How To Be A Woman

Chapter 1




I Start Bleeding!




So, I had assumed it was optional. I know that women bleed every month, but I didn’t think it was going to happen to me. I’d presumed I would be able to opt out of it – perhaps from sheer unwillingness. It honestly doesn’t look that much use or fun, and I can’t see any way I can fit it into my schedule.

I’m just not going to bother! I think to myself, cheerfully, as I do my ten sit-ups a night. Captain Moran is opting out!

I am taking my ‘By The Time I’m 18’ list very seriously. My ‘Loose [sic] Weight’ campaign has stepped up a gear – not only am I still not eating gingernuts, but I’m also doing ten sit-ups and ten press-ups a night. We don’t have any full-length mirrors in the house, so I’ve no idea how I’m doing, but I imagine that, at this rate, my boot-camp regime will have me as slender as Winona Ryder by Christmas.


I’d only found out about periods four months ago, anyway. My mother never told us about them – ‘I thought you’d picked it all up from Moonlighting,’ she said, vaguely, when, years later, I asked her about it – and it’s only when I came across a Lil-lets leaflet, stuffed in the hedge outside our house by a passing schoolgirl, that I’d discovered what the whole menstrual deal was.

‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ Caz says, when I come into the bedroom with the leaflet, and try to show it to her.

‘But have you seen?’ I ask her, sitting on the end of her bed. She moves to the other end of the bed. Caz doesn’t like ‘nearness’. It makes her extremely irascible. In a three-bedroom council house with seven people in it, she is almost perpetually furious.

‘Look – this is the womb, and this is the vagina, and the Lil-let expands widthways, to fill the … burrow,’ I say.

I’ve only skim-read the leaflet. To be honest, it has blown my mind quite badly. The cross-section of the female reproductive system looks complicated, and impractical – like one of those very expensive Rotastak hamster cages, with tunnels going everywhere. Again, I’m not really sure I want ‘in’ on all of this. I think I thought I was just made of solid meat – from my pelvis to my neck – with the kidneys wedged in there somewhere. Like a sausage. I dunno. Anatomy isn’t my strong point. I like romantic 19th-century novels, where girls faint in the rain, and Spike Milligan’s war memoirs. There isn’t much menstruation in either. This all seems a bit … unnecessary.

‘And it happens every month,’ I say, to Caz. Caz is now actually lying, fully dressed, under her duvet, wearing Wellington boots.

‘I want you to go away,’ her voice says, from under the duvet. ‘I’m pretending you’re dead. I can’t think of anything I want to do less than talk about menstruation with you.’

I trail away.

‘Nil desperandum!’ I say to myself. ‘There’s always someone I can go to for a sympathetic ear, and a bowl full of cheery chat!’

The stupid new dog is under my bed. She has got pregnant by the small dog, Oscar, who lives over the road. None of us can quite work out how this has happened, as Oscar is out of those small, yappy types dogs, only slightly bigger than a family-sized tin of baked beans, and the stupid new dog is a fully grown German Shepherd.

‘She must have actually dug a hole in the ground, to squat in,’ Caz says, in disgust. ‘She must have been gagging for it. Your dog is a whore.’

‘I’m going to become a woman soon, dog,’ I say. The dog licks its vagina. I have noticed the dog always does this when I talk to it. I have not yet worked out what I think about this, but I think I might be a bit sad about it.

‘I found a leaflet, and it says I’ll be starting my periods soon,’ I continue. ‘I’ll be honest, dog – I’m a bit worried. I think it’s going to hurt.’

I look into the dog’s eyes. She is as stupid as a barrel of toes. Galaxies of nothing are going on in her eyes.

I get up.

‘I’m going to talk to Mum,’ I explain. The dog remains under my bed, looking, as always, deeply nervous about being a dog.

I track Mum down on the toilet. She’s now eight months pregnant, and holding the sleeping one-year-old Cheryl whilst trying to do a wee.

I sit on the edge of the bath.

‘Mum?’ I say.

For some reason, I think I am allowed only one question about this. One shot at the ‘menstrual cycle conversation’.

‘Yes?’ she answers. Even though she is doing a wee and holding a sleeping baby, she is also sorting out a whites wash from the washing basket.

‘You know – my period?’ I whisper.

‘Yes?’ she says

‘Will it hurt?’ I ask.

Mum thinks for a minute.

‘Yeah,’ she says, in the end. ‘But it’s OK.’

The baby then starts crying, so she never explains why it’s ‘OK’. It remains unexplained.


Three weeks later, my period starts. I find it to be a deeply uncheerful event. It starts in the car on the way to Central Library in town, and I have to walk all around the Non-Fiction section for half an hour, desperately hoping it won’t show, before Dad takes us all home again.

‘My first period started: yuk,’ I write in my diary.

‘I don’t think Judy Garland ever had a period,’ I tell the dog, unhappily, later that night. I am watching myself cry in a small hand-mirror. ‘Or Cyd Charisse. Or Gene Kelly.’

The bag of Pennywise sanitary towels my mum keeps on the back of the bathroom door has become my business now, too. I feel a sad jealousy of all my younger siblings who are still ‘outside the bag’. The towels are thick, and cheap – stuck into my knickers, they feel like a mattress between my legs.

‘It feels like a mattress between my legs,’ I tell Caz.

We’re playing one of our Sindy games. Four hours in, and Caz’s Sindy, Bonnie, is secretly murdering everyone on a luxury cruise ship. My Sindy, Layla, is trying to solve the mystery. The one-legged Action Man, Bernard, is dating both of them simultaneously. We argue constantly over the ownership of Bernard, even though he actually belongs to Eddie. Neither of us want our Sindy to be single.

‘A horrible, thick mattress,’ I continue. ‘Like in The Princess and the Pea.’

‘How long are they?’ Caz asks.

Ten minutes later, and six Pennywise sanitary towels are laid out, like a dormitory, with Sindys sleeping on them.

‘Well, this is lucky!’ I say. ‘Like when we found out that a Brussels sprout looks exactly like a Sindy cabbage. See, Caz – this is the bright side of menstruation!’

Because the sanitary towels are cheap, they shred between my thighs when I walk, and become ineffective, and leaky. I give up walking for the duration of my period. My first period lasts three months. I think this is perfectly normal. I faint quite regularly. I become so anaemic my finger- and toenails become very pale blue. I don’t tell Mum, because I’ve asked my question about periods. Now I just have to get on with them.

The blood on the sheets is depressing – not dramatic, and red, like a murder, but brown, and tedious, like an accident. It looks like I am rusty inside, and am now breaking. In an effort to avoid handwashing stains out every morning, I take to stuffing huge bundles of loo roll in my knickers, along with the useless sanitary towel, and lying very, very still all night. Sometimes, there are huge bloodclots, that look like raw liver. I presume this is the lining of my womb, coming off in inch-thick slices, and that this is just how visceral menstruation is. It all adds to a dreary sense that something terribly wrong is going on, but that it is against the rules of the game to ever mention it. Frequently, I think about all the women through history, who’ve had to deal with this ferocious bullshit with just rags and cold water.

No wonder women have been oppressed by men for so long, I think, scouring my pants with a nail-brush and coal-tar soap, in the bathroom. Getting dried blood out of cotton is a bitch. We were all too busy scrubbing to agitate for the vote until the twin-tub was invented.

Even though she’s two years younger than me, Caz starts her periods six months after me – just as I’m starting my second one. She comes crying into my bedroom, when everyone else is asleep, and whispers the awful words, ‘My period’s started.’


I show her the bag of sanitary towels, on the back of the bathroom door, and tell her what to do.

‘Put them in your knickers, and don’t walk for three months,’ I say. ‘It’s easy.’

‘Will it hurt?’ she asks, eyes wide.

‘Yes,’ I say, in an adult and noble manner. ‘But it’s OK.’

‘Why is it OK?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

‘Well, why are you saying it, then?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jesus. Why do you bother talking? The stuff that comes out of your mouth.’

Caz gets horrific cramps – she spends her periods in the bedroom with the curtains drawn, covered in hot water bottles, shouting ‘F*ck off’ at anyone who tries to come into the room. As part of being a hippy, my mother doesn’t ‘believe’ in pain-killers, and urges us to research herbal remedies. We read that sage is supposed to help, and sit in bed eating handfuls of sage and onion stuffing, crying. Neither of us can believe that we’re going to have to put up with this for the next 30 years.

‘I don’t want children anyway,’ Caz says. ‘So I am getting nothing out of this whatsoever. I want my entire reproductive system taken out, and replaced with spare lungs, for when I start smoking. I want that option. This is pointless.’

At this juncture, it seems there is absolutely nothing to recommend being a woman. Sex hormones are a bitch that have turned me from a blithe child into a bleeding, weeping, fainting washerwoman. These hormones do not make me feel feminine: every night, I lie in bed feeling wretched, and the bulge of my sanitary towel in my knickers looks like a cock.

I take everything off, sadly, while I get my nightie out of the drawer. When I turn around again, the dog has slunk out from under the bed, and started to eat my bloody sanitary towel. There are bits of shredded, red cotton wool all over the floor, and my knickers are hanging out of her mouth. She stares at me, desperately.

‘Oh God – your dog’s a lesbian vampire,’ Caz says, from her bed, turning over to sleep.

I go to retrieve my knickers, and faint.


In the midst of this hormonal gloom, however, the cavalry finally arrives, over the hill, jangling its spurs, and epaulettes shining in the sun: my green library card. Now I’m 13, I can get adult books out of the library, without having to borrow my parents’ cards. And that means I can get secret books out. Dirty books. Books with sex in.

‘I’ve been having these dreams,’ I tell the dog, as we walk to the library. The library is on the other side of The Green – a gigantic, desolate stretch of grass, where one must be constantly on the lookout for The Yobs. It doesn’t do to boldly walk in the middle of it – this leaves one exposed. You must stick to the outer edges, near the houses, so that if you get attacked the people who live in the houses can get a good view of you getting your head kicked in without having to fetch their binoculars.

‘Dreams about … men,’ I continue. I look at the dog. The dog looks back at me. I think the dog deserves to know the whole truth of what is going on here. I owe her that much, at least.

‘I’m in love with Chevy Chase,’ I tell the dog, in a sudden, joyful burst. ‘I saw him in the video to Paul Simon’s “Call Me Al”, from the 1986 Graceland album, on Warner Bros., and I just can’t stop thinking about him. I had this dream where he kissed me, and his mouth felt exciting. I’m going to ask Dad if we can get The Three Amigos out of the video shop on Friday.’

Requesting The Three Amigos from the video shop will be a bold move – the next video for rental has already been earmarked as Howard the Duck. I will have to pull a lot of fancy footwork but it will be worth it. I have not told the dog yet but the thought of kissing Chevy Chase has made me so excited that, yesterday, I listened to ‘Call Me Al’ 16 times on repeat, imagining him touching my face while Paul Simon plays the bass solo. I am so hot for Chevy. I have even imagined what my first line to him will be – the one that will capture his heart.

‘Chevy Chase?’ I will say, at a party very closely modelled on the ones I’ve seen in Dynasty. ‘Any relation to Cannock Chase?’

Cannock Chase is just off the A5 to Stafford. LA-born movie star and comedian Chevy is going to both get, and love, this joke.

Of course, I have had crushes before. Well, one. It didn’t go very well. When I was seven, I saw an episode of Buck Rogers, and fell in love with that dumb American space-cowboy, so obviously based on Han Solo they might as well have called him San Holo and had him ride around in the Fillennium Malcon, with Bewchacca.

As the new love-chemicals rushed through me – Bucknesium and Rogertonin – I discovered what love is, and found that it’s just feeling very … interested. More interested than I had been about anything before.

I was interested in absolutely everything to do with Buck. Just looking at his face was interesting. How he stood, near a door = interesting. The way he held the obviously lightweight and plastic laser gun as if it were very heavy = interesting. The theme tune takes on such an unbearable load of yearning and Buck Rogerness that – 28 years later – I still feel stirred when I hear it.

Obviously, these were all some big-assed feelings to be dealing with, and so I did what we always did when an event of some import is going on. I grabbed Caz – then five – and pulled her into the airing cupboard with me. Like the Mitfords used to – except theirs was probably much larger than ours, and didn’t smell of Bold, mouse droppings and farts.

‘Caz,’ I said, pulling the door as shut as I could, and assuming an expression of deep portent. ‘I have something incredible to tell you.’

I paused, staring at her.

‘I … am IN LOVE, with Buck Rogers. Don’t tell Mum.’

Caz nodded.

My burden lifted, I opened the door again, and gestured for Caz to leave. I watched her cross the landing and go down the stairs. I heard her open the front room door.

‘Mum. Cate’s in love with Buck Rogers,’ she said.

I learn then, in that moment – as mortification burns across me like hot ash – that love is agony, all crushes should remain secret, and that Caz was an untrustworthy, faint-hearted son of a bitch.

All these facts stood me in good stead, subsequently. I learned a lot in the airing cupboard that day. Just 20 minutes later, I was stuffing frozen peas into Caz’s pillowcase whilst whispering, portentously, ‘And so the war begins.’


But – having crushed all feelings of love for so long – the onrush of adolescent hormones have made it now impossible to ignore them any longer. The 13-year-old girl with her hair in plaits, edging around The Green, talking to her pregnant dog, is actually crazed with lust.

‘I’m going to get the novelisation of Fletch out,’ I tell the dog. Fletch was a very average movie of the time, starring Chevy Chase. ‘There will be a picture of Chevy on the cover, and I am going to look at the picture of Chevy, and then copy it into my Love Book.’

The Love Book is a recent invention. On the cover it says ‘Inspiration Book’ but it is really ‘The Love Book’. So far, I have nine pictures of the Duchess of York in there, and a very small picture of Kermit the Frog, cut out of the Radio Times. I love the Duchess of York. In 1988, she’s very fat, but married to a prince. She gives me hope for the future.


I’ve already planned exactly what I’m going to do with the novelisation of Fletch. When I get home, I’m going to wrap it up in a vest and hide it at the back of my knicker drawer, so my parents don’t see it. It’s very important my parents don’t think I’m starting to fall in love with people, because then they might notice that I’m growing up, and I’m kind of trying to keep it secret. I think it will cause some kind of incident.

At the library, I find the novelisation of Fletch easily. It has a satisfyingly big picture of Chevy on the cover – I am going to wear down some pencil lead copying out that sweet face.

Almost as an afterthought, I put Riders by Jilly Cooper onto the countertop, to be stamped out. It’s got a horse on the front. I like horses. I can hear the dog whining outside. I’ve tied her to a tree, but she often fusses around, and kind of lynches herself with the lead a bit. It’s probably time to cut her down, before she stops breathing.


Three hours later, and I cannot believe what I am reading. My first day of getting adult books out, and I have struck filth gold. Absolute filth gold. Riders by Jilly Cooper is more than I could ever have dreamed of – there’s cocks, tits and shagging everywhere. *s falling from the sky. Arses two feet deep. A hurricane of nipples, blowjobs and muff-diving.

Some of it’s confusing – Cooper keeps referring to one heroine’s ‘bush’, and until I get to page 130, I can’t swear with absolute certainty that she’s not talking about vegetation. And I have no idea what cunnilingus is – certainly no one I’ve ever met in Wolverhampton can afford it. I bet they don’t even have it in Birmingham. It must be a London thing.

But this aside, it is, without doubt, a Bible of lubriciousness, the Rosetta Stone of filth: the key text that will translate ‘new and unusual feelings’ that I have been having into ‘masturbating furiously and compulsively for the next four years’.

The first time I try – halfway through Chapter 5 – it takes 20 minutes to come. I don’t really know what I’m doing – in the book, people ‘delve’ around in ‘wet bushes’ until something amazing happens. I futz around – tongue clamped between teeth in concentration – and determinedly try everything, in this absolutely unfamiliar place I have had for 13 years.

When I finally come, I lie back, damp, exhausted, hand aching, out of my mind with excitement. I feel amazing. I feel like The Fonz must feel when he walks in the room and says, ‘Heeeeeey,’ or like the Duchess of York feels when Andrew kisses her. I feel kind of clean, and light, and happy. I feel, in this cherry-blossom star-burst glow – ears ringing, breath still ragged – a bit, well, beautiful.

I cannot write about what has happened in my diary – Caz and I have had a tit-for-tat diary-reading war on for years. Sometimes, she writes comments – ‘You’re so pathetic’ – in the margins, when an entry particularly disgusts or riles her.

But the gusto with which I write about the rest of the day’s events does, perhaps, betray the extremity of my feelings.

‘Mum bought pastry brush! USEFUL!’ I write. ‘Cheese sarnies for tea – they’re soooooooooo tastie. Dad says we can get The Three Amigos out. YESSSSSSSSS!!!’


Over the next few weeks, I become an amazingly dexterous masturbator. The time and effort I put into the project is phenomenal. I woo myself in a variety of different locations – in the front room, in the kitchen, at the bottom of the garden. Standing up, sitting in a chair, lying on my front, and with my left hand – I want to keep things fresh for myself. I am a considerate and imaginative lover of me.

Some afternoons, I lock myself in my bedroom and come for hours and hours and hours – until my fingertips are as wrinkled as if I’d been in the bath. This new hobby is amazing. It doesn’t cost anything, I don’t have to leave the house, and it isn’t making me fat. I wonder if everyone knows about it. Perhaps there would be revolution if they did! I can’t wait to tell everyone, except I will never tell anyone, because this is the biggest secret ever. Even more secret than periods, or the fact I have spots on my bum.

I tell the dog, of course, and the dog, as is her wont, licks her vagina – which seems appropriate, but also not quite enough. I need more disclosure. I must do what I always do.

‘If you are going to try and tell me how much you enjoy wanking,’ Caz says, with a look very similar to when lasers come out of the eyes of Zod, in Superman II, ‘then I will have to strongly pray to God that you die in the next four seconds. I don’t ever want to know anything about this.’

I turn around, go back to my room, and open up page 113 of Riders again. The glue in the spine is shattered, so it now opens at this page quite naturally. Billy takes Janey down to the Bluebell Wood – where the nettles are peppery and damp, and August makes everything slow – and I float away again.

Under the bed, the dog whines.


Over the next few years, masturbation becomes a time-consuming but fulfilling hobby. Even though – after a few weeks – I learn that it is called ‘masturbation’, I never call it that myself. ‘Masturbation’ sounds too much like ‘perturbation’, and this is, by and large, a very unperturbing development. ‘Wank’ is similarly unsuitable – it sounds like cranking a handle, or some difficult handling of chunky machinery, that requires axle grease, and shouting.

What I am doing, by way of contrast, is dreamlike, delicate and soft – apart from the occasions where I have grown my nails too long, and become so sore I have to repel my own advances for a few days. I just think of it as ‘it’ – and, soon, ‘it’ requires more than Riders, however revolutionary Riders has been, to feed it.

I start doing what everyone of my generation is doing – the last generation before free, online pornography starts being handed out, with the same largess the post-war Labour government handed out milk, and spectacles. I start reading the Radio Times, and trying to work out where the dirty TV programmes are.

The best sources of filth, I soon discover, along with millions of other teenagers in the late eighties/early nineties, are split evenly between ‘classy films and dramas on BBC2’, and ‘late night “youth programmes” on Channel 4’. There are certain key words you look for, in the listings. ‘Jenny Agutter’ is the big one. Agutter is the sure-fire harbinger of filth. Logan’s Run, An American Werewolf in London, Walkabout – which might as well have been retitled ‘Wankabout’: wherever Agutter materialises, there will be bosoms, and neck-biting, and thighs grabbed by hands, soundtracked by gasping. Even in The Railway Children – lovely, family-friendly The Railway Children – she ends up waving her undergarments at a trainful of startled Victorian gentlemen, as they come out of a tunnel in a fury of steam and squealing brakes. It’s as if she insists on this stuff.

I watch An American Werewolf in London late at night, with the sound down low, as Jenny Agutter slowly, hungrily bites David Naughton’s shoulder in the shower, and I think how I, too, would like to have someone to eat – even if they did later turn out to be a werewolf, and got shot in front of me in the street, like a bad dog. I am accepting of the downs, as well as the ups, of love. I know it won’t be easy. Many of the tracks on Graceland have also told me this. Late at night, I am in the gutter, looking at Agutter.


But it’s not Agutter alone we seek. ‘A dark story of sexual betrayal’ is always a good listings harbinger – A Sense of Guilt and Blackeyes are full of moments where I have to run across the room, quickly, and rest my finger on the ‘off’ button, lest my mother come in and see me watching unsuitable things. It’s very unsuitable. Hands are thrust into black stocking-tops, Blackeyes is sent to be drowned. Sex seems unbelievably complicated and nerve-wracking, but at least I’m seeing kissing, and some tits. When I see the red-haired teenager being seduced by Trevor Eve in A Sense of Guilt, I want to tell Caz – also a redhead – that I have finally found her another role model, aside from Woody Woodpecker, and Annie in Annie – but only the week before, we have had this exchange:





On one, single occasion, the sex isn’t guilty, or inter-species, but just gorgeous. In The Camomile Lawn, Jennifer Ehle’s character rackets around war-time London in an unimaginably pleasurable froth of parties, champagne, cheerful licentiousness and f*cking. There is one scene that looks the ultimate in adult aspiration: half reclining in a zinc bath, Ehle is on the phone, arranging her social life on a black Bakelite phone.

‘London’s great!’ she trills, poshly, hair damp at the nape of her neck, eyes already champagne-bright. ‘Thar’s SO many paaaaahrties!’

Her tits float, like archipelagos of junket, in serene perfection. The nipples are mouse-nose pink. Later, they will be dressed in rose-coloured silk, and walked out on to a balcony to smoke a cigarette with some handsome boy who sighs to touch them. Jennifer Ehle’s Camomile tits made having tits look like the most fun in the world. I watch them, sitting in the front room, alone, in the dark. My tits do not look like that in the bath. I have no clue what my tits look like in the bath – I always cover them with a flannel, in case someone bursts in on me, and sees them. There is still no lock on the bathroom door.

‘One of the kids might shut themselves in, and drown themselves,’ my mother cautions, as I climb into the bath, still wearing my knickers.

And then, in 1990, Channel 4 shows the biopic of the young Cynthia Payne’s life, Wish You Were Here, and it is my big moment of revelation. Oh, Emily Lloyd in Wish You Were Here! My Beatles of porn! My Dickens of f*cking! The first character I see of my age and background – teenage, working-class – who treats sex not as something dark, and leading to doom, but silly, and fun – to be taken as seriously as smoking a fag (which I haven’t done yet, but intend to) or riding a bicycle (which I did once, and fell off, but hey-ho).

Alone in the front room, wrapped in a duvet, eating our favourite snack of the moment – The Cheese Lollipop: a lump of cheese on a fork – I watch, wide-eyed, the scene which almost all my sexual persona comes to be based on. Cynthia’s dirty uncle takes her into a shed, and, after a small session of prick-teasing, starts f*cking her, up against a wall. She’s in a neatly fitted 1950s cotton sundress, with winged eyeliner, and pop sox on. As he grunts away, she chews her gum, and whispers, ‘You dirty. Old. Sod.’

Ten minutes later, she’s on the seafront, tucking her dress into her knickers and shouting ‘Up your bum!’ at passers-by, while laughing hysterically.

Coupled with the pan-sexual, freak-show silliness of Euro-trash – Lolo Ferrari, the woman with the biggest breasts in the world, bouncing on a trampoline; drag queens with dildos and butt plugs; gimps in harnesses; hoovering bored Dutch housewives’ flats – this is the sum total of all the sex I see until I’m 18. Perhaps ten minutes in total – a series of arty, freaky, sometimes brutal vignettes, which I lash together, and use as the basis for my sexual imagination.

Along with a couple of recurring dreams about Han Solo, and Aslan (which I cook up myself – I am not idle), this is the first thing that feels like a crude but true sensor into adulthood: Sex. Desire. Wanting to come. Something which will lead me in the right direction. It feels like it will – eventually – somehow – I don’t know how – and only if I attend to its lessons carefully – make me dress right, say the correct things, give me the impetus to leave the house, and find whatever it is that’s out there for me.

At the time, I wish I could see more sex. I want more porn than I can run through, in my head, whilst making a sandwich. In later years, however, I come to believe that this wasn’t such a bad sexual education, after all. Freely available, hardcore 21st-century pornography blasts through men and women’s sexual imaginations like antibiotics, and kills all mystery, uncertainty and doubt – good and bad.

But in the meantime, I have found this thing. I have discovered this one good thing, so far, about being a woman, and it is coming.


Twenty-two years later, and, on an idle night, I float around the internet, looking for porn. I know what I like – threesomes, screaming, giant mythical lions from the Chronicles of Narnia – and, to be fair, I can find them all, if I look hard enough. There is almost nothing that can be conceived of, sexually, that can’t be found with a rigorously specific Google search-string and ten minutes to spare.

But there is one thing – one, obvious, amazing thing – that is not available. Something glaringly absent amongst the MILFS and DILFS and BDSM and A2A. There’s one thing I can’t find at all, no matter how many websites I try, or how many times I punch in my debit card details. One thing which fuels all my anger about pornography, which I will come back to later.

On the other hand, there’s one thing that’s glaringly over-available – something that fills YouPorn and RedTube and wank.net to the brim. One thing that the internet is stocked with, shelf after shelf, clip after clip, and none of them more than six minutes long – the average time it takes for a man to come. This is 21st-century heterosexual porn:


Once upon a time, a girl with long nails and a really bad outfit sat on a sofa, trying to look sexy, but actually looking like she’d just remembered a vexing, unpaid parking fine. She might be slightly cross-eyed, due to how tight her bra is.

A man comes in – a man who walks rather oddly, as if he’s carrying an invisible garden chair in front of him. This is because he’s got a uselessly large penis, which is erect, and appears to be scanning the room for the most sexually disinterested thing in it.

Having rejected the window and a vase, the cock finally homes in on the girl on the sofa.

As she disinterestedly licks her lips, the man leans over and – inexplicably – weighs her left breast in his hand. This appears to be the crossing of some kind of sexual Rubicon because, 30 seconds later, she’s being f*cked at an uncomfortable angle, then bummed whilst looking quite pained. There’s usually a bit of arse-slapping here, or some hair-pulling there – whatever can ring in the variety in a straightforward two-camera shoot in less than five minutes.

It all ends with him coming all over her face, messily – as if he’s haphazardly icing a bun in one of the challenges on The Generation Game.

The End.


There are obviously variants on this – maybe she gets double-ended by two guys or perhaps she has an equally badly dressed, dagger-nailed female friend that she pretends to go down on in a desultory manner, for a faux lez-up – and there are, obviously, endless amounts of niche stuff available.

Essentially, the internet vends a porn mono-culture – a sexual East Anglia. Hedgeless and featureless and planted, as far as the eye can see, with the dull, monotonous sex-spuds described above. This is the Tesco F*ck; the Microsoft Windows screw; crushing every other kind of sex out of the market.


That single, unimaginative, billion-duplicated f*ck is generally what we mean by ‘porn culture’ – arguably the biggest cultural infiltration since the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s; certainly more pervasive than peer rivals, such as gay culture, multi-culturalism or feminism.

It’s so embedded, we don’t even realise when we’re looking at it, half the time. Brazilians. Hollywoods. Round, high plastic tits. Acrylic nails that make it impossible to do up a shoe buckle, or type. MTV full of crotches, and tits. Nuts and Zoo having pages and pages of readers’ breasts – volunteered, willingly, as rites of passage. Anal sex being an assumed part of every woman’s repertoire. Posters for make-up, or TV shows, that show women glassy-eyed, open-mouthed and ready for a faceful of come. Knickers being replaced by thongs. High, high heels that aren’t really made for walking – just lying back and being f*cked in. The Hollyoaks ‘Babes’ calendar, Lindsay Lohan’s pre-jail ‘sex’-shoot. If 12 per cent of the internet is pornography – that’s 4.2m websites, 28,000 people looking at porn per second – then that means that 12 per cent of the images of women on the internet are of them either on all fours, rammed into some highly unhygienic PVC, or being forced around out-sized male genitalia, as if their sundry openings were some manner of tube bandage.

Just as a quick comparison point: this is clearly as unhappy and detrimental to women’s collective peace of mind as it would be if 12 per cent of images of men on the internet were of them having their heads horrifically blown off by alien laser guns, or being lowered down a well, full of Nazi sharks, crying. After the brief promise of the sexual revolution freeing up women’s sexual lexicon, it’s been closed right down again, into this narrow, uncomfortable, exploitative series of cartoons. It’s just … not very nice. Not polite. It’s harshing our mellow.

It’s not pornography per se that’s the problem here. Pornography is as old as humankind itself. Practically the first action of the Neanderthal – on the happy day he evolved out of the monkey-egg – was to draw a picture on a cave wall, of a man with an enormous willy. Or, indeed, perhaps it was the first action of a woman. After all, we’re more interested in a) cocks and b) decorating.

This is why museums are so wonderful: walking around, observing mankind’s joyride from slime to WiFi, you see incredible ironwork, inspirational pottery, fabulous vellums and exquisite paintings and – across these disciplines – tons of fruity historical humping. Men f*cking men, men f*cking women, men going down on women, women pleasuring themselves – it’s all there. Every conceivable manifestation of human sexuality, in clay and stone and ochre and gold.

The idea that pornography is intrinsically exploitative and sexist is bizarre: pornography is just ‘some f*cking’, after all. The act of having sex isn’t sexist so there’s no way pornography can be, in itself, inherently misogynist.

So no. Pornography isn’t the problem. Strident feminists are fine with pornography. It’s the porn industry that’s the problem. The whole thing is as offensive, sclerotic, depressing, emotionally bankrupt and desultory as you would expect a widely unregulated industry worth, at an extremely conservative estimate, $30 billion to be. No industry ever made that amount of money without being superlatively crass and dumb.

But you don’t ban things for being crass and dispiriting. If you did, we would have to ban the Gregg’s Mega Sausage Roll first – and we would have a revolution on our hands.

No. What we need to do is effect a 100 per cent increase in the variety of pornography available to us. Let’s face it: the vast majority of the porn out there is as identikit and mechanical as fridge-freezers rolling off a production line.

And there are several reasons why this is bad for everyone – men and women equally. Firstly, in the 21st century, children and teenagers get the majority of their sex education from the internet. Long before school or parents will have mentioned it, chances are they’ll have seen the lot on the net.

But it’s not just their sex education – which is a series of useful facts and practicalities, and the basic business of what goes where, or what could go where, if you’re determined enough – that kids are getting from the net. It’s also their sex hinterland. It informs the imagination, as well as the mechanics.

This is why – however limited, patchy or centred on Trevor Eve the pornography I scavenged in my teenage years – there was, at least, a balance to all the stuff I was finding – a variety. I had petticoats and spies and woodlands and nuns and threesomes on sun loungers, and vampires and sheds and gum and fauns and the back seats of Capris and, more often than not, even though I was reading something from the 19th century, the chicks got their kicks. The women came. The women’s desires were catered for. Indeed, these were the women’s desires.

And this was important, because the sexual imagery of your teenage years is the most potent you’ll ever have. It dictates desires for the rest of your life. One flash of a belly being kissed now is worth a million hardcore fisting scenes in your thirties.

One early sex researcher, Wilhelm Stekel, described masturbation fantasies as a kind of trance or altered state of consciousness, ‘a sort of intoxication or ecstasy, during which the current moment disappears, and the forbidden fantasy alone reigns supreme’.

You want to make sure that whatever you’re thinking of in that state, it has an element of … joy to it.

I did a talk last year at a meeting by a feminist pressure group called Object. In a discussion about pornography – which everyone seemed to presume, automatically, had to be banned – the conversation turned to how upsetting accidentally watching hardcore pornography would be for young girls.

‘And young boys,’ I pointed out, mildly. ‘I think eight-year-old boys would be as distressed as a girl on clicking a link and seeing some hardcore anal sex.’

‘NO! NO!’ a very angry woman shouted.

I regret to say that she looked like everyone’s clichéd idea of a post-Dworkin feminist. She was wearing one of those little velvet smoking caps, covered in embroidery and mirrors.

‘A BOY wouldn’t be upset about that, because he’s watching the MAN being IN CONTROL.’

And I thought about all the eight-year-old boys I know – Tom, and Harris, and Ryan, still getting a little bit nervous of the skeleton pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean – and I thought, I don’t think they’d be exhilarated by seeing a man in control. I think they’d be scared of someone who looks like an angry Burt Reynolds, bumming someone across a landing. I also think that, when they’d told their mums what I’d shown them, I’d probably be off the coffee-morning rota for a good six months.

And that was when I started thinking that we needed more pornography, not less. Eight-year-olds aren’t supposed to see hardcore pornography, so, of course, it doesn’t matter at all what their reaction to it is. They might as well be giving us their feedback on whisky, and VAT.

But when they do come of an age where they want to start viewing sexual imagery, I want Harris and Ryan and Tom to have a chance of finding some, for the want of a better word, free-range porn out there. Something that shows sex as something that two people do together, rather than a thing that just happens to a woman when she has to make rent. Something in which – to put it simply – everyone comes. In a genre where you’re really not holding out for incredible CGI, or a deathless monologue, and it’s solely and only some humping, that’s got to be a baseline requirement. Universal hoggins.


And that’s why we need to start making our own stuff. Not the anodyne stuff that’s ostensibly ‘women-friendly’ porn – all badly shot princesses, and dominatrix lady-bosses getting office juniors to do a bit of extra-curricular faxing.

No. I suspect that female pornography, when it really gets going, will be something wholly other: warm, humane, funny, dangerous, psychedelic, with wholly different parameters to male porn.

You only have to read Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden – a compendium of female masturbatory fantasies – to be able to make the enjoyably broadsweep generalisation that whilst male fantasies are short, powerful and to the point – a bit like ‘My Sharona’ by The Knack, say – female fantasies are some symphonic, shape-shifting thing by Alice Coltrane. In their fantasies, the women grow and shrink, shape-shift, change age, colour and location. They manifest as vapour, light and sound, they strobe through conflicting personas (nurse, robot, mother, virgin, boy, wolf) and a zodiac of positions whilst, you suspect, also imagining consistently great-looking hair. NO woman ever came with an imaginary bad bouff.

But that’s just the start. Imagine if pornography was not this bizarre, mechanised, factory-farmed f*cking: bloodless, naked aerobics, concerned solely with high-speed penetration and ostentatious ejaculation. Imagine if it were about desire.

Because the one thing I couldn’t find, that night, as I glided around the internet, was desire. People who actually wanted to f*ck each other. Had to f*ck each other. Imagine watching two people screwing at that early, white-hot stage of attraction when your pupils dilate just looking at each other, and you want to melt each other’s bones so bad you’re practically eating each other’s clothes off the minute the door closes. I can’t be the only one who’s occasionally had a f*ck so spectacular, all-encompassing, cinematic and intense that, at the end of it, I’ve lain back – ears still ringing – and thought, CNN wanna get a hold of that. Now that REALLY needed a tickertape running underneath it.

In a world where you can get a spare kidney, a black-market Picasso or a ticket to ride into space, why can’t I see some actual sex? Some actual f*cking from people who want to f*ck each other? Some chick in an outfit I halfway respect, having the time of her life? I have MONEY. I’m willing to PAY for this. I AM NOW A 35-YEAR-OLD WOMAN, AND I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME.

I just want to see a good time.