How To Be A Woman

Chapter 5




I Need A Bra!




Of course, feminism will only take you so far – and then you need to go shopping. I’m not talking about Sex and the City shopping here – that belief that it’s a fun and revelatory experience, a bit like meditating, but with one leg stuck in a pair of size 12 jeggings in Topshop. Personally, I find the idea that women are supposed to ‘love’ shopping bizarre – nearly every woman I know wants to cry after 45 minutes of trawling the high street looking for a shirt, and hits the gin with alacrity upon the sad occasions where jeans have to be found.

No. By ‘shopping’, I mean just ‘going out and getting a thing you actually need’ – like knickers. Because at the age of 15, I need pants. I need pants very badly. I might be ready to smash the patriarchy, and get my ‘I Am A Strident Feminist’ tattoo, but not if it involves showing anyone the contents of my underwear drawer. Who am I kidding? I don’t even have an underwear drawer. Everything I own – pants, two vests, two pairs of tights, a skirt, three T-shirts and a single, tatty jumper – are all in a cardboard box, under the bed. I don’t really have ‘underwear’ at all.


What I have, instead, is heirlooms. At age 15, I have become too big for anything you could buy from the tiny, olden-days clothing shop on Warstones Road – where children’s pants were kept in a huge wall of wooden drawers, and the correct-sized ones would be handed to you in a paper bag, as if they were a quarter of boiled sweets, or some lamb chops.

So – as we are currently too poor to buy new, adult pants – I become the recipient of the The Moran Underwear Bequest, instead: four pairs of my mum’s old, classic big pants. The kind a five-year-old would draw on a washing line. They have been blasted through with Bold on a boil wash so many times that the once-cheerful pink stripes are now pale shadows: like the grey outlines people are supposed to leave on walls, near the epicentre of an atomic explosion.

In addition, the elastic of the waistband is only sporadically attached to the main body of the pants – it hangs from the over-stretched rubber like bunting. It was like there was a party in my pants, to which absolutely no one was invited.

Although not a particularly vile child, wearing my mother’s old pants hadn’t caused me any squeamish thoughts. After all, compared to the fact that I was sleeping in the bed my nanna had died in – indeed, right in the middle of the massive indentation her body left in the mattress; I am wearing her ghost as a nightie – it is chicken feed.

That is, it is chicken feed until the day I am sitting in the garden with Caz.

We are engaged in quietly and lovingly drawing a moustache, beard and monobrow on the sleeping, two-year-old Cheryl with a piece of charcoal.

Everything is quite idyllic until Caz nods down to Cheryl and says – with the mixture of distaste and shit-stirring that makes all my adolescence with her so much fun – ‘Mum was probably wearing your knickers when she conceived her, you know. Dad probably TORE them off her to make Chel. He was being ALL SEXY. AT YOUR PANTS.’

Obviously, I then hit Caz. I hit her with all my strength, so that she fell over backwards.

‘You PREVERT!’ I shout. ‘Prevert’ is our new word. We all read a great deal – but also, possibly, too quickly. We have also recently taken to using the word ‘paradigm’, pronounced as spelt. Autodidactism has its drawbacks. Or backdrawers, as we would probably have speed-read, and never been corrected.

‘You DICK FACE!’ Caz screams, kicking out at me like a kangaroo. Were it a film, the picture my mother took just three weeks ago – of us hugging, on the landing, in dressing gowns – would cross-fade in, quietly burning down to ash. Our entente cordiale is over for another year.

But my upset was just for that afternoon. I had no choice other than to sit back down, and just carry on wearing those pants, as I will for another four, long, bad-pants years. I just didn’t have any other options. It’s one of the many reasons why being very, very poor sucks. You have to live in pants that give you nightmares.


Underwear – knickers and bra primarily, but also including petticoats, and hosiery, and ‘control-wear’ – are the specialist clothing of being a woman. They are the female equivalent of a fireman’s jumpsuit and helmet. Or the large shoes of a clown. We need this stuff, for the ‘work’ of being a woman. It’s technically necessary. I mean, every woman is different but, more often than not, we must have a bra to get us through the day – particularly if that day is to involve running for a bus, or wearing a low-cut dress. Otherwise one might have to do that thing of breaking into a trot whilst clutching one’s bosom – lest their breasts bounce so violently they appear to go round and round, like a stripper’s tassels, and inadvertently hypnotise a passer-by. I have done that. It was bad.

Similarly, while Wish You Were Here’s Judith Chalmers famously wears no knickers at all – not even up the Acropolis – I think most of us know the risks inherent in this. Yes. Spiders could climb up your legs, and make a nest inside you, and lay eggs in your precious. Emma Parry at school knew a girl whose cousin had had that happen to her, in Leicester. When the baby spiders came out, they were hungry, and ate her bum hair. Don’t look at me in horror – I am just reporting what was very big news in Wolverhampton in 1986. I was surprised it wasn’t picked up nationally at the time.

I think we can all see, quite clearly, that the stakes are too high for a woman to live without pants.


Because all through the four and a half years I wore my mother’s knickers, I knew I was failing a major part of the curriculum in being a woman: women are supposed to look good in underwear. Chicks have to rock pants. They should be acing bras. There is a widely held supposition that, really, when you come down to it, a woman in her underwear is a woman at her best.

And to be fair, often, she is. It’s one of those inimical talents of the softer, gentler and rounder sex – we really can fill out a pair of knickers and a bra very well. If you’ve got some half-decent tits in a half-decent bra, it doesn’t matter if the rest of you looks like a child’s teatime blancmange that fell on the floor and got attacked by the cat – everyone will be looking at the tits in the bra. Their magic is out of all proportion to their abilities: very much not healing the sick or working complex equations, very much just sitting in a bra and, occasionally, wobbling in an exciting manner.

Indeed, the panoply of underwear – across the ages and cultures – is notable for the extraordinary, odds-bucking fact that nearly all of it looks hot. We just, to paraphrase Will Smith in Men In Black, make this shit look good.


The magic of good underwear – underwear so good you want to call it ‘lingerie’, in a French accent – is endless. When you get the really good stuff – the Olympic standard gear; the stuff dealers only sell to their ‘special customers’ – straight girls can have their heads turned by other straight girls in it.

Once, I ended up in a strip club with my friend, Vicky. It’s a long story. Indeed, it’s most of Chapter 9. But when, at around 1am, a stripper called Marina gave us a private dance, my head was swimming after just three minutes. I was in some kind of Imperial Lingerie Swoon. Marina’s incredible, Snow-White arse was wrapped, like a present, in the cerise-coloured satin – the ribbon ties trailing down her thighs. As she swayed from side to side, drunk, laughing, it was impossible to think of anything other than how you could hear the faint, faint rasp of the fabric on her skin, and how overwhelmingly tempting it was to pull on those ribbons, like an emergency brake, and bring her to a shuddering, sudden stop, right next to your face.

Marina obviously had the same idea. Woozy with vodka, she had just asked us to pull the ribbons with our teeth when Security came in, and bellowed, ‘NO TOUCHING! NO TOUCHING!’

Marina sulkily pulled away from us: the girl-fun ended. I left the club reeling, my head totally shanked from the combination of sticky, demi-sec champagne, and Marina’s Defcon 3 lingerie drawer.

So let us hymn a while on lingerie – recite the psalms of the smaller, higher drawers in the chest. Stockings – black, seamed or sheer – allowing you to f*ck instantly, spontaneously, standing; possibly even as you’re still saying ‘So do you need me to sign for this parcel?’

French knickers in peach satin, with ruffles all up the back. Cami-knickers in outrageous colours, flashing under basques: kingfisher blue; rose-red; gold, like the wedding ring on the floor. The frothing, cloudy, egg-white joy of tulle. The way silk slip-slides over you, like a sheet of oil. Watching the blood rush through the semi-visibility of lace. The black line from calf to thigh. The hook-and-eye, with flesh swelling beneath. Torn buttons. The hem.


I have an August-blue petticoat with tiny pink roses, and black suspender straps, that makes me happier than nearly anything else I own. Not only does it embody the kind of purring, spanky, joyous 1950s soft-porn postcards I have based most of my wardrobe/sexuality on, but I also look dead thin in it too. I have often noticed this, with underwear: the right stuff will be the most flattering outfit you can wear.

Oh, if only the world knew how amazing we look, under all these clothes.


But, of course, often, it can! Being able to wear underwear brilliantly is such a key talent for a woman, that there are even competitions to judge who is the best at it: Miss America, Miss World, Miss International, Miss Universe. You can call this ‘the swimsuit round’ all you like – we know what it really means. It’s the ‘bra and pants round’.

I’m sure it was referred to as such up until 30 seconds before the first ever Miss World, when someone leant across to Eric Morley and – putting their hand over the microphone as the theme music boomed out – said, ‘Eric, look. This feminism thing. I don’t think it is “the new skiffle”. I really think it might hang around a bit. Shall we pretend that the “phwoar – bra and pants round” is about swimming instead?’

Perhaps it is because we have formalised Being Able To Wear Bra & Pants as a competition, with incredible rewards – tour the world meeting old people and children! Have sex with footballers! Get a crown! – that, over the years, we have made wearing knickers harder and harder. Knickers have gradually become difficult. And the reason for this is that knickers have become smaller. Much smaller. Too small.

A case in point: a few months ago, I was on a crowded tube with a friend of mine, who gradually grew paler and quieter until she finally leaned forward, and admitted that her knickers were so skimpy, her front bottom had eaten them entirely.

‘I’m currently wearing them on my * – like a little hat,’ she said.

Clearly, this is not right. Jesus Christ. Pants like this need to be bombed back to the Stone Age. Batman doesn’t have to put up with this shit – why should we? Women need, as a basic human right, to be given enough underwear for it to cling to their exteriors, like a starfish – and not slowly become pulled in to the deep gravity of their inside, and get internalised, due to motion friction. It’s insanity.

I’m going to lie this one right on the line, right here, right now: I’m pro big pants. Strident feminism NEEDS big pants. Really big. I’m currently wearing a pair that could have been used as a fire blanket to put out the Great Fire of London at any point during the first 48 hours or so. They extend from the top of my thigh to my belly button, and effectively double up as a second property that I can escape to at weekends. If I were going to run for parliament, it would be solely on a platform of ‘Get Women In Massive Grundie’s’.

Lovely readers, if I have distressed you with how much you have just learned of my underwear predilections, then it is, I’m afraid, only matched by how distressed I have been to learn of the underwear predilections of others. In the 21st century, these are no longer a secret. Pencil skirts, skin-tight jeans and leggings – they all allow us to witness an exact outline of the wearer’s pants, rather like the ‘Geo-Phys’ print-out of an ancient drainage system on Time Team.

And what these results tell us is that there is scarcely a woman in Britain wearing a pair of pants that actually fit her. Instead of having something that, sensibly and reassuringly, contains both the buttocks – what I would call a good pair of pants – they’re wearing little more than gluteal accessories, or arse-trinkets. They’re all in briefs, demi-briefs, bikinis, strings, midis, hi-legs or shorts.1

These tight, elasticated partitions across the mid-derrière are, in terms of both comfort and aesthetics, as cruel as the partition between India and Pakistan. There is catastrophic physical displacement. Entire body parts are split asunder, or undertake vast migrations. With my own eyes, I have seen women walking around out there with anything between two and eight buttocks – and placed anywhere between the hip and the mid-thigh. This enforced deformity is not the fault of the pants. They are little guys, simply overwhelmed by the task that faces them. They are outnumbered. They are the Alamo.

Women, this manner of underwear cannot be an act of sanity. Why are we starving our bottoms of the resources – like an extra metre of material – to stay comfortable? Why have we succumbed to pantorexia?

It is, of course, all a symptom of women’s continuing, demented belief that, at any moment, they might face some snap inspection of their ‘total hotness’. Women wear small pants because they think they’re sexy. But, in this respect, women have communally lost all reason. Ladies! On how many occasions in the last year have you needed to wear a tiny pair of skimpy pants? In other words, to break this right down, how many times have you suddenly, unexpectedly, had sex in a brightly lit room, with a hard-to-please erotic connoisseur?

Exactly. On those kind of odds, you might just as well be keeping a backgammon board down there, to entertain a group of elderly ladies in the event of emergencies. It’s more likely to happen.

You know, when it comes to sex, you really do have to remember men are blessedly forgiving creatures. They don’t care what kind of knickers you’re wearing. By the time you’ve taken your skirt off, you could be wearing a Gregg’s paper bag with leg holes torn in it, and it wouldn’t put them off. THERE ARE MEN OUT THERE HAVING SEX WITH BICYCLES. Men don’t remotely care if you’re wearing sexy pants or not.

Imagine if men suffered from this demented level of over-preparation. If they did, they would be packing two tickets for a mini-break to Prague in their boxers, least they suddenly come across a lady who needs romance RIGHT NOW. And men aren’t doing that. They really aren’t.

Of course, whilst ostensibly both a literally and figuratively small problem, tiny pants have massive ramifications for us as a nation. It cannot have gone unnoticed that, as a country, our power has waned in synchronicity with the waning of our pants. When women wore undergarments that extended from chin to toe, the sun never set on the British Empire. Now the average British woman could pack a week’s worth of pants into a match-box, we have little more than dominion over the Bailiwick of Jersey, and the Isle of Man. All the good that women getting the vote has done has been undone by their constant struggle against their tiny pants. How can 52 per cent of the population expect to win the War on Terror, if it can’t even sit down without wincing?


NOTE: the only time it’s actually a good idea to not wear knickers at all is at a rock festival, if you’re wearing a floor-length dress. In this event, any women understandably piqued by the half-hour-long queues for the toilets can simply do a ‘Festival Wee’. For this, a lady must sit down on a spare square of grass, taking care to spread her skirts about her in the manner of Miss Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Having ensured the skirts are arranged suitably, she can then quietly have a wee where she sits, with no one any the wiser – and then wait for nature’s gentle breezes to dry her ‘area’.

It is the way I imagine Snow White passed water, when she was abandoned in the forest by the huntsman. Or how Galadriel from Lord of the Rings wets her cabbage, as and when the need arises.



FURTHER NOTE: This plan can ONLY go wrong in the event of ants. Ants do NOT like being pissed on.


But, of course, pants are just half of the underwear business – the bottom half. What of the top half – bras? Bras have a power all their own. Every four years, when the World Cup rolls round, the highlight of the entire event for me and my five sisters is a Brazil match. Any Brazil match. Brazil v. anyone.

‘BRA!’ we holler, pointing to the screen. ‘BRA! It says BRA on the backs of their shirts! BRA!!!!!!’

We drum our heels against the sofa, as if we were being strangled by the amusingness of it all.

‘BRA!!!!!!!!’ we croak, faces so hot and wet from crying we look as if we’ve been boiled. ‘BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!’

Aside from finding the port of Brest in a world atlas in 1991, it is the funniest thing that ever happens to us.

The bra is, perhaps, the rudest item of women’s clothing. If you do not doubt this, try this simple test: throw a bra at a nine-year-old boy. He will react as if he has had a live rat wanged at his head. He will run, screaming, away from you – like that Vietnamese kid covered in napalm. He cannot handle the rudeness of bras.


Thank goodness we ladies can – for a good bra can be one of the greatest aids a woman will ever know. At 35, my breasts are, still, like peaches. But the kind of peaches you find in the bottom of your handbag – after you’d forgotten you’d put them there, for a snack. Peaches that have the obvious indentation mark of your keys on one end, and a bus ticket stuck to the sticky bit. The kind of peaches you’d look at doubtfully in a market, 10 for ￡1, and say, ‘I suppose I could make smoothies out of them …’

It’s breastfeeding, man. Breastfeeding two really colicky babies. Since the day the second child had some screaming fit up the M1, and I tried to pacify her by climbing in the back, sitting next to her with my seatbelt on, and doglegging my breast around and into her mouth, like some kind of lactating U-bend, my tits are bust. And they – God bless them – know that. If they were a character in a film, they’d be the girl who falls over when they’re being chased by the Nazis, and shouts, ‘Go on without me! I’ve had a good life!’ My breasts wish the rest of me well, but they are just not going to make it.

But you know what? It’s OK! It really is. First of all, I’m not an international supermodel, so I could have tits that look like Yosemite Sam’s face for all the world will care. No one will ever judge me on them! Ha! The patriarchy can try and make me as insecure about my wabs as it likes! That’s its hobby! Apart from darts! But it simply can’t make me! Because I know the only people who are ever going to see them naked are going to approach them in an attitude of immense gratefulness, i.e. hungry children, and men who are about to get laid.

And all the rest of the time, I have my faithful friend, Bra, to help me out. Oh, Bra. I love you, Bra. You are like the lingerie equivalent of tomato ketchup – everything is great with you. With the right bra, you can put whatever is left of your mammaries into them – maybe with the help of a spade, or loved one – and they will mould the raw material into two lovely lady-lumps.

These days, I simply coil up my shattered tits like a fire hose, and rely on a fierce piece of engineering from Rigby & Peller to put them in roughly the anatomically correct place. On their own, I’d just be kicking them in front of me, like an overly long dress. But with Bra, I can place them anywhere. Indeed, when I adjust my bra straps, it is rather in the manner of a mammarian game of ‘Pin The Tail On The Donkey’. ‘Pin The Breasts On The Thirty-Something Woman.’ If I don’t have my contact lenses in, they could end up anywhere. I fully expect to leave the house one day, hungover and in a hurry, with my tits on my head.


On the other hand, if you live by the bra, you must die by the bra. As one would expect from an item capable of such powerful magic, sometimes the bra is prone to suddenly turning evil and attempting to destroy you. Think of it as a little like Saruman in Lord of the Rings, but with a little bow in the middle. Sarumam.

In Cougar Town – the Courteney Cox sitcom about a 40-something divorcee attempting, every week, to get a foot-and-a-half of 20-something cock before midnight – there’s a line where she explains to her younger friend why she doesn’t like going out clubbing any more.

‘I have better wine than this at home,’ she says, holding up what even on TV looks like a very lacklustre Pinot Grigio, ‘and at this time of night, all I want to do is take my bra off.’

For people who’ve never worn a bra – men, children, animals, Agyness Deyn – it is almost impossible to describe the sheer, raw pleasure that comes with taking off certain bras. I once had a bra – teal-coloured, full-cup, slight padding, beautiful, extremely expensive – so cruelly tight, I rang the shop I bought it from on day three, in tears.

‘Is it supposed to hurt so much?’ I asked, trying to repress a sob.

‘You just need to break it in,’ the woman said, sternly, like an army drill sergeant instructing his new recruits to piss on their boots to soften the leather. I did, eventually, domesticate that bra – but on the first 20 occasions I wore it, I reached 6pm every evening and went tearing upstairs to take it off, sighing like a spaceman getting out of a spacesuit. I would hurl it to the floor, and rub the red welt that it had left, like a monk tending the after effects of a cilice belt.

The relief of taking off a bad bra is immeasurable. It’s like a combination of putting your feet up, going to the toilet, a drink of cold water on a hot day, and sitting on the steps of a caravan having a fag. Bad bra removal is a measure of your friendships. If you would feel comfortable in going round to someone’s house at the end of a long day, and saying, ‘I’m just going to take my bra off,’ you know you are intimate friends.

Of course, on occasion, bad bra removal has to happen in a more urgent location. I have seen women taking bras off in cabs on their way back from clubs; women taking off bras in cabs that are still outside clubs.

I once saw it happen at a bus stop, outside Bar Rumba on Camden High Street.

I understood.

To any idiot who says, ‘You a feminist? Do you burn your bras, then, huh? HUR? You burn your bras, you feminist?’ you must reply, calmly, ‘Fool. FOOL. Bra is my friend. My bosomest buddy. My inti-mate. Except for that balcony-cup Janet Reger one that was an inch too small, and cut off the circulation to my head. Yeah. That one, I covered that one in petrol, and torched it outside the American Embassy.’

1The last, to the uninitiated, sounds like it would give you full coverage but merely provides a thin black strip across the middle section. Much as if your reproductive area had been the victim of a terrible crime, and was being interviewed on the Six O’Clock News, with its identity concealed.