Anyway, by 16, I had a new idea. I didn’t want to be a princess. Princes were dull. I was all about the artists, instead. They were the guys to be hanging with. I wanted to be a muse. I wanted to be a muse quite badly. To be so incredible that some band wrote a song about me, or some writer based a character on me, or a painter produced canvas after canvas of me, in every mood, that hung in galleries across the world. Or even a handbag. Jane Birkin inspired a handbag. By way of contrast I would happily have settled for my name on a plastic Superdrug bag.
It’s not like I was the first ambitious girl to think this was how to make my way in the world. In an interview in Please Kill Me. Patti Smith – by all accounts a feminist goddess – recounted how, when she was growing up in New Jersey, ‘the coolest thing in the world was to become the mistress of a great artist. The first thing I did on leaving home was to [move to New York and] become [legendary photographer] Robert Mapplethorpe’s lover.’
Of course, in the end, when Mapplethorpe turned out to be very gay, Smith was left with no other option than to go off and write Horses, and grow the world’s most influential lady moustache, instead. Her hand was forced into productivity.
Inspired by Smith, when I started attending after-show parties, drunk, I would stand around – trying to look so potent with mystery that someone would be compelled to write a song about how cool I was. Like a lady Fonz, but sexy. And when that plan abjectly failed, and there were no songs about me, and I got a little drunker, I just took a more direct root: tipsily berating friends in bands to immortalise me in a song.
‘It doesn’t have to be a big single,’ I would say, reasonably, fag in my mouth the wrong way round. ‘I’m not that demanding. It could be the first track on the album, instead. Or the final, anthemic one, I suppose. The one that builds to an affirmative chorus about how nothing’s going to be the same, now that you know me. Come on – how long would it take – five minutes? Write a song about me. WRITE A SONG ABOUT ME. BE INSPIRED BY ME, YOU FUCK!’
It wasn’t purely out of egotism. ‘It would be good for womankind as a whole if you wrote a song about someone like me,’ I would explain, nobly, as they quietly ordered a cab on their mobile. ‘All the songs about girls are about some boring model that Eric Clapton knew, or some groupie with an “inner sadness”. Don’t you think women would be happier if Layla had a whole chorus about Eric Clapton watching Patti Boyd trying to climb over a park fence, pissed, in order to retrieve a shoe she threw in there, for a bet? You’d be breaking new ground, man – muse-wise, it would be as revolutionary as the sonic introduction of the electric guitar! WRITE A SONG ABOUT A GOBBY BIRD! WRITE A SONG ABOUT MEEEEEEEE, YOU FUCK!’
As the years went on – and my friends kept persistently not writing novels, or West End musicals, about me – I gradually realised that I’m just not the muse type. Girls like me don’t inspire people.
I’m just not muse material, I finally thought to myself, sadly, on my 18th birthday – looking at a world wholly non-inspired by me. ‘I’m not a princess. I’m not a muse. If I’m going to change the world, it’s not going to be by endorsing a landmine charity in a tiara, or inspiring the next Revolver. Just “being” me isn’t enough. I’m going to have to do something, instead.’
And in the 21st century, being a woman who wants to do something is not hard. At any other point in time, Western women agitating for change would be at risk of imprisonment, social ostracisation, rape and death. Now, however, women in the Western world can bring about pretty much whatever change we want by writing a series of slightly arsey letters, whilst listening to Radio 4 and drinking a cup of tea.
Whatever it is we want the future to be like, no one’s going to have to die for it. Whilst we may still essentially be crying ‘Up the purple, white and green!’, we can now put together an outfit in whichever colours we choose, should purple, white and green look ‘clashy’. We do not have to throw ourselves under that horse.
Simply being honest about who we really are is half the battle. If what you read in magazines and papers makes you feel uneasy or shitty – don’t buy them! If you’re vexed by corporate entertaining taking place in titty-bars – shame your colleagues! If you feel oppressed by the idea of an expensive wedding – ignore your mother-in-law, and run away to a registry office! And if you think a £600 handbag is obscene, instead of bravely saying, ‘I’ll just have to max my credit card,’ quietly say, ‘Actually, I can’t afford it.’
There’s so much stuff – in every respect – that we can’t afford and yet we sighingly resign ourselves to, in order to join in, and feel ‘normal’. But, of course, if everyone is, somehow, too anxious to say what their real situation is, then there is a new, communal, median experience which is being kept secret by everyone being too embarrassed to say, ‘Don’t think I’m a freak, but …’
Anyway, it’s not like this is all just about, and for, the ladies. If women’s liberation truly comes to pass – as the slow, unstoppable gravity of social and economic change suggests it must – then it’s going to work out pretty peachy for the men, too. If I were the patriarchy I would, frankly, be thrilled at the idea of women finally getting an equal crack of the whip. Let’s face it – the patriarchy must be knackered by now. It’s been 100,000 years without even so much as a tea break: men have been flat out ruling the world. They have been balls to the wall.
Faced, then, with the option of some manner of flexitime – women ruling the world half the time – the patriarchy could finally take its foot off the gas a bit; go on that orienteering holiday it’s been talking about for years; really sort the shed out, once and for all. The patriarchy could get stuck into some hardcore paint-balling weekends.
Because it’s not as if strident feminists want to take over from men. We’re not arguing for the whole world. Just our share. The men don’t really have to change a thing. As far as I’m concerned, men can just carry on doing pretty much whatever they like. They don’t really need to stop at all. Loads of stuff they’re doing – iPads, and the Arctic Monkeys, that new nuclear arms deal between America and Russia – is cool. And they’re funny, and I am friends with lots of them, and they’re good for having sex with, and they look great in reproduction World War 2 uniforms, or reversing into tight parking spaces.
I don’t want men to go away. I don’t want men to stop what they’re doing.
What I want, instead, are some radical market forces. I want CHOICE. I want VARIETY. I want MORE. I want WOMEN. I want women to have more of the world, not just because it would be fairer, but because it would be better. More exciting. Reordered. Reinvented. We should have the lady-balls to say, ‘Yeah – I like the look of this world. And I’ve been here for a good while, watching. Now – here’s how I’d tweak it. Because we’re all in this together. We’re all just, you know. The Guys.’
So, in the end, I suppose the title of the book is a bit of a misnomer. All through those stumbling, mortifying, amazing years, I thought that what I wanted to be was a woman. To be some incredible amalgam of Germaine Greer, Elizabeth Taylor, E. Nesbit, Courtney Love, Jilly Cooper and Lady Gaga. Finding some way of mastering all the arcane arts of being female, until I was some witchery paragon of all the things that confused and defeated me at the outset, in my bed, in Wolverhampton, at the age of 13. A princess. A goddess. A muse.
But as the years went on, I realised that what I really want to be, all told, is a human. Just a productive, honest, courteously treated human. One of ‘The Guys’. But with really amazing hair.
www.how-tobeawoman.com
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When I had my first ever meeting with my agent, Georgia Garrett, and she asked me what I wanted to do, I found myself saying, ‘I want to write a book about feminism! A funny, but polemic, book about feminism! Like The Female Eunuch – but with jokes about my knickers!’
It was as much a surprise to me as it was to her – I’d gone in to pitch her some ‘Eat, Pray, LOLcatz’ stocking-filler, and/or my long-term project: a gay r
e-working of Oliver! But her immediate, ‘I get it! Write this book! Now!’ enthusiasm – coupled with the fact I figured that writing a book meant I had a legitimate reason to take up smoking again – meant I ended up writing How To Be a Woman in an urgent, five-month blur. Man, I smoked a lot. By the end, my lungs felt like two socks full of black sand. But all the way through, she was the main cheerleader and rant-inspirer, and I thank her from the bottom of my tobacco-trashed heart.
My brilliant editor, Jake Lingwood – and all at Ebury – were similarly ‘Wooo!’ about the whole thing – even at the stage where I was campaigning for the front cover to be my naked belly flopped out on a table, with ‘This is what a REAL woman’s stomach looks like’ written underneath in angry, red capital letters. Thank you, dudes. Particularly for the money. I spent it on a new cooker and a handbag. Yeah! Feminism! Woo!
Thank you to Nicola Jeal, Louise France, Emma Tucker, Phoebe Greenwood and Alex O’Connell at The Times, who displayed hot, sexy patience over a summer where I kept ringing up, saying, ‘Can I drop a column this week? I’m writing a book about FEMINISM for God’s sake, don’t try to SHACKLE me to my CONTRACTUALLY AGREED WORD COUNT, get off my BACK The Man,’ even though they are all women, and were insisting I take the time off, and being totally reasonable about the whole thing.
My family were, as always, both game for me to plunder their lives for laughs, and very good at taking me to the pub when I got stressed, insisting I got shit-faced, and then pretending they’d left their wallets at home. My sisters – Weena, Chel, Col and Caz – are the most hardcore feminists this side of Greer, and were always very good at re-inspiring my ardour for the project – mainly by reminding me that Carl Jung’s favourite party-trick was to whip people with a tea-towel until they punched him. I don’t know why that was particularly inspiring, but it was. And my brothers – Jimmy, Eddie and Joe – are also my sisters in ‘The Struggle’, apart from when they wrestle me to the floor, screaming, ‘It’s time for a Gimping!’
Endless thanks to the redoubtable Alexis Petridis, who – during a whole summer of me ringing him, weeping, ‘I appear to be writing an impossible book! Write it for me, Alexis! Even though you are part of the patriarchy!’ – never once pointed out that he did actually have a job that he needed to be getting on with, and that I was hiccupping too much for him to make sense of what I was saying anyway.
The Women of Twitter – Sali Hughes, Emma Freud, India Knight, Janice Turner, Emma Kennedy, Sue Perkins, Sharon Horgan, Alexandra Heminsley, Claudia Winkleman, Lauren Laverne, Jenny Colgan, Clare Balding, Polly Samson, Victoria Coren and particularly the awe-inspiring, and frankly terrifying, Grace Dent – who daily reminded me that funny women with a well-informed point are a dime-a-dozen, and I really needed to up my ante if I was going to pretend to compete with them. Thank you also to the Honorary Women of Twitter – Dorian Lynskey, Martin Carr, Chris Addison, Ian Martin, David Quantick, Robin Turner, David Arnold – for being the best imaginary office-mates in the world; and especially Jonathan Ross and Simon Pegg, for their block-busting quotes. And Nigella, whose comment made me squeeeee.
‘Lizzie’ and ‘Nancy’ – I love you to bits, and I’m so sorry mummy was away for a whole summer but, to be fair, Uncle Eddie is better at playing Mario Kart with you than I am, and once I’d taught you to say ‘Damn you, The Patriarchy!’ every time you fell over, you’d had the best of me as a parent, to be honest.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book – like I’m standing on a stage or something, about to play ‘Paradise City’; rather than just typing on a laptop with absolutely no one watching – to my husband, Pete Paphides, who is the most Strident Feminist I’ve ever met, to the point where he actually taught me what feminism is, or should be, anyway: ‘Everyone being polite to each other.’ Darling, I love you very much. And it was me who broke the back door handle that time. I fell on it when I was drunk and pretending to be Amy Winehouse. I can admit that now.
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