How to Be a Woman Page 4

  It all ends with him coming all over her face, messily – as if he’s haphazardly icing a bun in one of the challenges on The Generation Game.

  The End.

  There are obviously variants on this – maybe she gets double-ended by two guys or perhaps she has an equally badly dressed, dagger-nailed female friend that she pretends to go down on in a desultory manner, for a faux lez-up – and there are, obviously, endless amounts of niche stuff available.

  Essentially, the internet vends a porn mono-culture – a sexual East Anglia. Hedgeless and featureless and planted, as far as the eye can see, with the dull, monotonous sex-spuds described above. This is the Tesco Fuck; the Microsoft Windows screw; crushing every other kind of sex out of the market.

  That single, unimaginative, billion-duplicated fuck is generally what we mean by ‘porn culture’ – arguably the biggest cultural infiltration since the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s; certainly more pervasive than peer rivals, such as gay culture, multi-culturalism or feminism.

  It’s so embedded, we don’t even realise when we’re looking at it, half the time. Brazilians. Hollywoods. Round, high plastic tits. Acrylic nails that make it impossible to do up a shoe buckle, or type. MTV full of crotches, and tits. Nuts and Zoo having pages and pages of readers’ breasts – volunteered, willingly, as rites of passage. Anal sex being an assumed part of every woman’s repertoire. Posters for make-up, or TV shows, that show women glassy-eyed, open-mouthed and ready for a faceful of come. Knickers being replaced by thongs. High, high heels that aren’t really made for walking – just lying back and being fucked in. The Hollyoaks ‘Babes’ calendar, Lindsay Lohan’s pre-jail ‘sex’-shoot. If 12 per cent of the internet is pornography – that’s 4.2m websites, 28,000 people looking at porn per second – then that means that 12 per cent of the images of women on the internet are of them either on all fours, rammed into some highly unhygienic PVC, or being forced around out-sized male genitalia, as if their sundry openings were some manner of tube bandage.

  Just as a quick comparison point: this is clearly as unhappy and detrimental to women’s collective peace of mind as it would be if 12 per cent of images of men on the internet were of them having their heads horrifically blown off by alien laser guns, or being lowered down a well, full of Nazi sharks, crying. After the brief promise of the sexual revolution freeing up women’s sexual lexicon, it’s been closed right down again, into this narrow, uncomfortable, exploitative series of cartoons. It’s just … not very nice. Not polite. It’s harshing our mellow.

  It’s not pornography per se that’s the problem here. Pornography is as old as humankind itself. Practically the first action of the Neanderthal – on the happy day he evolved out of the monkey-egg – was to draw a picture on a cave wall, of a man with an enormous willy. Or, indeed, perhaps it was the first action of a woman. After all, we’re more interested in a) cocks and b) decorating.

  This is why museums are so wonderful: walking around, observing mankind’s joyride from slime to WiFi, you see incredible ironwork, inspirational pottery, fabulous vellums and exquisite paintings and – across these disciplines – tons of fruity historical humping. Men fucking men, men fucking women, men going down on women, women pleasuring themselves – it’s all there. Every conceivable manifestation of human sexuality, in clay and stone and ochre and gold.

  The idea that pornography is intrinsically exploitative and sexist is bizarre: pornography is just ‘some fucking’, after all. The act of having sex isn’t sexist so there’s no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist.

  So no. Pornography isn’t the problem. Strident feminists are fine with pornography. It’s the porn industry that’s the problem. The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth, at an extremely conservative estimate, $30 billion to be. No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb.

  But you don’t ban things for being crass and dispiriting. If you did, we would have to ban the Gregg’s Mega Sausage Roll first – and we would have a revolution on our hands.

  No. What we need to do is effect a 100 per cent increase in the variety of pornography available to us. Let’s face it: the vast majority of the porn out there is as identikit and mechanical as fridge-freezers rolling off a production line.

  And there are several reasons why this is bad for everyone – men and women equally. Firstly, in the 21st century, children and teenagers get the majority of their sex education from the internet. Long before school or parents will have mentioned it, chances are they’ll have seen the lot on the net.

  But it’s not just their sex education – which is a series of useful facts and practicalities, and the basic business of what goes where, or what could go where, if you’re determined enough – that kids are getting from the net. It’s also their sex hinterland. It informs the imagination, as well as the mechanics.

  This is why – however limited, patchy or centred on Trevor Eve the pornography I scavenged in my teenage years – there was, at least, a balance to all the stuff I was finding – a variety. I had petticoats and spies and woodlands and nuns and threesomes on sun loungers, and vampires and sheds and gum and fauns and the back seats of Capris and, more often than not, even though I was reading something from the 19th century, the chicks got their kicks. The women came. The women’s desires were catered for. Indeed, these were the women’s desires.

  And this was important, because the sexual imagery of your teenage years is the most potent you’ll ever have. It dictates desires for the rest of your life. One flash of a belly being kissed now is worth a million hardcore fisting scenes in your thirties.

  One early sex researcher, Wilhelm Stekel, described masturbation fantasies as a kind of trance or altered state of consciousness, ‘a sort of intoxication or ecstasy, during which the current moment disappears, and the forbidden fantasy alone reigns supreme’.

  You want to make sure that whatever you’re thinking of in that state, it has an element of … joy to it.

  I did a talk last year at a meeting by a feminist pressure group called Object. In a discussion about pornography – which everyone seemed to presume, automatically, had to be banned – the conversation turned to how upsetting accidentally watching hardcore pornography would be for young girls.

  ‘And young boys,’ I pointed out, mildly. ‘I think eight-year-old boys would be as distressed as a girl on clicking a link and seeing some hardcore anal sex.’

  ‘NO! NO!’ a very angry woman shouted.

  I regret to say that she looked like everyone’s clichéd idea of a post-Dworkin feminist. She was wearing one of those little velvet smoking caps, covered in embroidery and mirrors.

  ‘A BOY wouldn’t be upset about that, because he’s watching the MAN being IN CONTROL.’

  And I thought about all the eight-year-old boys I know – Tom, and Harris, and Ryan, still getting a little bit nervous of the skeleton pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean – and I thought, I don’t think they’d be exhilarated by seeing a man in control. I think they’d be scared of someone who looks like an angry Burt Reynolds, bumming someone across a landing. I also think that, when they’d told their mums what I’d shown them, I’d probably be off the coffee-morning rota for a good six months.

  And that was when I started thinking that we needed more pornography, not less. Eight-year-olds aren’t supposed to see hardcore pornography, so, of course, it doesn’t matter at all what their reaction to it is. They might as well be giving us their feedback on whisky, and VAT.

  But when they do come of an age where they want to start viewing sexual imagery, I want Harris and Ryan and Tom to have a chance of finding some, for the want of a better word, free-range porn out there. Something that shows sex as something that two people do together, rather than a thing that just happens to a woman when she has to make rent. Something in which – to put it simply – everyone comes. In a
genre where you’re really not holding out for incredible CGI, or a deathless monologue, and it’s solely and only some humping, that’s got to be a baseline requirement. Universal hoggins.

  And that’s why we need to start making our own stuff. Not the anodyne stuff that’s ostensibly ‘women-friendly’ porn – all badly shot princesses, and dominatrix lady-bosses getting office juniors to do a bit of extra-curricular faxing.

  No. I suspect that female pornography, when it really gets going, will be something wholly other: warm, humane, funny, dangerous, psychedelic, with wholly different parameters to male porn.

  You only have to read Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden – a compendium of female masturbatory fantasies – to be able to make the enjoyably broadsweep generalisation that whilst male fantasies are short, powerful and to the point – a bit like ‘My Sharona’ by The Knack, say – female fantasies are some symphonic, shape-shifting thing by Alice Coltrane. In their fantasies, the women grow and shrink, shape-shift, change age, colour and location. They manifest as vapour, light and sound, they strobe through conflicting personas (nurse, robot, mother, virgin, boy, wolf) and a zodiac of positions whilst, you suspect, also imagining consistently great-looking hair. NO woman ever came with an imaginary bad bouff.

  But that’s just the start. Imagine if pornography was not this bizarre, mechanised, factory-farmed fucking: bloodless, naked aerobics, concerned solely with high-speed penetration and ostentatious ejaculation. Imagine if it were about desire.

  Because the one thing I couldn’t find, that night, as I glided around the internet, was desire. People who actually wanted to fuck each other. Had to fuck each other. Imagine watching two people screwing at that early, white-hot stage of attraction when your pupils dilate just looking at each other, and you want to melt each other’s bones so bad you’re practically eating each other’s clothes off the minute the door closes. I can’t be the only one who’s occasionally had a fuck so spectacular, all-encompassing, cinematic and intense that, at the end of it, I’ve lain back – ears still ringing – and thought, CNN wanna get a hold of that. Now that REALLY needed a tickertape running underneath it.

  In a world where you can get a spare kidney, a black-market Picasso or a ticket to ride into space, why can’t I see some actual sex? Some actual fucking from people who want to fuck each other? Some chick in an outfit I halfway respect, having the time of her life? I have MONEY. I’m willing to PAY for this. I AM NOW A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, AND I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME.

  I just want to see a good time.

  CHAPTER 2

  I Become Furry!

  It’s a cold house – a cold house, and a small one. When you get out of the bath, you wrap yourself in the towel – still damp from the last person who used it – and run downstairs, to dry in front of the fire.

  It’s Saturday night, so Bergerac is on. The sofa has six people on it, of varying sizes, packed in tight, at sundry angles. Some people are essentially lying on top of other people – only ‘on’ the sofa in the most nugatory sense. Eddie lies across the back of the sofa, like an antimacassar made of seven-year-old boy. It looks a little bit like the Galactic Senate in The Clone Wars – if everyone in the Galactic Senate were eating cream crackers, Branston and cheese.

  I come into the room, towel like a cloak, and crouch in front of the fire. I still have the shower cap on, which is one of the best things in our house. It’s one of our more feminine items. I always feel a little bit demure wearing it. Not as much as when I wear a pair of woolly tights on my head – to signify long, princess hair. But still, quite lovely.

  As Charlie Hungerford shouts, ‘Jim! It was just a misunderstanding!’, I start to put on my nightie.

  ‘Oooooooh!’ rings out a voice, suddenly, from the tightly packed sofa. It’s my mother. ‘Is that PUBES I can see? PUBES, Cate?’

  The sofa stirs into instant alertness. Everyone stops looking for the diamond thief on Bergerac and starts looking at my pubic hair instead – except my dad, who appears absolutely unaware of what is going on, and continues to eat crackers and cheese whilst staring at the television. There is clearly a part of his brain that has evolved to be like this, in order to survive the horror of his daughters’ puberty.

  I feel like I’m not allowed to look for the pubes myself – I have to be nonchalant about it, although it is all, frankly, news to me. The contents of my pants are a bit like my subconscious, or the field by the playground. Since my bad birthday, I’ve tried not to go down to any of them.

  ‘There!’ my mother says, pointing. The whole sofa cranes to see. ‘It’s DEFINITELY a pube! AND your little legs are getting hairy! You’re growing up! You’re growing into a lady!’

  My mother has a way of saying this that makes me feel that this is both the worst possible outcome to being a 13-year-old girl and also, somehow, my fault.

  ‘Look!’ I say, pulling my nightie down, firmly, and pointing at the television. ‘Look! Liza Goddard!’

  The next day, I resolve to sort all this out before things get out of hand. I am simply going to remove all the hair so that the most interesting thing to look at in the front room will be, once again, Bergerac, and everything can get back to normal.

  ‘I’m going to commit a crime,’ I tell the dog. The dog lies under my bed – nervous, baleful eyes glowing in the dark. Since the incident on my birthday, I have put the whole affair from my mind, but the dog has become even more anxious. Last week, she ate the plasticine model village that Caz had made. In the dog’s faeces the next day, we could clearly make out the tiny face of the woman who ran the Post Office.

  ‘I’m going to steal one of Dad’s razors, and beautify myself,’ I continue. Even saying it to the dog makes me nervous. Stealing a blade, in order to address the issue of my pubic hair, is definitely the most transgressive and rebellious thing I’ve ever done. It feels little better than stealing a gun, in order to start my periods. It’s a world away from my previous biggest crime: eating more than half a packet of raw strawberry jelly, then claiming that it wouldn’t set because the weather was ‘too warm’.

  As my mother believes in neither medicine (‘Just have a poo and a hot bath, and go to bed, and you’ll be fine in the morning’) nor ‘beauty treatments’ (‘Deodorant gives you cancer. And you don’t want that’) there are only four things in the bathroom cabinet: a dark-blue 1920s-style glass eye-bath, a bottle of calamine lotion the colour of Ermintrude in The Magic Roundabout, baby-gin (gripe water) and Dad’s razors. Under the cover of running a bath, I take the razor from the shelf. I am so nervous I can feel my heartbeat in the soles of my feet, on the lino.

  As my mother doesn’t believe in locks on the door, either (‘They give you cancer’), I barricade myself into the room with the washing basket, get into the bath, lather myself up, and shave off my pubes. I place them on the side of the bath, by the soap. They never even had a chance to get curly. They were cut down in their infancy.

  I then shave my legs, too; not really understanding which direction the razor should go in, slashing my knee and thigh. It feels like it takes around nine hours. I am amazed how much calf I have. Just after I finish one bit, I notice another outcrop, looking like a patch of marram grass on a dune. I wish some manner of ‘leg mower’ had been invented, so it could be done all in one go. I frequently think, 13-year-old girls should not be allowed to use razors. It is dangerous, Wow. I really am bleeding quite a lot!

  But, eventually, the shaving is done. I have removed the problem. I am back to normal.

  ‘Feel all clean and silky,’ I write in my diary that night, sticking a fresh piece of tissue paper to the wounds. ‘Might do under my arms tomorrow!’

  I turn out the light. I have to rest, in order to be fresh for stealing again in the morning.

  Hair is one of the first, big preoccupations of womanhood. It appears, unbidden, and so decisions must be made about it – decisions which signal to yourself, and the world, who
you are. As the teenage years are where you begin the complicated, lifelong business of beginning to work this out, hair is the opening salvo in decades of quietly screaming ‘WHO AM I?’ whilst standing in front of an array of products in Boots, clutching an empty basket.

  And it is hair that has the most money, and attention, spent on it. Hair in the ‘wrong’ place: legs, underarms, upper lip, chin, arms, nipples, cheeks, and across the sundry contours of your pelvis. Against this hair, lifelong wars of attrition are waged. It informs the ebb and flow of day-to-day life – the scheduling of events. Sometimes, the entire course of a woman’s life.

  A man may think, I have a party next week. I’d better roughly flannel my face before I tootle out the door.

  A woman, on the other hand, will call up the calendar in her head – like the mid-air screens in Minority Report – and start a cycle of furious planning, based around hair management.

  Here is my friend, Rachel, and me on a Sunday night, discussing a forthcoming party.

  ‘Party’s on Friday,’ Rachel says, sighing. ‘Friday. This means we will have to get our legs waxed tomorrow, latest, in order to start undercoating self-tan on Tuesday. Can’t undercoat on Monday – all the follicles will still be open, from the ripping.’

  We’ve both applied self-tan when the follicles are still open, from ‘the ripping’. The self-tan embeds itself in each tiny, empty hole. Your legs end up looking like that freckled, ginger kid on the cover of Mad magazine.

  ‘I’ll make us a waxing appointment for tomorrow,’ Rachel says, picking up the phone. ‘But we should book upper lip and eyebrows for Thursday. I want minimal regrowth. I think Andrew’s going to be there.’