Here’s comedian Louis C.K.’s routine on women and men: “Globally and historically, men are the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. By comparison, do you know what men’s number one threat is? Heart disease. Guys, if you want to know how brave a woman is every time she says yes to going on a date, try to imagine that you could only date a half bear, half lion. ‘Oh—I hope this one’s nice!’ That’s being a woman.”
Sometimes, when you think about the stats on sexual assault—90 percent of women know their attackers; one in five women are attacked—it feels like a fact too awful to be acknowledged. One in five, man. If those were your odds on the lottery, you’d already have preemptively bought the Porsche. One in five means you often look round a room of your girlfriends and think, “Which one of us will it be?”
If your teenage daughters are in the room—with their big, smiling faces and their awkward, beautiful, perfect trust in the world—you feel so panicked you go into the kitchen and hold on to the sink.
There you are. Scared again. But you don’t go on about it to the men you know—because that would be morbid. So men don’t know how scared we are. That’s the first big thing you don’t know about us. How scared we are.
The second big thing you don’t know about us is, we’re exhausted. So, so exhausted. We have less money than you—the pay gap, illegal since 1970 yet still, astonishingly, here, means we effectively work for free for fifty-seven days of the year. That’s exhausting. We must have babies, quickly, before our eggs die, but while we also work—that’s exhausting.
And since we were teenage girls—since the moment we went, mortified, to buy that first bra, and left the safe, unisex world of childhood to become “a woman”—we’ve been judged and commented on. Catcalls in the streets; relatives saying we’re too fat or too thin. Comments in yearbooks or on Facebook; hairdressers saying, “You have a mannish jaw.” “Uncles” at weddings, and bosses at parties, and friends of friends, rating you to your face—saying if they “would” or “wouldn’t,” scoring you out of ten, as if you’re a gadget for sale on Amazon, or livestock at a fair.
People touching you, evaluating and owning you—until you find yourself saying, almost as a recurring mantra, in your head, “Fuck off! Stop talking about me! Fuck off, and stop being the voice in my head! Stop telling me you have decided my worth.”
And, so, yes. Yes, I do understand why human rights lawyer Charlotte Proudman “perv-shamed” an older, senior lawyer—Alexander Carter-Silk—when he contacted her on LinkedIn and told her her picture was “stunning.”
In the furor that followed, he—and a million other commentators afterwards—seemed confused by Proudman’s reaction. It was just flirtation! It was just an appreciative comment! This is what men and women do!
But men do it without knowing we’re scared and we’re tired. So very, very tired.
Women Keep Fucking Things Up
The thing is, when practically the whole world needs to be changed, we get a bit . . . impatient when it doesn’t.
Do you know what the problem with feminism is, in 2016? Sadly, it’s the feminists. Time and time again, those women just keep . . . screwing it up.
Sheryl Sandberg, previously chief of staff at the US Treasury, is now second in command at Facebook, and is regularly voted one of Time’s “100 Most Powerful People in the World.”
But this year, when she published her book Lean In—encouraging more women to take up positions of high power in business—she targeted an audience who are already well educated, wholly neglecting to address such issues as child care and housework, which hold back so many other, less privileged women. Ultimately, she screwed it up.
Twenty-seven-year-old Lena Dunham, meanwhile, writes, directs, produces, and stars in one of the most talked-about shows of the last ten years—HBO’s Girls. She tackles abortion, STDs, pornography, masochism, and her generation’s parlous reversal of fortune. Her grasp of the moment is equal with Tom Wolfe’s.
But as the first season of Girls began to air, it became sadly apparent that Dunham hadn’t included a single nonwhite character in the show.
“They should call it White Girls” was the common payoff to angry pieces about it. Dunham screwed up.
And then what about Beyoncé? Another woman who does that rare thing—of openly describing herself as a feminist—Beyoncé has an all-female band, manages herself, writes rogue suffragette anthems like “Independent Women,” “Single Ladies,” and “Run the World (Girls),” and has famously made having a big, fantastic arse and thighs aspirational.
But then she got married to Shawn Carter, a.k.a. Jay Z, and named her current world tour the Mrs. Carter Tour. Women have campaigned for decades for the right to keep their own names—and then this sexy chick gets stuck for a title for her tour, and puts back women’s rights by thirty years. Yeah, thanks, Mrs. Norman Maine.
Indeed, thanks to all the “feminists” out there who keep screwing it up. Because every time you make some error, or miss something out, you’re making feminism look foolish.
That’s the presumption, anyway. I’ve lost count of the pieces I’ve read in the last six months or so bewailing previously loved feminist icons who’ve done something that has supposedly caused an immovable stain on themselves and their movement. Whenever I read about Sheryl Sandberg, or Lena Dunham, or Beyoncé, the core complaint seems to be: Why haven’t these women done everything? Why haven’t they addressed all the problems women face? To put it in the most succinct terms possible, why haven’t these women been able to simply and inclusively address the concerns of every one of the 3.3 billion women on earth?
But, of course, if the infallible guide for being able to detect the presence of sexism is “Are the men doing this?,” as we can see, the men are resolutely not expecting one single dude to rock up and solve all the problems of every man on earth. You know—the men are happy when Jeremy Clarkson merely tells them if he thinks a car is “gay” or not. Men didn’t stand at the bottom of Mount Everest, arms folded, waiting for Edmund Hillary to come down, then greet him with, “Yeah, nice one, Hillary—but when are you gonna invent the Internet?”
But this is what we do—time and time again—with our female pioneers. Understandably overinvested in any woman who does begin to succeed, we load a million hot, desperate expectations onto them, then enter a weird world where we become immensely peevish at a thousand things they haven’t done—energetically attacking wholly phantom, imaginary wrongs rather than taking a moment to be joyful over the stuff that, against all the odds, they actually did do. Imperfect but useful achievements which, even as we sigh over their failings, will inevitably be inspiring others to follow in their wake, with their specific quests.
You know what—it really is okay if a woman comes along and does just a little bit of pioneering. Encourage childless university graduates to run global companies! Write brutally honest sitcoms about self-obsessed girls! Stand onstage in front of 250,000 people making them sing, “All the women who are independent / Throw your hands up at me”! Because, let’s face it—no one else is doing that. These are still hardly overcrowded arenas of activity.
We’re all working on a massive patchwork quilt called “A Better Future” here—anyone can pull up a chair and have a go. The only rule of Feminism Quilt Club is that we don’t expect one woman to sew the entire damn thing herself, while bitching about her to her face. Oh, and crisps. You have to bring crisps.
I would like to say this useful thing, in 2016: if we’re waiting for some kind of Feminist Megatron to appear—who will solve all our problems—we will be waiting another hundred thousand years. Personally, I don’t have that long. I’m happy to make feminism a team sport.
I Propose Not Having Opinions on Women for, Say, Five Years
Ironically, sometimes, one of the things that makes it hardest to be a woman is feminism. That’s just how it is. Nothing is perfect all the time.
As one of north London’s top fifteen humorous feminists
, I am often asked for my opinion of women who have been in the news.
In the last few months, for instance, there has been Marissa Mayer—the first pregnant woman to be hired as the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Brave, estrogen-high pioneer? Or hopeless bun-ovened deludo? Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a highly publicized article in The Atlantic stating that women can’t “have it all,” and should stop pretending they can. Had she called it like it really is? Or is she a batshit harpy who couldn’t hack it herself and is now engaging in a gigantic bout of ex post facto projection onto the rest of womankind? E. L. James became a millionaire almost overnight, as her S&M trilogy, Fifty Shades, turned every bookshop window gray and porny. Has she enabled women to finally discuss their sexuality openly? Or merely reinforced patriarchal stereotypes about submissive female sexuality?
And what about Louise Mensch? First the facelift controversy, then bailing out of the Murdoch select committee for the school run, before, finally, resigning as MP for Corby in order to relocate to New York with her family. What does it all mean? How is this going to affect the future of women in British politics? Are CERN going to issue any conclusions on the significance of what Louise Mensch, 41, has done?
To save you all time, I can tell you now, no one actually knows the answer to any of these questions—but they spent the summer debating the hell out of them on Newsnight, and in the Daily Mail. They totally opinionized that stuff.
For, currently, every time a woman in the public eye does something, she doesn’t do it just for, and as, herself. She does it on behalf of 3.3 billion other women, too. She is seen to represent her entire gender—a putative Team “The Birds”—in a way men just aren’t. When a bloke screws up, he’s just some bloke screwing up. When a woman makes a hash of it, however, she’s a cultural signifier, and basis for a million polarized debates. Every famous woman is someone we have to have an opinion on: Lady Gaga, Rebekah Brooks, Naomi Wolf, Rihanna, Ted Cruz’s wife. You must be either for or against them. Your stance on them is a telling indicator of your worldview.
Over the summer I came to a decision. I decided this was working out quite badly for the women, all things told. That given, I would like to propose the following:
1. We need to stop referring to things as “female dilemmas,” “women’s problems,” or “thorny subjects for feminism.” If there’s something which is making life difficult for women, then this is something that is, most assuredly, making it difficult for everyone else in the world, too. Women don’t live on a separate continent—Birdtopia—communicating only sporadically with the menfolk by email. If 52 percent of the potential brain power in the world is being hindered by something—like lack of child care, or creepy WTF? debates on rape and contraception—it behooves this small planet for everyone to jump on it and sort it out as quickly as possible. Basically, this is an emergency. We don’t have time for another hundred thousand years of women feeling sad about their arses, and being held back at work by some swaggering misogynist pinhead called Simon, when there’s polar bears to save and cancer to cure.
My second suggestion is, perhaps, more radical. It is:
2. We need a temporary cessation in people having any opinions about any women, ever. I propose a, say, five-year moratorium on having opinions about women, in order to let one generation of girls get from one side of puberty to the other without growing up in a climate where women are constantly being scolded, chivvied, harassed, or subjected to thunderous opinion columns concluding that, yet again, some woman in the public eye has overreached herself and should wind her neck in.
I offer this last suggestion as some kind of lighthearted, bagsy-no-returns experiment to see if this might benefit the future of the human race or not. Obviously, this “not having an opinion on women” thing wouldn’t be total. I propose that, in an emergency, we might write about something that women are doing: if a prominent female politician turned into some manner of malign she-werewolf and sold her children to Nazis, say, we could legitimately opinionize on that. But on nearly every other matter concerning a newsworthy woman, I suggest one of the following range of reactions: “That doesn’t seem to be any of my business, to be honest.” “I feel wholly neutral about what this woman has done.” “Hmmmm—I don’t know all the facts here, so I’m suspending my judgment.” “I reckon she should just get on with it. Good luck!” Or just the classic: “Whatever.”
A Woman’s Monthly Faultiness
And then, of course, my second most regular political act is an inadvertent one: it is the continuing of my monthly unpleasantness.
Gentle, sweet readers of The Times, this week it is my sad duty to inform you that this column is to be on the topic of an immense beastliness—one I can still scarcely bring myself to mention, even now, after the application of a patent draft for fortifying the nerves. And it is—and Lord forgive me!—this: the circumstance of a woman’s monthly faultiness.
Well, I know that I have already lost half of you—to the sanctuary of the library, and a soothing pipe full of best Black Cherry Twist, muttering darkly about the utter unpleasantness of the female sex.
And as for all the men—well, I imagine them to have simply bolted out of the back door, and to be pouring across the moors in unhappy packs, crying, “ARGH, nooooooooo, NOT THE GROO!”
For it is, is it not, a perfect storm of a subject—one which women find vaguely shaming, and which men are confused and horrified by. Even as a strident, forthright, and notoriously “oversharey” rogue suffragette, I struggle to use the words associated with the topic. They are all, without exception, vile. I can’t say them. I do not wish them to exist in a canon of language that has, by contrast, words as beautiful as “coracle,” “iodine,” “mimosa,” “uxorious,” and “zoo.” Indeed, for the purposes of this article, from now on I will be referring to both the event, and its associated substances, with a series of euphemisms guaranteed to be soothing to everyone reading them. I’m not going to say “menstruation” once.
When Paul McCartney’s Magic Fairy Potion first waltzes into your life—almost invariably at some drearily disadvantageous time, such as “while on a rollercoaster” or “in a bridesmaid’s dress, surrounded by sharks”—as a woman, you know one thing, instantly: this is the biggest secret ever. Like some kind of CIA operative, you have now been summoned to the toughest mission of your life: to spend the next three decades hiding every aspect of “the bit in The Wizard of Oz where it goes from black and white into color.” Go! Go, scared thirteen-year-old girl! Good luck with this task!
Because you really do have to keep it utterly mysterious and hidden. Despite the astonishing amount of effort 52 percent of the world puts into this repetitive—yet, excitingly, also painful, mortifying, and expensive—chore, popular culture will make no comforting, relaxing, casual references to it. You will never put on EastEnders and see Roxy in the caff with Dot sighing, “I’m not opening the Vic tonight—I’m on Mother Nature’s Enforced Kit-Kat Break.”
In Doctor Who, the Doctor’s female assistants never make a crucial, instant bond with an otherwise hostile female alien by lending her one of God’s Special Blue-Tailed Mice at a time of urgent need.
Even in places where you would think it was utterly necessary and specific to be frank about the matter—such as washing-powder commercials—one merely sees a blue stain and is left to figure things out for oneself. “Bold is for . . . royals?”
And this is bizarre—because popular culture, as a whole, is pretty blasé about all other human viscera. In modern comedy films, anything goes—American Pie is about a man who has sex with a pie, Ted has a party-crashing sex worker use the floor as a toilet, and There’s Something About Mary is a film almost wholly based on an idea as slight as it is bizarre: that twenty-six-year-old Cameron Diaz might not know what human ejaculate looks like, and would subsequently and innocently put it on her head, believing it to be hair gel. (Note to scriptwriters: Grown women being able to rapidly and correctly recognize ejaculate is a necessary su
rvival skill we master by the age of sixteen, tops. We like to be able to identify and keep an eye on the movement of that stuff. It’s often “quite consequent-y” for us.)
All other manifestations of blood are fine, of course: approaching my forties, I couldn’t begin to calculate the millions of gallons of blood I’ve seen from shot men’s heads exploding like melons, or people’s severed legs issuing parabolas of spurting gore. You can apply that stuff by the tankerful. Splash it all over! Go nuts! That’s the good movie blood!
And yet the small, peaceful, inevitable, and—even though I may be in a minority here—frequently amusing arrival of a woman’s Great British Bake Off Christmas Special is never witnessed on screen. Not a drop, nor a smudge, nor an horrific accidental trashing of hotel sheets that necessitates Lara Croft stuffing them all into a massive, scavenged Tesco Bag for Life, hiding it up her jumper, and dumping it in a bin at Victoria station—only to be erroneously arrested as a bomb suspect, and buggering up her entire adventure.
What is the sole cinematic exception to this? Carrie. Just one huge, horrific celluloid visitation to Café Rouge—then nothing for the next twenty-seven years.
And, as all women will know, that is one hell of an alarming cycle. It probably means, underneath it all, something quite bad’s happening.
Stop Making Everything Sexy
We live now in a glorious age which we might term “Post Frozen.” Frozen—the feminist Disney movie where the idiot sexy prince turns out to be a betraying motherfuck, and the whole plot revolves around, instead, the love of two sisters. It is Elsa who gives “true love’s kiss” to her sister, Anna—not a boy. Boys may come and boys may go, Frozen told its millions of young, female fans, but your brilliant, idiot, annoying, amazing sister—she’s there for life.