How To Be A Woman

Chapter 7




I Encounter Some Sexism!




So, I’ve lost weight, I can wear a dress, and I’ve got a job. I am now – as I cheerfully say, to everyone – The Least Important Person At Melody Maker, the weekly music paper that everyone confuses with NME, which is far more famous but, we think, less cool. At the NME, they take drugs, but don’t really write about it. At Melody Maker, on the other hand, it’s often the basis for a whole feature.

Whilst the NME is staffed by normal, respectable men, who all go on to high-flying careers in broadcasting – Stuart Maconie, Andrew Collins, David Quantick – Melody Maker’s retinue looks like the cast of The Addams Family. During editorial meetings, there’s a distinct sense that everyone’s come here because they failed the door policy at the cantina in Star Wars.

It is an odd, mismatched group. Everyone here is a social outcast for one reason or another. In the case of some of the staff, it’s because they’re antediluvian sexists with odd hair, and a distinct aura of not having left the pub since 1976. With others, it’s because they’re so admirably, innovatively un-normal that it’s clear that no other city but London, and no other employers but this publication, would have them.

Pricey’s a strapping Welsh goth with his hair in two piggy-tails of ginger dreadlocks, who goes right down the front at Public Enemy gigs, wearing lipstick and nail varnish. When the Manic Street Preachers are in town, he leaves the office with a black lace fan and a bottle of Malibu. Anyone who talks to him is astonished to discover he is a) heterosexual and b) from this planet.

Ben Turner is a tiny, shaven-headed man-child who appears to be around 13 years old. When I first meet him, I presume he’s a kid with leukaemia, who wrote to the Make A Wish Foundation, asking to hang out at a ‘real music magazine office’ for the day. After a few weeks, I find that he’s, in fact, a) a fully grown adult, and b) one of the leading authorities on dance music in Britain, who eventually goes on to defeat the imaginary leukaemia I’ve given him, and found the Bestival festival.

The editor, Jonesy, is in his late forties, and looks like a rugged bison – but with the incongruously glossy, glamorous, auburn hair of Carol Decker from T’Pau. Viewed from behind, in a bar, he is often the subject of initially lustful comments from men. When he turns around, they run away, screaming.

The Stud Brothers wear leather, swear like cunting dockers, and often come in drunk from the night before, then fall asleep under a desk. Simon Reynolds is a beautiful, pre-Raphaelite Oxford graduate into unlistenably cutting-edge dance music, who spends all his time in clubs where people have guns, and is so clever, half of us are too scared to talk to him. Pete Paphides has just left his parents’ chip shop in Birmingham, and come to work for a magazine with an ethos of ‘no music too cool, too weird or too marginal’, whilst nursing his ABBA, ELO, Crowded House and Bee Gees back-catalogues, and wearing a selection of snugly cardigans from M&S.

And, now, there’s a 16-year-old from Wolverhampton, in a hat, who chain smokes, and kicks people’s shins if they slag off The Wonder Stuff. In the first week, I make David Bennun bleed. Twenty years later, I run into him, in Manchester, at a Lady Gaga gig, and he ruefully rolls up his trouser leg and shows me the scar I left. Then he reminds me of the occasion where I threatened to push someone out of the window, 26 storeys up, whilst most of the staff calmly carried on typing at their computers. It’s not a normal workplace. We think this is why we are cool. The NME think we’re wankers for exactly the same reason.

This is the first time I’ve really been out in the world, and met adults. Previously, all my socialising took place on the dance floor and toilets of the Raglan, a tiny, dark pit populated by fringed, boot-wearing teenagers: essentially a playpen, with a bar. Our innocence was obvious – it shone in our faces the same way our teeth glowed white under the UV light. Yes, people were having sex, and fighting, and spreading rumours, and taking drugs – but it was essentially like tiger cubs knocking each other around, claws velveted. We were all equal. There was no calculation, or recrimination. Everything was forgotten after a nap.


Going into the adult world, then, is a shock. Rolling up at the office for my first day, I’m smoking a fag as I come out of the lift – so they know that I, too, am a grown-up. I offer everyone a nip of Southern Comfort, from the bottle in my rucksack, for the same reason. Most demur, but Ben Stud – who’s just come off the ferry from Amsterdam, from interviewing a band – says, ‘Handy!’, cheerfully, and takes a swig. He is, I notice, looking down, using a promotional Frisbee as a combined ashtray, plate for his bacon bap, and somewhere safe to keep his house keys.

I’ve already decided I’m going to have sex with as many people in London as I can. There’s no reason not to. With my first wage cheque – ￡28.42 – I’ve bought some new, pretty, grey-and-lace knickers from Marks & Spencer, and finally thrown away my mum’s now too-capacious inheritance, so I’m looking none-too-shabby in the knack. Although I’ve offered it all around town, no one in Wolverhampton seems remotely interested in taking my virginity, so I have concluded it’s one of those things you can only get done in London – like natural-looking highlights, or Dirty Martinis. It’s a specialist job.

So my task this month is to work out just how to be both a red-hot journalistic wunderkind and a red-hot piece of ass that someone, hopefully quite soon, will have sex with – but without getting a ‘reputation’. Yes: at 16, I am having to learn how to drive the 16-wheeled vehicle that is my Flirt Truck; but without ruining my career.


Flirting in the workplace is a tricky subject for feminists. Many of the hardcore don’t believe in it at all: as far as they’re concerned, you might as well go the whole hog and just install yourself in a window in Soho with a card reading ‘Model, 18, Hand-Jobs’ next to the doorbell.

And you know, for many, that’s the right view to take. The idea that women should have to flirt in order to get on is just as vexing as any other thing women are supposed to have to do – such as be thin, accept 30 per cent lower wages, and not laugh at 30 Rock when they have food in their mouth and it falls out a bit, on to the floor, and the cat eats it.

Some women just don’t flirt. They don’t want to and they don’t have the bones for it, and it makes them feel tetchy, and like they might punch someone. They feel about flirting like I do about anything that involves upper-body strength, high heels or spatial awareness. They just want it to f*ck off.

But for other women, flirting’s just … how it comes out. It’s not there as a defence mechanism, or as a result of years of being unwillingly sexualised by the goddamn patriarchy. It’s not a consequence. It’s an action. It comes from an almost demented joy in being alive, talking to someone who isn’t boring you to death, and conspiring in an unspoken, momentary, twinkly, ‘I like you, and you like me. Isn’t it lovely that we’re being total lovelies together?’ conspiracy.

If you’re a natural flirt, it’s not even a sex thing, really. You flirt with everyone – men, women, children, animals. Automated response ticket-booking phone lines (‘Press ‘3’ for more options? Oh darling, I don’t think you have a button for the option I’d like’).

As a cheerful, born flirt, my rationale is, if you’re going to spend all day having conversations with people – even if it’s only on the phone, arranging the delivery of a new dishwasher – why not try to make it end with everyone feeling a bit bucked and perky? For me, flirting is the bit in Mary Poppins where Mary says, ‘In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. Find the fun, and – SNAP! The job’s a game.’

But did flirting help me at Melody Maker? Did I further my career on the basis of my devastating sexual allure? I must be brisk here: no. Bear in mind, though, I was a tipsy 16-year-old in a huge hat, who still looked slightly scared of the lighter she was using to light her fags. At the time, my flirting skills were very, very rudimentary – as I recall, the majority of it revolved around ‘bold’ winking, a bit like a mad pirate. I also have a suspicion that my idea of subtly indicating my interest in matters of a sexual nature consisted of little more than saying, ‘Cor. Sexy intercourse, huh? It’s sexy,’ during otherwise perfectly normal conversations about, say, when the lift might arrive.

Almost without exception – and wholly understandably – my superiors at the magazine appeared to regard me as some kind of chimp in a dress who’d climbed in through an open window, and who they’d decided they would leave alone to quietly play with the computers, lest it became agitated and started biting people. And even if they hadn’t been looking at me with borderline horror, I wouldn’t have wanted to flirt with them anyway: they were proper grown-ups! Really old! Like, in their thirties! If I ended up getting off with one of them, they might suddenly start talking to me about council tax, or cavity insulation, or grown-up stuff like that, and I would be all at conversational sea. It wasn’t appealing at all.

So no. I did not further my career by flirting. Indeed, on the contrary: I suspect my burgeoning sexuality burgeoning all over the place led to the curtailment of a great many offers of work, due to worries about being accused of predating a Brummie Lolita. However, I wholeheartedly believe that, should they wish to, strident feminists are allowed to flirt their way to the top, without compromising their strident feminist principles one smidge.

Ladies, we are at a massive disadvantage in the workplace. Your male peers are flirting with their male bosses constantly. The average workplace is like f*cking Bromancing the Stone. That’s basically what male bonding is. Flirting. They’re flirting with each other playing golf, they’re flirting with each other going to the football, they’re flirting with each other chatting at the urinals – and, sadly, flirting at each other in after-hours visits to strip clubs and pubs. They are bonding with each other over their biological similarities. If the only way you can bond with them is over your biological differences, you go for it. Feel pressurised to actually f*ck them if you do? Then don’t flirt. Find it an easy way to just crack on? Then crack on – and don’t blame other women for doing it.

Well, not to their faces, anyway. Bitching in the toilets is always allowed, of course.


So I am learning about flirting. Not for business – just for fun. God it’s tricky. I’ve only ever flirted with teenage boys before, who don’t really notice it half the time, God bless them. Actually, now I come to think of it, it must have been more than half the time – I am still a virgin. They were obviously not picking up on this stuff at all.

I’m just too subtle, I think, at a party, a few weeks later. I’m still wearing a huge hat – since I floated the idea in my diary that it might make my body look smaller, by way of perspective, I’ve never taken it off – a metric metre of eyeliner, and I’m fairly tipsy. Well, I’m doing a ‘sexy dance’ at the bar to ‘Respect’ from Erasure. That’s fairly relaxed. ‘I need to be less subtle. It’s not working.’

The next time a man comes up to me, we talk about Erasure for five minutes, float the possibility of my moving to the left slightly, so he can get served, and then I stare at the man, silently.

‘You OK?’ he asks, finally, looking a little perturbed, holding out a fiver to the barman for his beer.


‘I was just wondering what it would be like to kiss you,’ I reply, giving him an intense stare from underneath the hat. At the time, I’m not aware of it, but looking back now I suspect I looked like a slightly cross-eyed clam, looking for unwary plankton.

Ten seconds later, and we’re kissing. He’s stuffing his tongue down my throat like I’ve been on a hunger strike and he’s about to force-feed me with a tube, and I’m doing my level best not to cough him back out again. I am euphoric. My God! Who knew it was this easy! That you can just ask for some sexual contact – and get it! I see now that my previous tactic, in Wolverhampton – simply hanging around boys, hoping they might trip over, fall on my face, and then get off with me ‘while they’re there’ – was hopelessly amateurish. This is the way forward – simply putting in a kissing order, like at Argos!

The next few weeks are revelatory. I essentially put my career on hold to go round getting kissed as much as possible. I learn a great deal about it. I find that, by and large, the best kissers are also the best conversationalists: they kind of … listen to what you’re doing, and reply. One man kisses me right out of my shoes in an alleyway in Soho, and I spend the next three days so high from the experience that I write a six-page poem full of terrible metaphors about stars, anemones and quicksand. On another kissing night with another man, we both manage to smoke cigarettes all the way through our session, although I do have to demur over his chewing gum: I fish it out of his mouth, and dramatically chuck it over my shoulder, saying, ‘Chew on me, instead,’ in a sultry, Wolverhampton accent.

But the music and media industry is a tiny world – essentially a village congregating in the same five or six bars and venues every night. I start to get a ‘reputation’ back at Melody Maker. Things start happening in the office I feel uncomfortable with. One writer fills that week’s gossip column with barely concealed references to the fact I got off with another writer. A bloke from the art department spends one of our editorial pub sessions making comments about someone else I got off with’s premature ejaculation problems – ‘I hope that dress is wipe-clean.’

Then one of the section editors calls me over to his desk, and tells me that the feature I’ve just filed could be a cover story, ‘So why don’t you sit on my lap, while we talk about it?’

Wow, I think. This is some sexism! Some sexism is happening at me! Even in an office full of forward-thinking liberal outcasts, there are still some people who are judging me for being a sexually active woman! In some respects, it’s almost exciting – after all, the last time I was being judged on issues of my sexuality, it ended with The Yobs throwing stones at me on my birthday. If I’ve gone from being wholly undesirable (then), to being looked down upon as a slag (now), this is, surely, a bit of a promotion? Becoming a woman has to be done one step at a time and this is, in its own way, considerable progress.

On the other hand, I’m initially stumped about what to do about it. I’ve read novels about the patriarchy judging sexually active women but those books don’t give me a great deal of advice on what to do next. By and large, those women end up dying on moors, being excluded by the society of Atlanta, or swallowing arsenic, before their daughter is sent off to work in the cotton mills. The coping tactics of grown women in the 19th century give me little to work on, and so – without any better role models – I simply regress back into the coping methods of my childhood. As the eldest of eight children who regularly punch each other, my tactic at Melody Maker is just go a bit … gonzo. I require the guy from the art department with his ‘wipe-clean dress’ comments to buy me a double, for ‘injury to feelings’. The writer who defamed me in the gossip column is told to stand on a chair, in front of the whole office, and apologise to me, while I point at him and say, ‘That column didn’t even have any jokes in.’ I can think of no worse insult.

And when the section editor asks me to sit on his lap, in order to discuss my ‘promotion’, I think, merely, more fool you, dude, and plonk down on him, heavily, then light a fag.

‘Lost your circulation yet?’ I ask, cheerfully, as he sweats and coughs.

I get my first front cover. He spends ten minutes in the conference room, banging his thighs until he gets the circulation back in his legs.

On the one hand, I can see why I have become a bit of a running gag in the office. I am, let’s be fair, acting like a sexed-up lady Pac-Man – running around flapping my mouth open and closed, gobbling up people’s faces. It’s certainly worth a good 100 gags or so. Hell, I’m making about 50 on the topic myself.

But the jokes aren’t ‘amused’ jokes. There’s an odd air to the comments; there’s a kind of … poking, pinching, mean quality to them. And I notice that these jokes aren’t being made about the men in the office who are kissing me. There’s a kind of crushing element to them. It feels like these jokes are coming from a dark place. A darkness is what I sense, as I walk out of the office for the day, smoking a fag, to prove I’m a grown-up, and still one of them. An uncomfortable darkness.


These days, sexism is a bit like Meryl Streep, in a new film: sometimes you don’t recognise it straightaway. You can be up to 20 minutes in, enjoying all the dinosaurs and the space-fights and the homesick Confederate soldiers, before you go, ‘Oh my God – under the wig! THAT’S MERYL.’

Very often, a woman can have left a party, caught the bus home, washed her face, got into bed, read 20 minutes of The Female Eunuch and put the light out before she puts the light back on again, sits bolt upright and shouts, ‘Hang on – I’VE JUST HAD SOME SEXISM AT ME. THAT WAS SOME SEXISM! WHEN THAT MAN CALLED ME ‘SUGAR TITS’ – THAT WAS SEXISM, AND NOT AN HONEST MISPRONUNCIATION OF THE NAME “ANDREA”!’

It never used to be like this, of course – before the second wave of feminism, political correctness, and women having Mace in their handbag, sexism used to be both overt and everywhere. You knew it when you met it. It was all, ‘Know your limits, women,’ ‘Make us a cup of tea, love,’ ‘Look at the rack on THAT,’ and wolf-whistles from any passing male over the age of 12.

Benny Hill chasing a blonde round and round a desk, making ‘honk honk’ gestures with his hands, wasn’t ‘light entertainment’ back then. It was a simple fact of life. Sexism – like ashtrays, David Essex and the smell of BO – was everywhere: no matter how inappropriate the setting. I rewatched Gregory’s Girl recently – Bill Forsyth’s lovely, fluffy, heart-warming film about the girl who’s good at football and wants to play in the school team – and was amazed to note a scene where the guy teaching cookery gropes schoolgirl Susan’s arse and she just saunters away, and neither she nor the film has any comment to make. In Gregory’s Girl! The film that I’d remembered as being essentially Vindication of the Rights of Women for anyone who, at the time, slept under a Holly Hobby duvet!

And no one even thought to complain at the time – because, if you were cheerfully and publicly touching up a schoolgirl, it was just good, healthy British perving. Wench-handling. Part of our heritage, like cheese rolling, and drowning malformed babies in cider barrels.


And, of course – like half-timbered buildings, and Stonehenge – there is still plenty of this old-fashioned sexism around today. I asked on Twitter if anyone had experienced any outrageous sexism recently, and whilst I was expecting quite a few, amusingly stereotyped clangers, I wasn’t expecting the deluge that started 30 seconds after I inquired, and which carried on for nearly four days afterwards.

In the end, I had nearly 2,000 replies – which, as they stacked up, very rapidly turned into a gigantic debate amongst women, who’d all presumed their cases were more isolated than they were.

Here are the ones that made me actually gasp:

‘I had a boss who said, “We all have a wank thinking about Rosie – but I’m the only one who’s got an office to do it in.”’

‘A guy jumped out of a car and stuck his hand up my skirt to see if I was wearing stocking or tights as I stood at a bus queue.’

‘I once worked in a Ford garage where the rest of the staff would shout TITTIES as I walked across the workshop.’


So that’s old-fashioned sexism: as slow-moving yet obvious as the giant boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And in some ways, however ghastly, depressing and enervating it is, I miss it. It is an increasingly complex world out there, after all. Over the years, all kinds of sexism variables have sprung up, muddying the waters. Now, there are female chauvinist pigs, and men trading in ‘ironic sexism’, whereby calling you ‘Tits McGee’ and telling you to go and ‘make us a fried egg sandwich’ is technically not sexism but ‘a laugh’, which you must ‘laugh’ along to.

These days, a plethora of shitty attitudes to women have become diffuse, indistinct or almost entirely concealed. Fighting them feels like trying to combat a mouldy, mildew smell in the hallway, using only a breadknife. Because – like racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia – modern sexism has become cunning. Sly. Codified. In the same way a closet racist would never dream of openly saying ‘nigger’ but might make a pointed reference to someone black having natural rhythm, or liking fried chicken, so a closet misogynist has a vast array of words, comments, phrases and attitudes that they can employ to subtly put a woman down, or disconcert her, but without it being immediately apparent that that is what they are actually doing.

Take, for instance, a small dispute in the office. You have had a difference of opinion about a project. A male colleague has taken it quite badly, and stomped off. When he returns, he places a packet of Tampax on your desk.

‘Given how emotional you’ve been, I thought you might need these,’ he says, with a Jimmy Carr grin. A couple of people snigger.

What are you to do? Obviously, had you more resources, you would be able to reach in to your desk drawer, pull out a pair of testicles and place them on the desk, replying, ‘And given how spineless you were over our last contretemps, I thought you might need these,’ but, alas, even the most prepared woman in the world is unlikely to have a spare pair of rubber knackers in her desk.

Or how about a social situation? You’ve gone on holiday with another family. You all have children. You notice that the men are doing around half the amount of housework and childcare that the women are – they have an amazing ability to sit in an armchair, serenely playing Angry Birds on their iPhones, whilst the wives run around peeling potatoes, and rescuing wailing, shit-encrusted toddlers from disused wells.

‘I’m just not as good at that stuff,’ the men say, almost mournfully, as the women stand in the kitchen, stressed, knocking back shots of whisky from 4pm onwards.

Again, ideally, you’d be prepared for this: perhaps having taught your older children to quote The Female Eunuch from memory, in exchange for a Milky Bar. Or maybe you’d have an iPhone App called ‘Division Of Domestic Labour Tracker, 1600 – Present Day’, which you could fire up, and leave on the table, next to the beer, for the men to have a look at. But again, who has the time for these delightful schemes?

When I asked the ladies of Twitter for their instances of sexism, it was, in the end, the more codified examples that were disturbing. Kate, who explained that she ‘no longer wears a white top and black skirt to meetings, since a queue formed in front of me at a coffee break. They all presumed I was a waitress’. Or Hannah, who – on being made redundant – was comforted by her boss with the comment, ‘Don’t worry, love – at least you still have great legs.’

Of course, the reason these instances are so pernicious and damaging is the element of doubt involved. Are they being sexist on purpose or was it just some accidental sexism, due to carelessness and stupidity? The ‘great legs’ comment, for instance – that could just be an extremely cloddish attempt at condolence, rather than the implied assumption that the only thing that matters for a woman is looking good and that, as long as she still looks nice in a short skirt, she’ll be fine in the work-place; although, obviously, buggered when she gets older and starts wearing comfy shoes and slacks.

Are you going to look like a screaming, humourless harridan if you call people out on this? Should you just shruggingly let it pass when someone your inferior sees you standing next to a tea urn, and asks you for ‘Milk, no sugar – and you got any HobNobs?’

In short, how can you tell when some sexism is happening to you?


Well, in this matter, what ultimately aids us is to simply apply this question to the issue: Is this polite? If we – the entire population of the earth, male and female alike – are just, essentially, ‘The Guys’, then was one of The Guys just … uncouth to a fellow Guy?

Don’t call it sexism. Call it ‘manners’, instead. When a woman blinks a little, shakes her head like Columbo, and says, ‘I’m sorry, but that sounded a little … uncivil,’ a man is apt to apologise. Because even the most rampant bigot on earth has no defence against a charge of simply being rude.

After all, you can argue – argue until you cry – about what modern, codified misogyny is; but straight-up ungentlemanliness, of the kind his mother would clatter the back of his head for, is inarguable. It doesn’t need to be a ‘man vs woman’ thing. It’s just a tiff between The Guys.

Seeing the whole world as ‘The Guys’ is important. The idea that we’re all, at the end of the day, just a bunch of well-meaning schlumps, trying to get along, is the basic alpha and omega of my world view. I’m neither ‘pro-women’ nor ‘antimen’. I’m just ‘Thumbs up for the six billion’.

Because I don’t think that ‘men’/maleness/male sexuality is the problem here. I don’t think sexism is a ‘man vs woman’ thing. The Man is not The Man simply because he’s a man. Sometimes, The Man is a woman – particularly if you go to the kind of late-night clubs I do, although that’s a different issue altogether. Men don’t do this shit to women just because of their ‘femaleness’. AND I DON’T THINK IT’S ABOUT SEX.

As I start to watch men and women interacting in the adult area – in work, relationships and marriages but mainly, to be fair, in the pub – I don’t come to believe, as many people, including the Goddess Greer, do, that men secretly hate women. That men hate women because there is something about penis and testosterone that wants to wage war on vagina and oestrogen.


No. Even though I’m quite drunk half the time, and often wearing so much eyeliner I am, technically, blind, I don’t see it as men vs woman at all. What I see, instead, is winner vs loser.

Most sexism is down to men being accustomed to us being the losers. That’s what the problem is. We just have bad status. Men are accustomed to us being runners-up or being disqualified entirely. For men born pre-feminism, this is what they were raised on: second-class citizen mothers; sisters who need to be married off; female schoolmates going to secretarial school, then becoming housewives. Women who disengaged. Disappeared.

These men are the CEOs of our big companies, the big guys on the stock markets, the advisors to governments. They dictate working hours and maternity leave, economic priorities and societal mores. And, of course, they don’t feel equality in their bones – sexism runs deep in their generation, along with a liking for boiled puddings, spanking and golf. Their automatic reaction is to regard women as ‘other’. The entrenched bias against the working, liberated female will only die out when they do.

Even those men born post-feminism, raised on textbooks and marches and their own mothers leaving each morning for the office, however much they might believe in the theoretical equality of women, and respect those around them, they’re scarcely unaware of the great sweep of history that went before. A quiet voice inside – suppressed, but never wholly silenced – says, ‘If women are the true equals of men, where’s the proof?’ And it is not just a voice inside men. It is inside women, too.

For even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female – citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra – can’t conceal that women have basically done f*ck all for the last 100,000 years. Come on – let’s admit it. Let’s stop exhaustingly pretending that there is a parallel history of women being victorious and creative, on an equal with men, that’s just been comprehensively covered up by The Man. There isn’t. Our empires, armies, cities, artworks, philosophers, philanthropists, inventors, scientists, astronauts, explorers, politicians and icons could all fit, comfortably, into one of the private karaoke booths in SingStar. We have no Mozart; no Einstein; no Galileo; no Gandhi. No Beatles, no Churchill, no Hawking, no Columbus. It just didn’t happen.

Nearly everything so far has been the creation of men – and a liberal, right-on denial of it makes everything more awkward and difficult in the long run. Pretending that women have had a pop at all this before but just ultimately didn’t do as well as the men, that the experiment of female liberation has already happened but floundered gives strength to the belief that women simply aren’t as good as men, full stop. That things should just carry on as they are – with the world shaped around, and honouring, the priorities, needs, whims and successes of men. Women are over, without having even begun. When the truth is that we haven’t begun at all. Of course we haven’t. We’ll know it when we have.

I see the wrongness of this presumption in the office. Melody Maker is filled with good, liberal men. Whatever sexism I’ve experienced, it was with the people the rest of the office considered to be sad nutters: by and large, this group of rock critics are as feminist a bunch of men as I’ll ever know. One of them ends up being my husband, and teaches me more about the bullshit men project on women than any woman ever does. In his cardigan, with his carrier bag full of Field Mice and Abba records, a 23-year-old Greek boy from Birmingham ends up rivalling Germaine Greer as my feminist hero.

But this is all in the future. Here, in 1993, I am sitting in the office, on a desk, smoking a fag. I am watching liberal men tie themselves in knots trying to square their ardent belief that women are equal to men, with the evidence that there just aren’t that many great records made by women. Every six weeks or so, in an editorial meeting, the guys look around at the music scene of the time – all grunge or Blur or whatever – and despair, ‘Jesus, we’ve got to get some women in the paper! We’ve just got to get … some women!’

And so we’d get Sonya from Echobelly, say, to take part in a ‘debate’ on the future of Radio 1. Or Louise Wener from Sleeper to review the singles. Or – in an emergency – just print a picture of Debbie Harry somewhere. A conscious effort had to be made because in those days, the music scene was much like Auschwitz. There were no birds.

You couldn’t find a woman making music for love nor money. This was a pre-Spice Girl, pre-Gaga era, remember – when it was presumed that there was no mass market for women making pop music. And that’s presuming they could make music in the first place. Julie Burchill, of all people, summed up the presumptions of many when she said, ‘A girl in a dress with a guitar looks weird – like a dog riding a bicycle. Very odd. Hard to get past it.’

What we were all thinking, but were too embarrassed to say, was that women simply had less to say than men. It had, after all, been over 70 years since women had been given the vote and yet, as far as the music scene was concerned, we had little more than a handful of female geniuses to show for it: Joni Mitchell, Carole King, PJ Harvey, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Madonna, Billie Holiday. Few enough to be regarded as freakish anomalies rather than the first outriders on a forthcoming storm. There was still no female rock band to rival Led Zeppelin, or Guns N’ Roses. No female hip-hop artist to rival Public Enemy, or the Wu-Tang Clan. No female dance artist to rival Richie ‘Plastikman’ Hawtin, or The Prodigy. And what all-female band would you put up against the might of The Beatles? The Runaways? The Go-Gos? The Slits? The disparity was laughable. But we could never, ever mention it. The truth sounded sexist.

Creativity, we silently fretted, should really have begun the moment legislation changed. All manner of female incredibleness – pent up for centuries – should have been unleashed; flattening trees for thousands of miles around, like a pyroclastic blast. If women really were equal to men, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst should have been knocking out ‘All Along The Watchtower’ before dusk on the day suffrage was granted. While they were underneath that horse.

But they didn’t. Because simply being able to vote isn’t the same as true equality. It’s difficult to see the glass ceiling because it’s made of glass. Virtually invisible. What we need is for more birds to fly above it, and shit all over it, so we can see it properly.

In the meantime, we had Echobelly on the cover.

‘Do you want to go and interview her?’ the editor asked. The unspoken follow-up sentence was, ‘Because you’re a girl.’

‘No,’ I said. I knew they were awful.


So why, then, didn’t we do anything?

Based on my own, personal experiences, 100,000 years of male superiority has its origins in the simple basis that men don’t get cystitis. Why wasn’t it a woman who discovered the Americas, in 1492? Because in a pre-antibiotic era, what woman would dare risk getting halfway across the Atlantic then spend the rest of the voyage clamped to the toilet, crying, and occasionally shouting, ‘Can anyone see New York yet? Get me a hotdog,’ out of the porthole?

We are, physically, the weaker sex. We’re not as good at hefting stones, killing mammoths and rowing boats. In addition, sex often had the added complication of getting us pregnant, and leaving us feeling ‘too fat’ to lead an army into India. It’s not a coincidence that efforts towards female emancipation only got going under the twin exegeses of industrialisation and contraception – when machines made us the equal of men in the workplace, and The Pill made us the equal of men in expressing our desire. In more primitive times – what I would personally regard as any time before the release of Working Girl, in 1988 – the winners were always going to be anyone who was both physically strong enough to punch an antelope to the ground, and whose libido didn’t end up with them getting pregnant, then dying in childbirth.


So to the powerful came education, discussion, and the conception of ‘normality’. Being a man and men’s experiences were considered ‘normal’: everything else was other. And as ‘other’ – without cities, philosophers, empires, armies, politicians, explorers, scientists and engineers – women were the losers. I don’t think that women being seen as inferior is a prejudice based on male hatred of women. When you look at history, it’s a prejudice based on simple fact.


Oddly, however, I don’t feel like I can talk about sexism with other women. It feels too tender a point to discuss with them. All the women I know are strong feminists working in male environments – journalists, editors, PRs, computer programmers – but they are too busy at this point – 1993 – just getting on with stuff to have big debates about it. Besides, it is the beginning of Britpop, the dawn of the Ladette. As young women essentially at play – with no children, no childcare worries, no sudden stalling of their careers in their thirties, as the men inexplicably start to sail past them – things still feel hopeful. In this era of Doc Martens and beer and minimal make-up, sexism seems to be dying so fast it would be counter-productive to draw attention to it. We all, naively, presume it is a problem of another age, and that things are getting better and better by the day. We don’t know what’s coming towards us – Nuts and Brazilians, Moira Stuart fired because she’s too old, and another decade and a half of unequal pay. In an era of PJ Harvey, we cannot imagine the p-ssycat Dolls.

But I do have conversations about the patriarchy. And I am having them with gay men. At 18, I am discovering what generations of women have long known: that the natural ally of the straight woman is the gay man. Because they are ‘other’ – losers – too.


‘Do you think they won’t notice you’re a woman?’ Charlie says.

We’re in a shabby cafe in Camden, eating spaghetti bolognese. I live in London now – queuing up in Barclays Bank, Queen Square, Wolverhampton on my 18th birthday, the very first hour I could legally get an overdraft and move out. I have a house in Camden where I am the world’s most disorganised tenant: the phone is so regularly cut off that people start leaving messages for me in the nearby pub, The Good Mixer, instead. I leave a lit candle on top of the television and it melts right through to the cathode tube Not that it matters. The electric’s been cut off, too. I haven’t watched the TV in months.

Coming to this cafe every lunchtime and eating spaghetti bolognese, ￡3.75, still feels like the height of sophistication and grown-up-ness. Look at me! Eating out! Eating foreign! With a homosexual!

‘Because they always do, you know,’ Charlie says. ‘They notice you’re a woman straightaway. I used to think they didn’t notice I was gay, too. But they do.’

‘It’s not that there’s anything terribly wrong,’ I say, almost apologetically. ‘I mean, they’re not keeping me in a Rape Cupboard, or anything. It’s just …’

I sigh.

‘It’s just … oh, everything I say seems a bit weird, and wrong,’ I say. ‘I’m not normal. I just feel like a twat. Yes, I’m reclaiming the word. Shut up.’

I am still smarting from a conversation I had today at Melody Maker. The big new thing is an American movement called ‘Riot Grrrl’ – a hardcore, punk-feminist scene where band members eschew talking to the mainstream press, disseminate fanzines, ban boys from the mosh pit, and scrawl revolutionary slogans on their bodies in lipstick and marker pen.

Courtney Love is a figurehead – and through her, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana are allied. As I now work for The Times as a rock critic, I mentioned in conversation that I think Riot Grrrl bands should do interviews with the mainstream press, as the kind of girls who really need a hardcore feminist movement – in council blocks, listening to Radio 1, fantasising about New Kids On The Block – are unlikely to come across a photocopied Riot Grrrl fanzine being handed out outside a Sebadoh gig. Any revolution worth its salt needs to get its message across to as many people as possible. Ipso facto, Huggy Bear should do an interview with me.

Halfway through this speech, I am shouted down by a male editor, who dismisses everything I say out of hand, and concludes his argument with the statement, ‘You wouldn’t know what it’s like to be a fat teenage girl, being shouted at in the street by arseholes.’

At the time, I am a fat teenage girl, being shouted at in the street by arseholes. I am rendered silent with astonishment that I am being lectured on a radical feminist youth movement by a middle-aged straight white man.

‘It’s like he thinks he understands everything better than me – even me!’ I tell Charlie, getting indignant again. ‘It’s boiling my piss – a piss which, incidentally, I am having to queue up for twice as long as he is at any gig.’

‘Oh, I get it all the time,’ Charlie says, cheerfully. ‘It’s mainly conversations about how difficult it is to be a gay man – explained to me by a straight man. The problem is, straight men don’t know that much about us, do they?’

‘We’re very mysterious,’ I agree, as spaghetti dangles from my mouth.

‘Well, we are, aren’t we?’ Charlie says. ‘I mean, think of all those films or TV shows where there’s one woman, or one gay, in a script otherwise full of straight men, written by a straight man? Or a book? Fiction and film is full of these imaginary gay men and straight women, saying what straight men imagine we would say, and doing what straight men imagine we would do. Every gay I ever see has an ex-lover dying of AIDS. F*cking Philadelphia. I’ve started to think I should get an AIDS boy-friend, just to be normal.’

‘Yeah – and all the women are always just really “good” and sensible, and keep putting the men, with their crazy ideas, and their boyish idealism, into check,’ I say, mournfully. ‘And they’re never funny. WHY CAN’T I EVER SEE A FUNNY LADY?’

‘Imaginary Jewish women can be funny,’ Charlie points out. ‘But they also have to be neurotic, and never get a boyfriend.’

‘Maybe I should convert,’ I say, gloomily. ‘I’ll go down the synagogue and get one of those candlesticks, and you go down the Terrence Higgins Trust and pull. Then we’ll be proper.’

‘Still, we’ve got it easy compared to the lesbians,’ Charlie says, getting the bill. ‘There isn’t a single lesbian in Britain, apart from Hufty.’

As I chuck my fags into my bag, I have an idle, stupid thought. I know what I need to do next, I think. I need to get a boyfriend. A boyfriend would make everything better.