Fight Like A Girl

by Clementine Ford

  I can’t remember the first time I was called ugly, but I can remember the last. It was today. I was called it numerous times by numerous different men, all of whom are so obviously enraged by my refusal to concede ground to them that they’ve reached for the one word they believe will destroy me. That’ll show her! you can almost hear them thinking. She’ll think twice before being such a loud-mouthed shrew again!

  BRB, laughing myself into a coma.

  We have to stop being afraid of the term ‘ugly’. Feminism is about so much more than fighting for the rights of women everywhere to feel beautiful. Beauty is such an arbitrary state, and for women especially it has become an unnecessary trap. If we’re aiming to liberate women, we would find more success in doing away with notions of beauty and ugliness altogether. It’s fine to want to be pretty – but it’s also fine not to care about it at all. Because in exactly the same way that there is nothing wrong with being fat or hairy or a lesbian, there is nothing wrong with not being considered traditionally attractive.

  We are not all beautiful snowflakes. But that’s okay, because we’re so much more than that. We’re smart, passionate, angry, funny, complex, flawed, brilliant human beings who are not only more than the sum of our parts but better than the sum of how we make other people’s parts feel.

  The people who call you ugly are afraid of you and they are afraid of how much you don’t need them. And that’s why you keep talking anyway.

  Slut/whore: Sigh. Raise your hand if you’ve ever been called one of these and raise both hands if you’ve been given the double whammy. I’ll wait for everyone reading this to pick up their books from the floor, because I guarantee you’ve just dropped them.

  ‘Slut’ and ‘whore’ are used so interchangeably that they may as well patch them together into a single portmanteau word. A slutwhore or a whoreslut. Mix up the letters of slutwhore and you can spell ‘worthluse’, which is pretty close to ‘worthless’, and is essentially what you’re being labelled every time an angry troglodyte decides to try to take you down a peg or two because you’re not attracted to the way his knuckles drag along the ground. All you need to know about being called a whoreslut is that it has absolutely nothing to do with you and everything to do with the intense terror some men have about the impending collapse of the patriarchy.

  Let’s unpack what all this means. According to popular theory, sluts and whores are women who have no respect for themselves. They have no respect for themselves because they’ve engaged in consensual sex with thousands and thousands of men in the past, or maybe even just one man or maybe, astonishingly, no men at all. See, even though A Slut is understood to be a woman who fucks a lot, the extreme diversity of women it’s used against – virgins, single women, married women, grandmothers, daughters, bosses, lesbians, sex workers, adolescents, employees and so on and so forth – indicates it’s not really about sex at all (not that any of us should care about that anyway).

  What’s really being thrown down when someone calls a woman a slut or a whore is that she deserves to be fucked as if she’s nothing. She deserves to be degraded, violated and humiliated, because she’s worth nothing. She is worthluse.

  Raise your hand if you’ve ever been called a slut or a whore for the sex you’ve had. And raise your other hand if you’ve ever been called a slut or a whore for rejecting a man’s request for sex or even just attention.

  I’ll just wait while you pick up the book again.

  Frigid: Usually used in connection with slut, which is just too hilarious even to bother with. What a bunch of oxymorons.

  Bitter: Applied on its own or in tandem with one of the other charming epithets listed above, ‘bitter’ is supposed to mark women (and feminists especially) as something toxic and unreasonable. There are myriad reasons we’re said to be bitter, but once again they all boil down to the supposed depression we feel at being excluded from the male gaze and its associated approval. Here is a list of just some of the reasons why men have said I’m bitter:

  Because I’m old and haggard.

  Because I’m fat.

  Because I’m ugly.

  Because men don’t want to sleep with me.

  Because I’m jealous of the younger, thinner, prettier women who men do want to sleep with.

  Because I’m stupid.

  Because I have toxic ideas and they’re poisoning me from the inside out.

  Because feminism is a disease.

  It’s a curious thing, trying to label someone’s opposition to patriarchy as a simple case of bitterness. Never forget that women are expected to accept the supporting roles handed out to us. Instead of aiming for liberation, we’re supposed to find happiness by aspiring to the good opinion of men and propping up the structures of power that benefit them. So it doesn’t really matter how young, thin and pretty we are. What matters is how willing we are to maintain the illusion that these are the most important things we can be, as judged by a male gaze. If we refuse to be compliant within this power dynamic, we are ‘bitter’ – as if the acidic fault lies with us for wanting to be thought of as equal rather than a grateful doormat happy to receive a fucking.

  But the bitter fruit doesn’t care how it tastes to others. If I can make a chauvinist sick up in his mouth at least once a day because he doesn’t like what I have to say, I consider that a personal achievement. Bitter is the new black, babes.

  Mentally unstable: Modern women who are labelled crazy for valuing and asserting themselves as autonomous human beings join a long tradition of similarly scorned women punished throughout history. In Salem, they burned women as witches when we did things that contradicted the social order and destabilised its power. Over the centuries, women have been institutionalised and subjected to the most horrendous treatment for such ‘crimes’ as becoming pregnant outside of wedlock; having sex before marriage; having sex outside of marriage; enjoying sex; being depressed; wanting to live independently; being lesbians; being transgender; living in an era where no-fault divorce didn’t exist but having husbands who automatically possessed power of attorney and wanted to marry someone else; being women’s liberationists – the list goes on and on.

  In Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, Bella Manningham is subjected to constant psychological abuse by her husband, Jack. He flirts with the servants, disappears at odd times and insists she’s imagining it when she tells him the gas light grows dimmer each evening. In fact, Jack is responsible for the fluctuations of the gas light and is aware of it – but it serves what turns out to be his criminal leanings to have Bella believe she’s going mad.

  Hamilton’s play gave rise to the term ‘gaslighting’, which is a helpful way of pointing out when someone’s reasonable perception of events is being deliberately undermined by someone else in order to convince the first person that their behaviour is unsound. Feminists are constantly subjected to attempts to gaslight, from anti-feminist family members, friends and partners and beyond to the broader media and cultural narrative which benefits by painting feminism as irrational and extreme.

  And none of this is new. Women have long been accused of ‘being hysterical’ when it comes to having a political viewpoint that challenges the status quo. Calling a woman ‘crazy’ isn’t a logical argument by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s been settled on as an easy way to dismiss the validity of what she’s saying. Because any woman who looks around at the structures of power in society and finds them flickering like the gaslights is OBVIOUSLY imagining things and is thus clearly unstable.

  But listen – you are not unstable or crazy. You may have issues with depression and anxiety (present), you may have clinically diagnosed issues with mental health, you may wake up some days filled with searing rage that cannot be quelled (goodness knows I do) – but you’re not unstable or crazy. The world you live in is real. The way you see it is real. And no one else can define your experience of it, especially not the people for whom those injustices and inequalities are theoretical.

  Your
experience of living as a woman in this world isn’t a product of your imagination and it isn’t invisible. I see it too. And so does she, and so does she, and so does she, and so does she.

  Little girl: I’m thirty-five years old. I have lived independently for seventeen years. I earn my own money, pay my own bills, cook my own food and fight my own battles. Yet I’ve lost count of the number of times older men (and some older women, particularly those of a conservative and mildly self-hating bent) spit the word ‘child’ at me. This is usually accompanied by accusations of being immature, nasty, silly and selfish – a naughty little girl running amok in a world of Serious Adults who would like nothing more than to sit her in a time-out and make her apologise for her harridan ways.

  There is a sense, too, that this chiding relates to the inability of so-called argumentative women to ‘wake up to the real world’ (which is yet another phrase we hear repeatedly). ‘Adults’ are supposed to have learned that the world isn’t always fair and that we don’t always get what we want. Children throw tantrums when they don’t get what they want. Children need to be disciplined. Children need to realise that the world doesn’t owe them anything. Children need to grow up.

  But it’s no coincidence that it is men who most often berate the women whose behaviour they find disagreeable as ‘immature little girls’. The world is predisposed to valuing men’s words, actions and deeds. From birth, boys are praised as courageous, strong, tough, bolshy, adventurous, heroic, rambunctious and rough ’n’ tumble. Boys who like to play outside, to explore, to get dirty, to build things, to run freely, to use a loud voice, to use sticks as swords, to pretend at being pirates and cowboys and police officers and firefighters – these kinds of boys are referred to as being ‘typical’.

  Girls, on the other hand, are praised for a much narrower scope of perceived qualities, most notably the ones that involve being pretty, sweet, cute, gentle, diminutive, deferential, kind, thoughtful and helpful. From the moment we’re born until the moment we die, girls and women are told what not to do – don’t take risks, don’t be bossy, don’t be too loud, don’t get dirty, don’t open your legs, don’t put your hands in there, don’t speak up for yourself, don’t be disagreeable, don’t backchat, don’t provoke the boys, don’t eat too much, don’t wear revealing clothes, don’t get tattoos, don’t swear, don’t drink too much, don’t be rude, don’t reject compliments, don’t make men feel bad for liking you, don’t be too independent, don’t be intimidating, don’t be a know-it-all. When referring to girls, ‘typical’ usually means frivolous, appearance-obsessed, delicate, slight and prone to whining.

  Am I a little girl? Technically speaking, I’m actually closer to menopause than I am to puberty. I have crow’s feet around my eyes and increasingly more whiskers sprouting on my chin. But what does age, experience and the occasionally depressing reality of biology have to do with anything? I am a woman who advocates for liberation in a world that dehumanises, abuses and degrades girls and women on a regular basis. I do all of this without keeping my voice in check, without deferring to male opinion and certainly without asking for permission to speak. And this, in the eyes of gender equality’s opponents, makes me nothing more than a loud-mouthed toddler who has fundamentally misunderstood how the world works.

  In desperate need of a root: This is a lovely little observation offered to me on a regular basis by men who, for the most part, I wouldn’t touch even with a ten-foot pole that was attached to a cast-iron robot casing in which I could sit while swaddled in a hazmat suit and a giant, oversized condom. For international readers, a ‘root’ is charming Australian slang for sexual intercourse. Specifically, heterosexual intercourse involving the penetration of a vagina with a penis. You might know this sentiment as ‘needs a good dick up her’ or ‘in need of a good dicking’, or perhaps something even less imaginative that involves being an angry woman who wants cock.

  See, feminists aren’t driven to despair by the consequences of misogyny and violence. We aren’t enraged by the lack of political representation, the condescending language used to ridicule and mock us, the legislation installed by all-male committees to curtail our reproductive freedoms or the number of women beaten, raped and murdered every minute of every day. No, we’ve just been driven bonkers by the absence of wang in our lives (and beds). Clearly, what we need is a series of erect cis-het dicks to come along and cure us of our political beliefs and agitation.

  There’s another term for this kind of mentality. It’s called corrective rape, and it’s routinely employed against women, men, trans and gender non-conforming people around the world. It’s used as a weapon against sexual expressions and what’s perceived to be unacceptable behaviour. Corrective rape is the heteronormative attempt to punish transgressors by reasserting the rightful dominance of the heterosexual, cisgender man.

  The men who call for difficult women to be fucked into submission might not be actually going out and forcing themselves on and into them. But even joking about it supports an attitude that not-so-subtly suggests that they would be within their rights to – that it is only their benevolence and ‘decency’ which keeps them from doing so, not awareness of the lack of dominion they have over women’s bodies. ‘Get a dick up ya’ isn’t just variously used as an insult or a threat. It’s also used as a reminder (sometimes an unconscious one) of the bodily autonomy and power gifted to men as a courtesy and denied to women as a rule. It’s a way of saying that women are nothing, and that we’ll stay that way until a man comes along and makes us something.

  Man-hater/Misandrist: This is one of my favourites, and a good thing too because I probably get called some variation of a misandrist or man-hater at least a few times a day. I think one of things I like about it is that it’s underpinned by a layer of astonishment – as if it’s not only reprehensible that a woman could have anything remotely close to feelings of ambivalence towards men, but that such a thing could be possible at all. But then there’s the nonsensical bent to it. After all, if a woman truly hated men (and presumably knew it), what possible emotional harm could it do to point it out to her?

  That’s not the point though, is it? When men call me a man-hater or a misandrist, what they’re really saying is that there’s something wrong with me and the way I refuse to soothe their egos and flatter them with my positive attention. Such an accusation is supposed to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed, because heaven forbid a woman be held in low esteem by a man. But it becomes much easier to ignore the inherent accusation there when you realise the term ‘man-hater’ isn’t really about women hating men at all – it’s about women acting outside of the bounds of respectable femininity in a way that adversely challenges men so much that, ironically, they can only respond by hating women. Trust me on this: anyone who calls you a misandrist or a man-hater is either a closet misogynist themselves or invested in perpetuating the patriarchal dominance of men.

  This all stems from the basic fear that women’s cavalier rejection of men (both in body and thought) will destabilise men’s power and dominance. When a woman behaves in a way that indicates she doesn’t need a man or his approval (and this can be as simple as refusing to change her opinion to accommodate his, or indicating that she doesn’t care what he thinks), the fact of whether or not she likes men in general is irrelevant. She’s behaved in a way that makes a single man feel uncomfortable or intimidated or strange or maybe just even dismissed, and the only recourse he believes he has – indeed, the only one he’s been conditioned to have – is to make it her problem and her failure. Oh, she disagrees with me or says something that makes me feel as if she might have a life outside of wanting to flatter me and secure my good opinion? She’s just another fucking feminazi man-hater, mate.

  There was a time when I took special pains to reassure men of my like for them. My speeches and articles were peppered with caveats about how wonderful men were. I wanted everyone to know that of course I loved men. I had a brother and a father and male friends who I just adored! S
ee? I was telling them. You don’t need to be scared of me! I’m not here to threaten your masculinity or make you feel bad!

  Vomit.

  Because what purpose does that serve? Why does every conversation have to begin with reassuring the men in the room that you think they’re more fabulous than the time Cleopatra packed a box full of bees and discovered it could be used as a vibrator? It’s such a condescending expectation and a complete waste of energy. All the evangelising in the world about men’s natural brilliance won’t convince the people who are determined to view feminists as a threat, and trying will only frustrate you further. So let them believe that you hate men if they want to. I promise you it doesn’t hurt. It makes no difference to you or your message, and it frees up all this precious time to focus on the message at hand – women’s liberation from the prison of gender inequality.

  Besides – and this is really important – ‘misandry’ is not in any way, shape or form comparable to misogyny. It can’t be, because that would assume we live in a world where the treatment of men and women is unilaterally equal. It isn’t. Women do not have the political, social or economic power to cause any kind of lasting damage to men as a whole.

  On the other hand, misogyny does have the power to brutalise and harm women, and it employs that power with sustained and terrifying regularity. Every day, women are raped, beaten, trafficked, enslaved and, devastatingly, murdered. In an overwhelming majority of cases, these things are done to them by men. And this isn’t a problem which discriminates based on geographical location or race, despite what casual racists and misogynists would like to believe.

  Meanwhile, the more casual forms of misogyny are treated either like funny japes or the consequence of women’s own silly behaviour. Men are being funny when they humiliate women for being old or fat or ugly, and they’re being deadly serious when they urge women to ‘take more care’ after a bloke decides that having a drink with a woman entitles him to fuck her.