You’re probably doing pretty well at your job by now. You’ve got at least four nice dresses. You’ve been to Paris and experimented with anal sex and know how to repressurise your boiler and can quote bits of The Wasteland when you’re making Whisky Macs.
How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, grey hairs) that you’ve entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to … totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you.
I don’t want that. I want a face full of frown lines and weariness and cream-coloured teeth that, frankly, tells stupid and venal people to FUCK OFF. I want a face that drawls – possibly in the voice of James Cagney, although Cagney from Cagney & Lacey will do – ‘I’ve seen more recalcitrant toddlers/devious line managers/steep mountain passes/complicated dance routines on Parappa the Rapper/big sums than you’ll ever see in your life, sunshine. So get out of my special chair, and bring me a cheese sandwich.’
Lines and greyness are nature’s way of telling you not to fuck with someone – the equivalent of the yellow and black banding on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider. Lines are your weapons against idiots. Lines are your ‘KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN’ sign.
When I get ‘old’ (59 – I reckon 59 is old) I personally intend to bomb around town with white hair fully two foot wide, looking like one of the Wild Women of Wonga, SHOUTING about how I can feel my cells dying, and ordering doubles to help me forget it. I’m not going to spend £50,000 on dying my hair, pumping up my tits, resurfacing my face and pretending I’m a dewy virgin shepherdess, off to seek my first tumble at the bridal fair.
Because there is an unspoken announcement commensurate with that look. Women who’ve had the needle, or the knife, look like they’re saying: ‘My friends are not my friends, my men are unreliable and faint hearted, my lifetime’s work counts for nothing, I am 59 and empty-handed. I’m still as defenceless as the day I was born. PLUS, I’ve now spunked all my yacht money on my arse. By any sane index, I have failed at my life.’
But what of the aesthetics? Whilst it’s shooting frozen fish in a barrel to dismiss the women who’ve spent £30,000 on bad procedures, and who now look like astronauts experiencing g-force in a wind tunnel, there are some women – celebrities we can’t name, because they sue, BUT WE ALL KNOW WHO THEY ARE, who’ve had the really expensive, subtle kind of interventions. They just look kind of … young, and fresh, and sparkly. Amazing. Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of amazing. Surely the subtle interventions are OK? You’re not trying to look 27 again. You’re just trying to look like an amaaaaaaazing 52. In some ways, to advance a moral case against plastic surgery seems surreally nebulous. After all, we seem to have stopped having discussions about the morality of arms-dealing years ago – and that’s about killing people, in some cases quite severely. Plastic surgery, on the other hand, is about slightly dumpy women wanting to have their noses look like Reese Witherspoon’s – something that most of us, I’m sure, would agree is not quite in the same league as blowing a Somali orphan’s leg off.
But the thing is, they’re not subtle. We’re still noticing it. We’re all commenting on the ‘good’ intervention, just as much as we would if it were ‘bad’. We still observe that Time appears to have suddenly swerved off to the right when it approached them, and left their faces unmarked. We still notice the 30-something cleavage on top of the 50-something heart. Even though it looks natural, we know – we know, because we can see the date on the calendar, and our own faces – that it is unreal. That it is in denial of the fact we are dying. An unsettling, fundamental re-routing of perception. That only – only – only women are having to conspire in. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ‘SUBTLY’ LOOKING DRAMATICALLY AND ILLOGICALLY MUCH, MUCH BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE.
Sigh. Look: I love artifice and fantasy and escapism as much as the next person – I love drag and make-up and reinvention and wigs and make-believe and inventing yourself from the floor up, as many times as you need to. Every day, if you want. At the very end of all this arguing, women should be allowed to look how they damn well please. The patriarchy can get OFF my face and tits. In an ideal world, no one would ever criticise women for how they look – whatever it is. Even if that look is ‘I have a bulldog clip under my hair pulling my face this tight’. A woman’s face is her castle.
But this is all under the provision that how women look should be fun, and joyful, and creative, and say something amazing about us as human beings. Even though a five-foot-eight drag queen – tottering through Birmingham city centre at 4am, in pinchy-winchy shoes and inch-thick lippy – will have suffered pain, and spent a great deal of money, and is in TOTAL denial of reality (i.e. that they have a penis), they haven’t done all that out of fear. On the contrary, the bravery involved is off the scale.
But women living in fear of aging, and pulling painful and expensive tricks to hide it from the world, does not say something amazing about us as human beings.
Oh, it makes women look like we were made to do it, by big boys. It makes us look like losers. It makes us look like cowards. And that’s the last thing we are.
That’s the very, very last thing women are.
POSTSCRIPT
London, October 2010
So do I know how to be a woman now? The pat, self-deprecating thing would be to say, ‘No. No, I still don’t have a clue! I’m just still the same schlumpy, well-meaning idiot I was at 13. I’m still just a chimp in a frock with a laptop, setting fire to saucepans, falling down staircases, saying the wrong thing and feeling like an insecure child inside. I’m a buffoon! A div! A numnut!’
Because, of course, there are still ways in which I don’t know how to be a woman yet. I’ve not had to deal with teenage children, or family bereavement, or the menopause, or losing my job. I still can’t iron, do maths, drive a car or – and I must be frank here – 100 per cent reliably remember which is ‘left’ and which is ‘right’ in an emergency. I am responsible, when navigating, for a lot of screeching U-turns and swearing. There’s still a million things I have left to learn. A billion. A trillion. In terms of how much better I potentially could be, I’ve barely even been born yet. I’m still an egg.
But then, on the other hand, I distrust this female habit of reflexively flagging up your own shortcomings. Not the breezy, airy witticism in the face of a compliment – ‘Lost weight? No. We’re just in a larger room than usual, darling.’ ‘You think my children are well mannered? I have wired them with small electrodes, and every time they misbehave, I punch the “Bad Kid” button in my pocket.’ That’s fine.
No – I’m talking about the common attitudinal habit in women that we’re kind of … failing if we’re not a bit neurotic. That we’re somehow boorish, complacent and unfeminine if we’re content.
The way women feel that they are not so much well-meaning human beings doing the best that they can but, instead, an endless list of problems (fat, hairy, unfashionable, spotty, smelly, tired, unsexy, and with a dodgy pelvic floor, to boot) to be solved. And that, with the application of a great deal of time and money – I mean, a great deal of time and money. Have you seen how much laser hair removal is? – we might, one day, 20 years into the future, finally be able to put our feet up and say, ‘For nine minutes today, I almost nailed it!’
Before, of course, starting up the whole grim, remorseless, thankless schedule again, the next day, all over again.
So if I was asked, ‘Do you know how to be a woman now?’, my answer would be, ‘Kind of yes, really, to be honest.’
Because if all the stories in this book add up to one single revelation, it is this: to just … not really give a shit about all that stuff. To not care about all those supposed ‘problems’ of being a woman. To refuse to see them as problems at all. Ye
s – when I had my massive feminist awakening, the action it provoked in me was a … big shrug.
As it turned out, almost every notion I had on my 13th birthday about my future turned out to be a total waste of my time. When I thought of myself as an adult, all I could imagine was someone thin, and smooth, and calm, to whom things … happened. Some kind of souped-up princess, with a credit card. I didn’t have any notion about self-development, or following my interests, or learning big life lessons, or, most importantly, finding out what I was good at, and trying to earn a living from it. I presumed that these were all things that some grown-ups would come along and basically tell me what to do at some point, and that I shouldn’t really worry about them. I didn’t worry about what I was going to do.
What I did worry about, and thought I should work hard at, was what I should be, instead. I thought all my efforts should be concentrated on being fabulous, rather than doing fabulous things. I thought my big tasks were discovering my ‘Love Style’ via questionnaires in Cosmopolitan, assembling a capsule wardrobe, learning how to go from day to night with the application of heels and lipstick, finding a signature perfume, planning when to have a baby, and learning how to be mesmerically sexually proficient – but without getting a reputation as a total slag. Whilst, at the same time, somehow losing a whole load of character traits that would blow my whole ‘pretending to be a proper woman’ cover – talking too fast, falling over, arguing, emitting smells, getting angry, being quite excited about the idea of a revolution, and wanting to be a guest star on The Muppet Show, in a plot where Gonzo fell in love with me. Even though they’d stopped making The Muppet Show seven years previously.
I presumed that once I’d cracked being thin, beautiful, stylishly dressed, poised and gracious, everything else would fall into place. That my real life’s work was not a career – but myself. That if I worked on being pleasing, the world would adore, and then reward me.
Of course, this supposition that women are supposed to just ‘be’, while men go out and ‘do’, have been argued as inimically sex-tied traits. Men go out and do things – wage wars, discover new countries, conquer space, tour Use Your Illusion I and II – whilst the women inspire them to greater things, then discuss afterwards, at length, what’s happened: like Ena Sharples and Minnie Caldwell over a bottle of milk stout.
But I don’t know if I believe ‘being’ is an innately female thing to do – that that’s just how we’re wired. Going back to my previous argument – about so many suppositions about ‘femaleness’ actually coming down to us having been ‘losers’ for so long – I would suggest that when you’ve spent millennia not being allowed to do anything, you do tend to become more focused on being self-critical, analytical and reflective because there’s nothing else you can do, really, other than a) look hot and b) turn inward.
Would Jane Austen’s characters have spent pages and pages discussing all the relationships in their social circle if they’d been a bit more in control of their own destinies? Would women fret themselves half to death over how they look, and who fancies them, if this wasn’t the main thing they were still judged on? Would we give so much of a shit about our thighs if we, as a sex, owned the majority of the world’s wealth, instead of the men?
When I think of everything about womanhood that hamstrung me with fear when I was 13, it all came down, really, to princesses. I didn’t think I had to work hard to be a woman – which is scary, but, obviously, eventually achievable. I thought I had to somehow, magically, through super-human psychic effort, transform into a princess, instead. That’s how I’d get fallen in love with. That’s how I’d get along. That’s how the world would welcome me. The books; the Disney films; the most famous woman in the world being, when I was a child, Princess Diana: whilst there were other role models around, the sheer onslaught of princessalia every girl is subject to wedges its way into the heart, in a quietly pernicious way.
In the last decade, the post-feminist reaction to princesses has been the creation of ‘alternative’ princesses: the spunky chicks in Shrek and the newer Disney films, who wear trousers, do kung-fu, and save the prince. Possibly as a reaction to the life, and then death, of Diana, princesses have had to be reconfigured to acknowledge that we all now know that being a real princess isn’t all about wafting around in a castle, being beautiful and noble. It’s about eating disorders, loneliness, Wham! mix-tapes, shagging around, waging a pitched battle with the royal family, and, eventually, the incredible fascination that you hold over others conspiring to kill you.
It’s interesting to note that, since the death of Diana, women have generally lost interest in the idea of actually being a real princess. Princesses have forfeited a great deal of their currency. When Prince Charles was of marriageable age, he was the subject of worldwide perving from the ladyfolk: treated as a cross between James Bond and Prince Charming. And when Diana married him, women across the world sighed over the dress, the ring, the diamonds, and the dreamlike life she was marrying into.
When Prince William announced his marriage to Kate Middleton, on the other hand, womenfolk were united in their sentiments: ‘Poor cow. Jesus Christ, does she know what she’s let herself in for? A lifetime of scrutiny, bitching, pap-shots of her thighs, and speculation on her state of mind. Rather you than me, darling.’
No – the dream now for women still set on ‘being’, rather than ‘doing’, is to become a WAG, instead. Marry a footballer, and you get a princess’s wealth, glamour and privilege – plus the same, implicit acceptance that your powerful husband is going to cheat on you, and that you just have to accept that – but without the expectation that you also have to be demure, upstanding and good at a banquet. The WAG is the 21st-century princess.
But whether it’s a WAG in Dolce & Gabbana at Mahiki, or Ariel in her fish-tail under the sea, the tropes of ‘princess women’ are still the same. The residual hold they have over female ability to imagine our own future is sneakily harmful.
What is it about the princess that is so wrong? Well, I know that – from personal experience – the thing that has given me the most relief and freedom in my adult years has been, finally, once and for all giving up on the idea that I might secretly be, or will one day become, a princess. Accepting you’re just some perfectly ordinary woman who is going to have to crack on, work hard and be polite in order to get anything done is – once you’ve got over the crippling disappointment of your thundering ordinariness – incredibly liberating.
Let me list my aspects of non-princessiness – acknowledgement of each gained with terrible initial sadness and loss.
1) I can’t sing. Admitting that to myself was a massive sorrow – all princesses sing. All women are supposed to be able to sing. They can calm the birds in the trees as soon as they start trilling. By way of contrast, I sound like the noise gigantic 16-wheeler trucks make, just before they smash into a police roadblock. HONK HONK. SCREEEECH. ‘Oh my God – no one will come out of that alive.’
2) I don’t taste sweet – like cake, or honey. I can’t tell you the amount of filthy books I’ve read that led me to believe that, when a man went down on you, he was basically lapping away on a Sherbet Dip Dab. The first time someone commented – positively, mind – that I tasted like ‘a lovely pie’, I cried hysterically for two hours afterwards. What kind of stompy, sweaty, beefy item was I? It was supposed to be like tiramisu down there … some kind of sweet, milky paradise; junket pudding. Not some hearty peasant main course. A hog roast. But we are, of course, sweaty, fleshy lady-animals – all fur and umami. Of course we don’t taste like a Bird’s Strawberry Trifle – like a princess would.
3) I’m not going to be worshipped by some powerful, loaded, sword-wielding man, who will change my life if I marry him. Because that is Aragorn, son of Arathorn, and he doesn’t exist. I don’t want some alpha-y patriarchal brute – some confident man of action, who will treat me like ‘his woman’. When P. J. O’Rourke said, ‘No woman ever dreamed of being thrown on a bed and ravishe
d by someone dressed as a liberal,’ I wished to cry, ‘Speak for yourself, dear! You are scarcely qualified to judge. When were you last in All Bar One in your Spanx, eyeing up the ass?’ In the modern world, this old-fashioned notion of what makes men desirable to women is useless and outdated: as evidenced by the fact that it’s usually only people over the age of 40 who ever go on about it. For most people under that age, they see that this is a time where what really makes a man ‘alpha’ is avoiding pugilism (the legal system is a drag, plus expensive), being amusing (we’re sitting on top of 50 years’ worth of amazing sitcoms. If you haven’t picked up a couple of techniques for cracking a joke by now, you look a trifle slow-witted), and, as a bonus, knowing how to reinstall Adobe AIR when Twitter goes down on your laptop. Speaking for all my lady friends, we all want some geeky, nerdy, polite and ridiculous mate who we can sit at home with, slagging off all the tossers, and waiting for our baked potatoes to be ready. Who, obviously, is additionally so hot for us he regularly crawls across the front room on his hands and knees, croaking, ‘I must have sex with you now, or go literally insane.’ Compared to that, Prince Charming looks like a total donk.
4) Princesses never run in gangs. They never have any mates. There’s no palling around. Princesses never spend the day wandering round the Natural History Museum with their sisters, arguing about their favourite mineral or stone (mine is the piece of peridot that landed here in a meteor. Weena’s is feldspar: ‘It’s sensual’). Princesses never sit outside a pub with a couple of princes on a crisp autumn afternoon, putting their favourite Beatles vocal performances into order of preference. Princesses never go away with a couple of other families on holiday, get a bit wankered, and end up doing ‘The Nudey Run’ around a tree on the lawn, as their children watch – disapprovingly – from an upstairs window. Princesses don’t enliven a dull day in the office by playing the game ‘I Am Burt Reynolds’. (A person is chosen to be ‘it’. They must think of a celebrity. All the other players must take it in turns to ask as many questions as possible in order to guess the identity of the celebrity, until – finally – someone asks, ‘Is it Burt Reynolds?’ It is always Burt Reynolds. This game can be played for hours.)
How to Be a Woman Page 27
