“All fat girls,” he stated, confidently, smoking a fag, “are good at two things. Swimming and blow jobs. Swimming is because they don’t like any other sports, because it makes their boobies all jiggle around, and they like being weightless in the water. And blow jobs is because you don’t have to take your clothes off.”
I elegantly declined his later offer of “a poke”—“Soz—Aqua Aerobics at six a.m.!” I said, brightly, gathering my coat. “Gotta go and find my nose clip!”
Additionally, that man smelled of ham. In a bad way.
But I’m still very happy that I had my two years of teenage rumpeteering. Dinner parties can still be enlivened with the story of the pop star who passed out in my bed, leaving me confused as to what to do next.
Eventually, I rang his tour manager, who sounded like he’d dealt with this situation before: “Just drag him into the corridor, and leave him there. What room you in?” he said.
“One six nine. But he’s naked,” I added.
“That’s okay.” The tour manager sighed. “We can dress him tomorrow.”
And then there was the time I was with a man and we decided to bring food into our “love play,” but all there was in the hotel minibar was a miniature packet of Pringles. This initially stumped us, until he remembered reading in a survival handbook that Pringles—due to their high fat content—make amazing firelighters. Utterly distracted, we then set fire to them one by one, marveling over their steady, potato-y light, before just having some normal sex, without any food in it at all.
And when I told these stories, my female friends started chipping in with their stories of being dirty teenage girls, too: how they were not shy, or tremulous, or scared, but bright, witty, horny girls going out and absolutely choosing to get about a bit, have sex with a man who made balloon animals, masturbating dementedly, trying out every perversion under the sun, and exploring the world through their genitals. And I thought, I’d like to write a novel about a girl like this. And then I did absolutely nothing about it.
But then, Fifty Shades of Grey got big. At first, I was thrilled by the idea of it—an international blockbuster about a twenty-one-year-old girl going at it hell-for-leather with a hot boy.
“Hell yeah—really dirty books for young girls,” I thought. “Nice one, the twenty-first century.”
But then I read the book and completely changed my mind. For, by that point, one in three books sold that year were Fifty Shades, and the book had become by way of a shorthand for female sexuality. If you were into sex, you were “a bit Fifty Shades.” Female celebrities lined up to be quoted on what their favorite bits of the book were.
But what I found in the book was a very niche corner of female sexuality—being presented as an everywoman coming-of-age fantasy. Fifty Shades of Grey is about a shy, studious, twenty-one-year-old virgin who is repeatedly humiliated, tested, and silenced—often literally, with a ball gag—in exchange for a go on Christian Grey’s helicopter.
While I don’t doubt this is what some women want, it’s the monolithic place this book was taking up in young girls’ sexual hinterlands I found disturbing. It’s the opposite of independence, rebellion, curiosity, rock ’n’ roll, and the carefully attended forming of your own desires. Anastasia is essentially a thoughtless, desireless, empty girl who has sex happening to her, via a powerful and unstoppable man—and I don’t think I have to spell out why I find that sexual templating deeply skeevy for, say, my own teenage daughter and her friends.
In short, although Anastasia Steele spends three whole books being fucked every which way but Tuesday, this totemic shag book seemed to be the very opposite of everything I and my collection of dirty female friends recalled about their own Sex Adventuring years—and, if I may be so bold and inappropriate, what I would want my own daughters to do, when the triumphant, unignorable clarion call of their own genitals starts to rule their lives, in a few short years.
On top of all this—my dears, the solemn, unjoyous faff of it! The dungeons and linens and paddles and diets and doctors and waxing and waiting and whips and mind games. In a busy world that needs revolution, admin, inventiveness, glee, and thrift, sex being depicted as a cross between the challenges on I’m a Celebrity—Get Me Out of Here! and a trolley dash around Selfridges seems like a deeply unnecessary complication. You know—sex is very simple. It’s something cats manage to do on the shed roof, in the rain. If you want to, you can make it complicated—but I’ve had some great times in a graveyard on a picnic blanket—and, indeed, up against some bins around the back of a club—and I’d like something of that very British, make-do spirit to be represented somewhere in British sex fiction in 2014.
So, I wrote How to Build a Girl about a dirty teenage girl. Oh, it’s not just about sex—it’s about class, and pop music, and an odd love affair, and family. But I wanted to write something spirited and truthful and amusing about the two biggest words a girl can ever say—“Yes” and “No”—and about what actually happens when a virgin gets into bed with a much older man who’s into S&M.
What I’ve actually done, I realized, even as I was writing this piece, is finally sit down, and give the Big Sex Talk to my thirteen-year-old self. Here you go, babe. Hope you like it. Just one other thing—you don’t end up marrying Han Solo. Sorry. But you also don’t die a virgin in a nuclear holocaust—you definitely end up doing it. A lot. So it’s swings and roundabouts.
We Should Ban Homework
When you do the sex crime—sex—then you almost inevitably, at some point, have to do the sex time—having children.
By and large, I enjoy being a mother—it involves little travel or actual physical danger, and much of it, I have found, can be done on the sofa, usually with the telly on.
I’ve enjoyed most of it—pretty astonishingly, really, given that it’s a twenty-four-hours-a-day job with no pay attached. Indeed, as my children head into their teens, I would say there is only one bit that didn’t involve troubling my cervix that I actively loathed: homework.
I’m not one for craven populism. I dare to say the unsayable. In my time on these pages I’ve suggested some pretty contentious things: Jam is horrible. Fish are evil. Ketchup shouldn’t be kept in the fridge. Father Christmas is the sexiest man alive.
But this week I am going to say something that I confidently expect to win 100 percent support. I cannot imagine a single person disagreeing with me. It’s this:
We should ban homework.
If one thing happens in 2015, it should be a concerted campaign to eradicate this illogical, damaging, ass-paining institution once and for all.
It is an invention universally loathed. It’s slightly less popular than mouth ulcers.
For children, homework is one of their classic, immortal enemies: up there with vegetables, darkness, teeth cleaning, and bedtime.
Parents, meanwhile, are doubly enraged. As former children themselves, they can’t believe this homework stuff has come back round again—this time, with the added top spin of you now being the poor sap that has to haul their kids in from the playground, and make them give a shit about Richard II on one side of A4 paper, as your offspring scream, “I HATE YOU! I’M TOO TIRED TO DO THIS, AND I WANT TO DIE!”
Finally, should parents and children wish to round on the people who have given them the homework—teachers—they would find that teachers are the ones who hate homework most of all. Teachers are all like, “Don’t have a go at us—we’d kick homework in the nuts if we could.”
Teachers loathe homework. It’s yet another round of projects to be set, handed out, nagged over, and marked. Homework for the kids just basically means homework for teachers, too.
And everyone is quite right to hate it—for it makes life far worse than even we imagined.
Look—these are days of rocketing child obesity, anxiety, and emotional disorders. Prescriptions for tranquilizers for children have gone through the roof. I don’t think I’m being too fanciful to suggest that, as soon as children complete th
eir seven-hour-long academic day, they should be free to run around in the park, muck about with their friends, and have the chance to interact with their parents in a way not centered around screaming, “I HATE YOU! I’M TOO TIRED TO DO THIS AND I WANT TO DIE!” And that this would, obviously, improve the physical and mental health of British children immeasurably.
When else are they going to do all of that “running around and being happy” we keep saying they need to do? The winters are long, they’ve got homework until eight p.m., and then that big history project over the weekend. Homework means our children never really leave school. Even when they’re at home, they’re strapped to that bulging rucksack full of folders: still on deadlines, still producing.
And while that’s never fun for any child, for some, it’s utterly devastating. If you know, in your bones, that academia isn’t for you, those final hours of homework mean you’ve spent your entire waking day doing stuff that you feel a failure in.
You have no time to go out there and find the things that you might excel at—that give you joy and change your life. You could help your mum mend the clutch, or be taught how to cook by your dad, or hear the record that makes you form a band, or spend five hours obsessively practicing free kicks with your mates.
Instead, it’s that sad chair at the kitchen table, and the slow pen across the pages as your heart revolts and, latterly, breaks.
I loathe my children’s homework with a passion. When they come home from school, I want that time to be ours. How many hours do we all have left of their already dwindling childhood? How many of these ultra-vivid years, where an evening—walking along a river, visiting Nan, learning how to do magic tricks, reading stories—is something you’ll remember forever: will become you?
That my children spend these evenings exhaustedly weeping over a cardboard model of a neutron—which will just get chucked into some cupboard at school, and doesn’t count in their exams—makes me feel a sad and desperate fury.
And not least because of the final awfulness of homework—that my kids are the lucky ones. That homework just about works for them, because they have a calm house, and parents who have the time—just about, if we forget that we actually wanted to listen to Serial while having a hot bath—to help them.
But for those children not that lucky—in a chaotic house; parents busy, or gone—homework is the cruelest reminder yet that the biggest factor in your educational attainment is, over and over, your parents’ education and class. It’s the final blow to the already struggling.
Let’s call homework what it really is. It’s a parent test. It’s a life vampire. It’s a future heart attack. It’s emptied our playgrounds and panicked our children. It puts work into a home. I wish it death. I hope the biggest dog in the world comes and eats it.
To Teenage Girls on the Edge
My kids are lucky, of course. The worst thing that happens in their lives is homework, or realizing, tearfully, that there is no emoji for “emoji” (“This is a Disaster”).
For other teenagers, however, things are much more difficult. In the last few years, I have met so many who are standing on the edge of a vortex I remember from my teenage years—toes over the abyss, looking down and wondering what it would be like to fall—and I wrote this in half an hour, on a train, coming back from one particularly intense night. Beautiful girls, this is for you, with all my love.
I have just finished a tour where I would speak onstage, for two hours, about doubt and self-loathing, anxiety, eating disorders, hope, joy, and wanting to change both yourself, and the world—because those are the subjects of my latest book, How to Build a Girl. And unless I was ill, I would always sign books, and meet everyone, after.
These signings were no small things—they would go on for two, three hours. I would meet four hundred, five hundred people a night—something not many people get to do, and which is both a rare and unusual gift, and something that can blow a hole in your heart as often as it uplifts you.
For when you are someone who talks about the bloody war of attrition that adolescence can so often be—especially for girls—you tend to get two kinds of people coming to the gigs.
Half are the ones who’ve already been through it—winking and hooting, “Thank you for telling the truth. And thank God it’s all over.”
And the other half? They are the ones still going through it. You can tell instantly as they step up. The posture, the sleeves over the hands, something in the eyes—the girls who are struggling right now. Some of them are hard, and tense, with overeating. Others, anorexic, feeling like starving baby birds when you hug them—a handful of brittle bamboo canes. There are arms furious with crisscross razor lines. Studs in the ear, the nose, the tongue—where they have tried to reclaim their bodies from something, or someone, with the snap of a piercing gun.
Sometimes their parents are there—standing in the background, nervous, their faces anxiously projecting, “She likes you. Please make her feel better now. Oh Christ, don’t break her.”
What do I say to these girls? The ones who are having the Bad Year—the Bad Year where you cannot remember why you were happy aged twelve, and cannot imagine being happy at twenty-one? What can you say in one minute, two minutes, three minutes?
So many things. That panic and anxiety will lie to you—they are gonzo, malign commentators on the events of your life. Their counsel is wrong. You are as high, wired, and badly advised by adrenaline as you would be by cocaine. Panic and anxiety are mad, drugged fools. Do not listen to their grinding-toothed, sweaty bullshit.
Here is a promise, and a fact: you will never, in your life, ever have to deal with anything more than the next minute. However much it feels like you are approaching an event—an exam, a conversation, a decision, a kiss—where, if you screw it up, the entire future will just burn to hell in front of you and you will end: you are not. That will never happen. That is not what happens. The minutes always come one at a time, inside hours that come one at a time, inside days that come one at a time—all orderly strung, like pearls on a necklace, suspended in a graceful line. You will never, ever have to deal with more than the next sixty seconds. Do the calm, right thing that needs to be done in that minute. The work, or the breathing, or the smile. You can do that, for just one minute. And if you can do a minute, you can do the next.
Pretend you are your own baby. You would never cut that baby, or starve it, or overfeed it until it cried in pain, or tell it it was worthless. Sometimes, girls have to be mothers to themselves. Your body wants to live—that’s all and everything it was born to do. Let it do that, in the safety you provide it. Protect it. That is your biggest job. To protect your skin, and heart.
Buy flowers—or if you are poor, steal one from someone’s garden; the world owes you that much at least: a blossom—and put them at the end of the bed. When you wake, look at them, and tell yourself you are the kind of person who wakes up and sees flowers. This stops your first thought being, “I fear today. Today is the day maybe I cannot survive anymore,” which I know is what you would otherwise think. Thinking about blossoms before you think about terror is what girls must always do, in the Bad Years.
And the most important thing? To know that you were not born like this. You were not born scared and self-loathing and overwhelmed. Things have been done—which means things can be undone. It is hard work. But you are not scared of hard work, compared to everything else you have dealt with. Because what you must do right now, and for the rest of your life, is learn how to build a girl. You.
My Beauty Advice
And yet more advice. It’s almost as though, as a woman, I live in a world where I am daily given beauty advice, and somehow feel I must fight back with my own, psychotic, scutty, no-frills whimsy.
As someone who is regularly asked how old she is—only for the answer to come back, “Oh yeah—that sounds about right. Thirty-nine, you said? Mmmm-hmmm. You’ve got quite dry skin, haven’t you?”—I feel it’s only fair to share the beauty philosophy I ha
ve pieced together over my near four decades, although to be fair to my interlocutors, it does feel longer; it’s not the years, it’s the mileage; and, yes, my skin is very dry. Sometimes, my face feels like one of those sachets of silica gel—inexplicably found everywhere these days, yet able, when placed in the same box, to suck all of the moisture out of a pair of trainers! And who knows how! Or why!
Small yet regular outbreaks of adult acne simply mean you’re more sexual than “normal” people. Feel self-conscious about the sporadic eruptions on your chin? Regularly succumb to flailing despair that you’re still fighting a rearguard action with teenage acne at the same time as dealing with your own adolescent child’s burgeoning acne? Simply remind yourself of the fact that I totally made up: adult acne means you’re so pumped full of irresistible sexual pheromones and sexy sex things that, yes, inevitably, they become dangerously overheated and burst out on your face. Whenever, in weaker moments, you are in danger of feeling self-conscious about what appears to be a re-creation of the Avebury stone circle around your nose, simply look everyone in the room in the eye and say, “I apologize for being hotter and more irresistible than everyone else in here. It must be awful being you,” scream, bow, then leave. NB: This exit works in almost every situation except when on a surveillance exercise. MI5 do not like this exit being used by employees.
“Ringing in the changes” with your makeup is the ethos of a lunatic. There may be those who enjoy experimenting with their makeup, and to them—I wish you nothing but joy! Delight in standing in the big Boots uptown and trying on seventeen different kinds of bronzer on the side of your nose! Thrill at the prospect of experimenting with modish new makeup looks recommended in Grazia, such as “Neon Murderer,” “Confused Baby-Mother,” or “Pimpy Clown.” For the rest of us, however—those who found a “look” they liked in 1994 and are, frankly, still exhausted from the task—I say: Dig in! Carry on! State your intention, loudly, to take your current makeup regime to the grave. Stipulate in your will: “I will be buried in Rimmel eyeliner, ‘Hurrah! Britpop Forever!’ eye shadow, and whatever the fuck foundation is under £20.” Your motto is: “Ring in—the same! Experiment—with not giving a shit about experimenting! Be bold—in your obdurate belief that one kind of face per lifetime is enough!”
Moranifesto Page 30