Fight Like A Girl

by Clementine Ford

  The good thing is that you don’t have to listen. No matter how much they try to force you to (and they will, whether your interaction happens online or off) You. Do. Not. Have. To. Listen. Because in addition to it being okay for you to be angry, it’s also okay for you to shut down conversations with people you don’t want to talk to. You are not required to stand there and nod politely as a man lectures you on why gender inequality is a myth. It doesn’t make your experience of life any less real or true if you walk away from sanctimonious dickheads. They don’t want to have a discussion with you. Their only objective is to get you to admit you’re wrong. I know exactly how frustrating and disempowering this is, because I am a woman and most women have spent their lives being taught to doubt their feelings and instincts. I am angry about the number of women who write to me to recount tedious conversations with arrogant men who won’t let them get a word in edgeways, but who ultimately succeed in making these women second-guess themselves because ‘You’re overreacting’ may as well be the first sentence we hear after ‘It’s a girl’.

  I used to feel obligated to participate in these discussions. But I grew so frustrated at being spoken over, lectured and mansplained to that eventually I decided to stop doing it. Except in the rare situations where a dialogue has been initiated by someone who genuinely wants to learn more (even if they don’t ultimately end up agreeing with everything said, which is their right), these conversations are mostly completely pointless. Nothing is achieved beyond yet more of your precious time being wasted on people who aren’t there in good faith and don’t have any interest in listening to what you have to say.

  I might still have to deal with incessant demands that I ‘defend my position’, but I have the choice to ignore them. I used to think that doing so meant I was letting the side down or missing a valuable opportunity to educate, but then I realised you can lead a man to thought but you cannot make him think. This was a huge moment for me. Not only did it free up a lot of time, it also liberated me from a lot of the emotional trauma that came from being constantly ambushed by MRAs and other dingleberries. I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to watch them grow more and more infuriated at being ignored. Truly, it gives me a lot of pleasure, and in this world we take what we can get.

  So walk away. Walk away before the conversation even starts. Shut it down if they keep trying to goad you into it. Don’t answer them and don’t rise to the bait when they tell you that your refusal to engage is just further evidence that you have no argument (your status as a woman being the first and most damning proof of this). Face it, they already think you’re full of shit anyway, and they’re just chomping at the bit to tell you how there’s no such thing as sexism, feminism is over, most ‘sensible’ women know that it’s ridiculous, you just want superiority, you’re just angry because you’re ugly, if you gave it up you could get a boyfriend and (my personal favourite) ‘real’ feminists would be turning in their graves over what the movement’s become. Yeah, because the suffragettes (all of whom encountered exactly the same kind of paternalistic lectures from whiny man-babies) were traditionally super into standing there and listening politely while men spoke at them. Try again, dickheads.

  Like I said, it’s okay to walk away. It’s okay to ignore men, especially when they are furiously trying to put you back into the tiny little box they need to carry you around in so that they can feel comfortable and in control. It’s okay to block men on Facebook and Twitter, to delete their emails without reading them, to tell them to Fuck Off on Tinder and basically to do whatever else you think is necessary to keep their toxic bullshit from seeping into your life. You are allowed to do all these things. It doesn’t make you weak. It doesn’t make you an enemy of free speech like some will argue (as if closing the door on a travelling evangelist who keeps yelling about how much of a fat cunt you are is an egregious form of censorship that shows how much you hate democracy). In fact, block with abandon. Walk away gleefully. Don’t let people with shitty intentions suck your energy from you. Why should they have free access to it, especially when you get absolutely nothing from them in return?

  It is okay for you to do all these things. It’s okay for you to acknowledge your rage and give voice to it. It’s okay for you to deny men your time and energy. It’s okay not to care if they think you’re fat and ugly. You are not responsible for other people’s insecurities or the way they try to use them against you. It’s okay for you to disagree with men. It’s okay for you to tell men to fuck off. God, is it fucking okay for you to tell them to fuck off. Sometimes those two words are the only thing you need. I like to use them when someone’s taken the time to send me an incomprehensible, illegible treatise on the dangers of feminism or how women have infiltrated the government and are now putting steps in place to prepare for the matriarchy (like, I wish that was actually happening). It’s okay for you to make fun of them when they try to pick on you, to tease them when they act as if their approval has any bearing on your life whatsoever.

  It’s okay for you to reject men’s attentions, to say no without explanation. You don’t have to fabricate a boyfriend to make it easier for them to accept your lack of interest, as tempting as it might be. Men shouldn’t need to view you as the property of another man in order to respect your wishes. You don’t owe them anything. Of course, this can be dangerous. There are countless recorded cases of men killing women because they wouldn’t go out with them (check out the website When Women Refuse). Elliot Rodger wrote an entire manifesto about that and then went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California. It’s terrifying. I get that. But you still don’t owe it to them to ease the pain of rejection.

  It’s okay for you to have conversations about the pain and abuse that’s inflicted on women without also having to acknowledge that these things happen to men too. Yes, men can be victimised. Yes, men can be raped. Yes, men can be targeted by family violence. Those are terrible things, and help should be given to the victims and survivors of such atrocities. But none of that negates the reality that women are victimised in different and more sustained ways, and the constant interruption to and attempts to derail that dialogue is just another form of violence. Why is it always seen as the responsibility of women to take on the burden of men’s emotional labour, even (and especially) when it means putting our own problems to the side? History is one long laundry list of men’s problems being put front and centre. In fact, women are the ones who have always led the charge to defend men from violence. It was largely women – mothers, wives, sisters and socialists – who marched against war and the policies of conscription that sent young men off to die and kill for colonialist governments. It’s largely women who do the work of healing their broken communities. Women have always taken care of everyone else and will likely continue to do so. But the moment we start organising ourselves to address the serious, systemic issues that see us hospitalised and/or put in the ground, we’re suddenly vilified for ‘ignoring the bigger picture’ while greedily siphoning off all the available funds into our own cause. Such a claim is ridiculous. Do you know how many women’s health organisations and refuges have been defunded in the last decade? Compare that with the nationwide response whenever a young lad is randomly attacked on a city street and left to die. That situation is so intolerable to us as a nation that we even came up with a new phrase to replace the former description of being ‘king hit’. Now these men suffer a ‘coward’s punch’, because there can be nothing more cowardly than punching a man in the back of the head when he’s just trying to enjoy a night out.

  I have no objection to the rebranding of that behaviour. It’s despicable. My heart breaks for the families who’ve lost sons and brothers to that kind of violence. I think it’s commendable that our government has responded to it in such a proactive way. But domestic violence is still called domestic violence. Men who kill their wives or families and then themselves are still valorised in newspapers, praised for being ‘good blokes’ and ‘family men’. Their old coaches and
community sporting teams are still sought for comment on what wonderful team players they were. Everyone talks about what a terribly tragedy it was all round.

  Women and children are put in the ground, and the feminists who campaign against these atrocities are abused for making it all about us.

  Embrace your anger. Don’t be pretty little flowers decorating the hallways of life. Women have spent too long burying our anger deep beneath those roots in the hope that we could stop it from affecting our blooms, but all it’s resulted in is failure to thrive.

  If you are a woman living in this world and you’re not angry, you’re not paying enough attention. Not to your own life, not to the lives of other women and not to the lives of the women who’ll come after you.

  Be angry. Be rageful. Be loud. Be unrepentant. Be assertive. Be aggressive. Be the kind of she-beast that trains her fire-filled eyes on the male gaze and burns it down. Be everything that women are always told not to be, and commit to giving zero fucks about who may or may not have a problem with that.

  It is okay to be angry. It is fucking okay.

  EPILOGUE

  This book is a love letter to the girls. It’s a letter to the bitches and the broads, the sluts and the whores. It’s to the troublemakers and the rebels, the women who are told they’re too loud, too proud, too big, too small.

  Or not enough of nothing at all.

  This is a letter to our mothers and our daughters, whose womanhood has been told it ought to reduce itself, to mute itself, to not wave but drown in a current that refuses to let us cast sail and find shores that will let us be free. It’s a letter to all our friends and all our sisters, whose anger is recast as histrionics and caterwauling, a widespread madness that must be quelled for our own good and our own happiness.

  This is a letter to the women we don’t know but whose lives we do, because we live them too.

  This is a letter to history, and to all of it that has been lost. History, you have been like a present passed around in a party game, layers and layers of you torn away and discarded because only a tiny part of you was ever considered to be of value. This is a letter to the women who were swept away in those layers, their stories crumpled up and thrown in the bin, rendered irrelevant to the bigger prize because of the assumption they were merely packaging. This is a letter to the people forced to relive that over and over, recycled into platforms for other people to scale and conquer, to plant a flag and declare ownership over while praising themselves for getting there on their own two feet.

  This is a letter to all the girls born into this world only to be told that they don’t belong.

  Dear girls, I wish that I had written the rules.

  If I had written the rules, the full expanse of human history wouldn’t stretch out behind us as a list of White Men’s Great Achievements. The trumpets wouldn’t sound for the men who marched on to greater things, but for the legions of faceless, forgotten warriors who were assigned the thankless task of scrubbing out the bloodstains all those men left behind.

  If I had written the rules, the progress of civilisation wouldn’t be measured by the success of man’s colonialism but by women’s resistance to it. History books would be filled with the names of the women who fought back, those brave soldiers who rejected Man’s arrogant quest to assume the status of God and remake the world in his own image.

  If I had written the rules, there would be no God, no eternal father, no holy trinity designed to wrestle spiritual power away from the women who mock those aspirational conquerors with an ability to bear life from within.

  If I had written the rules, women wouldn’t be the first casualties of any conflict. We wouldn’t be violated and abused as a means of sending a message, remembered only as a footnote in later renditions of Great Military Campaigners of Old and their Spoils of War. Our bodies wouldn’t form a battleground for men to destroy because they think that stealing our power will make them stronger.

  If I had written the rules, women would never have been traded as property, forced into marriages with men chosen by other men for the purpose of bearing new men to take over from the old and then thrown away if we failed to fulfil the obligations of a contract we had no part in writing. We would have been given leave to choose our own destinies, to forge our own paths and to believe from the first moment of our existence that our lives and our bodies belonged to us and us alone.

  If I had written the rules, we wouldn’t hear now about how women are so empowered. That we are so liberated, that we’ve been freed from the supposedly mythical ‘patriarchy’ and that anything beyond this is a dangerous tilt at supremacy. We wouldn't be told this while having to endure the indignity of also being told that merit dictates who wins and that if we aren’t winning it’s probably because we’re not trying hard enough.

  If I had written the rules, we wouldn’t hear how the real problem is that women don’t respect themselves enough, that we’re asking for trouble, that our right to be treated as autonomous human beings with dignity and ownership of our bodies rises and falls with the length of our hemlines and we have no one to blame but ourselves. We wouldn’t be told when we complain about this violence that we are ‘making it up’, that we’re demonising men, that feminism has gone too far, that a compliment is just that, and can’t a man even talk to a woman on the street anymore without being vilified, I mean, COME ON, how on earth will the human race possibly survive if men can’t even talk to women on the street anymore? We wouldn’t be told all that and then in the same breath be told that we lack common sense, that we all have to protect ourselves, that there are Bad People out there and if you leave your wallet sitting on the window sill of an unlocked car then you can’t be surprised when someone steals it, it’s just human nature, when when when WHEN will women learn?

  If I had written the rules, the word ‘shrill’ would be banned from human vocabulary.

  Instead, we would listen to everyone who is silenced, the chicks, the crips, the queers, the freaks, the people not born with white skin in white houses with white picket fences patrolled as fiercely as the borders that keep out people who didn’t ‘earn’ their way into a life of arbitrary privilege.

  If I had written the rules, the world would come to life with the volume of voices that we never get to hear, and the music of them all would ring in our ears for days.

  I didn’t write the rules. Instead, I wrote this book. I wrote it because I believe in the strength of girls and women. I know how deep those rivers of courage run – how deeply, in fact, they must run if any of us are to go on living in a world that demands we accept our own weakness and inferiority. Girls and women wake up and face the world with the kind of steely determination that can only be forged from years of bracing against whatever shit we expect to have thrown at us on any given day. Before we can even properly understand what it means to be a girl, we learn that such a thing is a source of shame and embarrassment. Girls are weak. Girls are boring. Girls are too sensitive. Girls are pathetic. To do something like a girl is to fail in some way. ‘Girl’ is an accusation that’s used against boys to humiliate them. And the absolute proliferation of this in sitcoms, movies, books and pop culture has resulted in 50 percent of the world internalising the idea that not only are we somehow less than our male counterparts, we also occupy a state that’s shameful and gross.

  You dress like a girl.

  You run like a girl.

  You throw like a girl.

  You fight like a girl.

  What are we to take away from this, except the understanding that the very state of being a girl is a humiliation?

  Girls have two choices available to them if they want to survive under this system. The first is to rebel against it, to exist as the aberration other people say they are and thus be hated openly, enthusiastically and greedily. This is a hard road, which explains why so few us of choose it. The second option is to capitulate to the powers that be. To accept our humiliating existence and agree that we are, indeed, a laughable w
aste of time. Many girls feel safer walking this path, because the hate foisted on them feels more manageable. What does it matter that they learn also to hate themselves? Isn’t this what they deserve, after all?

  Along the way, we learn that the quickest way to deflect attention from ourselves is to direct it to the other girls, the ones who commit the grave crimes of being either too girly or not girly enough. Whose ironed bows and penchant for pink draw as much withering disdain as the shapeless clothes and unpainted faces of those girls who ‘don’t take care of themselves’. We might sit there and laugh as boys throw around the words ‘slut’ and ‘whore’, wanting to believe that the offer of fierce support will be enough to protect us from their animosity. We learn to do it to each other, to use the language of hatred and misogyny against our fellow girls as a way of policing each other and elevating ourselves to the top of the pile.

  We strive for happiness, but learn to equate its meaning with simply being ‘the least hated’.

  I think back on my teenage years now with a mixture of sadness and wonder. My face is frozen in artificial smiles across albums full of photographs, but inside is a swirling storm of anxiety, self-doubt and loneliness. I wanted desperately to be liberated from the discomfort I felt in my own skin, but I also didn’t believe I deserved anything more than that. What had I done to qualify for a life defined by love and respect? I thought of myself as ugly, unwieldy, fat, monstrous, too loud, too brash, too freckled, too grotesque, too too too too too. I was a girl and that made me a joke. But I was also a failure at all the things that girls were supposed to be, and that made me worse.

  I was a nothing-girl. And in a way, it didn’t matter how much I perceived the world might hate me. It was nowhere near the depths to which I had learned to hate myself.

  All those years spent feeling inadequate and ashamed, absorbing the messages that had dripped into me from birth and that told me I was right to feel this way, that the only way I could negotiate some kind of value for myself was by playing the game. To let myself become a conduit for other people to nurture their self worth and power, and to be grateful for the opportunity to do so. To blush with pride every time a man singled me out on the street, regardless of what he might be saying. To thrill at even being noticed, because if a girl isn’t being looked at does she really even exist at all? Like Hans Christian Andersen’s tragic mermaid, I looked beyond a glass ceiling to a world I yearned to become a part of. I signed my voice away and learned to swallow the pain of walking on a thousand knives. And so I went on for years, silenced against complaint and sliced into more manageable pieces.