Fight Like A Girl Read online

  PRAISE FOR FIGHT LIKE A GIRL

  ‘Clementine Ford was one of my very first formative feminist influences, initiating me into the world of feminism. She is someone whose tenacity and fearlessness I admire greatly, and she helped me along the path to becoming the humourless, bitter, lesbian feminist I am today.’ Rebecca Shaw, writer, SBS and WomanAgainstFeminism@NoToFeminism

  ‘A beautiful, bittersweet journey to self-acceptance. A companion to all those still seeking to forge a sense of self. Clementine Ford has always been a bastion of shamelessness in a world that would rather see her defeated, and her book is a testament to the commitment she has to living fearlessly. I am comforted daily by her presence in the lives of young Australians, and I’m beyond thrilled that we now have her unique brilliance committed to these pages.’ Caitlin Stasey, actor and creator of Herself.com

  ‘Clementine is furious and scathing when she needs to be, yet compassionate and encouraging every moment she can be. This book is both a confirmation of sisterhood and a call to arms.’ Bri Lee, Hot Chicks with Big Brains

  ‘Clementine Ford was put on this earth to give courage to the young girl inside all of us. This is an exciting, essential book from Australia’s most fearless feminist writer.’ Laurie Penny, author of Unspeakable Things

  ‘As a feminist writer, Clementine has placed great importance on establishing and maintaining a strong connection with the women’s services sector, and to those who do the work supporting women experiencing male violence. The women’s services sector places great value on Clementine’s writing, and that the relationship is mutually beneficial really speaks to Clementine’s values. The past few years have been a watershed for the elimination of violence against women in Australia, and Clementine’s voice has not only been instrumental, but has taken up a mainstream space that has aligned with and reinforced the efforts of the women’s services sector. We love her for that.’ Ada Conroy, family violence worker

  Clementine Ford is a freelance writer, broadcaster and public speaker based in Melbourne.

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Clementine Ford 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of non-original material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.

  Excerpt here from The New Republic: © 2014 The New Republic. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, or redistributions, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone:(61 2) 8425 0100

  Email:[email protected]

  Web:www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760292362

  eISBN 9781952534942

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Cover design: Catherine L Donaldson

  faster pussycat productions

  For the girls

  CONTENTS

  Author’s note

  1 Birth of a feminist

  2 Ready for my close-up

  3 Real girls

  4 Like a virgin

  5 A league of their own

  6 Are you my mother?

  7 The belle jar

  8 Women against feminism

  9 Man-hater

  10 Hate male

  11 Dicktionary

  12 The good guys

  13 When will you learn?

  14 It’s okay to be angry

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The following book contains references to topics such as sexual violence, rape culture, eating disorders and mental health issues. Some readers may find certain descriptions or recollections triggering for them and are advised to take care while reading.

  Fight Like A Girl is an exploration of my experience as a girl in this world. It is not intended to claim itself as a universal experience, even though many of the situations and feelings described herein are universal to girls the world over.

  Some words or abbreviations you may not be familiar with are listed below, with explanations.

  Cisgender: The description given to those people whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth.

  MRAs: Men’s Rights Activists. Typically refers to a specific kind of man who believes feminism is oppressing him with its mean words and women who won’t stay in their place.

  Thank you for reading Fight Like A Girl. I hope you enjoy it, and find it galvanising!

  In solidarity,

  Clementine Ford

  –

  1 –

  BIRTH OF A FEMINIST

  ‘Of course I believe in equality . . . but I’m certainly not a feminist.’

  Such was the catch cry of my late adolescence, and it was just one of many sadly ignorant views on the world that I offered to anyone who would listen. As a teenager coming of age in the late 1990s, I had multiple explanations for my belief that I was Not A Feminist, and it will come as precisely zero surprise to you that none of them were particularly earth-shattering or well researched.

  When I thought of feminism, I thought of a tired old movement filled with irrelevant ideas and even more irrelevant women. They didn’t understand that the world had moved on. It wasn’t the seventies anymore! Women were allowed to shave their legs and wear make-up and look like women, dammit! It didn’t mean that they were being subjugated by patriarchy, it just meant that they cared about looking nice. What could possibly be wrong with that?

  Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think we were living in some kind of utopia, a post-feminist paradise which sparkled with the reflective shards of a thoroughly shattered glass ceiling. I had been a loud and opinionated child and, with the exception of a stifling period of time between twelve and sixteen, I was a loud and opinionated teenager. Had I been a boy, this would have been considered acceptable. But I was a girl and, even worse than that, I was a bolshy one. I had already felt the sting of judgment and approbation that came from having opinions while female, and even if I didn’t have the tools or skill to articulate what was wrong with that just yet, I could see that something definitely was.

  Despite being a feminism-denying adolescent, I was still interested in the disparate treatment of men and women. I bristled each time domestic chores were handed down to my sister and I while our brother was given leave to play and explore, our femaleness apparently carrying with it a greater capacity for cleaning things. Why was there still this sticking point that assumed certain jobs were just the realm of girls? That we were ‘just better at those kinds of things’, as if we’d emerged from the womb only to look around at the mess, rip the obstetrician’s rubber gloves off and get a start on scrubbing the blood off all the medical implements and washing out the sheets?

  As the cracks of sexism started to appear at home, the outside world
also began to change. Home might have been frustrating at times, but life with my family was at least safe (a privilege not all children can claim). An undercurrent of danger began to rear its head, manifesting in both the warnings I started to hear about ‘being safe’ and the unsettling feeling one gets when they realise someone’s looking at them. On the streets and at school, I became aware of the lingering threat that circled girls. The men who yelled crude sexual taunts and those who simply stared, both executions resulting in the slow and steady shrinking in on oneself that begins with the budding of breasts and never truly goes away.

  I had read Not Without My Daughter and Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl so I knew that atrocious things happened to women ‘out there’, some of them as young or younger than myself. (Later, I would realise just how much the conservative voices opposed to feminism would exploit these women of colour, and use their suffering to paint their sexism as some kind of benevolent entity, as if the trials and tribulations endured by whinging western women were more like an annoying itch rather than a dangerous burn and subsequently didn’t deserve to be complained about.)

  It seemed clear to me that women suffered the world over, some more than others, and my heart throbbed quietly for us all.

  Still, I did not call myself a feminist. Because even though I knew that women still suffered from inequality, I managed to convince myself that this inequality was a different kind of beast to the sexism and misogyny that had raged throughout the course of human history. It was sexism – but it wasn’t sexism-sexism.

  And so I continued, stockpiling examples and experiences of injustice that would later prove too heavy to bear anymore in silence. I was a camel crossing the desert, and I was starting to feel the rumbling strains of thirst.

  Of course, all of this internal dialogue and justification was just subterfuge for the only reason that counted. At seventeen, I was Not A Feminist because I was overwhelmingly scared of how it would make other people think of me. When I say ‘other people’, I mean ‘boys’.

  Securing the good opinion of boys had by this stage been a concern of mine for at least a third of my life. Since the onset of puberty, I had felt keenly awkward in my skin, undeserving of the label ‘girl’ and insurmountably far from the identity of ‘woman’. I defined everything I was by everything I was not. I was tall, but I was not willowy. Pale, but not unblemished. I was strong, but I was not thin.

  Biologically human, but not female.

  I thought of myself as a kind of nothing-girl, an unwieldy and unattractive blob whose very existence was an imposition on the boys who were used to being charmed by the small, slight and accommodating beauty of the delicate creatures around me. My sense of feminine disgrace was so profound that I quickly fell into the habit of apologising whenever I was introduced to a peer.

  ‘This is Clementine,’ a friend might say, pointing me out to whoever I was being made an acquaintance of. I’d cringe internally, vicariously bristling at the inconvenience of those three syllables, before rushing in to qualify their ordinary statement with something reassuring like, ‘But it’s okay, you can call me Clem.’ I had unconsciously come to the conclusion that it was too big an ask to expect that a girl as galumphing and large as me could be called by her full name, particularly one as uncommon (this was the nineties, remember) and old-fashioned as Clementine. ‘Clem’ seemed more suitable, an acceptance of the stocky androgyny I had not asked for but which I reasoned must be navigated without complaint.

  If I were beautiful, I thought, I could call myself whatever I liked and people would be captivated by me. If I were slim hipped and slight, I could be a Clementine and my schoolmates would think me as graceful as a Shakespearian heroine, my features as delicate as fine bone china with a birdlike appetite to match.

  I was not these things, and to pretend otherwise was to participate in a humiliating display of wishful thinking. Better to get on with it eagerly, as if being such a tragic outsider to the female condition had been my plan all along. It would be okay for a ‘Clem’ to have wide feet and broad haunches. ‘Clem’ could get away with exposing her gums when she smiled. A ‘Clem’ would be fine with her drama teacher telling her (in what he thought was a helpful manner) that she would ‘never be the lead but should embrace being a character actress.’ No one would think that a ‘Clem’ was entertaining any fanciful notions of fielding evening phone calls from boys or joining other couples to kiss in quiet corners of dimly lit living rooms. A ‘Clem’ wouldn’t mourn these truths or think about what it might be like to be suddenly lifted into the air, squealing with delight and demanding in mock indignation to be put down.

  So I called myself ‘Clem’ and filled my wardrobe with men’s trousers bought in op-shops, cargo shorts found in surf stores and sneakers which didn’t pinch my toes. I did all this to let people know that I was in on the joke that was me. It’s okay, I tried to translate to them. I’m not even trying to be thought of as a girl, so it doesn’t matter that you don’t see me that way.

  I told myself that, and went to bed every night wishing to wake up different.

  I wish I could sit here now, almost two decades later, and write brazenly and proudly about being the kind of girl who didn’t give a shit, who told bully boys to go fuck themselves while subtly trying to recruit the girls who put so much stock in securing their good approval and the limited rewards that came with that. I would like my memories to be of a girl who didn’t treat other girls with suspicion. A girl who didn’t think that boasting about ‘just getting along better with boys’ was a way to circumvent the deep and devastating feeling of being irrelevant to their dicks and so instead became useful tools for their emotional egos. I wish I could say that I had integrity and strength, a girl with an unshakeable sense of self and a belief that I mattered as much as other girls, that they mattered as much as me.

  But it’s not the way things were. I was a nothing-girl, and adolescence was an obstacle course which needed to be both navigated and survived.

  In her wildly popular book, How To Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran proposed this simple test for feminists:

  Put your hand in your pants.

  a) Do you have a vagina? and

  b) Do you want to be in charge of it?

  If you said ‘yes’ to both, then congratulations! You’re a feminist.

  How To Be a Woman was a useful book in many ways. It was entertaining, funny and irreverent. It has been credited with being part of the groundswell to reinvigorate feminist activism, introducing ideas of gender equality to a mainstream audience who had fallen victim to the anti-feminist propaganda highlighted in Susan Faludi’s Backlash. For those of us wandering in the desert wastelands of feminist activism and social awareness, it was like a sudden downpour that swept us back into the suddenly welcoming arms of the greater population.

  But there are problems with Moran’s terminology, and I suspect she might acknowledge them now, five years after HTBAW’s publication. Namely, that being a feminist isn’t as simple as putting your hand in your pants and finding a vagina there. And it’s not as simple as that because, as trans activists working tirelessly against a tide of phobia and suspicion have brought into the mainstream, being a woman isn’t as simple as what goes on in between your legs.

  In her book, Moran also wrote, ‘When a woman says, “I have nothing to wear!”, what she really means is, “There’s nothing here for who I’m supposed to be today.”’

  And this is perhaps a better definition, or at least scope, of what it means to be a woman. As individuals, we have a vast and magnificent range of identity expressions, desires, hopes, passions, beliefs and fears. The terrain of possibilities that exists inside our hearts is immense – and yet, so often the experience of being a woman in this world is one that is suffocating and heartbreaking.

  There have been long stretches of time where I’ve been silent about the pain I was in – the fear of not being good enough, not pretty enough, not small enough, not compliant enough, not enough enough
enough. I have moved through the world desperately trying to figure out how this unwieldy body, with its unfeminine heft, loud voice and lack of physical fragility, could possibly fit into one of the tiny little boxes allocated to women. Boys are given the universe in which to carve out their identities, the promise of infinite space for them to expand into and contract upon. Girls are allowed only enough room to be stars, and they must twinkle, twinkle if they want anyone to pay attention to them.

  Part of being a woman, regardless of what you look like under your clothes, is the knowledge that other people assume the right to decide who you are allowed to be on any given day. There is a little flexibility, but there are also rules so strictly enforced that you must suffer the consequences for disobeying them. Be whatever you like, but do not be this. Do not be loud. Do not be sexual. Do not be prudish. Do not be disagreeable. Do not challenge. Do not be too fat. Do not be too skinny. Do not be too dark skinned. Do not be too masculine. Do not take up too much space. Do not say the things we don’t like. Laugh when we tell you to. Smile when we tell you to. Fuck when we tell you to. And you will be free.

  In Princesses and Pornstars, Emily Maguire writes that her own hesitation to label herself a feminist came from one very basic place. She was afraid that if she called herself a feminist, boys wouldn’t want to have sex with her. When I first read this, I nodded in wry recognition. Because isn’t this what it fundamentally comes down to, when you strip away the quasi-dense language and the analysis of social codes? That women alike (particularly those in their adolescence) have been trained to desire the approval of men? And that the way a sexist society teaches its men to show approval for women is by deciding they want to fuck them?

  I feared all the irrelevant things that women are even now still taught to fear, and I worked my hardest to avoid being associated with them. I didn’t explicitly know any feminists (in the same way that some people think they don’t know any gay folks), but I knew enough to know that nobody liked them. Feminists were loud and shouty. They overreacted to everything. They didn’t know how to relax and have a laugh. They had to turn everything into a goddamn issue and spoil everyone’s fun. Even worse, feminists were disgusting. They were hairy, man-hating banshees. They were ugly, fat lesbians in desperate need of a good root but unable to get one because what man would go near that?