The Cows

by Dawn O'Porter

  I type in my password.

  My daughter’s face appears as my screensaver, little folders all over it with key words reflecting various elements of my life. ‘Photos’, ‘Annie Medical’, ‘Research’, ‘TV Contributors’, ‘Financial’. These secret little files that keep me in order, but I know that my life has just gone beyond my desktop. The Internet icon stares back at me like a red boil I need to burst.

  I click on it.

  I log onto MailOnline, and there I am. Clear as anything on the home page, having a ‘good old wank’, as Adam so beautifully put it. I click through to watch it on YouTube. I press play.

  I see myself lost in the throes of ecstasy. My head is back, my tongue is licking my lips. My hand and crotch are pixelated but there is an undeniable dark mass representing my pubic hair. The Metro newspaper is next to me on the floor. If only I’d have held it with my other hand!

  The video is only thirteen seconds long, but shows me making eye contact with the camera and throwing myself forward as I realise I’m being filmed. It is the clearest, most undeniable image of my face. I look into my own eyes; the desperation is shattering, my attempt to grab his phone futile. I land face down in the aisle of the train, like a deranged animal that’s been shot with a tranquilliser gun. The guy filming me ran off the train backwards, so the final shot is me on the floor with my trousers round my ankles. It then it cuts out and the words, ‘Play Again?’ appear over the picture of my face.

  I look to the bottom right. It’s had 946,873 views.

  It’s only 11.30 a.m.

  I log on to Twitter. #WalthamstowWankWoman is trending, as CCTV footage of me stumbling off the train at Walthamstow Central has been released. I shut it down instantly, I can’t bear to look any more.

  My life is fucked. Fucked. There is nothing I can do.

  I sit with my head in my hands in my kitchen. The silence sounds like cymbals crashing in my ears. What am I supposed to do next? Call someone? Who? I have no idea. I feel like outside my front door is too terrifying to contemplate.

  WALTHAMSTOW WANK WOMAN?

  Of all the accolades!

  Nearly one million people have seen me masturbate. God knows how many more by the end of today. So rarely in life would someone ever give in to an urge like that, and then to get filmed, it’s just so unfair. This doesn’t make sense.

  I think of Jason. That speech bubble drove me nuts all weekend. He obviously already thought I was into crazy shit from asking if he had ‘any special requests’, now he’s probably seen this. He must think I’m some slutty, crazy animal who turns down sex but has weird creepy wanks in public places; I mean, my God. If I was a man this would be illegal. Fuck, maybe it is illegal? I quickly type, ‘is it illegal to masturbate in public if I’m a woman?’ A Guardian article comes up; the first thing I see is that the penalty for masturbating in public in Indonesia is decapitation. I throw up a bit in my mouth. Then keep reading.

  It is an offence for anyone to ‘wilfully and indecently’ expose his ‘person’ in a street or public place to the obstruction, annoyance or danger of residents or passengers (N.B. references to a ‘person’ mean ‘penis’).

  Well, I don’t have a ‘person’ and I wasn’t being dangerous or an obstruction. And I thought I was alone! I can find nothing on what happens if you’re a woman caught publicly masturbating when you’re not an actual porn star. As I sift through Google, the only evidence I find of a woman ever masturbating in public are articles about me. And there are hundreds of them. Nearly every news outlet has covered it; everyone from Sky News to Buzzfeed, all either laughing, or questioning my sanity. One even says ‘Is it any different because she is a woman?’ I click on the article and see multiple comments from online users saying things like ‘It’s no different, anyone who is willing to expose themselves that way is a danger to society.’

  I think about Annie. Her school. Her teachers have done a great job at pretending not to judge me, but this will tip them over the edge. What if they report me to social services? What if social services see this? I look at my front door, an inch thick of wood protecting me from a stampede of judgement. I’ll never go out there again. I can’t.

  My phone beeps. It’s Sophie.

  Wait, is this real? Is this actually really happening or is this some weird TV stunt?

  It’s real, help me.

  Meet me tonight, our bar. 6?

  I don’t reply. I’m never leaving the house again.

  Oh, God. I feel like someone died. Like I died. Like I have to arrange my own funeral. Grief and logic are battling in my brain. The girl in me wants to sit and cry. The other parts – the mother, the producer – know I have shit to sort out. People to tell, accounts to close.

  I stand up. Come on, Tara, you can get on top of this.

  OK, Annie. How do I deal with her? I text my mother.

  Mum, I’ve come home. Really sick, please can Annie stay until tomorrow?

  She texts back instantly.

  Of course love, you must have caught Annie’s bug, get better.

  She doesn’t really go on the Internet. She reads the Daily Mail but only the physical paper, hopefully I won’t make it into that.

  OK, next. I go back to my computer, and log on to Facebook. I have 145 Notifications and forty-three messages. The video has been posted on my page multiple times with comments varying from, ‘Is this one of your documentaries?’ to the more piss taking, ‘You’re such a wanker.’

  I delete them all, check my privacy settings and make my timeline private so nobody can post on it.

  Next, work. I look at my email account. As expected, there is an email from Adam already.

  ‘Are you planning on coming back? We have a lot to do. I suggest you get a taxi.’

  I can’t think of anything to say. All I know is, I am never going back to that office. I don’t reply. The grief is starting to overtake my logic now. A few minutes of clarity was enough, but reality is now kicking in. And yes, it’s grief. Grief for the life I had, that I know I don’t have any more. How can I? This isn’t just a drunken night where I acted like a dick in front of friends and need to say sorry; this is strangers, colleagues, the media.

  I should have been at home with my kid, not out exposing myself. And to think it was the one night I actually tried to do the right thing. I was going to go home, after that blissful bubble of a date, and I was going to look forward to seeing Jason again. I was going to play it right, be mysterious, take it slow. And now him and half the world have seen me partake in what is being presented as the grossest sexual act imaginable. I still can’t believe this was me. What was I thinking?

  Actually, I know what I was thinking. I was thinking about Jason, and how great he made me feel. And that maybe I had actually met a guy I could fall in love with, someone who accepted me for who I am. But most importantly, I was thinking I was alone.

  And now I am alone and mortified. I’m worried that if I start to cry I just won’t stop. I have no idea what the world is about to unleash on me or, to my utter shame, my six-year-old daughter. I have to hold it together. I text Sophie back.

  Sophie, can you come here instead? I can’t leave the house.

  Sorry babe, I’ll be in town already and then I have a dinner. Come, you’ll be fine. Everyone can’t have seen it yet?

  Why can’t she go out of her way for me, even just this once? But sod it, I need to talk. And she’s right, I suppose. Not everyone will have seen it yet.

  See you there at 6

  FUCK!

  Cam

  Cam, wearing just black cotton knickers and a non-wired bra, looks up to see Mark standing naked at the bathroom door with a towel hanging over his erection. She stares through him while sucking a pen.

  ‘How do you feel about women masturbating?’ she says, not really looking for an answer.

  ‘I love it when you masturbate, babe. Like you love it when I do.’ He tosses the towel to the side and starts to touch himself. Cam reverts her eyes back to
her computer and starts typing ‘women masturbating’ into Google. She is instantly met with an abundance of hardcore porn sites.

  ‘Not me,’ she continues, thinking aloud. ‘Just women masturbating generally. Is it OK?’

  Of course Cam knows it’s OK by her standards, but she’s throwing the question out there to society. Only society isn’t actually in the room, so her young and unworldly lover is a little confused by the question.

  ‘Do you want me to watch you?’

  ‘No, Mark. No, I’m just asking if it’s OK for women to masturbate, publicly. Is it different from men?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘No, Mark. You don’t have to answer. It’s rhetorical.’

  Mark doesn’t know what rhetorical means, so walks over to the bed, hoping to end the conversation by resting his penis on her bottom lip.

  ‘I have to work. I’ll text you tomorrow, OK?’

  Mark gets dressed and leaves without a peep. When the door shuts, Cam watches the Wank Woman video again.

  She tries to put herself in this woman’s shoes. Would she ever do it in public? In front of sexual partners, masturbating is hot, but when caught doing it unaware it’s … creepy? Would she feel differently if it had been a man on the train? Why do women never talk about it? This whole thing is making her really uncomfortable, she can’t help but feel sorry for this … Wank Woman. As everyone on the Internet seems to be judging or laughing, Cam is having a different response.

  Cam thinks carefully, her fingers resting lightly on her keypad. Then, she writes.

  I just sexually abused someone. And the chances are, you probably did too.

  You’ve seen the Wank Woman video, right? That thirteen-second clip of a woman on a train, touching herself before she realises that she is being filmed? The clip that has, at time of writing, been viewed by 1,345,876 people. The clip that has no doubt changed a woman’s life forever.

  I, like everyone else, clicked on the video with intrigue. You try and keep me away from a catchy headline like ‘WALTHAMSTOW WANK WOMAN’. And I watched and I started to laugh, but then I watched it again, and didn’t find it funny at all. And then I watched it a third time, and felt angry at myself for ever seeing it at all.

  There isn’t a single news outlet in the country that isn’t either laughing at this woman, calling her insane, or making her out to be some pervert. But that isn’t what I see at all. I see someone who clearly thought she was alone, doing a very private thing, being filmed against her knowledge and then being publicly humiliated. And you know what? I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. She may have been on a train, but she wasn’t trying to be seen. The look on her face when she realised she was being filmed isn’t funny, it’s heartbreaking. The person who filmed her is not only a pervert, but he is an arsehole. He indecently filmed her against her will, and we are all guilty of abuse for watching it.

  Human beings get up to all sorts of debauched and sexually intolerable things all the time, but they get away with it because most people aren’t unfortunate enough to get caught. This poor woman wasn’t even doing anything that wrong. She wasn’t waving her vagina in people’s faces, rubbing herself against them in the street, flashing her boobs at passers-by; she was simply trying to get away with a quick moment of private thrill in the wrong place. And now she’s a national joke.

  I feel sorry for her. You should too.

  Before you watch that video again, before you forward it to your mates, I ask you to imagine this woman now. No doubt hiding in her house, too scared to go outside. Crying, alone and afraid. So embarrassed that she can’t face even her nearest and dearest. Of course there is the chance she isn’t, that she finds this all funny and got caught on purpose, but we all know that isn’t true. You only have to look at her face at the end to know the consequences of this footage will be high.

  I urge you to rethink your attitude towards this. It’s not just a case of a woman being caught; it’s a case of a woman being exploited.

  Think about it.

  Cam x

  Tara

  I race towards Sophie and throw my arms around her. ‘Oh my God, Sophie, help me. What have I done?’ I need my friend, a friend, any friend, to help me make sense of all this.

  ‘Oh, Tara, I can’t believe it. I mean, that video, it’s so graphic,’ she says, not helping.

  ‘I thought maybe he was just taking a bloody picture. At worst I thought he might show it to his mates, put it on Facebook but then take it down because his mum told him to. He was a kid, like, eighteen, or something. How did he manage to do this? Jesus, it’s usually pictures of cats that go viral, not forty-two-year-old mums,’ I say, drinking some of the champagne she had already ordered me.

  ‘Well, to be fair, your pussy kind of stole the show,’ she says, laughing to herself.

  ‘Sophie, no! Please.’

  ‘Sorry. But wow, the moment you realised you were being filmed. That was priceless.’

  ‘Sophie, seriously. Just try to say things that will make me feel better. Just try, OK?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Work was horrible. I can never go back there. The bastards didn’t even try to help me.’

  ‘Help you, how could they help you?’

  ‘I don’t know, support? Suggestions. Anything. Instead they just laughed, called me names, it was like being at school. FUCK. Sophie, I have a little girl, I have a career. I need this to go away.’

  Sophie takes a sip of her drink. She looks like she has something to tell me.

  ‘What?’ I ask her. ‘Oh God, what?’

  ‘Nothing, it’s just— I’m not sure I can see you until this has all died down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Carl saw the video at lunchtime. It made him really mad, he said he always got the impression that you were a bit like that and now his imagination is running wild as to what we used to get up to. He was all like, “If she’s masturbating on a train when she’s forty-two, what the hell were you two doing when you were in your twenties?”’

  I can’t believe she is saying this, and OK, maybe Carl is that bad. But she should be sticking up for me.

  Rage starts to consume me. I don’t know why I put up with Sophie and her crap idea of what friendship should be.

  ‘Well why don’t you tell him the truth then? That you fucked pretty much everything with two eyes and two legs for most of your premarital life, and that I was usually left on my own waiting for you?’

  ‘OK, Tara, don’t be like that.’

  ‘Or about how I raced you to hospital three times to get your stomach pumped?’

  ‘OK, you don’t have to …’

  ‘Or how I counselled you through two abortions, or how you deliberately used to seek out married men so that you didn’t have to commit to anything more than just their wallet?’

  ‘OK, now you’re just being mean.’

  We sit quietly. She looks at her watch, as if she needs to be somewhere.

  ‘I’m sorry, hon, it just makes things really complicated for me. I’ve got a different life now and I don’t want your mistakes to ruin that. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You’re a terrible friend,’ I say, meaning it. She always has been. I don’t know why I stuck with it. I feel too shocked to feel betrayed. But if this is Sophie’s reaction – Sophie, who’s done worse things than this, on all forms of public transport – this must be bad.

  ‘OK, you’re upset. Hopefully by the time we get back, you’ll have calmed down.’

  ‘By the time you get back?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve booked us two weeks in Bora Bora. We need a holiday and this seemed like perfect timing, seeing as your face and fanny are all over the news. I need to get Carl as far away from it as possible. Classic distraction. It should have died down in two weeks … I hope.’

  Two weeks, that feels like an eternity. What the hell is going to happen to me in the next two weeks?

  ‘I’ll let you know when I’m back, see how you’re doing,’ sh
e says, downing her bubbles and walking away. I don’t have the energy left to shout abuse after her.

  I sit with my elbows on the bar, and drop my head into my hands.

  ‘Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,’ I murmur quietly. ‘Aggghhhh, aghhgghghghg, aghghghghghh.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ says a woman’s voice behind me. I turn to her; she is looking at me as if she’s trying to pinpoint where we met. ‘I don’t mean to be rude, and please excuse me if I am wrong. But my friend and I were just wondering, is this you?’

  She holds up her phone. It’s a freeze frame of me with my head tossed back and my hand in my pants. What is the correct response in these situations? I don’t know, but the only one I can offer is to run out of the bar, with my hand over my mouth, and throw up into a drain outside.

  Back home, I look in the fridge. It’s almost empty apart from some milk, a block of cheese and the leftover roast chicken that I now know to throw away. In the freezer there are two pizzas, a bag of peas and a gel eye mask. In the cupboard there are two tins of soup, a few tins of beans, some pasta, some rice, some crackers and a tube of Pringles. I calculate that I have around three days until I’ll have to leave the house to get food. Maybe things will have died down by then. Maybe not.

  Annie. My baby. Oh God.

  Maybe Mum can bring her here after school tomorrow, they can bring food? I’ll pretend to be sick. No, that’s ridiculous.

  Fucking hell. What the fucking fuck am I going to do?

  Stella

  I stand naked in front of the mirror in the examination room, my huge boobs hanging in front of me like horse’s heads. My large brown nipples are like snouts, pointing subtly up at the end. My small waist is hidden by them; my wide hips are complemented by them. Alice and I used to stand side by side, comparing every tiny detail and difference like they were small secrets only we knew. We were like the hardest game of Spot the Difference, identical to anyone but us. We loved our bodies, and I still do. Which is why the prospect of losing pieces of it is so terrifying, of it being different to Alice’s. I need it for my memories.