How to Be a Woman

  Boobs are also, by and large, white and working class – you don’t really get Bangladeshi boobs, or boobs from Bahrain. There are no ‘boobs of Lady Antonia Fraser’. Boobs are what Jordan and Pamela Anderson and Barbara Windsor have – except when Barbara had a breast cancer storyline in EastEnders, when they quickly became ‘breasts’. ‘Boobs’, of course, can’t get cancer, or lactate, or be subject to the subtle erotic arts of the Tao. Boobs exist only to jiggle up and down on the chests of women between the ages of 14 and 32, after which they get too droopy, and then presumably fall off the face of the earth, into space; maybe to eventually become part of the giant rings of Saturn.

  For exactly the opposite reasons, ‘breasts’ will not do, either. You never hear the word ‘breasts’ in a positive scenario. Breasts are bad news. Much like vaginas, breasts exist to be examined by doctors and get cancer, but breasts also rack up impressive horrorpoints for being hacked off chickens and cooked in white wine, as being the word of choice for awkward men about to have very bad sex with you (‘May I touch your left breast with my finger?’) and ageing pervs (‘Her magnificent breasts were unleashed from the flimsy fabric, and seemed to dance towards Hengist’).

  ‘Bosom’ sounds a bit Les Dawson. ‘Cleavage’ doesn’t work, obviously – ‘I have a pain in my cleavage’ – and neither does ‘embonpoint’, because it sounds both embroidered and pointy, and so would cease to exist when you took your bra off. ‘Tits’ seems nicely down to earth for day-to-day use – ‘Give me a KitKat, I’ve just banged my tit on the door’ – but struggles to make a satisfactory transition to night-time use, where it seems a little too brusque. Personally, I quite like the idea of ‘The Guys’ – but then that’s also how I refer to my seven brothers and sisters, and as potential confusion there could lead to an even greater incidence of mental illness than we already have, I’ll probably have to leave it be.

  I did go through a phase of referring to my upper palaver by the names of celebrated duos – ‘He made me get my Two Ronnies out!’ ‘And it was all going so well until The Scarecrow and Mrs King here refused to fit into the top.’ ‘Actually I call them Simon & Garfunkel because one’s bigger than the other.’ – but then I had a baby. The midwife looked very sternly on me trying to wedge the business end of ‘Christopher Dean’ into my newborn’s mouth, while ‘Jayne Torvill’ lay, traumatised and bleeding, nearby.

  The English language has yet to get its head convincingly around the problem of the average woman’s bristols. Indeed, given what alarmed, ignorant, giggling fools we are, there’s every chance that this is a problem that could hang around for a while. Maybe we should give up on spoken language during the interregnum, and just refer to them as ‘(.)(.)’.

  Certainly the solution to mine and Caz’s problem was realising that – when it came to both breasts and vaginas – language wasn’t really necessary. After a short period of referring to them, jointly, as ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ – which had the additional benefit of making them sound like a classy BBC production, which inspired fond memories in many – it dawned on us that we could simply point at the relevant areas, whilst mouthing ‘there’, extravagantly, in the manner of Les Dawson. ‘There’ and ‘there’ worked by way of a holding operation until we finally felt worldly and louche enough to use the words ‘tits’ and ‘cunt’ – for me, 15, and for Caz, around 27, as I recall. But, man, what a maid-of-honour’s speech that was.

  1In Lost in Translation, she presented us with the question, ‘Is it ever right not to have sex with Bill Murray during a trip to Japan?’, to which anyone with any sense was able to answer, ‘No – you must always have sex with Bill Murray when you are on a trip to Japan.’

  CHAPTER 4

  I Am A Feminist!

  In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer suggests that the reader take a moment to taste their menstrual blood. ‘If you haven’t tasted it yet, you’ve got a long way to go, baby,’ she says.

  Well, I cannot help but agree. You have to try everything once – even eating sweet and sour prawns from a dodgy-looking takeaway van in Leicester, or wearing a puffball skirt. I have, of course, tasted my own menstrual blood. By and large, I’d prefer a bag of Nik Naks, but it was all right: better than most stuff you can buy on an Inter-city buffet, and certainly an ethically sound product. My welfare of me has been exemplary. I always have clean, deep hay to sleep on.

  Personally, however, I will not be urging you to taste your menstrual blood right now, as I’m very aware you might be on a bus, or sitting at the back of the Tick Tock Toddlers club, making desultory small-talk with a woman called ‘Barb’. As with so many ‘empowering’ things – doing a parachute jump, learning belly-dancing, getting a tattoo – tasting your menstrual blood would be, let’s face it, just another thing to add to the ‘To Do’ list, along with getting that curtain pole mended, de-fleaing the cats, and sewing that button back on your coat which, now you come to think of it, fell off in 2003.

  No, ladies, rest easy. You will not have to taste your menses today. Not on my watch.

  What I AM going to urge you to do, however, is say ‘I am a feminist’. For preference, I would like you to stand on a chair, and shout ‘I AM A FEMINIST’ – but this is simply because I believe everything is more exciting if you stand on a chair to do it.

  It really is important you say these words out loud. ‘I AM A FEMINIST.’ If you feel you cannot say it – not even stading on the ground – I would be alarmed. It’s probably one of the most important things a woman will ever say: the equal of ‘I love you’, ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ or ‘No! I’ve changed my mind! Do NOT cut me a fringe!’

  Say it. SAY IT! SAY IT NOW! Because if you can’t, you’re basically bending over, saying, ‘Kick my arse and take my vote, please, the patriarchy.’

  And do not think you shouldn’t be standing on that chair, shouting ‘I AM A FEMINIST!’ if you are a boy. A male feminist is one of the most glorious end-products of evolution. A male feminist should ABSOLUTELY be on the chair – so we ladies may all toast you, in champagne, before coveting your body wildly. And maybe get you to change that light bulb, while you’re up there. We cannot do it ourselves. There is a big spider’s web on the fitting.

  I was 15 when I first said, ‘I am a feminist.’ Here I am in my bedroom, saying it. I am looking in the mirror, watching myself say it: ‘I am a feminist. I am a feminist.’

  It is now nearly three years since I wrote my ‘Things To Do By The Time I Am 18’ list, and I am slowly piecing together a vague plan of who I should be. I still haven’t got my ears pierced, lost any weight or trained the dog, and all my clothes are still awful. My second-best top is a T-shirt with a cartoon of an alligator holding a beer, with ‘HAVE FUN IN THE FLORIDA SUN!’ written underneath it, in neon pink. It looks wholly incongruous on a depressed, fat, hippy girl with waist-length hair, walking around Wolverhampton in the rain. It looks, to be frank, like an ongoing act of immense sarcasm.

  I still don’t have any friends, either. Not one – unless you count family, which obviously you don’t, because they just come free with your life, wanted or not, like the six-page Curry’s brochure that falls out of the local paper, advertising Spectrum 128k home computers, and ‘ghetto blasters’. No. Family doesn’t count at all.

  But on the plus side, I am not alone because – as with a million lonely girls and boys before – books, TV and music are looking after me now. I am being raised by witches, wolves and unexpected guest stars on Wogan. All art is someone trying to tell you something, I realise. There’s thousands of people who want to talk to me, so long as I open their book, or turn on their show. These are a trillion telegrams with important information and tips. It may be bad information, or a misconstrued tip – but at least you are getting some data on what it’s like out there. Your CNN ticker-tape is running full blast. You are getting input.

  Books seem the most potent source: each one is the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I’m hoovering up live
s at a ferocious pace; six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sun-down. I’m reading about Welsh hill farmers and female round-the-world yachtswomen, World War Two soldiers and housekeepers in pre-war Shropshire mansions, journalists and movie stars, screenwriters, Tudor princes and 17th-century prime ministers.

  And every book, you find, has its own social group – friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end. When I first meet David Niven’s The Moon’s a Balloon, it keeps on mentioning Harpo Marx, until – when I finally bump into him, on the ‘Autobiographies: M’ shelf – we get on like a house on fire. I’m soon up to speed with how Marx spends his afternoons: at the Algonquin Round Table in New York, which is by way of a pre-war Valhalla for cocktail-drinking dandies with typewriters. Robert Benchley and Robert E. Sherwood and Alexander Woollcott – who stirs in me a lifelong affection for camp, waspy men who show their love with increasingly vile insults (‘Hello, Repulsive’).

  Finally, through Woollcott, I come face to face with the holy Dorothy Parker, who I feel has been waiting for me forever, in 1923, with her lipstick and her cigarettes and her glorious, whiplash despair. Dorothy Parker is monumentally important because, it seems to me at the time, she is the first woman who has ever been capable of being funny: an evolutionary step for women as major as the development of the opposable thumb, or the invention of the wheel. Parker is funny in the 1920s and then – I am led to believe – no other women are funny until French and Saunders and Victoria Wood come along, in the eighties. Parker is the Eve of female humour.

  Robert Johnson invented the blues, at midnight, at a crossroads, after selling his soul to the devil. Dorothy Parker invented amusing women, at 2pm, in New York’s best cocktail bar, after tipping a bus-boy 50 cents for a Martini. It’s hard not to draw conclusions as to which is the brighter sex.

  But Parker also worries me, because half the funny stuff she writes is about killing herself: funny doesn’t seem to be working out as well for her as it does for, say, Ben Elton. And it cannot be ignored that it takes nearly 60 years for any women to be funny again after her. The trail she blazed stayed notably untrodden. I start to worry that women are, as the rumour has it, not as good as men, after all.

  In the same month I read Parker’s ‘Résumé’ – ‘Razors pain you/Rivers are damp/Acids stain you/And drugs cause cramp/Guns aren’t lawful/Nooses give/Gas smells awful/You might as well live’ – I start reading Sylvia Plath, who everyone agrees is one of the few women who can write as well as a man, but who also keeps trying to kill herself: always crashing in the same car, or overdosing. This is worrying. I’m in the middle of being obsessed with Bessie Smith, whose life is raddled with heroin. I adore Janis Joplin, who sixties herself to death. And, increasingly, people are being horrible about the Duchess of York, just because she’s ginger.

  I can’t help but note that most of the women who hold their own with the men seem unhappy, and apt to die young. Lazy, popular opinion has it that this is because women are fundamentally unsuited to putting their head over the parapet and competing on the same terms as men. They just can’t handle the big-boy stuff. They simply need to stop trying.

  But when I look at their undoing – despair, self-loathing, low self-esteem, exhaustion, frustration at repeated lack of opportunity, space, understanding, support or context – to me it seems as if they are all dying of the same thing: being stuck in the wrong century. All these earlier ages are poisonous to women, I begin to think. I knew it before – but just as quiet, accepted fact. I know it again now – but this time, as loud, outraged fact.

  They are surrounded by men, without a team or a den mother to cheer them on. They are the sole pair of high heels clacking through a room of brogues. They are loaded with all the wearisomeness of being a novelty. They are furious and exhausted from having to explain to the men what the women have known all along. They are astronauts in the Mir Space Station, or hearts sewn into early transplant patients. They can pioneer, yes, but it’s not sustainable. Eventually, the body rejects them. The atmosphere proves too thin. It doesn’t work.

  And so, finally, just when I need her, I find Germaine Greer. I know roughly what she’s about, of course – whenever my mother hazards a guess at what might be wrong with the car, my father replies, sighingly, ‘All right, Germaine Greer. Give it a rest’ – but I’ve never actually encountered Greer. I’ve never read anything she’s written, or seen her speak. I presume she is a stern, shouting thing, always pointing out the ‘right’ thing to do: like a nun, but angry.

  Then I see her on TV. I don’t know what programme it is – my diary doesn’t say – but it notes the day with a garland of exclamation marks. ‘I’ve just seen Germaine Greer on TV – she’s NICE!!!!!!!’ I write. ‘FUNNEEEE!!!!!’

  Greer uses the words ‘liberation’ and ‘feminism’ and I realise – at the age of 15 – that she is the first person I’ve ever seen who doesn’t say them sarcastically, or tempered with invisible quote marks. She doesn’t say them like they are words that are both slightly distasteful, and slightly dangerous, and should be handled only at the end of tongs, like night soil, or typhus.

  Instead, Greer says ‘I am a feminist’ in a perfectly calm, logical and entitled way. It sounds like the solution to a puzzle that’s been going on for years. Greer says it with entitlement and pride: the word is a prize that billions of women, for the span of human history, fought to win. This is the vaccine against the earlier pioneers’ failure. This is the atmosphere that would sustain us all in space: the piece of equipment we’ve all been missing. This is what will keep us alive.

  A week later, and I, too, am saying ‘I am a feminist’, into the mirror. I am smoking a pretend cigarette made of rolled-up toilet paper. I blow imaginary smoke away, like Lauren Bacall, and say, ‘I’m a feminist, Humphrey Bogart.’

  The word feels even more exciting than swearing. It is intoxicating. It makes my head swim.

  I know I am a feminist now, because – after seeing Greer on TV and liking her – I have just read The Female Eunuch. I haven’t been drawn to it solely for its promise of emancipation – I must admit, I am also looking for sex scenes. I know it is – as Eulalie McKecknie Shinn refers to the poetry of Balzac in The Music Man – ‘a SMUTTY book’. Look: the cover has tits on. There should definitely be shagging inside.

  However, whilst there are rude bits, what is most notable, for someone raised on rock music, is that Greer writes about being a woman the way men sing about being men. When Bowie describes Ziggy in ‘Ziggy Stardust’ – ‘He was the nazz/with God-given ass/He took it all too far/But boy could he play guitar’ – it might as well have been Greer talking about herself. She is the nazz, with God-given ass. She writes paragraphs like piano solos, and her rendering of feminism is simple: everyone should just be a bit more like her. Scornful of any useless inherited bullshit. New; fast; free. Laughing, and fucking, and unafraid to call anyone out – from a boyfriend to the government – if they were stupid, or wrong. And LOUDLY. LIKE ROCK MUSIC.

  Subsequently, The Female Eunuch is like someone running into the room – my room – shouting ‘Oh my God!’, and triggering gold-glitter cannonade. Greer has the unstoppable velocity of someone working at the top of their game. And she has the heart-in-mouth glee of knowing she is saying stuff no one’s said before. She knows she was the new weather front; the coming storm.

  I don’t understand half of what she is on about. At the age of 15, I have yet to come across anything I could call sexism in the workplaces, men’s loathing for women or, indeed, what had driven me to the book in the first place: a penis looking to be stimulated and caressed. Half of it confuses the hell out of me: the combination of her anger towards men, and her belief in women letting themselves down, and being weak, is pretty alien to my way of thinking. By and large, I just think we’re all ‘The Guys’, trying to get on as best we can.

  I don’t really get massive g
eneralisations – and I bet the rest of the world doesn’t, either, I think to myself.

  But there is no doubt that this book – the world in this book – is a total thrill. Germaine makes being a woman – the sex wholly sidelined, reviled, silenced and crushed – suddenly seem like an amazing thing to be. In the 20th century – an age in thrall to the new – women turn out to be the newest thing of all: still packed up in cellophane, still folded up in the box, having played dead for the length of history. But now we are the new species! The new craze! We are the tulip – America – the Hula Hoop – the moon shot – cocaine! Everything we do was going to be, implicitly, amazing.

  I feel fandom – that slightly lazy, wholly thrilled decision to simply believe everything your hero says and does; to follow in their fluorescing slipstream without question. This is a hero who would not hurt me – who will not, suddenly and shockingly, reveal that they probably hate me – like Led Zeppelin’s roadies handing out laminates to underage groupies decorated with an eye, a bird and a sailor: ‘I swallow semen.’ Or like when I found out Frank Bough – ‘breakfast daddy’ – was into S&M.

  As a soft teenage girl, this is a rare hero who will be good for my soul.

  In later years, of course, I would grow Greer-ish enough to disagree with Greer on things that she said: she went off sex in the eighties, opposed the election of a transsexual lecturer at Newnham Ladies College, got a bee in her bonnet about transgender males-to-females, and, most importantly, had a go at Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore’s backcombed hair (‘bird’s nest hair and fuck-me shoes’), which saddened me: I love a bouff.

  But at 15, by the time I have finished reading The Female Eunuch, I am so excited about being a woman that, had I been a boy, I think I would have switched sides.