How to Be a Woman Read online

  ‘Dreams about … men,’ I continue. I look at the dog. The dog looks back at me. I think the dog deserves to know the whole truth of what is going on here. I owe her that much, at least.

  ‘I’m in love with Chevy Chase,’ I tell the dog, in a sudden, joyful burst. ‘I saw him in the video to Paul Simon’s “Call Me Al”, from the 1986 Graceland album, on Warner Bros., and I just can’t stop thinking about him. I had this dream where he kissed me, and his mouth felt exciting. I’m going to ask Dad if we can get The Three Amigos out of the video shop on Friday.’

  Requesting The Three Amigos from the video shop will be a bold move – the next video for rental has already been earmarked as Howard the Duck. I will have to pull a lot of fancy footwork but it will be worth it. I have not told the dog yet but the thought of kissing Chevy Chase has made me so excited that, yesterday, I listened to ‘Call Me Al’ 16 times on repeat, imagining him touching my face while Paul Simon plays the bass solo. I am so hot for Chevy. I have even imagined what my first line to him will be – the one that will capture his heart.

  ‘Chevy Chase?’ I will say, at a party very closely modelled on the ones I’ve seen in Dynasty. ‘Any relation to Cannock Chase?’

  Cannock Chase is just off the A5 to Stafford. LA-born movie star and comedian Chevy is going to both get, and love, this joke.

  Of course, I have had crushes before. Well, one. It didn’t go very well. When I was seven, I saw an episode of Buck Rogers, and fell in love with that dumb American space-cowboy, so obviously based on Han Solo they might as well have called him San Holo and had him ride around in the Fillennium Malcon, with Bewchacca.

  As the new love-chemicals rushed through me – Bucknesium and Rogertonin – I discovered what love is, and found that it’s just feeling very … interested. More interested than I had been about anything before.

  I was interested in absolutely everything to do with Buck. Just looking at his face was interesting. How he stood, near a door = interesting. The way he held the obviously lightweight and plastic laser gun as if it were very heavy = interesting. The theme tune takes on such an unbearable load of yearning and Buck Rogerness that – 28 years later – I still feel stirred when I hear it.

  Obviously, these were all some big-assed feelings to be dealing with, and so I did what we always did when an event of some import is going on. I grabbed Caz – then five – and pulled her into the airing cupboard with me. Like the Mitfords used to – except theirs was probably much larger than ours, and didn’t smell of Bold, mouse droppings and farts.

  ‘Caz,’ I said, pulling the door as shut as I could, and assuming an expression of deep portent. ‘I have something incredible to tell you.’

  I paused, staring at her.

  ‘I … am IN LOVE, with Buck Rogers. Don’t tell Mum.’

  Caz nodded.

  My burden lifted, I opened the door again, and gestured for Caz to leave. I watched her cross the landing and go down the stairs. I heard her open the front room door.

  ‘Mum. Cate’s in love with Buck Rogers,’ she said.

  I learn then, in that moment – as mortification burns across me like hot ash – that love is agony, all crushes should remain secret, and that Caz was an untrustworthy, faint-hearted son of a bitch.

  All these facts stood me in good stead, subsequently. I learned a lot in the airing cupboard that day. Just 20 minutes later, I was stuffing frozen peas into Caz’s pillowcase whilst whispering, portentously, ‘And so the war begins.’

  But – having crushed all feelings of love for so long – the onrush of adolescent hormones have made it now impossible to ignore them any longer. The 13-year-old girl with her hair in plaits, edging around The Green, talking to her pregnant dog, is actually crazed with lust.

  ‘I’m going to get the novelisation of Fletch out,’ I tell the dog. Fletch was a very average movie of the time, starring Chevy Chase. ‘There will be a picture of Chevy on the cover, and I am going to look at the picture of Chevy, and then copy it into my Love Book.’

  The Love Book is a recent invention. On the cover it says ‘Inspiration Book’ but it is really ‘The Love Book’. So far, I have nine pictures of the Duchess of York in there, and a very small picture of Kermit the Frog, cut out of the Radio Times. I love the Duchess of York. In 1988, she’s very fat, but married to a prince. She gives me hope for the future.

  I’ve already planned exactly what I’m going to do with the novelisation of Fletch. When I get home, I’m going to wrap it up in a vest and hide it at the back of my knicker drawer, so my parents don’t see it. It’s very important my parents don’t think I’m starting to fall in love with people, because then they might notice that I’m growing up, and I’m kind of trying to keep it secret. I think it will cause some kind of incident.

  At the library, I find the novelisation of Fletch easily. It has a satisfyingly big picture of Chevy on the cover – I am going to wear down some pencil lead copying out that sweet face.

  Almost as an afterthought, I put Riders by Jilly Cooper onto the countertop, to be stamped out. It’s got a horse on the front. I like horses. I can hear the dog whining outside. I’ve tied her to a tree, but she often fusses around, and kind of lynches herself with the lead a bit. It’s probably time to cut her down, before she stops breathing.

  Three hours later, and I cannot believe what I am reading. My first day of getting adult books out, and I have struck filth gold. Absolute filth gold. Riders by Jilly Cooper is more than I could ever have dreamed of – there’s cocks, tits and shagging everywhere. Clits falling from the sky. Arses two feet deep. A hurricane of nipples, blowjobs and muff-diving.

  Some of it’s confusing – Cooper keeps referring to one heroine’s ‘bush’, and until I get to page 130, I can’t swear with absolute certainty that she’s not talking about vegetation. And I have no idea what cunnilingus is – certainly no one I’ve ever met in Wolverhampton can afford it. I bet they don’t even have it in Birmingham. It must be a London thing.

  But this aside, it is, without doubt, a Bible of lubriciousness, the Rosetta Stone of filth: the key text that will translate ‘new and unusual feelings’ that I have been having into ‘masturbating furiously and compulsively for the next four years’.

  The first time I try – halfway through Chapter 5 – it takes 20 minutes to come. I don’t really know what I’m doing – in the book, people ‘delve’ around in ‘wet bushes’ until something amazing happens. I futz around – tongue clamped between teeth in concentration – and determinedly try everything, in this absolutely unfamiliar place I have had for 13 years.

  When I finally come, I lie back, damp, exhausted, hand aching, out of my mind with excitement. I feel amazing. I feel like The Fonz must feel when he walks in the room and says, ‘Heeeeeey,’ or like the Duchess of York feels when Andrew kisses her. I feel kind of clean, and light, and happy. I feel, in this cherry-blossom star-burst glow – ears ringing, breath still ragged – a bit, well, beautiful.

  I cannot write about what has happened in my diary – Caz and I have had a tit-for-tat diary-reading war on for years. Sometimes, she writes comments – ‘You’re so pathetic’ – in the margins, when an entry particularly disgusts or riles her.

  But the gusto with which I write about the rest of the day’s events does, perhaps, betray the extremity of my feelings.

  ‘Mum bought pastry brush! USEFUL!’ I write. ‘Cheese sarnies for tea – they’re soooooooooo tastie. Dad says we can get The Three Amigos out. YESSSSSSSSS!!!’

  Over the next few weeks, I become an amazingly dexterous masturbator. The time and effort I put into the project is phenomenal. I woo myself in a variety of different locations – in the front room, in the kitchen, at the bottom of the garden. Standing up, sitting in a chair, lying on my front, and with my left hand – I want to keep things fresh for myself. I am a considerate and imaginative lover of me.

  Some afternoons, I lock myself in my bedroom and come for hours and hours and hours – until my fingertips are
as wrinkled as if I’d been in the bath. This new hobby is amazing. It doesn’t cost anything, I don’t have to leave the house, and it isn’t making me fat. I wonder if everyone knows about it. Perhaps there would be revolution if they did! I can’t wait to tell everyone, except I will never tell anyone, because this is the biggest secret ever. Even more secret than periods, or the fact I have spots on my bum.

  I tell the dog, of course, and the dog, as is her wont, licks her vagina – which seems appropriate, but also not quite enough. I need more disclosure. I must do what I always do.

  ‘If you are going to try and tell me how much you enjoy wanking,’ Caz says, with a look very similar to when lasers come out of the eyes of Zod, in Superman II, ‘then I will have to strongly pray to God that you die in the next four seconds. I don’t ever want to know anything about this.’

  I turn around, go back to my room, and open up page 113 of Riders again. The glue in the spine is shattered, so it now opens at this page quite naturally. Billy takes Janey down to the Bluebell Wood – where the nettles are peppery and damp, and August makes everything slow – and I float away again.

  Under the bed, the dog whines.

  Over the next few years, masturbation becomes a time-consuming but fulfilling hobby. Even though – after a few weeks – I learn that it is called ‘masturbation’, I never call it that myself. ‘Masturbation’ sounds too much like ‘perturbation’, and this is, by and large, a very unperturbing development. ‘Wank’ is similarly unsuitable – it sounds like cranking a handle, or some difficult handling of chunky machinery, that requires axle grease, and shouting.

  What I am doing, by way of contrast, is dreamlike, delicate and soft – apart from the occasions where I have grown my nails too long, and become so sore I have to repel my own advances for a few days. I just think of it as ‘it’ – and, soon, ‘it’ requires more than Riders, however revolutionary Riders has been, to feed it.

  I start doing what everyone of my generation is doing – the last generation before free, online pornography starts being handed out, with the same largess the post-war Labour government handed out milk, and spectacles. I start reading the Radio Times, and trying to work out where the dirty TV programmes are.

  The best sources of filth, I soon discover, along with millions of other teenagers in the late eighties/early nineties, are split evenly between ‘classy films and dramas on BBC2’, and ‘late night “youth programmes” on Channel 4’. There are certain key words you look for, in the listings. ‘Jenny Agutter’ is the big one. Agutter is the sure-fire harbinger of filth. Logan’s Run, An American Werewolf in London, Walkabout – which might as well have been retitled ‘Wankabout’: wherever Agutter materialises, there will be bosoms, and neck-biting, and thighs grabbed by hands, soundtracked by gasping. Even in The Railway Children – lovely, family-friendly The Railway Children – she ends up waving her undergarments at a trainful of startled Victorian gentlemen, as they come out of a tunnel in a fury of steam and squealing brakes. It’s as if she insists on this stuff.

  I watch An American Werewolf in London late at night, with the sound down low, as Jenny Agutter slowly, hungrily bites David Naughton’s shoulder in the shower, and I think how I, too, would like to have someone to eat – even if they did later turn out to be a werewolf, and got shot in front of me in the street, like a bad dog. I am accepting of the downs, as well as the ups, of love. I know it won’t be easy. Many of the tracks on Graceland have also told me this. Late at night, I am in the gutter, looking at Agutter.

  But it’s not Agutter alone we seek. ‘A dark story of sexual betrayal’ is always a good listings harbinger – A Sense of Guilt and Blackeyes are full of moments where I have to run across the room, quickly, and rest my finger on the ‘off’ button, lest my mother come in and see me watching unsuitable things. It’s very unsuitable. Hands are thrust into black stocking-tops, Blackeyes is sent to be drowned. Sex seems unbelievably complicated and nerve-wracking, but at least I’m seeing kissing, and some tits. When I see the red-haired teenager being seduced by Trevor Eve in A Sense of Guilt, I want to tell Caz – also a redhead – that I have finally found her another role model, aside from Woody Woodpecker, and Annie in Annie – but only the week before, we have had this exchange:

  On one, single occasion, the sex isn’t guilty, or inter-species, but just gorgeous. In The Camomile Lawn, Jennifer Ehle’s character rackets around war-time London in an unimaginably pleasurable froth of parties, champagne, cheerful licentiousness and fucking. There is one scene that looks the ultimate in adult aspiration: half reclining in a zinc bath, Ehle is on the phone, arranging her social life on a black Bakelite phone.

  ‘London’s great!’ she trills, poshly, hair damp at the nape of her neck, eyes already champagne-bright. ‘Thar’s SO many paaaaahrties!’

  Her tits float, like archipelagos of junket, in serene perfection. The nipples are mouse-nose pink. Later, they will be dressed in rose-coloured silk, and walked out on to a balcony to smoke a cigarette with some handsome boy who sighs to touch them. Jennifer Ehle’s Camomile tits made having tits look like the most fun in the world. I watch them, sitting in the front room, alone, in the dark. My tits do not look like that in the bath. I have no clue what my tits look like in the bath – I always cover them with a flannel, in case someone bursts in on me, and sees them. There is still no lock on the bathroom door.

  ‘One of the kids might shut themselves in, and drown themselves,’ my mother cautions, as I climb into the bath, still wearing my knickers.

  And then, in 1990, Channel 4 shows the biopic of the young Cynthia Payne’s life, Wish You Were Here, and it is my big moment of revelation. Oh, Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were Here! My Beatles of porn! My Dickens of fucking! The first character I see of my age and background – teenage, working-class – who treats sex not as something dark, and leading to doom, but silly, and fun – to be taken as seriously as smoking a fag (which I haven’t done yet, but intend to) or riding a bicycle (which I did once, and fell off, but hey-ho).

  Alone in the front room, wrapped in a duvet, eating our favourite snack of the moment – The Cheese Lollipop: a lump of cheese on a fork – I watch, wide-eyed, the scene which almost all my sexual persona comes to be based on. Cynthia’s dirty uncle takes her into a shed, and, after a small session of prick-teasing, starts fucking her, up against a wall. She’s in a neatly fitted 1950s cotton sundress, with winged eyeliner, and pop sox on. As he grunts away, she chews her gum, and whispers, ‘You dirty. Old. Sod.’

  Ten minutes later, she’s on the seafront, tucking her dress into her knickers and shouting ‘Up your bum!’ at passers-by, while laughing hysterically.

  Coupled with the pan-sexual, freak-show silliness of Euro-trash – Lolo Ferrari, the woman with the biggest breasts in the world, bouncing on a trampoline; drag queens with dildos and butt plugs; gimps in harnesses; hoovering bored Dutch housewives’ flats – this is the sum total of all the sex I see until I’m 18. Perhaps ten minutes in total – a series of arty, freaky, sometimes brutal vignettes, which I lash together, and use as the basis for my sexual imagination.

  Along with a couple of recurring dreams about Han Solo, and Aslan (which I cook up myself – I am not idle), this is the first thing that feels like a crude but true sensor into adulthood: Sex. Desire. Wanting to come. Something which will lead me in the right direction. It feels like it will – eventually – somehow – I don’t know how – and only if I attend to its lessons carefully – make me dress right, say the correct things, give me the impetus to leave the house, and find whatever it is that’s out there for me.

  At the time, I wish I could see more sex. I want more porn than I can run through, in my head, whilst making a sandwich. In later years, however, I come to believe that this wasn’t such a bad sexual education, after all. Freely available, hardcore 21st-century pornography blasts through men and women’s sexual imaginations like antibiotics, and kills all mystery, uncertainty and doubt – good and bad.

  But in th
e meantime, I have found this thing. I have discovered this one good thing, so far, about being a woman, and it is coming.

  Twenty-two years later, and, on an idle night, I float around the internet, looking for porn. I know what I like – threesomes, screaming, giant mythical lions from the Chronicles of Narnia – and, to be fair, I can find them all, if I look hard enough. There is almost nothing that can be conceived of, sexually, that can’t be found with a rigorously specific Google search-string and ten minutes to spare.

  But there is one thing – one, obvious, amazing thing – that is not available. Something glaringly absent amongst the MILFS and DILFS and BDSM and A2A. There’s one thing I can’t find at all, no matter how many websites I try, or how many times I punch in my debit card details. One thing which fuels all my anger about pornography, which I will come back to later.

  On the other hand, there’s one thing that’s glaringly over-available – something that fills YouPorn and RedTube and wank.net to the brim. One thing that the internet is stocked with, shelf after shelf, clip after clip, and none of them more than six minutes long – the average time it takes for a man to come. This is 21st-century heterosexual porn:

  Once upon a time, a girl with long nails and a really bad outfit sat on a sofa, trying to look sexy, but actually looking like she’d just remembered a vexing, unpaid parking fine. She might be slightly cross-eyed, due to how tight her bra is.

  A man comes in – a man who walks rather oddly, as if he’s carrying an invisible garden chair in front of him. This is because he’s got a uselessly large penis, which is erect, and appears to be scanning the room for the most sexually disinterested thing in it.

  Having rejected the window and a vase, the cock finally homes in on the girl on the sofa.

  As she disinterestedly licks her lips, the man leans over and – inexplicably – weighs her left breast in his hand. This appears to be the crossing of some kind of sexual Rubicon because, 30 seconds later, she’s being fucked at an uncomfortable angle, then bummed whilst looking quite pained. There’s usually a bit of arse-slapping here, or some hair-pulling there – whatever can ring in the variety in a straightforward two-camera shoot in less than five minutes.