and noble manner. ‘But it’s OK.’

  ‘Why is it OK?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  ‘Well, why are you saying it, then?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Jesus. Why do you bother talking? The stuff that comes out of your mouth.’

  Caz gets horrific cramps – she spends her periods in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, covered in hot water bottles, shouting ‘Fuck off’ at anyone who tries to come into the room. As part of being a hippy, my mother doesn’t ‘believe’ in pain-killers, and urges us to research herbal remedies. We read that sage is supposed to help, and sit in bed eating handfuls of sage and onion stuffing, crying. Neither of us can believe that we’re going to have to put up with this for the next 30 years.

  ‘I don’t want children anyway,’ Caz says. ‘So I am getting nothing out of this whatsoever. I want my entire reproductive system taken out, and replaced with spare lungs, for when I start smoking. I want that option. This is pointless.’

  At this juncture, it seems there is absolutely nothing to recommend being a woman. Sex
hormones are a bitch that have turned me from a blithe child into a bleeding, weeping, fainting washerwoman. These hormones do not make me feel feminine: every night, I lie in bed feeling wretched, and the bulge of my sanitary towel in my knickers looks like a cock.

  I take everything off, sadly, while I get my nightie out of the drawer. When I turn around again, the dog has slunk out from under the bed, and started to eat my bloody sanitary towel. There are bits of shredded, red cotton wool all over the floor, and my knickers are hanging out of her mouth. She stares at me, desperately.

  ‘Oh God – your dog’s a lesbian vampire,’ Caz says, from her bed, turning over to sleep.

  I go to retrieve my knickers, and faint.

  In the midst of this hormonal gloom, however, the cavalry finally arrives, over the hill, jangling its spurs, and epaulettes shining in the sun: my green library card. Now I’m 13, I can get adult books out of the library, without having to borrow my parents’ cards. And that means I can get secret books out. Dirty books. Books with sex in.

  ‘I’ve been having these dreams,’ I tell the dog, as we walk to the library. The library is on the other side of The Green – a gigantic, desolate stretch of grass, where one must be constantly on the lookout for The Yobs. It doesn’t do to boldly walk in the middle of it – this leaves one exposed. You must stick to the outer edges, near the houses, so that if you get attacked the people who live in the houses can get a good view of you getting your head kicked in without having to fetch their binoculars.