How To Be A Woman

How To Be A Woman By Caitlin Moran



PROLOGUE




The Worst Birthday Ever




WOLVERHAMPTON, 5 APRIL 1988

Here I am, on my 13th birthday. I am running. I’m running from The Yobs.

‘Boy!’

‘Gyppo!’

‘Boy!’

I’m running from The Yobs in the playground by our house. It is a typical playground of Britain in the late eighties. There’s no such thing as safety surfaces, ergonomic design or, indeed, slats on the benches. Everything’s made of concrete, broken Corona pop bottles and weeds.

As I run, I’m totally alone. I can feel the breath in my throat catching, like sick. I’ve seen nature documentaries like this before. I can see what’s happening here. My role is, clearly, that of ‘weak antelope, separated from the pack’. The Yobs are ‘the lions’. I know this never really ends well for the antelope. Soon, my role will turn into a new one: that of ‘lunch’.

‘Yah pikey!’

I’m wearing Wellington boots, NHS glasses that make me look like Alan Bennett, and my dad’s Withnail-style army coat. I do not, I admit, look very feminine. Diana, Princess of Wales is feminine. Kylie Minogue is feminine. I am … femi-none. So I understand The Yobs’ confusion. They do not look as if they have dabbled much in either a) the iconography of the counter-culture or b) the inspirational imagery of radical gender-benders. I imagine they were confused by both Annie Lennox and Boy George when they appeared on Top of the Pops.

If they weren’t so busy chasing me, I would probably say something to this effect. Maybe I would tell them that I have read The Well of Loneliness, by famous, trouser-wearing lesbian Radclyffe Hall, and that they need to open their minds to alternative modes of dress. Perhaps I would mention Chrissie Hynde, too. She wears masculine tailoring. And Caryn Franklin on The Clothes Show – and she seems lovely!

‘Yah pikey!’

The Yobs stop for a moment, and appear to confer. I slow to a trot, lean against a tree and hyperventilate wildly. I am knackered. At 13 stone, I am not really built for hot pursuit. I am less Zola Budd – more Elmer Fudd. As I catch my breath, I reflect on my situation.

It would be amazing, I think, if I had a pet dog. A well-trained German Shepherd, who would attack these boys – almost brutally. An animal really in tune with the fear and apprehension of its owner.

I observe my pet German Shepherd, Saffron, 200 yards away. She is joyfully rolling in a slick of fox shit, and waving her legs in the air with joy. The dog looks so happy. Today is working out really well for it. This is a much longer, and faster, walk than usual.

Although today is obviously not working out very well for me, I am none the less surprised when – having finished their tête-à-tête – The Yobs pause for a minute, and then start throwing stones at me. That seems a bit extreme, I think. I start running again.

You don’t have to go to this bother to oppress me! I think, indignantly. I was already pretty subjugated! Honestly – you had me at ‘Pikey’.

Only a few of the stones actually hit me and, obviously, they don’t hurt: this coat has been through a war, possibly two. Pebbles are nothing. It’s built for grenades.

But it’s the thought that counts. All this time spent on me, when they could be engaging in other, more worthwhile pursuits – like abusing solvents, and fingering girls who are actually dressed as girls.

As if reading my mind, after a minute or so The Yobs begin to lose interest in me. It looks like I’m yesterday’s antelope now. I’m still running, but they’re just standing still – throwing the occasional rock in my direction, in an almost leisurely way, until I’m out of range. They don’t stop shouting, however.

‘You bloke!’ the biggest Yob shouts, as a final thought at my departing back. ‘You … bummer!’


I get home, and cry on the doorstep. It’s honestly too crowded to cry in the house. I’ve tried crying in the house before – you explain why you’re crying to one person between the sobs, and then you’re only halfway through before someone else comes in, and needs to hear the story from the top again, and before you know it, you’ve told the worst bit six times, and wound yourself up into such an hysterical state you have hiccups for the rest of the afternoon.

When you live in a small house with five younger siblings, it’s actually far more sensible – and much quicker – to cry alone.

I look at the dog.

If you were a good and faithful hound, you’d drink the tears off my face, I think.

Saffron noisily licks her vagina instead.

Saffron is our new dog – ‘the stupid new dog’. She is also a ‘dodgy dog’ – my dad ‘procured’ her in one of the deals he periodically conducts at the Hollybush pub, which involve us sitting outside in the van for two hours, while he occasionally brings us crisps, or a bottle of Coke. At some point, he’ll suddenly come bowling out at a rapid lick, carrying something incongruous like a bag of gravel or a statue of a concrete fox with no head.

‘It’s gone a bit serious in there,’ he would say, before gunning off at top speed, pissed.

On one occasion, the incongruous thing he came out carrying was Saffron – a one-year-old German Shepherd.

‘Used to be a police dog,’ he said, proudly, putting her in the back of the van with us, where she promptly shat all over everything. Further investigation revealed that, whilst she had been a police dog, it was only a week before the police dog trainers realised she was profoundly psychologically disturbed, and scared of:



1) loud noises

2) the dark

3) all people

4) all other dogs

5) and suffers stress incontinence.


Still, she is my dog and, technically, the only friend I have who isn’t a blood relation.

‘Stay near, old friend!’ I say to her, blowing my nose on my sleeve, and resolving to become cheerful again. ‘Today will be truly notable!’

Having finished crying, I climb over the side fence and let myself in through the back door. Mum is in the kitchen, ‘getting the party ready’.

‘Go into the front room!’ she says. ‘Wait in there! And DON’T LOOK AT THE CAKE! It’s a surprise!’

The front room is packed with my siblings. They have materialised from every nook and cranny in the house. In 1988, there are six of us – there are eight by the time the decade is out. My mother is like some Ford car production line, producing a small, gobby baby every two years, as regular as clockwork, until our house is full to bursting point.

Caz – two years younger than me, ginger, nihilistic – is lying across the sofa. She doesn’t move when I come in. There is nowhere else for me to sit.

‘AHEM!’ I say, pointing at the badge on my lapel. It says, ‘It’s my BIRTHDAY!!!!’ I am forgetting all about crying now. I have moved on.

‘It’ll be over in six hours,’ she says, flatly, immobile. ‘Why don’t we just stop the charade now?’

‘Only six hours of FUN left!’ I say. ‘Six hours of BIRTHDAY FUN. Who KNOWS what could happen! This place is a MAD HOUSE, after all!’

I am, by and large, boundlessly positive. I have all the joyful ebullience of an idiot. My diary entry for yesterday was ‘moved the deep fat fryer onto the other worktop – it looks BRILLIANT!’

My favourite place in the world – the south beach at Aberystwyth – has a sewage outfall pipe on it.

I truly believe the new, stupid dog is our old dog, reincarnated – even though our new dog was born two years before the old dog died.


‘But you can see Sparky’s eyes in there!’ I will say, looking at the stupid new dog. ‘Sparky NEVER LEFT US!’

Rolling her eyes in disdain, Caz gives me her card. It is a picture of me, in which she has drawn my nose so that it takes up approximately three-quarters of my head.

‘Remember: you promised you’d move out on your 18th birthday, so I can have your room,’ it says inside. ‘Only five years to go now! Unless you die before then! Love Caz.’

Weena is nine – her card is also based around me moving out and giving her my bedroom: although she has robots saying it, which makes it less ‘personal’.

Space really is at a premium in our house, as evidenced by the fact I still have nowhere to sit. I am just about to sit on my brother Eddie when Mum comes in, holding a plate of burning candles.

‘Happy Birthday TO YOU!’ everyone sings to me. ‘I went to THE ZOO. I saw a FAT MONKEY – and I THOUGHT IT WAS YOU!’

Mum crouches down to where I am on the floor, and holds the plate out in front of me.

‘Blow them out and make a wish!’ she says, brightly.

‘It’s not a cake,’ I say. ‘It’s a baguette.’

‘Filled with Philadelphia!’ mum says, cheerfully.

‘It’s a baguette,’ I repeat. ‘And there’s only seven candles.’

‘You’re too old for a cake any more,’ Mum says, blowing out the candles herself. ‘And the candles count for two years each!’

‘That would be 14.’

‘Stop being so fussy!’

I eat my birthday baguette. It’s lovely. I love Philadelphia. Lovely Philadelphia! So cool! So creamy!


That night – in the bed I share with my three-year-old sister, Prinnie – I write up my diary.

‘My 13th birthday!!!!’ I write. ‘Porridge for brekkie, sausage and chips for dinner, baguette for tea. Got ￡20 all in all. 4 cards and 2 letters. Get green (teenage) ticket from library tomorrow!!!!! Man next door asked us if we wanted some chairs he was throwing out. We said YES!!!!’

I stare at the entry for a minute. I should put everything in, I think. I can’t leave out the bad stuff.

‘Some boys were shouting rude thinks [sic] in the field,’ I write, slowly. ‘It’s because their willies are getting big.’

I have read enough about puberty to know that burgeoning sexual desires can often make teenage boys act cruelly towards girls.

I also know that, in this case, it really was not suppressed desire that made those boys throw gravel at me while I ran up a hill – but I don’t want my diary to pity me. As far as my diary will know, I had the philosophical upper hand there. This diary is for glory only.

I stare at the entry for my 13th birthday. A moment of unwelcome clarity washes over me. Here I am, I think, sharing my bed with a toddler, and wearing my dad’s old thermal underwear as pyjamas. I am 13 years old, I am 13 stone, I have no money, no friends, and boys throw gravel at me when they see me. It’s my birthday, and I went to bed at 7.15pm.

I turn to the back page of my diary. This is where I have my ‘long-term’ projects. For instance, ‘My Bad Points’.



My Bad Points

1) I eat too much

2) I don’t take any exercise

3) Quick bursts of rage

4) Loseing [sic] everything


‘My Bad Points’ were written down on New Year’s Eve. A month later, I have written my progress report:



1) I no longer eat gingernuts

2) Take dog for a walk every day

3) Trying

4) Trying


Underneath all these, I draw a line, and write my new list.



By The Time I’m 18

1) Loose weight [sic]

2) Have good clothes

3) Have freinds [sic]

4) Train dog properly

5) Ears pierced?


Oh God. I just don’t have a clue. I don’t have a clue how I will ever be a woman.


When Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘One is not born a woman – one becomes one,’ she didn’t know the half of it.

In the 22 years that have passed since my 13th birthday, I have become far more positive about being a woman – indeed to be honest, it all picked up considerably when I got some fake ID, a laptop and a nice blouse – but in many ways, there is no crueller or more inappropriate present to give a child than oestrogen and a big pair of tits. Had anyone asked me in advance of my birthday, I think I would have requested a book token or maybe a voucher for C&A, instead.

At the time, I was – as you can see – far too busy fighting with my siblings, training my dog and watching the classic musicals of MGM to ever have made space in my schedule for becoming a woman until my hand was forced, eventually, by my pituitary gland.

Becoming a woman felt a bit like becoming famous. For, from being benevolently generally ignored – the base-line existence of most children – a teenage girl is suddenly fascinating to others, and gets bombarded with questions: What size are you? Have you done it yet? Will you have sex with me? Have you got ID? Do you want to try a puff of this? Are you seeing anyone? Have you got protection? What’s your signature style? Can you walk in heels? Who are your heroes? Are you getting a Brazilian? What porn do you like? Do you want to get married? When are you going to have kids? Are you a feminist? Were you just flirting with that man? What do you want to do? WHO ARE YOU?

All ridiculous questions to ask of a 13-year-old simply because she now needs a bra. They might as well have been asking my dog. I had absolutely no idea.

But – like a soldier dropped into a war zone – you have to get some ideas, and fast. You need reconnaissance. You have to plan. You have to single out your objectives, and then move. Because once those hormones kick in, there’s no way to stop them. As I rapidly discovered, you are a monkey strapped inside a rocket; an element in a bomb-timer. There isn’t an exit plan. You can’t call the whole thing off – however often you may wish you could. This shit is going to happen, whether you like it or not.

There are those who try to stop it, of course: the teenage girls who try to buy themselves time by aggressively regressing back to their five-year-old selves, and becoming obsessed with ‘girliness’, and pink. Filling their beds with teddies, to make it clear there’s no room for sex. Talking in baby language, so they aren’t asked adult questions. At school, I could see some of my contemporaries were choosing not to be active women – out there, making their own fate – but to be princesses, just waiting to be ‘found’, and married, instead. Although obviously I didn’t analyse it like that at the time. I just noticed Katie Parkes spent every maths lesson drawing hearts on her knuckles in Biro and showing them to David Morley – who, by rights, should have been experiencing his first stirrings of sexual excitement when looking at my exemplary long division instead.

And at the most dysfunctional end, of course, there are the kamikaze girls who wade into war with their pituitary – trying to starve it, or confuse it into defeat, with anorexia, or bulimia.

But the problem with battling yourself is that even if you win, you lose. At some point – scarred, and exhausted – you either accept that you must become a woman – that you are a woman – or you die. This is the brutal, root truth of adolescence – that it is often a long, painful campaign of attrition. Those self-harming girls, with the latticework of razor-cuts on their arms and thighs, are just reminding themselves that their body is a battlefield. If you don’t have the stomach for razors, a tattoo will do; or even just the lightning snap of the earring gun in Claire’s Accessories. There. There you are. You have dropped a marker-pin on your body, to reclaim yourself, to remind you where you are: inside yourself. Somewhere. Somewhere in there.


And – just as with winning the lottery, or becoming famous – there is no manual for becoming a woman, even though the stakes are so high. God knows, when I was 13, I tried to find one. You can read about other people’s experiences on the matter – by way of trying to crib, in advance, for an exam – but I found that this is, in itself, problematic. For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who – against all the odds – got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled or ruined, because all around them, society was still wrong. Show a girl a pioneering hero – Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc – and you also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed. Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful or – most crucially of all, for a teenage girl – simply uncool. Few girls would choose to be right – right, down into their clever, brilliant bones – but lonely.

So whilst How To Be a Woman is the story of all the times that I – uninformed, underprepared, fatally deluded as to my ability to ‘style out’ a poncho – got being a woman wrong, in the 21st century, merely recounting experience doesn’t seem to be enough any more. Yes, an old-fashioned feminist ‘consciousness raising’ still has enormous value. When the subject turns to abortion, cosmetic intervention, birth, motherhood, sex, love, work, misogyny, fear, or just how you feel in your own skin, women still won’t often tell the truth to each other unless they are very, very drunk. Perhaps the endlessly reported rise in female binge-drinking is simply modern women’s attempt to communicate with each other. Or maybe it is because Sancerre is so very delicious. To be honest, I’ll take bets on either.

However, whilst chipping in your six penn’orth on what it’s actually like – rather than what we pretend it’s like – to be a woman is vital, we still also need a bit of analysis-y, argument-y, ‘this needs to change-y’ stuff. You know. Feminism.

And this is where the second problem arises. Feminism, you would think, would cover all this. But feminism, as it stands, well … stands. It has ground to a halt. Again and again over the last few years, I turned to modern feminism to answer questions that I had but found that what had once been the one most exciting, incendiary and effective revolution of all time had somehow shrunk down into a couple of increasingly small arguments, carried out among a couple of dozen feminist academics, in books that only feminist academics would read, and discussed at 11pm on BBC4. Here’s my beef with this:



1) Feminism is too important to only be discussed by academics. And, more pertinently:

2) I’m not a feminist academic, but, by God, feminism is so serious, momentous and urgent, that now is really the time for it to be championed by a lighthearted broadsheet columnist and part-time TV critic, who has appalling spelling. If something’s thrilling and fun, I want to join in – not watch from the sidelines. I have stuff to say! Camille Paglia has Lady Gaga ALL WRONG! The feminist organisation Object are nuts when it comes to pornography! Germaine Greer, my heroine, is crackers on the subject of transgender issues! And no one is tackling OK! magazine, ￡600 handbags, tiny pants, Brazilians, stupid hen nights or Katie Price.


And they have to be tackled. They have to be tackled, rugby-style, face down in the mud, with lots of shouting.

Traditional feminism would tell you that these are not the important issues: that we should concentrate on the big stuff like pay inequality, female circumcision in the Third World, and domestic abuse. And they are, obviously, pressing and disgusting and wrong, and the world cannot look itself squarely in the eye until they’re stopped.

But all those littler, stupider, more obvious day-to-day problems with being a woman are, in many ways, just as deleterious to women’s peace of mind. It is the ‘Broken Windows’ philosophy, transferred to female inequality. In the ‘Broken Windows’ theory, if a single broken window on an empty building is ignored, and not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may break into the building, and light fires, or become squatters.

Similarly, if we live in a climate where female pubic hair is considered distasteful, or famous and powerful women are constantly pilloried for being too fat or too thin, or badly dressed, then, eventually, people start breaking into women, and lighting fires in them. Women will get squatters. Clearly, this is not a welcome state of affairs. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wake up one morning and find a load of chancers in my lobby.

When Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York in 1993, his belief in the ‘Broken Windows’ theory led him to implement the ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy. Crime dropped dramatically, significantly, and continued to for the next ten years.

Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives – I want a Zero Tolerance policy on ‘All The Patriarchal Bullshit’. And the great thing about a Zero Tolerance policy on Patriarchal Broken Windows Bullshit is this: in the 21st century, we don’t need to march against size zero models, risible pornography, lap-dancing clubs and Botox. We don’t need to riot, or go on hunger strike. There’s no need to throw ourselves under a horse, or even a donkey. We just need to look it in the eye, squarely, for a minute, and then start laughing at it. We look hot when we laugh. People fancy us when they observe us giving out relaxed, earthy chuckles.

Perhaps they don’t fancy us quite as much when we go on to bang on the tables with our fists, gurgling, ‘HARGH! HARGH! Yes, that IS what it’s like! SCREW YOU, the patriarchy!’ before choking on a mouthful of crisps, but still.

I don’t know if we can talk about ‘waves’ of feminism any more – by my reckoning, the next wave would be the fifth, and I suspect it’s around the fifth wave that you stop referring to individual waves, and start to refer, simply, to an incoming tide.

But if there is to be a fifth wave of feminism, I would hope that the main thing that distinguishes it from all that came before is that women counter the awkwardness, disconnect and bullshit of being a modern woman not by shouting at it, internalising it or squabbling about it – but by simply pointing at it, and going ‘HA!’, instead.

So yes. If there is a fifth wave, then this is my contribution. My bucketful. A fairly comprehensive telling of every instance that I had little, or in many cases, no idea … of how to be a woman.