In 1990, at 15½, I am walking around saying, ‘I’m a feminist,’ in the same way normal people are going round saying, ‘Loadsamoney!’, ‘Rodney, you plonker,’ or ‘Follow the bear!’ I have discovered part of who I am.
But, of course, you might be asking yourself, ‘Am I a feminist? I might not be. I don’t know! I still don’t know what it is! I’m too knackered and confused to work it out. That curtain pole really still isn’t up! I don’t have time to work out if I am a women’s libber! There seems to be a lot to it. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?’
I understand.
So here is the quick way of working out if you’re a feminist. Put your hand in your pants.
a) Do you have a vagina? and
b) Do you want to be in charge of it?
If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.
Because we need to reclaim the word ‘feminism’. We need the word ‘feminism’ back real bad. When statistics come in saying that only 29 per cent of American women would describe themselves as feminist – and only 42 per cent of British women – I used to think, What do you think feminism IS, ladies? What part of ‘liberation for women’ is not for you? Is it freedom to vote? The right not to be owned by the man you marry? The campaign for equal pay? ‘Vogue’, by Madonna? Jeans? Did all that good shit GET ON YOUR NERVES? Or were you just DRUNK AT THE TIME OF SURVEY?
These days, however, I am much calmer – since I realised that it’s technically impossible for a woman to argue against feminism. Without feminism, you wouldn’t be allowed to have a debate on a woman’s place in society. You’d be too busy giving birth on the kitchen floor – biting down on a wooden spoon, so as not to disturb the men’s card game – before going back to quick-liming the dunny. This is why those female columnists in the Daily Mail – giving daily wail against feminism – amuse me. They paid you £1,600 for that, dear, I think. And I bet it’s going in your bank account, and not your husband’s. The more women argue, loudly, against feminism, the more they both prove it exists and that they enjoy its hard-won privileges.
Because for all that people have tried to abuse it and disown it, ‘feminism’ is still the word we need. No other word will do. And let’s face it, there has been no other word, save ‘Girl Power’ – which makes you sound like you’re into some branch of Scientology owned by Geri Halliwell. That ‘Girl Power’ has been the sole rival to the word ‘feminism’ in the last 50 years is a cause for much sorrow on behalf of the women. After all, P. Diddy has had four different names, and he’s just one man.
Personally, I don’t think the word ‘feminist’ on its own is enough. I want to go all the way. I want to bring it back in conjunction with the word ‘strident’. It looks hotter like that. It’s been so wrong for so long that it’s back to being right again. They have used it to abuse us! Let’s use it right back at them! I want to reclaim the phrase ‘strident feminist’ in the same way the black community has reclaimed the word ‘nigger’.
‘Go, my strident feminist! You work that male/female dialectic dichotomy,’ I will shout at my friends, in bars, whilst everyone nods at how edgy and real we are – the word thrilling us as much as champagne, handbrake turns and Helter Skelter.
The fact that it’s currently underused and reviled makes it all the hotter – like deciding to be the person who single-handedly revives the popular use of the top hat. Once people see how hot you look in it, they’re all going to want to get one.
We need the only word we have ever had to describe ‘making the world equal for men and women’. Women’s reluctance to use it sends out a really bad signal. Imagine if, in the 1960s, it had become fashionable for black people to say they ‘weren’t into’ civil rights.
‘No! I’m not into civil rights! That Martin Luther King is too shouty. He just needs to chill out, to be honest.’
But then, I do understand why women started to reject the word ‘feminism’. It ended up being invoked in so many bafflingly inappropriate contexts that – if you weren’t actually aware of the core aims of feminism, and were trying to work it out simply from the surrounding conversation – you’d presume it was some spectacularly unappealing combination of misandry, misery and hypocrisy, which stood for ugly clothes, constant anger and, let’s face it, no fucking.
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Take, for instance, the ‘What I’m Really Thinking’ column from the Guardian which, in 2010, ran the secret thoughts of a cleaner:
Sometimes … I ponder the ironies of the job: for example, that all the ironing consists of men’s clothing. In a bid to escape domesticity, women are refusing to iron their husband’s shirts. Congratulations: your act of feminism means that the job is shunted onto a different woman, assigning her to a different rank.
I’ve seen this idea put forward a hundred times – that a proper feminist would do her own hoovering, Germaine Greer cleans her own lavvy, and Emily Wilding Davison threw herself under that horse, hands still pine-y fresh from Mr Muscle Oven Cleaner. On this basis alone, how many women have had to conclude, sighingly, as they hire a cleaner, that they can’t, then, be a feminist?
But, of course, the hiring of domestic help isn’t a case of women oppressing other women, because WOMEN DID NOT INVENT DUST. THE STICKY RESIDUE THAT COLLECTS ON THE KETTLE DOES NOT COME OUT OF WOMEN’S VAGINAS. IT IS NOT OESTROGEN THAT COVERS THE DINNER PLATES IN TOMATO SAUCE, FISHFINGER CRUMBS AND BITS OF MASH. MY UTERUS DID NOT RUN UPSTAIRS AND THROW ALL OF THE KIDS’ CLOTHES ON THE FLOOR AND PUT JAM ON THE BANISTER. AND IT IS NOT MY TITS THAT HAVE SKEWED THE GLOBAL ECONOMY TOWARDS DOMESTIC WORK FOR WOMEN.
Mess is a problem of humanity. Domestica is the concern of all. A man hiring a male cleaner would be seen as a simple act of employment. Quite how a heterosexual couple hiring a female cleaner ends up as a betrayal of feminism isn’t terribly clear – unless you believe that running a household is, in some way:
a) an inarguable duty of womenkind – that, in addition, can
b) only ever be done out of love, and never for cash, because that somehow ‘spoils’ the magic of the household. As if the dishes know they’ve been washed by hired help, instead of the woman of the house, and will feel ‘all sad’.
This is, clearly – to use the technical term – total bullshit. Everything else in this world, you can pay someone to do for you. There are places that will bleach your anus for you – lest you consider the skin tone too dark. That’s right. For cash, someone will apply peroxide to your bumhole, and make it look like Marilyn Monroe. If you have mines in your field, you can pay someone to risk their life removing them. If you want to watch people pound each other’s nasal cartilage to a pulp with their fists, you can go and see cage-fighting. There are people out there carting night soil, working as mercenaries, and masturbating pigs into jars.
And yet, somehow, in the midst of all this – and of all the jobs we get chippy about – it’s still wrong for a woman in North London to employ someone to clean the house.
When I was 16, I was a cleaner: I cleaned the house of a woman with an enormous amount of wooden panelling on the Penn Road, Wolverhampton, and I was thrilled that someone with my qualifications (nil) could earn money chucking Vim around someone’s mixer taps, and chipping limescale off a kettle with a fork. Twenty years later, I now have a cleaner myself.
And having a cleaner is nothing to do with feminism. If a middle-class woman is engaging in anti-feminist activity by hiring a woman to do the cleaning, then surely a middle-class man is engaging in class oppression when he hires a male plumber? Feminism has had exactly the same problem that ‘political correctness’ has had: people keep using the phrase without really knowing what it means.
My friend Alexis recently came across a ‘gentleman of the road’, sitting in a shop doorway, and drinking from a can of Kestrel at 9.07am.
‘Ha ha ha! I’m not being very politically correct!’ the hobo said, brandishing his can by way of a toast.
Of course, getting pissed at 9 o’clock in the morning outside
the Primark on Western Road, Brighton, has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness. With the best will in the world – dude, you’re a tramp, getting wankered. You are not cocking a snook at Polly Toynbee, Barack Obama and the BBC. Yet a huge number of people would agree with the tramp’s definition of ‘political correctness’, i.e. all vaguely risky fun being ‘banned’ by the ‘politically correct brigade’, rather than the actual definition of political correctness: formalising politeness. Codifying courtesy in areas where, previously, really awful things, like ‘Paki’, and me being called ‘Tits McGee’ by a builder when I was 15, used to happen.
There’s a whole generation of people who’ve confused ‘feminism’ with ‘anything to do with women’. ‘Feminism’ is seen as absolutely interchangeable with ‘modern women’ – in one way, a cheering reminder of what feminism has done, but on the other, a political, lexical and grammatical mess.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen feminism – to remind ourselves: the liberation of women – blamed for the following: eating disorders, female depression, rising divorce rates, childhood obesity, male depression, women leaving it too late to conceive, the rise in abortion, female binge-drinking and rises in female crime. But these are all things which have simply INVOLVED WOMEN, and have nothing to do with the political movement ‘feminism’.
In the most ironic twist of all, feminism is often used as the stick – actually, a stick is inappropriately phallocentric, maybe ‘a furry cup’ – to stop women behaving as freely, normally and unselfconsciously as men. Even – in some extreme cases – suggesting that acting as freely, normally and unselfconsciously as men is destroying other women.
Like with bitching. There is currently this idea that feminists aren’t supposed to bitch about each other.
‘That’s not very feministic of you,’ people will say, if I slag off another woman. ‘What about the sisterhood?’ people cry, when Julie Burchill lays into Camille Paglia, or Germaine Greer has a pop at Suzanne Moore.
Well, personally, I believe that feminism will get you so far – and then you have to start bitching. When did feminism become confused with Buddhism? Why on earth have I, because I’m a woman, got to be nice to everyone? And why have women – on top of everything else – got to be particularly careful to be ‘lovely’ and ‘supportive’ to each other at all times? This idea of the ‘sisterhood’ I find, frankly, illogical. I don’t build in a 20 per cent ‘Genital Similarity Regard-Bonus’ if I meet someone else wearing a bra. If someone’s an arsehole, someone’s an arsehole – regardless of whether we’re both standing in the longer toilet queue at festivals or not.
When people suggest that what, all along, has been holding women back is other women, bitching about each other, I think they’re severely overestimating the power of a catty zinger during a fag break. We have to remember that snidely saying ‘Her hair’s a bit limp on top’ isn’t what’s keeping womankind from closing the 30 per cent pay gap and a place on the board of directors. I think that’s more likely to be down to tens of thousands of years of ingrained social, political and economic misogyny and the patriarchy, tbh. That’s just got slightly more leverage than a gag about someone’s bad trousers.
I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge – when time is pressing, and one needs to make a snap judgement – whether some sexist bullshit is afoot. Obviously it’s not 100 per cent infallible but, by and large, it definitely points you in the right direction.
And it’s asking this question: ‘Are the men doing it? Are the men worrying about this as well? Is this taking up the men’s time? Are the men told not to do this, as it’s ‘letting the side down’? Are the men having to write bloody books about this exasperating, retarded, time-wasting bullshit? Is this making Jeremy Clarkson feel insecure?’
Almost always, the answer is: ‘No. The boys are not being told they have to be a certain way. They’re just getting on with stuff.’
Men are not being informed that they are oppressing other men with their comments. It is presumed than men can handle perfectly well the idea of other men bitching about them. I think, on this basis, we can presume women can cope with other women being bitchy about them, too. BECAUSE WE ARE ESSENTIALLY THE SAME AS MEN WHEN IT COMES TO BEING VILE ABOUT EACH OTHER.
This isn’t to say we should all start behaving like bitches towards each other, and turn every day into a 24-hour roasting session, in which people’s lives, wardrobes and psyches are destroyed before our eyes. All along, we must recall the most important Humanity Guideline of all: BE POLITE. BEING POLITE is possibly the greatest daily contribution everyone can make to life on earth.
But at the same time, ‘Are the boys doing it?’ is a good way to detect spores of misogyny in the soil, which might otherwise seem a perfectly fertile and safe place to grow a philosophy.
It was the ‘Are the boys doing it?’ basis on which I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas. Yes, the idea is that it protects your modesty, and ensures that people regard you as a human being, rather than just a sexual object. Fair enough. But who are you being protected from? Men. And who – so long as you play by the rules, and wear the correct clothes – is protecting you from the men? Men. And who is it that is regarding you as just a sexual object, instead of another human being, in the first place? Men.
Well. This all seems like quite a man-based problem, really. I would definitely put this under the heading ‘100 per cent stuff that the men need to sort out’. I don’t know why we’re suddenly having to put things on our heads to make it better. Unless you really, genuinely like all the gear, and would wear it even if you were alone, watching EastEnders, in which case carry on. My politeness accepts your choice. You can be whatever you want – so long as you’re sure it’s what you actually want, rather than one of two, equally dodgy, choices foisted onto you.
Because the purpose of feminism isn’t to make a particular type of woman. The idea that there are inherently wrong and inherently right ‘types’ of women is what’s screwed feminism for so long – this belief that ‘we’ wouldn’t accept slaggy birds, dim birds, birds that bitch, birds that hire cleaners, birds that stay at home with their kids, birds that have pink Mini Metros with ‘Powered By Fairy Dust!’ bumper stickers, birds in burkas, or birds that like to pretend, in their heads, that they’re married to Zach Braff from Scrubs, and that you sometimes have sex in an ambulance while the rest of the cast watch and, latterly, clap. You know what? Feminism will have all of you.
What is feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be.
Are you a feminist? Hahaha. Of course you are.
CHAPTER 5
I Need A Bra!
Of course, feminism will only take you so far – and then you need to go shopping. I’m not talking about Sex and the City shopping here – that belief that it’s a fun and revelatory experience, a bit like meditating, but with one leg stuck in a pair of size 12 jeggings in Topshop. Personally, I find the idea that women are supposed to ‘love’ shopping bizarre – nearly every woman I know wants to cry after 45 minutes of trawling the high street looking for a shirt, and hits the gin with alacrity upon the sad occasions where jeans have to be found.
No. By ‘shopping’, I mean just ‘going out and getting a thing you actually need’ – like knickers. Because at the age of 15, I need pants. I need pants very badly. I might be ready to smash the patriarchy, and get my ‘I Am A Strident Feminist’ tattoo, but not if it involves showing anyone the contents of my underwear drawer. Who am I kidding? I don’t even have an underwear drawer. Everything I own – pants, two vests, two pairs of tights, a skirt, three T-shirts and a single, tatty jumper – are all in a cardboard box, under the bed. I don’t really have ‘underwear’ at all.
What I have, instead, is heirlooms. At age 15, I have become too big for anything you could buy from the tiny, olden-days clothing shop on Warstones Road – where children’s
pants were kept in a huge wall of wooden drawers, and the correct-sized ones would be handed to you in a paper bag, as if they were a quarter of boiled sweets, or some lamb chops.
So – as we are currently too poor to buy new, adult pants – I become the recipient of the The Moran Underwear Bequest, instead: four pairs of my mum’s old, classic big pants. The kind a five-year-old would draw on a washing line. They have been blasted through with Bold on a boil wash so many times that the once-cheerful pink stripes are now pale shadows: like the grey outlines people are supposed to leave on walls, near the epicentre of an atomic explosion.
In addition, the elastic of the waistband is only sporadically attached to the main body of the pants – it hangs from the over-stretched rubber like bunting. It was like there was a party in my pants, to which absolutely no one was invited.
Although not a particularly vile child, wearing my mother’s old pants hadn’t caused me any squeamish thoughts. After all, compared to the fact that I was sleeping in the bed my nanna had died in – indeed, right in the middle of the massive indentation her body left in the mattress; I am wearing her ghost as a nightie – it is chicken feed.
That is, it is chicken feed until the day I am sitting in the garden with Caz.
We are engaged in quietly and lovingly drawing a moustache, beard and monobrow on the sleeping, two-year-old Cheryl with a piece of charcoal.
Everything is quite idyllic until Caz nods down to Cheryl and says – with the mixture of distaste and shit-stirring that makes all my adolescence with her so much fun – ‘Mum was probably wearing your knickers when she conceived her, you know. Dad probably TORE them off her to make Chel. He was being ALL SEXY. AT YOUR PANTS.’
Obviously, I then hit Caz. I hit her with all my strength, so that she fell over backwards.
How to Be a Woman Page 8