How to Be a Woman

by Caitlin Moran

  ‘We know your game,’ they said. ‘You’re prostitutes.’

  Apparently, we find out – during the next five minutes of increasingly shrill inquiry – ‘rough-looking’ Russian prostitutes often frequent the club, picking up trade from clients whose taste is for disappointingly ‘normal’-looking women rather than the strippers. This is what the bouncer is convinced we are. He knows we aren’t strippers – so we must, then, ergo, be prostitutes. Vicky, in her cardigan, and me, in my trainers.

  In his world, woman-type runs on a binary system: stripper, whore. There aren’t any other kind of women. Certainly not 20-something columnists hoping to milk 1,200-words out of the event, whilst caning the free bar for all it was worth.

  Once again, I was apt to dwell on what a thunderingly inappropriate and rude relic the strip club is.

  ‘I TOLD you they were arenas of abuse,’ I said to Vicky, as we sat in a doorway, smoking a fag.

  ‘But we’ll both be able to get a column out of it,’ she replied, eminently reasonably.

  And so, really, we were not losers at all.

  But, of course, in a wider sense, we were. For – given the context of the entirety of history up until about yesterday – the idea of clubs where women take off their clothes in front of men is stupendously … impolite.

  After all, history is very much ‘99 per cent women being subjugated, disenfranchised and sexually objectified’. Women have – there’s no two ways about this – really been shafted by the simple fact that men fancy them. We can see that men’s desire for women has, throughout history, given rise to unspeakable barbarity. It’s caused terrible, terrible things to happen, because men have been the dominant force, with no rules or checks on their behaviour. It’s no exaggeration to refer to ‘sexual tyranny’, and ‘total bullshit’. Within living memory in this country, men could rape their wives: women were not seen as a separate sexual entity, with a right of refusal. Germany only criminalised the practice in 1997; Haiti, in 2006. It’s still legal in – amongst other places – Pakistan, Kenya and the Bahamas. Even in countries where it has been criminalised, there is an unwillingness to actually prosecute: Japan and Poland have been particularly criticised by human rights organisations for their low conviction rates. There are large parts of the world where women are – with either the explicit or non-explicit sanction of the state – deemed little more than souped-up sex toys for men.

  In this context, then, it’s obvious that a lap-dancing club is as incongruous in a modern society as a ‘Minstrel Show!’ or adverts for ‘Jew Beating – Sticks £1!’

  Of course, the big difference here is that if a white man suggested starting a cleaning agency that only employed black cleaners, dressed up in plantation clothing, and being excessively cowed and deferential to their employers, the entire world would be up in arms.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ they would shout. ‘We’re not going to bring back a “light entertainment” version of slavery! Not even if it’s for a “social experiment” reality documentary on Channel 4!’

  But what are strip clubs, and lap-dancing clubs, if not ‘light entertainment’ versions of the entire history of misogyny?

  Any argument in their favour is fallacious. Recently, it has behoved modish magazines to print interviews with young women, who explain that their career as strippers is paying their way through university. This is thought to pretty much end any objections against strip clubs, on the basis that, look!, clever girls are doing it – in order to become middle-class professionals with degrees! Ipso facto Girl Power!

  For myself, I can’t believe that girls saying ‘Actually, I’m paying my university fees by stripping’ is seen as some kind of righteous, empowered, end-of-argument statement on the ultimate morality of these places. If women are having to strip to get an education – in a way that male teenage students are really notably not – then that’s a gigantic political issue, not a reason to keep strip clubs going.

  Are we really saying that strip clubs are just wonderful charities that allow women – well, the pretty, thin ones, anyway: presumably the fatter, plainer ones have to do whatever it is all the male students are also doing – to get degrees? I can’t believe women supposedly in further education are that stupid.

  One doesn’t want to be as blunt as to say, ‘Girls, get the fuck off the podium – you’re letting us all down,’ but: Girls, get the fuck off the podium – you’re letting us all down.

  But you know what? It’s not just a question of girls letting other girls down. Strip clubs let everyone down. Men and women approach their very worst here. There’s no self-expression or joy in these joints – no springboard to self-discovery, or adventure, like any decent night out involving men, women, alcohol, and taking your clothes off. Why do so many people have a gut reaction against strip clubs? Because, inside them, no one’s having fun.

  Instead, people are expressing needs (to earn money, to see a woman’s skin) in pretty much the most depressing way possible. Sit in one of these places sober – as Vicky and I did initially; it took almost SEVEN MINUTES for the first bottle of complimentary champagne to get to the table – and you see what’s going on here. The women hate the men. The stripper’s internal monologue as she peels off her thong for the twelfth time that day would make Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’ look like ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence None The Richer.

  And the men – oh, are you any gentler or happier? You cannot put your hand on your heart and say – as the music starts up, and she moves towards you – that you have kind feelings towards these women. No man who ever cared for or wanted to impress a woman made her stand in front of him and take her knickers off to earn her cab fare home. You spend this money on nothing at all – addiction to porn and strip clubs are the third biggest cause of debt in men. Between 60 and 80 per cent of strippers come from a background of sexual abuse. This place is a mess, a horrible mess. Every dance, every private booth, is a small unhappiness, an ugly impoliteness: the bastard child of misogyny and commerce.

  On the high street, a strip club looks like a tooth knocked out of a face.

  In 2010, Iceland – with a lesbian prime minister, and a parliament which is 50 per cent female – became the first country in the world to outlaw strip clubs for feminist, rather than religious, reasons.

  ‘I guess the men of Iceland will have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale,’ Gudrun Jonsdottir, who campaigned for the law change, said.

  I don’t think that’s an idea that will do men, their bank balances or the women they come across anything but good. Men don’t HAVE to see tits and fannies. They won’t DIE if they don’t have access to a local strip joint. Tits aren’t, like, Vitamin D or something. Let’s take our women off the poles.

  But pole-dancing classes, on the other hand, are fine. I know! Who would have thought! There seems to be no logic to it! I know a lot of feminists regard them as a sign of The End Days – evidence that the world is now being run by some misogyny Illuminati, intent on weakening our girl-children with strip-ercise classes at the local gym, 11.30am – but that’s clearly not the case.

  I mean, on a practical level, they’re totally useless: there aren’t any poles in nightclubs, girls. You’re going to spend hundreds of pounds learning all these ‘sexy’ moves, and then never have anywhere to show them off in public, save the grab-pole on the bus. If you think that’s a fair exchange for all your time and money, then best of British.

  But practical considerations to one side, there’s nothing contrary to the rules of strident feminism in gyms and dance classes offering pole-dancing lessons, and women attending them. In a world of infinite possibility, why not learn to hang off a pole by your pelvic floor? It probably will be more useful than learning Latin. For starters, I bet it’s incredibly useful if, when decorating, you need to roller a tricky corner on a landing. And who’s to say that, in the event of an Apocalypse, being able to take off your knickers in syncopation to ‘Womanizer’ by Britney Spears won’t make
the difference between the quick and the dead?

  Just as pornography isn’t inherently wrong – it’s just some fucking – so pole-dancing, or lap-dancing, or stripping, aren’t inherently wrong – it’s just some dancing. So long as women are doing it for fun – because they want to, and they are in a place where they won’t be misunderstood, and because it seems ridiculous and amusing, and something that might very well end with you leaning against a wall, crying with laughter as your friends try to mend the crotch-split in your leggings with a safety pin – then it’s a simple open-and-shut case of carry on, girls. Feminism is behind you.

  It’s the same deal with any ‘sexy dancing’ in a nightclub – any grinding, any teasing, any of those Jamaican dancehall moves, where the women are – not to put too fine a point on it – fucking the floor as if they need to be pregnant by some parquet tiles by midnight. Any action a woman engages in from a spirit of joy, and within a similarly safe and joyous environment, falls within the city-walls of feminism. A girl has a right to dance how she wants, when her favourite record comes on.

  And, frankly, from a spectator’s point of view, it’s better than watching people line dancing; or doing The Stonk.

  *

  For exactly the same reason, we shouldn’t have a problem with burlesque – lap-dancing’s older, darker, cleverer sister. Yes, I know: it’s stripping in front of men, for cash. Given the patriarchy and all that, I can see how many would say, ‘But that is like eschewing Daffy Duck and then loving George Costanza from Seinfeld. They are both essentially the same thing.’

  But, of course, they are not. The difference between a burlesque artist putting on a single show, in front of hundreds, and a stripper on an eight-hour shift, going one on one, is immense: the polarity between being a minstrel for a bored monarch, playing whatever song the monarch asks for, and U2 playing Wembley Stadium.

  With burlesque, not only does the power balance rest with the person taking their clothes off – as it always should do, in polite society – but it also anchors its heart in freaky, late-night, libertine self-expression: it has a campy, tranny, fetish element to it. It’s not – to use the technical term – ‘an easy wank’.

  Additionally, despite its intense stylisation of sexuality, it doesn’t have the oddly aggressive, humourless air of the strip club: burlesque artists sing, talk and laugh. They tell jokes – something unthinkable in the inexplicably po-faced atmosphere of a lap-dancing club, which treats male/female interactions with all the gravitas of Cold War-era meetings between Russia and the USA, rather than a potential hoot. Perhaps as a direct consequence, burlesque artists treat their own sexuality as something fabulous and enjoyable – rather than something bordering on a weapon, to be ground, unsmilingly, into the face of the sweaty idiot punter below.

  Because, most importantly, burlesque clubs feel like a place for girls. Strip clubs – despite the occasional presence of a Spice Girl, ten years ago – do not. Watching good burlesque in action, you can see female sexuality; a performance constructed with the values system of a woman: beautiful lighting, glossy hair, absurd (giant cocktail glasses; huge feather fans) accessories, velvet corsets, fashionable shoes, Ava Gardner eyeliner, pale skin, classy manicures, humour, and a huge round of applause at the end – instead of an uncomfortable, half-hidden erection, and silence.

  Burlesque artists have names – Dita Von Teese, Gypsy Rose Lee, Immodesty Blaize, Tempest Storm, Miss Dirty Martini – that make them sound like sexual super-heroes. They explore sexuality from a position of strength, with ideas, and protection, and a culture that allows them to do, creatively, as they please. They are dames, broads and women – rather than the slightly cold-looking girls you see in strip clubs. Their personas embrace the entire spectrum of sexuality – fun, wit, warmth, inventiveness, innocence, power, darkness – rather than the bloodless aerobics of the podium.

  Do you know what the final rule of thumb is with strip clubs? Gay men wouldn’t be seen dead in Spearmint Rhino – but you can’t move for them in a burlesque joint. As a rule of thumb, you can always tell if a place is culturally healthy for women when the gays start rocking up. They are up for glitter, filth and fun – rather than a factory-farm wank-trigger with – and I can say this now – very acidic house champagne.

  CHAPTER 10

  I Get Married!

  So what has my sister Caz been up to, in all this time? Many things. She’s cut her hair short, written three plays about an ineffectual evil overlord called Venger, had a massive crush on George Orwell, racked up an impressive collection of drum’n’bass records, and been part of the creative bar-keeping team that came up – one desperate Christmas – with the Sherry Cappuccino: a brave, but ultimately failed, concept. Sherry curdles in milk. We know that as a fact now. We also know that you can’t then re-emulsify it with cornflour, however much you stir.

  But what she’s mainly been doing is going to a lot of weddings. This is unfortunate, because Caz hates weddings.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ she says, throwing herself onto a kitchen chair. ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  She’s wearing a cream chiffon dress and cream satin shoes, both of which are covered in mud. She has nettle stings up her legs, reeks of booze, and is drinking anti-cystitis medicine straight from the bottle, like a cowboy necking whisky. Her eyes have the mad, red aspect of someone who has not only recently travelled out of hell, but been charged quite a lot to travel out of hell, too. In a vehicle with a malfunctioning buffet. During track maintenance. On a Bank Holiday.

  She throws a huge rucksack into the corner. Even from here, I can see it has a broken tent in it.

  ‘Who would invite 200 people to a wedding on a pig farm, in a valley with no mobile reception?’ she says, tight-jawed. ‘Who? “You can camp in an adjacent field,” they said. “In a circle with all the bride’s family. We call it The Fairy Circle! We’ll be nice and close. There’s a sing-a-long at night!”’

  She shudders. As you may recall, one of the main things about Caz is that she really doesn’t like people being close to her. If she could have a small, portable city-wall – lined with archers – she would.

  ‘What happened when the tent broke?’ I ask, pointing at the rucksack. The rucksack is very, very wet.

  ‘A stoned fuckwit in the next tent tried to mend the poles with three pencils and some Sellotape,’ she replies. ‘Even though I kept telling him it wouldn’t work, because modern tent poles have to bend. Then we had to walk to the wedding, which wasn’t in an adjacent field at all but seven fields away. My shoes didn’t like the seven fields. They didn’t like that at all. Neither did my legs, when we found the nettles. In a lane, a tractor came near us, and we had to lean into a hedge. All of me hated that. Also, the tractor made me nervous, so I did a sweat in my dress.’

  She lifts up her arms, to display the stains.

  ‘But we had some luck! Because then it started raining quite heavily on me, which made the frizziness of my hair, rather than the sweatiness of my armpits, the go-to visual starting point for the entire congregation when we got there. Five minutes into the ceremony.’

  Caz is now pouring her cystitis medicine into a mug, along with three shots of vodka. Her story didn’t get any better from here. Apparently, everyone had got so blindingly drunk that by 3pm, even 50-something aunties were leaning against the buffet table, saying, ‘I’ve got to sober up.’ It being a very ‘close-knit’ country family, Caz was repeatedly questioned by guests as to who she ‘knew’ – ‘Kind of inferring that I’d walked into the middle of fucking nowhere in the rain in order to steal a portion of very mediocre ham salad.’ By 4pm, Caz was so furiously, despairingly bored that she went and sat on the toilet for an hour.

  ‘They were very posh Portaloos. Apparently they’re the ones they use at Glyndebourne,’ she said. ‘They had music pumped into them. I listened to “Under Pressure” by Queen five times. Then I did what Freddie would have done – walked in the pissing rain up a hill until I got reception, called a minica
b, and booked myself in the Marriott, Exeter. Don’t ask me if I’ve got cystitis. I’ve got cystitis.’

  She popped three Nurofen Plus, and burst into tears. ‘Five weddings in four years,’ she wailed, taking the muddy shoes off, and throwing them in the sink. ‘I genuinely hope no one else I know ever, ever falls in love again. People discovering true love works out badly for me.’

  Of course, people discovering true love works out badly for everyone, really. I mean, it’s OK in the end – once everyone settles down, and stops making a big fuss about it. But fairly near the beginning, there is a massive test of everyone’s patience and love – a wedding.

  For whilst there are plenty of awful things we can place at the door of men – wars, rape, nuclear weapons, stock market crashes, Top Gear, that thing where you put your hand down the front of your jogging bottoms and rearrange your sweaty knackers whilst on the bus, then touching a railing I now have to touch, too, all covered in your sweaty bollock-mist – weddings definitely come down to the ladies.

  Weddings are our fault, ladies. Every aspect of their pantechnicon of awfulness happened on our watch. And you know what? Not only have we let humanity down, but we’ve let ourselves down, too.

  Weddings do women no good at all. They’re a viper’s pit of waste and despair. And nearly every aspect of them reverberates badly against the very people who love them the most: us. Our love for a wedding is a bad love. It does us no good. It will end badly, leaving us feeling cheated, and alone.

  Whenever I think about weddings, I want to run into the church – like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate – and shout ‘STOP! STOP THE WEDDINGS!’

  And when the organ has ground to a halt, and everyone turns around, astonished, to stare at me, and the vicar has stopped stuttering ‘Well, really!’ in a disapproving manner, I’m going to rock up to the pulpit – tearing my stupid bloody fascinator off as I go – light a fag, lean back, and this is the sermon I will preach.