How to Be a Woman

  Even those men born post-feminism, raised on textbooks and marches and their own mothers leaving each morning for the office, however much they might believe in the theoretical equality of women, and respect those around them, they’re scarcely unaware of the great sweep of history that went before. A quiet voice inside – suppressed, but never wholly silenced – says, ‘If women are the true equals of men, where’s the proof?’ And it is not just a voice inside men. It is inside women, too.

  For even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female – citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra – can’t conceal that women have basically done fuck all for the last 100,000 years. Come on – let’s admit it. Let’s stop exhaustingly pretending that there is a parallel history of women being victorious and creative, on an equal with men, that’s just been comprehensively covered up by The Man. There isn’t. Our empires, armies, cities, artworks, philosophers, philanthropists, inventors, scientists, astronauts, explorers, politicians and icons could all fit, comfortably, into one of the private karaoke booths in SingStar. We have no Mozart; no Einstein; no Galileo; no Gandhi. No Beatles, no Churchill, no Hawking, no Columbus. It just didn’t happen.

  Nearly everything so far has been the creation of men – and a liberal, right-on denial of it makes everything more awkward and difficult in the long run. Pretending that women have had a pop at all this before but just ultimately didn’t do as well as the men, that the experiment of female liberation has already happened but floundered gives strength to the belief that women simply aren’t as good as men, full stop. That things should just carry on as they are – with the world shaped around, and honouring, the priorities, needs, whims and successes of men. Women are over, without having even begun. When the truth is that we haven’t begun at all. Of course we haven’t. We’ll know it when we have.

  I see the wrongness of this presumption in the office. Melody Maker is filled with good, liberal men. Whatever sexism I’ve experienced, it was with the people the rest of the office considered to be sad nutters: by and large, this group of rock critics are as feminist a bunch of men as I’ll ever know. One of them ends up being my husband, and teaches me more about the bullshit men project on women than any woman ever does. In his cardigan, with his carrier bag full of Field Mice and Abba records, a 23-year-old Greek boy from Birmingham ends up rivalling Germaine Greer as my feminist hero.

  But this is all in the future. Here, in 1993, I am sitting in the office, on a desk, smoking a fag. I am watching liberal men tie themselves in knots trying to square their ardent belief that women are equal to men, with the evidence that there just aren’t that many great records made by women. Every six weeks or so, in an editorial meeting, the guys look around at the music scene of the time – all grunge or Blur or whatever – and despair, ‘Jesus, we’ve got to get some women in the paper! We’ve just got to get … some women!’

  And so we’d get Sonya from Echobelly, say, to take part in a ‘debate’ on the future of Radio 1. Or Louise Wener from Sleeper to review the singles. Or – in an emergency – just print a picture of Debbie Harry somewhere. A conscious effort had to be made because in those days, the music scene was much like Auschwitz. There were no birds.

  You couldn’t find a woman making music for love nor money. This was a pre-Spice Girl, pre-Gaga era, remember – when it was presumed that there was no mass market for women making pop music. And that’s presuming they could make music in the first place. Julie Burchill, of all people, summed up the presumptions of many when she said, ‘A girl in a dress with a guitar looks weird – like a dog riding a bicycle. Very odd. Hard to get past it.’

  What we were all thinking, but were too embarrassed to say, was that women simply had less to say than men. It had, after all, been over 70 years since women had been given the vote and yet, as far as the music scene was concerned, we had little more than a handful of female geniuses to show for it: Joni Mitchell, Carole King, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Madonna, Billie Holiday. Few enough to be regarded as freakish anomalies rather than the first outriders on a forthcoming storm. There was still no female rock band to rival Led Zeppelin, or Guns N’ Roses. No female hip-hop artist to rival Public Enemy, or the Wu-Tang Clan. No female dance artist to rival Richie ‘Plastikman’ Hawtin, or The Prodigy. And what all-female band would you put up against the might of The Beatles? The Runaways? The Go-Gos? The Slits? The disparity was laughable. But we could never, ever mention it. The truth sounded sexist.

  Creativity, we silently fretted, should really have begun the moment legislation changed. All manner of female incredibleness – pent up for centuries – should have been unleashed; flattening trees for thousands of miles around, like a pyroclastic blast. If women really were equal to men, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst should have been knocking out ‘All Along The Watchtower’ before dusk on the day suffrage was granted. While they were underneath that horse.

  But they didn’t. Because simply being able to vote isn’t the same as true equality. It’s difficult to see the glass ceiling because it’s made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it, and shit all over it, so we can see it properly.

  In the meantime, we had Echobelly on the cover.

  ‘Do you want to go and interview her?’ the editor asked. The unspoken follow-up sentence was, ‘Because you’re a girl.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I knew they were awful.

  So why, then, didn’t we do anything?

  Based on my own, personal experiences, 100,000 years of male superiority has its origins in the simple basis that men don’t get cystitis. Why wasn’t it a woman who discovered the Americas, in 1492? Because in a pre-antibiotic era, what woman would dare risk getting halfway across the Atlantic then spend the rest of the voyage clamped to the toilet, crying, and occasionally shouting, ‘Can anyone see New York yet? Get me a hotdog,’ out of the porthole?

  We are, physically, the weaker sex. We’re not as good at hefting stones, killing mammoths and rowing boats. In addition, sex often had the added complication of getting us pregnant, and leaving us feeling ‘too fat’ to lead an army into India. It’s not a coincidence that efforts towards female emancipation only got going under the twin exegeses of industrialisation and contraception – when machines made us the equal of men in the workplace, and The Pill made us the equal of men in expressing our desire. In more primitive times – what I would personally regard as any time before the release of Working Girl, in 1988 – the winners were always going to be anyone who was both physically strong enough to punch an antelope to the ground, and whose libido didn’t end up with them getting pregnant, then dying in childbirth.

  So to the powerful came education, discussion, and the conception of ‘normality’. Being a man and men’s experiences were considered ‘normal’: everything else was other. And as ‘other’ – without cities, philosophers, empires, armies, politicians, explorers, scientists and engineers – women were the losers. I don’t think that women being seen as inferior is a prejudice based on male hatred of women. When you look at history, it’s a prejudice based on simple fact.

  Oddly, however, I don’t feel like I can talk about sexism with other women. It feels too tender a point to discuss with them. All the women I know are strong feminists working in male environments – journalists, editors, PRs, computer programmers – but they are too busy at this point – 1993 – just getting on with stuff to have big debates about it. Besides, it is the beginning of Britpop, the dawn of the Ladette. As young women essentially at play – with no children, no childcare worries, no sudden stalling of their careers in their thirties, as the men inexplicably start to sail past them – things still feel hopeful. In this era of Doc Martens and beer and minimal make-up, sexism seems to be dying so fast it would be counter-productive to draw attention to it. We all, naively, presume it is a problem of another age, and that things are getting better and better by the day. We don’t know what’s coming towards us – Nuts and Brazilians, Moira
Stuart fired because she’s too old, and another decade and a half of unequal pay. In an era of PJ Harvey, we cannot imagine the Pussycat Dolls.

  But I do have conversations about the patriarchy. And I am having them with gay men. At 18, I am discovering what generations of women have long known: that the natural ally of the straight woman is the gay man. Because they are ‘other’ – losers – too.

  ‘Do you think they won’t notice you’re a woman?’ Charlie says.

  We’re in a shabby cafe in Camden, eating spaghetti bolognese. I live in London now – queuing up in Barclays Bank, Queen Square, Wolverhampton on my 18th birthday, the very first hour I could legally get an overdraft and move out. I have a house in Camden where I am the world’s most disorganised tenant: the phone is so regularly cut off that people start leaving messages for me in the nearby pub, The Good Mixer, instead. I leave a lit candle on top of the television and it melts right through to the cathode tube Not that it matters. The electric’s been cut off, too. I haven’t watched the TV in months.

  Coming to this cafe every lunchtime and eating spaghetti bolognese, £3.75, still feels like the height of sophistication and grown-up-ness. Look at me! Eating out! Eating foreign! With a homosexual!

  ‘Because they always do, you know,’ Charlie says. ‘They notice you’re a woman straightaway. I used to think they didn’t notice I was gay, too. But they do.’

  ‘It’s not that there’s anything terribly wrong,’ I say, almost apologetically. ‘I mean, they’re not keeping me in a Rape Cupboard, or anything. It’s just …’

  I sigh.

  ‘It’s just … oh, everything I say seems a bit weird, and wrong,’ I say. ‘I’m not normal. I just feel like a twat. Yes, I’m reclaiming the word. Shut up.’

  I am still smarting from a conversation I had today at Melody Maker. The big new thing is an American movement called ‘Riot Grrrl’ – a hardcore, punk-feminist scene where band members eschew talking to the mainstream press, disseminate fanzines, ban boys from the mosh pit, and scrawl revolutionary slogans on their bodies in lipstick and marker pen.

  Courtney Love is a figurehead – and through her, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana are allied. As I now work for The Times as a rock critic, I mentioned in conversation that I think Riot Grrrl bands should do interviews with the mainstream press, as the kind of girls who really need a hardcore feminist movement – in council blocks, listening to Radio 1, fantasising about New Kids On The Block – are unlikely to come across a photocopied Riot Grrrl fanzine being handed out outside a Sebadoh gig. Any revolution worth its salt needs to get its message across to as many people as possible. Ipso facto, Huggy Bear should do an interview with me.

  Halfway through this speech, I am shouted down by a male editor, who dismisses everything I say out of hand, and concludes his argument with the statement, ‘You wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a fat teenage girl, being shouted at in the street by arseholes.’

  At the time, I am a fat teenage girl, being shouted at in the street by arseholes. I am rendered silent with astonishment that I am being lectured on a radical feminist youth movement by a middle-aged straight white man.

  ‘It’s like he thinks he understands everything better than me – even me!’ I tell Charlie, getting indignant again. ‘It’s boiling my piss – a piss which, incidentally, I am having to queue up for twice as long as he is at any gig.’

  ‘Oh, I get it all the time,’ Charlie says, cheerfully. ‘It’s mainly conversations about how difficult it is to be a gay man – explained to me by a straight man. The problem is, straight men don’t know that much about us, do they?’

  ‘We’re very mysterious,’ I agree, as spaghetti dangles from my mouth.

  ‘Well, we are, aren’t we?’ Charlie says. ‘I mean, think of all those films or TV shows where there’s one woman, or one gay, in a script otherwise full of straight men, written by a straight man? Or a book? Fiction and film is full of these imaginary gay men and straight women, saying what straight men imagine we would say, and doing what straight men imagine we would do. Every gay I ever see has an ex-lover dying of AIDS. Fucking Philadelphia. I’ve started to think I should get an AIDS boy-friend, just to be normal.’

  ‘Yeah – and all the women are always just really “good” and sensible, and keep putting the men, with their crazy ideas, and their boyish idealism, into check,’ I say, mournfully. ‘And they’re never funny. WHY CAN’T I EVER SEE A FUNNY LADY?’

  ‘Imaginary Jewish women can be funny,’ Charlie points out. ‘But they also have to be neurotic, and never get a boyfriend.’

  ‘Maybe I should convert,’ I say, gloomily. ‘I’ll go down the synagogue and get one of those candlesticks, and you go down the Terrence Higgins Trust and pull. Then we’ll be proper.’

  ‘Still, we’ve got it easy compared to the lesbians,’ Charlie says, getting the bill. ‘There isn’t a single lesbian in Britain, apart from Hufty.’

  As I chuck my fags into my bag, I have an idle, stupid thought. I know what I need to do next, I think. I need to get a boyfriend. A boyfriend would make everything better.

  CHAPTER 8

  I Am In Love!

  A year later, and I am in love. He’s The One. Obviously, I thought the one before him was The One, and the one before that was The One, too. Frankly, I’m so into the idea of being in love that anyone out of about three million could be The One.

  But, no – this, now, is definitely The One. The very One. I am walking down Monet-grey pavements in Hampstead in March, hand in hand, and I am so in love. Admittedly I feel terrible, and he’s a total arsehole, but I am in love. Finally. By sheer force of will. I’ve got a person, all of my own.

  ‘You walk funny,’ he says, in an oddly needling way. ‘You don’t walk like a fat girl.’

  I have no idea what he means. I let go of his hand. I’m in love. Christ, it’s miserable.

  So yes, he’s a boy in a band – the first boy in a band I could get. Insanely talented, very beautiful, but also very lazy, and definitely troubled. His band gets nowhere because he refuses to do ‘shitty gigs’ he thinks are beneath him. He writes four or five songs a year but then spends months discussing each one, as if they had been Number One for weeks, and changed the world; instead of sitting on C90 tapes, unmixed and unfinished, scattered across my floor.

  He says he hates his mother – when I ask him why, he tells a long story that ends with him throwing the lid of a tub of Flora margarine at her, during an argument, and her fainting. I don’t understand that, either, but I agree with him that she sounds awful.

  But why are they eating Flora? I wonder to myself. If I were as rich as them, I’d eat butter every day.

  Even though we are going out with each other, and he’s moved into my flat, I don’t think he likes me. When I write, he sits next to me on a chair, and explains at great length how he’s more talented than me. When we’re with friends, he’ll make a joke and – when I laugh – snap, ‘Why are you laughing? You don’t understand what I’m talking about.’

  My family hate him: when my brother Eddie comes to stay with us, he accidentally spills a bottle of strawberry-flavoured Yop on my boyfriend’s suede jacket, and my boyfriend goes absolutely mental at this 13-year-old boy. Eddie cries. We have to leave my house and sit on the steps, outside, smoking fags while I apologise to Eddie over and over again.

  Caz is very brisk about him: ‘He is a cock. You were better off when you were just cohabiting with the mice in your kitchen. He’s a short man with a girl’s name – and that’s trouble.’

  His name is Courtney. And he is quite short, and very thin: he’s definitely smaller than me. I feel like I’m too big for him. This is a problem. I feel like, if I stood up straight, I’d crush him. I start smoking a lot of weed, to make myself smaller, and quieter.

  Love is the drugs, I think, skinning up at 11am. Love is the drugs. All you need is drugs.

  Besides, I’m not an amazing catch myself. I’m a teenage girl living in a house with the electr
icity cut off. I wake at 2pm and go to bed at dawn. I’m pretty nuts: having scored an amazing job, where I present a late-night music show on Channel 4 called Naked City. I’ve become fractionally famous, and have discovered that being fractionally famous consists, by and large, of drunk people coming up to you at gigs, saying ‘You’re shit!’ and walking away again.

  Not all of them say ‘You’re shit!’ – some of them say ‘You’re great!’, but in a way, that’s worse. Because when lots of other people have said ‘You’re shit!’, you feel you have a duty to tell the people who say ‘You’re great!’ that a lot of other people think you’re shit, and that they should maybe bear those statistics in mind before they make their final analysis. And if you’re trying to say all of this while you’re quite drunk – as I almost always was – then people are apt to stare at you in deep confusion, after a minute or two, and then make their apologies, and leave.

  So I’m sort of messy and fuzzy, and by turns belligerent – ‘I’m great! People say so!’ – and weepy – ‘I’m shit! People say so!’ I fall down stairs drunk quite a lot. Over at Pete from Melody Maker’s house, I get tearful and sit under the table all night, crying. Most of all – despite waiting my whole life to leave home – I’m missing my family. At night, when I lie in bed with Courtney – someone I can have sex with! A clever boy! – I find myself thinking of my double bed back in Wolverhampton, with my sister Prinnie in it; alone now.

  I may often have woken up soaked in her urine but I always felt safe there, I think, as I lie in the dark. I wish Prinnie was in the bed, instead of Courtney. Little Prinnie with her gobstopper eyes, smelling of biscuits and earth and puppies; warm. When she used to wake up in the night, I would tell her stories about Judy Garland, and stroke her hair until she fell back to sleep.