How To Be A Woman

Chapter 16




Intervention




I am now 35, stacking up decades as casually as I stacked up weeks, as a child. I’m stronger-minded, and more flexible in my emotions but these gains seem to have been made at the expense of my skin, which has taken on the slightly brittle qualities of taffeta. Perhaps the collagen is absorbed from skin into the heart, I think, dragging my finger over my arm, and watching, fascinated, how the skin herringbones behind it. I palm Cocoa Butter into the pleats, and they disappear. Hours later, they’re back again.

My skin is starting to be … needy.

It’s not the only part of my body that’s registering change. Hangovers now take on slightly ominous, depressive qualities. The awkward quarter-turn on the staircase makes my knee ache. My breasts start to need the underwiring equivalent of bodyguards – I must have my security around me at all times. I’m miles away from exhausted, and not even tired, but I don’t feel I could spontaneously dance at any point, which I often felt before.


I’m just a little bit more interested in sitting down than I was before.

The first big reminder-notes about mortality start to arrive. People’s parents start to ail. People’s parents start to die. There are funerals, and memorials, at which I say comforting things to my friends – whilst secretly comforting myself that death is still a generation away. A suicide, a stroke, cancer, these are all still happening to the grown-ups above me. They do not encroach on my generation, just yet.

But I watch the older mourners at the graveside, in the church, in the crematorium that looks oddly like a municipal sauna, by way of instruction on a future event. Soon it will be me, dealing with these awful goodbyes.

Soon I, too, will look down at my hands, and realise they are the hands of my Nanna, and that the ring that went on shiny, all those years ago, has – without me doing anything about it – become an antique. I have finished being truly young. There will be a holding period, a decade or so of stasis, and then the next thing that will happen is I will start to be old. That is what is happening next.


A month later and I am at an awards ceremony, in London.

This is where the great and the good of the media industry gather, for an evening of celebration, before going back to the grind of being great and good again.

The pavement outside has a semi-circle of photographers, lighting up the doorway with their epilepsy flashes. Trying to get through that doorway when you are not someone they want to photograph is a complex and embarrassing experience: it is vital that you must walk towards it with a casual, humble-yet-busy gait – exuding the vibe, I am not a Famous. Stand down your weapons. You may safely ignore me.

Should you misjudge your gait, and walk too confidently, you will suffer the terrible indignity of thirty photographers half-raising their cameras as you approach them only to lower them again, disappointedly, when they realise you’re not Sadie Frost. Sometimes, they even shout at you.

‘F*cking timewaster,’ one yelled, once, when I rocked up in a fake-fur coat that accidentally looked too real. I have learned since – a nice duffel-coat is better. Paps never bother looking at someone in a duffel. A duffel is safe.

Inside, and I’d never been in a room with so many eminent people before. Their power exuded a low hum, like a BMW engine, a hum muffled further by the good quality of their clothes. The cloth was thick, and well-cut. The coats were Prada, Armani, Dior. Calfskin leather from the bags and shoes; hand creams in vetiver and rose petal. The whole room smells wealthy. It embodied quiet, unshakeable, English privilege. I had expected all of that.

But what I hadn’t expected was the faces – the women’s faces. The men’s faces are just as you would expect – famous and non-famous alike, the men just look, like, well, men. Men in their forties and fifties and sixties. Well-to-do, well-cared-for, largely untroubled men. Men who holiday in reliably sunny places, and liked gin.

But the women: oh, the women all look the same.

The few women in their twenties and early thirties were exempt. They look normal. But as soon as the ages creep to 35, 36, 37, the first aspects of homogeneity starts to appear. Lips that haven’t worn down in quite the way one would expect – lips that appear to puff upwards and outwards, illogically, in Elvis pouts. Tight, shiny foreheads. Something indefinably – but definitely – wrong around the cheeks, and jaw. Eyes pinned wide open – as if they were in Harley Street, and have just been given the final bill for it all.

There is an air that the Eastern European maid had washed and ironed their dress, coat and face, all in one go. That in the laundry room, at 11pm at night, these women’s faces have hung from rosewood coat hangers, spritzed with verbena linen spray, sleeping.

As I look across the room, it reminds me of that scene in The Magician’s Nephew, where Polly and Digory find a banqueting hall, where an entire court – dozens of kings and queens, all crowned – sit around a long table, frozen in stone, by magic.

As the children walk down the table, the faces gradually change – from ‘kind, merry, friendly’ expressions at one end, through a middle section of anxiety, unease and shiftiness, and ending, at the extreme right, in people whose faces are ‘the fiercest – beautiful, but cruel’.

And this is what the women look like. Except they don’t seem cruel, or cold, or calculating.

As you progress through the decades – from the jolly, untroubled gals in their twenties, towards the grande dames in their forties, fifties and sixties – the women in the room just look more and more scared. To be as privileged and safe as they are – but to still go through such painful, expensive procedures – gives the impression of a room full of fear. Female fear. Adrenalin that had taken them all the way to a surgeon, and a ward full of bandaged faces.

I don’t know what exactly they were scared of – their husbands leaving them, the younger women in the room superseding them, the cameras outside the room judging them, or just the quiet, tired disappointment of the bathroom mirror in the morning – but they all looked unnerved. They’d spent thousands and thousands of pounds to look, literally and figuratively, petrified.

So that was the day I finally knew, knew inside my bones, that surgery wasn’t the sane or happy thing to do. I stared at the results and they looked both unhealthy and unholy. Because not only do all these women look like they’d done something very extreme and obvious out of fear, but their husbands and partners and brothers and sons and male friends seemed oddly oblivious to the whole thing. They haven’t had this stuff done. They stand right next to them, live alongside them, but clearly in a wholly different world. Something ails – deeply ails – these women, something that their men have brushed off like bugs. As I have said, in the same way that you can tell if some sexism is happening to you by asking the question ‘Is this polite, or not?’, you can tell whether some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring, ‘And are the men doing this, as well?’

If they aren’t, chances are you’re dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as ‘some total f*cking bullshit’.

Because the real problem here is that we’re all dying. All of us. Every day the cells weaken and the fibres stretch and the heart gets closer to its last beat. The real cost of living is dying, and we’re spending days like millionaires: a week here, a month there, casually spunked until all you have left are the two pennies on your eyes.

Personally, I like the fact we’re going to die. There’s nothing more exhilarating than waking up every morning and going ‘WOW! THIS IS IT! THIS IS REALLY IT!’ It focuses the mind wonderfully. It makes you love vividly, work intensely, and realise that, in the scheme of things, you really don’t have time to sit on the sofa in your pants watching Homes Under the Hammer.

Death is not a release, but an incentive. The more focused you are on your death, the more righteously you live your life. My traditional closing-time rant – after the one where I cry that they closed that amazing chippy on Tollington Road; the one that did the pickled eggs – is that humans still believe in an afterlife. I genuinely think it’s the biggest philosophical problem the earth faces. Even avowedly non-religious people think they’ll be meeting up with nana and their dead dog, Crackers, when they finally keel over. Everyone thinks they’re getting a harp.


But believing in an afterlife totally negates your current existence. It’s like an insidious and destabilising mental illness. Underneath every day – every action, every word – you think it doesn’t really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise. You make it up with your parents, and become a better person and lose that final stone in heaven. And learn how to speak French. You’ll have time, after all! It’s eternity! And you’ll have wings, and it’ll be sunny! So, really, who cares what you do now? This is really just some lacklustre waiting room you’re only going to be in for 20 minutes, during which you will have no wings at all, and are forced to walk around, on your feet, like pigs do.

If we wonder why people are so apathetic and casual about every eminently avoidable horror in the world – famine, war, disease, the seas gradually turning piss-yellow and filling with ringpulls and shattered fax machines – it’s right there. Heaven. The biggest waste of our time we ever invented, outside of jigsaws.

Only when the majority of the people on this planet believe – absolutely – that they are dying, minute by minute, will we actually start behaving like fully sentient, rational and compassionate beings. For whilst the appeal of ‘being good’ is strong, the terror of hurtling, unstoppably, into unending nullity is a lot more effective. I’m really holding out for us all to get The Fear. The Fear is my Second Coming. When everyone in the world admits they’re going to die, we’ll really start getting some stuff done.



*

So. Yes. We’re all dying. We’re all crumbling into the void, one cell at a time. We are disintegrating like sugar cubes in champagne. But only women have to pretend it isn’t happening. Fifty-something men wander around with their guts flopped over their waistbands and their faces looking like a busted tramp’s mattress in an underpass. They sprout nasal hair and chasm-like wrinkles, and go ‘Ooof!’ whenever they stand up or sit down. Men visibly age, every day – but women are supposed to stop the decline at around 37, 38, and live out the next 30 or 40 years in some magical bubble where their hair is still shiny and chestnut, their face unlined, their lips puffy, and their tits up on the top third of the ribcage. Sorry to mention this again – we strident feminists do go on about this – but Moira Stuart and Anna Ford got fired when they hit 55, whilst 73-year-old Jonathan Dimbleby slowly turns into a f*cking wizard behind his desk. As Mariella Frostrup said, ‘The BBC make finding older newsreaders seem like the Holy Grail. But all they have to do is look through the list of people they’ve sacked.’

Why the chicks? Why can’t we just loosen our belts, take off our heels and cheerfully rot, like the boys?

My Subconscious Conspiracy Theory about age denial is that women are, as I’ve said, generally, deemed to start going ‘off the boil’ in their mid-thirties. This is the age fertility declines, and the Botox and the fillers start to kick in. This is when women go into their savings account and start spending all their pension to remove these signs, and pretend they’re 30 again.

Given this, my Subconscious Conspiracy Theory would like to point out that your mid-thirties – by way of a massive coincidence – is the age that women usually start to feel confident.

Having finally left behind the – let’s be frank – awfulness of your twenties (You had sex with Steve. Steve! ‘Beaver-face’ Steve! You had that job where you were so bored, you hid in a cupboard and ate small pieces of paper! THERE WAS THE SUMMER OF CULOTTES), your thirties are the point where the good stuff finally kicks in.

You’re probably doing pretty well at your job by now. You’ve got at least four nice dresses. You’ve been to Paris and experimented with anal sex and know how to repressurise your boiler and can quote bits of The Wasteland when you’re making Whisky Macs.

How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, grey hairs) that you’ve entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to … totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you.

I don’t want that. I want a face full of frown lines and weariness and cream-coloured teeth that, frankly, tells stupid and venal people to F*ck OFF. I want a face that drawls – possibly in the voice of James Cagney, although Cagney from Cagney & Lacey will do – ‘I’ve seen more recalcitrant toddlers/devious line managers/steep mountain passes/complicated dance routines on Parappa the Rapper/big sums than you’ll ever see in your life, sunshine. So get out of my special chair, and bring me a cheese sandwich.’

Lines and greyness are nature’s way of telling you not to f*ck with someone – the equivalent of the yellow and black banding on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider. Lines are your weapons against idiots. Lines are your ‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN’ sign.

When I get ‘old’ (59 – I reckon 59 is old) I personally intend to bomb around town with white hair fully two foot wide, looking like one of the Wild Women of Wonga, SHOUTING about how I can feel my cells dying, and ordering doubles to help me forget it. I’m not going to spend ￡50,000 on dying my hair, pumping up my tits, resurfacing my face and pretending I’m a dewy virgin shepherdess, off to seek my first tumble at the bridal fair.

Because there is an unspoken announcement commensurate with that look. Women who’ve had the needle, or the knife, look like they’re saying: ‘My friends are not my friends, my men are unreliable and faint hearted, my lifetime’s work counts for nothing, I am 59 and empty-handed. I’m still as defenceless as the day I was born. PLUS, I’ve now spunked all my yacht money on my arse. By any sane index, I have failed at my life.’


But what of the aesthetics? Whilst it’s shooting frozen fish in a barrel to dismiss the women who’ve spent ￡30,000 on bad procedures, and who now look like astronauts experiencing g-force in a wind tunnel, there are some women – celebrities we can’t name, because they sue, BUT WE ALL KNOW WHO THEY ARE, who’ve had the really expensive, subtle kind of interventions. They just look kind of … young, and fresh, and sparkly. Amazing. Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of amazing. Surely the subtle interventions are OK? You’re not trying to look 27 again. You’re just trying to look like an amaaaaaaazing 52. In some ways, to advance a moral case against plastic surgery seems surreally nebulous. After all, we seem to have stopped having discussions about the morality of arms-dealing years ago – and that’s about killing people, in some cases quite severely. Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is about slightly dumpy women wanting to have their noses look like Reese Witherspoon’s – something that most of us, I’m sure, would agree is not quite in the same league as blowing a Somali orphan’s leg off.

But the thing is, they’re not subtle. We’re still noticing it. We’re all commenting on the ‘good’ intervention, just as much as we would if it were ‘bad’. We still observe that Time appears to have suddenly swerved off to the right when it approached them, and left their faces unmarked. We still notice the 30-something cleavage on top of the 50-something heart. Even though it looks natural, we know – we know, because we can see the date on the calendar, and our own faces – that it is unreal. That it is in denial of the fact we are dying. An unsettling, fundamental re-routing of perception. That only – only – only women are having to conspire in. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘SUBTLY’ LOOKING DRAMATICALLY AND ILLOGICALLY MUCH, MUCH BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE.


Sigh. Look: I love artifice and fantasy and escapism as much as the next person – I love drag and make-up and reinvention and wigs and make-believe and inventing yourself from the floor up, as many times as you need to. Every day, if you want. At the very end of all this arguing, women should be allowed to look how they damn well please. The patriarchy can get OFF my face and tits. In an ideal world, no one would ever criticise women for how they look – whatever it is. Even if that look is ‘I have a bulldog clip under my hair pulling my face this tight’. A woman’s face is her castle.

But this is all under the provision that how women look should be fun, and joyful, and creative, and say something amazing about us as human beings. Even though a five-foot-eight drag queen – tottering through Birmingham city centre at 4am, in pinchy-winchy shoes and inch-thick lippy – will have suffered pain, and spent a great deal of money, and is in TOTAL denial of reality (i.e. that they have a penis), they haven’t done all that out of fear. On the contrary, the bravery involved is off the scale.

But women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the world, does not say something amazing about us as human beings.

Oh, it makes women look like we were made to do it, by big boys. It makes us look like losers. It makes us look like cowards. And that’s the last thing we are.

That’s the very, very last thing women are.





POSTSCRIPT





London, October 2010

So do I know how to be a woman now? The pat, self-deprecating thing would be to say, ‘No. No, I still don’t have a clue! I’m just still the same schlumpy, well-meaning idiot I was at 13. I’m still just a chimp in a frock with a laptop, setting fire to saucepans, falling down staircases, saying the wrong thing and feeling like an insecure child inside. I’m a buffoon! A div! A numnut!’

Because, of course, there are still ways in which I don’t know how to be a woman yet. I’ve not had to deal with teenage children, or family bereavement, or the menopause, or losing my job. I still can’t iron, do maths, drive a car or – and I must be frank here – 100 per cent reliably remember which is ‘left’ and which is ‘right’ in an emergency. I am responsible, when navigating, for a lot of screeching U-turns and swearing. There’s still a million things I have left to learn. A billion. A trillion. In terms of how much better I potentially could be, I’ve barely even been born yet. I’m still an egg.

But then, on the other hand, I distrust this female habit of reflexively flagging up your own shortcomings. Not the breezy, airy witticism in the face of a compliment – ‘Lost weight? No. We’re just in a larger room than usual, darling.’ ‘You think my children are well mannered? I have wired them with small electrodes, and every time they misbehave, I punch the “Bad Kid” button in my pocket.’ That’s fine.

No – I’m talking about the common attitudinal habit in women that we’re kind of … failing if we’re not a bit neurotic. That we’re somehow boorish, complacent and unfeminine if we’re content.

The way women feel that they are not so much well-meaning human beings doing the best that they can but, instead, an endless list of problems (fat, hairy, unfashionable, spotty, smelly, tired, unsexy, and with a dodgy pelvic floor, to boot) to be solved. And that, with the application of a great deal of time and money – I mean, a great deal of time and money. Have you seen how much laser hair removal is? – we might, one day, 20 years into the future, finally be able to put our feet up and say, ‘For nine minutes today, I almost nailed it!’

Before, of course, starting up the whole grim, remorseless, thankless schedule again, the next day, all over again.

So if I was asked, ‘Do you know how to be a woman now?’, my answer would be, ‘Kind of yes, really, to be honest.’

Because if all the stories in this book add up to one single revelation, it is this: to just … not really give a shit about all that stuff. To not care about all those supposed ‘problems’ of being a woman. To refuse to see them as problems at all. Yes – when I had my massive feminist awakening, the action it provoked in me was a … big shrug.

As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things … happened. Some kind of souped-up princess, with a credit card. I didn’t have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning big life lessons, or, most importantly, finding out what I was good at, and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do at some point, and that I shouldn’t really worry about them. I didn’t worry about what I was going to do.

What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things. I thought my big tasks were discovering my ‘Love Style’ via questionnaires in Cosmopolitan, assembling a capsule wardrobe, learning how to go from day to night with the application of heels and lipstick, finding a signature perfume, planning when to have a baby, and learning how to be mesmerically sexually proficient – but without getting a reputation as a total slag. Whilst, at the same time, somehow losing a whole load of character traits that would blow my whole ‘pretending to be a proper woman’ cover – talking too fast, falling over, arguing, emitting smells, getting angry, being quite excited about the idea of a revolution, and wanting to be a guest star on The Muppet Show, in a plot where Gonzo fell in love with me. Even though they’d stopped making The Muppet Show seven years previously.

I presumed that once I’d cracked being thin, beautiful, stylishly dressed, poised and gracious, everything else would fall into place. That my real life’s work was not a career – but myself. That if I worked on being pleasing, the world would adore, and then reward me.

Of course, this supposition that women are supposed to just ‘be’, while men go out and ‘do’, have been argued as inimically sex-tied traits. Men go out and do things – wage wars, discover new countries, conquer space, tour Use Your Illusion I and II – whilst the women inspire them to greater things, then discuss afterwards, at length, what’s happened: like Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell over a bottle of milk stout.

But I don’t know if I believe ‘being’ is an innately female thing to do – that that’s just how we’re wired. Going back to my previous argument – about so many suppositions about ‘femaleness’ actually coming down to us having been ‘losers’ for so long – I would suggest that when you’ve spent millennia not being allowed to do anything, you do tend to become more focused on being self-critical, analytical and reflective because there’s nothing else you can do, really, other than a) look hot and b) turn inward.

Would Jane Austen’s characters have spent pages and pages discussing all the relationships in their social circle if they’d been a bit more in control of their own destinies? Would women fret themselves half to death over how they look, and who fancies them, if this wasn’t the main thing they were still judged on? Would we give so much of a shit about our thighs if we, as a sex, owned the majority of the world’s wealth, instead of the men?


When I think of everything about womanhood that hamstrung me with fear when I was 13, it all came down, really, to princesses. I didn’t think I had to work hard to be a woman – which is scary, but, obviously, eventually achievable. I thought I had to somehow, magically, through super-human psychic effort, transform into a princess, instead. That’s how I’d get fallen in love with. That’s how I’d get along. That’s how the world would welcome me. The books; the Disney films; the most famous woman in the world being, when I was a child, Princess Diana: whilst there were other role models around, the sheer onslaught of princessalia every girl is subject to wedges its way into the heart, in a quietly pernicious way.

In the last decade, the post-feminist reaction to princesses has been the creation of ‘alternative’ princesses: the spunky chicks in Shrek and the newer Disney films, who wear trousers, do kung-fu, and save the prince. Possibly as a reaction to the life, and then death, of Diana, princesses have had to be reconfigured to acknowledge that we all now know that being a real princess isn’t all about wafting around in a castle, being beautiful and noble. It’s about eating disorders, loneliness, Wham! mix-tapes, shagging around, waging a pitched battle with the royal family, and, eventually, the incredible fascination that you hold over others conspiring to kill you.

It’s interesting to note that, since the death of Diana, women have generally lost interest in the idea of actually being a real princess. Princesses have forfeited a great deal of their currency. When Prince Charles was of marriageable age, he was the subject of worldwide perving from the ladyfolk: treated as a cross between James Bond and Prince Charming. And when Diana married him, women across the world sighed over the dress, the ring, the diamonds, and the dreamlike life she was marrying into.

When Prince William announced his marriage to Kate Middleton, on the other hand, womenfolk were united in their sentiments: ‘Poor cow. Jesus Christ, does she know what she’s let herself in for? A lifetime of scrutiny, bitching, pap-shots of her thighs, and speculation on her state of mind. Rather you than me, darling.’

No – the dream now for women still set on ‘being’, rather than ‘doing’, is to become a WAG, instead. Marry a footballer, and you get a princess’s wealth, glamour and privilege – plus the same, implicit acceptance that your powerful husband is going to cheat on you, and that you just have to accept that – but without the expectation that you also have to be demure, upstanding and good at a banquet. The WAG is the 21st-century princess.

But whether it’s a WAG in Dolce & Gabbana at Mahiki, or Ariel in her fish-tail under the sea, the tropes of ‘princess women’ are still the same. The residual hold they have over female ability to imagine our own future is sneakily harmful.

What is it about the princess that is so wrong? Well, I know that – from personal experience – the thing that has given me the most relief and freedom in my adult years has been, finally, once and for all giving up on the idea that I might secretly be, or will one day become, a princess. Accepting you’re just some perfectly ordinary woman who is going to have to crack on, work hard and be polite in order to get anything done is – once you’ve got over the crippling disappointment of your thundering ordinariness – incredibly liberating.

Let me list my aspects of non-princessiness – acknowledgement of each gained with terrible initial sadness and loss.



1) I can’t sing. Admitting that to myself was a massive sorrow – all princesses sing. All women are supposed to be able to sing. They can calm the birds in the trees as soon as they start trilling. By way of contrast, I sound like the noise gigantic 16-wheeler trucks make, just before they smash into a police roadblock. HONK HONK. SCREEEECH. ‘Oh my God – no one will come out of that alive.’

2) I don’t taste sweet – like cake, or honey. I can’t tell you the amount of filthy books I’ve read that led me to believe that, when a man went down on you, he was basically lapping away on a Sherbet Dip Dab. The first time someone commented – positively, mind – that I tasted like ‘a lovely pie’, I cried hysterically for two hours afterwards. What kind of stompy, sweaty, beefy item was I? It was supposed to be like tiramisu down there … some kind of sweet, milky paradise; junket pudding. Not some hearty peasant main course. A hog roast. But we are, of course, sweaty, fleshy lady-animals – all fur and umami. Of course we don’t taste like a Bird’s Strawberry Trifle – like a princess would.

3) I’m not going to be worshipped by some powerful, loaded, sword-wielding man, who will change my life if I marry him. Because that is Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and he doesn’t exist. I don’t want some alpha-y patriarchal brute – some confident man of action, who will treat me like ‘his woman’. When P. J. O’Rourke said, ‘No woman ever dreamed of being thrown on a bed and ravished by someone dressed as a liberal,’ I wished to cry, ‘Speak for yourself, dear! You are scarcely qualified to judge. When were you last in All Bar One in your Spanx, eyeing up the ass?’ In the modern world, this old-fashioned notion of what makes men desirable to women is useless and outdated: as evidenced by the fact that it’s usually only people over the age of 40 who ever go on about it. For most people under that age, they see that this is a time where what really makes a man ‘alpha’ is avoiding pugilism (the legal system is a drag, plus expensive), being amusing (we’re sitting on top of 50 years’ worth of amazing sitcoms. If you haven’t picked up a couple of techniques for cracking a joke by now, you look a trifle slow-witted), and, as a bonus, knowing how to reinstall Adobe AIR when Twitter goes down on your laptop. Speaking for all my lady friends, we all want some geeky, nerdy, polite and ridiculous mate who we can sit at home with, slagging off all the tossers, and waiting for our baked potatoes to be ready. Who, obviously, is additionally so hot for us he regularly crawls across the front room on his hands and knees, croaking, ‘I must have sex with you now, or go literally insane.’ Compared to that, Prince Charming looks like a total donk.

4) Princesses never run in gangs. They never have any mates. There’s no palling around. Princesses never spend the day wandering round the Natural History Museum with their sisters, arguing about their favourite mineral or stone (mine is the piece of peridot that landed here in a meteor. Weena’s is feldspar: ‘It’s sensual’). Princesses never sit outside a pub with a couple of princes on a crisp autumn afternoon, putting their favourite Beatles vocal performances into order of preference. Princesses never go away with a couple of other families on holiday, get a bit wankered, and end up doing ‘The Nudey Run’ around a tree on the lawn, as their children watch – disapprovingly – from an upstairs window. Princesses don’t enliven a dull day in the office by playing the game ‘I Am Burt Reynolds’. (A person is chosen to be ‘it’. They must think of a celebrity. All the other players must take it in turns to ask as many questions as possible in order to guess the identity of the celebrity, until – finally – someone asks, ‘Is it Burt Reynolds?’ It is always Burt Reynolds. This game can be played for hours.)


Anyway, by 16, I had a new idea. I didn’t want to be a princess. Princes were dull. I was all about the artists, instead. They were the guys to be hanging with. I wanted to be a muse. I wanted to be a muse quite badly. To be so incredible that some band wrote a song about me, or some writer based a character on me, or a painter produced canvas after canvas of me, in every mood, that hung in galleries across the world. Or even a handbag. Jane Birkin inspired a handbag. By way of contrast I would happily have settled for my name on a plastic Superdrug bag.


It’s not like I was the first ambitious girl to think this was how to make my way in the world. In an interview in Please Kill Me. Patti Smith – by all accounts a feminist goddess – recounted how, when she was growing up in New Jersey, ‘the coolest thing in the world was to become the mistress of a great artist. The first thing I did on leaving home was to [move to New York and] become [legendary photographer] Robert Mapplethorpe’s lover.’

Of course, in the end, when Mapplethorpe turned out to be very gay, Smith was left with no other option than to go off and write Horses, and grow the world’s most influential lady moustache, instead. Her hand was forced into productivity.

Inspired by Smith, when I started attending after-show parties, drunk, I would stand around – trying to look so potent with mystery that someone would be compelled to write a song about how cool I was. Like a lady Fonz, but sexy. And when that plan abjectly failed, and there were no songs about me, and I got a little drunker, I just took a more direct root: tipsily berating friends in bands to immortalise me in a song.

‘It doesn’t have to be a big single,’ I would say, reasonably, fag in my mouth the wrong way round. ‘I’m not that demanding. It could be the first track on the album, instead. Or the final, anthemic one, I suppose. The one that builds to an affirmative chorus about how nothing’s going to be the same, now that you know me. Come on – how long would it take – five minutes? Write a song about me. WRITE A SONG ABOUT ME. BE INSPIRED BY ME, YOU F*ck!’

It wasn’t purely out of egotism. ‘It would be good for womankind as a whole if you wrote a song about someone like me,’ I would explain, nobly, as they quietly ordered a cab on their mobile. ‘All the songs about girls are about some boring model that Eric Clapton knew, or some groupie with an “inner sadness”. Don’t you think women would be happier if Layla had a whole chorus about Eric Clapton watching Patti Boyd trying to climb over a park fence, pissed, in order to retrieve a shoe she threw in there, for a bet? You’d be breaking new ground, man – muse-wise, it would be as revolutionary as the sonic introduction of the electric guitar! WRITE A SONG ABOUT A GOBBY BIRD! WRITE A SONG ABOUT MEEEEEEEE, YOU F*ck!’

As the years went on – and my friends kept persistently not writing novels, or West End musicals, about me – I gradually realised that I’m just not the muse type. Girls like me don’t inspire people.

I’m just not muse material, I finally thought to myself, sadly, on my 18th birthday – looking at a world wholly non-inspired by me. ‘I’m not a princess. I’m not a muse. If I’m going to change the world, it’s not going to be by endorsing a landmine charity in a tiara, or inspiring the next Revolver. Just “being” me isn’t enough. I’m going to have to do something, instead.’


And in the 21st century, being a woman who wants to do something is not hard. At any other point in time, Western women agitating for change would be at risk of imprisonment, social ostracisation, rape and death. Now, however, women in the Western world can bring about pretty much whatever change we want by writing a series of slightly arsey letters, whilst listening to Radio 4 and drinking a cup of tea.

Whatever it is we want the future to be like, no one’s going to have to die for it. Whilst we may still essentially be crying ‘Up the purple, white and green!’, we can now put together an outfit in whichever colours we choose, should purple, white and green look ‘clashy’. We do not have to throw ourselves under that horse.

Simply being honest about who we really are is half the battle. If what you read in magazines and papers makes you feel uneasy or shitty – don’t buy them! If you’re vexed by corporate entertaining taking place in titty-bars – shame your colleagues! If you feel oppressed by the idea of an expensive wedding – ignore your mother-in-law, and run away to a registry office! And if you think a ￡600 handbag is obscene, instead of bravely saying, ‘I’ll just have to max my credit card,’ quietly say, ‘Actually, I can’t afford it.’

There’s so much stuff – in every respect – that we can’t afford and yet we sighingly resign ourselves to, in order to join in, and feel ‘normal’. But, of course, if everyone is, somehow, too anxious to say what their real situation is, then there is a new, communal, median experience which is being kept secret by everyone being too embarrassed to say, ‘Don’t think I’m a freak, but …’


Anyway, it’s not like this is all just about, and for, the ladies. If women’s liberation truly comes to pass – as the slow, unstoppable gravity of social and economic change suggests it must – then it’s going to work out pretty peachy for the men, too. If I were the patriarchy I would, frankly, be thrilled at the idea of women finally getting an equal crack of the whip. Let’s face it – the patriarchy must be knackered by now. It’s been 100,000 years without even so much as a tea break: men have been flat out ruling the world. They have been balls to the wall.

Faced, then, with the option of some manner of flexitime – women ruling the world half the time – the patriarchy could finally take its foot off the gas a bit; go on that orienteering holiday it’s been talking about for years; really sort the shed out, once and for all. The patriarchy could get stuck into some hardcore paint-balling weekends.

Because it’s not as if strident feminists want to take over from men. We’re not arguing for the whole world. Just our share. The men don’t really have to change a thing. As far as I’m concerned, men can just carry on doing pretty much whatever they like. They don’t really need to stop at all. Loads of stuff they’re doing – iPads, and the Arctic Monkeys, that new nuclear arms deal between America and Russia – is cool. And they’re funny, and I am friends with lots of them, and they’re good for having sex with, and they look great in reproduction World War 2 uniforms, or reversing into tight parking spaces.

I don’t want men to go away. I don’t want men to stop what they’re doing.

What I want, instead, are some radical market forces. I want CHOICE. I want VARIETY. I want MORE. I want WOMEN. I want women to have more of the world, not just because it would be fairer, but because it would be better. More exciting. Reordered. Reinvented. We should have the lady-balls to say, ‘Yeah – I like the look of this world. And I’ve been here for a good while, watching. Now – here’s how I’d tweak it. Because we’re all in this together. We’re all just, you know. The Guys.’


So, in the end, I suppose the title of the book is a bit of a misnomer. All through those stumbling, mortifying, amazing years, I thought that what I wanted to be was a woman. To be some incredible amalgam of Germaine Greer, Elizabeth Taylor, E. Nesbit, Courtney Love, Jilly Cooper and Lady Gaga. Finding some way of mastering all the arcane arts of being female, until I was some witchery paragon of all the things that confused and defeated me at the outset, in my bed, in Wolverhampton, at the age of 13. A princess. A goddess. A muse.

But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human. One of ‘The Guys’. But with really amazing hair.






www.how-tobeawoman.com





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS





When I had my first ever meeting with my agent, Georgia Garrett, and she asked me what I wanted to do, I found myself saying, ‘I want to write a book about feminism! A funny, but polemic, book about feminism! Like The Female Eunuch – but with jokes about my knickers!’

It was as much a surprise to me as it was to her – I’d gone in to pitch her some ‘Eat, Pray, LOLcatz’ stocking-filler, and/or my long-term project: a gay re-working of Oliver! But her immediate, ‘I get it! Write this book! Now!’ enthusiasm – coupled with the fact I figured that writing a book meant I had a legitimate reason to take up smoking again – meant I ended up writing How To Be a Woman in an urgent, five-month blur. Man, I smoked a lot. By the end, my lungs felt like two socks full of black sand. But all the way through, she was the main cheerleader and rant-inspirer, and I thank her from the bottom of my tobacco-trashed heart.

My brilliant editor, Jake Lingwood – and all at Ebury – were similarly ‘Wooo!’ about the whole thing – even at the stage where I was campaigning for the front cover to be my naked belly flopped out on a table, with ‘This is what a REAL woman’s stomach looks like’ written underneath in angry, red capital letters. Thank you, dudes. Particularly for the money. I spent it on a new cooker and a handbag. Yeah! Feminism! Woo!

Thank you to Nicola Jeal, Louise France, Emma Tucker, Phoebe Greenwood and Alex O’Connell at The Times, who displayed hot, sexy patience over a summer where I kept ringing up, saying, ‘Can I drop a column this week? I’m writing a book about FEMINISM for God’s sake, don’t try to SHACKLE me to my CONTRACTUALLY AGREED WORD COUNT, get off my BACK The Man,’ even though they are all women, and were insisting I take the time off, and being totally reasonable about the whole thing.

My family were, as always, both game for me to plunder their lives for laughs, and very good at taking me to the pub when I got stressed, insisting I got shit-faced, and then pretending they’d left their wallets at home. My sisters – Weena, Chel, Col and Caz – are the most hardcore feminists this side of Greer, and were always very good at re-inspiring my ardour for the project – mainly by reminding me that Carl Jung’s favourite party-trick was to whip people with a tea-towel until they punched him. I don’t know why that was particularly inspiring, but it was. And my brothers – Jimmy, Eddie and Joe – are also my sisters in ‘The Struggle’, apart from when they wrestle me to the floor, screaming, ‘It’s time for a Gimping!’

Endless thanks to the redoubtable Alexis Petridis, who – during a whole summer of me ringing him, weeping, ‘I appear to be writing an impossible book! Write it for me, Alexis! Even though you are part of the patriarchy!’ – never once pointed out that he did actually have a job that he needed to be getting on with, and that I was hiccupping too much for him to make sense of what I was saying anyway.

The Women of Twitter – Sali Hughes, Emma Freud, India Knight, Janice Turner, Emma Kennedy, Sue Perkins, Sharon Horgan, Alexandra Heminsley, Claudia Winkleman, Lauren Laverne, Jenny Colgan, Clare Balding, Polly Samson, Victoria Coren and particularly the awe-inspiring, and frankly terrifying, Grace Dent – who daily reminded me that funny women with a well-informed point are a dime-a-dozen, and I really needed to up my ante if I was going to pretend to compete with them. Thank you also to the Honorary Women of Twitter – Dorian Lynskey, Martin Carr, Chris Addison, Ian Martin, David Quantick, Robin Turner, David Arnold – for being the best imaginary office-mates in the world; and especially Jonathan Ross and Simon Pegg, for their block-busting quotes. And Nigella, whose comment made me squeeeee.

‘Lizzie’ and ‘Nancy’ – I love you to bits, and I’m so sorry mummy was away for a whole summer but, to be fair, Uncle Eddie is better at playing Mario Kart with you than I am, and once I’d taught you to say ‘Damn you, The Patriarchy!’ every time you fell over, you’d had the best of me as a parent, to be honest.

Finally, I would like to dedicate this book – like I’m standing on a stage or something, about to play ‘Paradise City’; rather than just typing on a laptop with absolutely no one watching – to my husband, Pete Paphides, who is the most Strident Feminist I’ve ever met, to the point where he actually taught me what feminism is, or should be, anyway: ‘Everyone being polite to each other.’ Darling, I love you very much. And it was me who broke the back door handle that time. I fell on it when I was drunk and pretending to be Amy Winehouse. I can admit that now.