Fight Like A Girl Read online

  If the entire world tells you that it’s your job to be placid and accommodating, to sacrifice your own integrity and sense of self in order to soothe male egos, what hope does a single cog in the machine have to challenge that? Girls are raised to believe that the most important thing we can be is pretty. We learn early on that this won’t just garner us attention and rewards, but is in fact the rent we must pay in order to negotiate even the most illusory of powers. If we aren’t offering something pleasant for men to look at while they’re forced to listen to us, what’s the point of us at all?

  The message isn’t so much banged into us as it is kneaded into the fabric of our identities. To be granted an audience with the Gods, we must bring the appropriate tributes of beauty, complicity and deferential admiration. Those who turn up empty-handed will be punished severely.

  This exchange is keenly understood by everyone who operates in society, even those who’d like to pretend they don’t participate in such crude behaviour. How many times have you heard or seen someone dismiss a woman’s opinion by calling her ugly? By calling her a slut? A dumb cunt? A stupid fucking bitch who needs to get a decent dick up her? An irrational, man-hating feminazi with daddy issues who demonises men because she’s upset none of them find her attractive? A dog, a mutt, a hog, a useless lump, too old, too dried up, too aggressive, too shrill, too angry for anyone to take seriously?

  A joke.

  When there are so many people willing to degrade women so horrifically just for having the nerve to express an opinion, it doesn’t take long for us to regress into silence. In the face of such overwhelming hostility and virulent payback, it’s little wonder that women feel completely unqualified and undeserving of being the ones to bear witness to our own lives. That any of us have the courage to claim any space at all in the verbal marketplace is nothing short of remarkable.

  As a young girl and then a young woman, I felt all of these things keenly. At its heart, this is why I was so frightened to call myself a feminist. Everything I observed about the world screamed for women to take up arms against gender inequality once more, but I was afraid that by doing so, I would confirm everything that had been hinted at during my short time on earth. I already suffered from the overwhelming sense that I wasn’t good enough to be judged positively by society’s standards of womanhood – but I wanted to believe that I might one day be. That if I played the game hard enough, smiled at all the right moments and giggled in collusion whenever men put my gender (or even just me) down, that I might one day be deemed worthy of their attention and respect.

  Realising that the likelihood of this happening was slim to none was one of my first steps towards embracing feminism not just as a theoretical concept but as a label and identity. I enrolled in a gender studies course at university and, almost immediately, everything I thought I’d known about the world was completely deconstructed and then rebuilt again. I learned about concepts like ‘symbolic annihilation’, which is basically the idea that women have been ritually erased from history, storytelling and the representation of the world through its pop culture.

  I learned phrases like ‘hegemonic power’ (which I have admittedly used rarely) and ‘structural violence’ (which I have used much more). Both were useful tools in recognising how women have been oppressed by the enforcement of gender inequality and invisible discrimination. And I learned about ‘patriarchy’, which is the overriding system we all live under whereby men are privileged and generically imbued with the power of dominance. Referencing patriarchy fell out of favour for a few years, because it seemed cheesy and retro – a throwback to the humourless feminists of old, saddled as they were with their earnest and daggy descriptions of shit that had evolved, man. Thankfully, it’s back, along with words like ‘sexist’, ‘misogynist’ and ‘dickhead’, all beautiful words which can be used separately or strung together, your choice.

  I didn’t understand everything I was learning in my gender studies classes, and I don’t still agree with some of the things I did. My feminism has changed dramatically over the years, tempering in some areas and becoming more radical in others. I suspect this will be a characteristic of my ongoing relationship with this movement and ideology that has given me so much; it prompts me continuously to think in ways I never have before, and it challenges me to continuously defend my viewpoints and be okay with letting go of the ones that no longer make sense to me.

  But there are two fundamentally important gifts feminism has given me, and I received them the moment I opened myself up to it. The first was a sense of community among like-minded individuals – other women who had experienced the slow degradation of self that seemed part and parcel of being seen as female and therefore ‘less than’. Women who had been made to feel irrelevant or weak, who had been told that their lives and everything they stood for were jokes they must allow to be made cruel fun of and be willing to laugh at to show how much they ‘got it’. Women whose bodies had been violated in various ways, whose integrity had been called into question when they spoke out about it and who had learned, as a result, to expect such treatment and just get on with things.

  I was welcomed into this community alongside other newbies. The more our minds expanded to accommodate this startling, secret history of the world, the more strength we gleaned. We sat together in huddled circles on the university lawns, around pub tables, on the floor of the student newspaper office, and we talked excitedly about things that had, throughout all of our adolescent upbringings, seemed verboten. It felt powerful and liberating. It felt like we had spent our whole lives stumbling blindly through the dark. But someone had thrown a light on and we had gazed around the room in awe, blinking, realising suddenly that we were not alone.

  Those women remain my friends today. They were my first comrades and my lasting saviours. Without them, I don’t know what I would have done.

  And this is the second thing feminism gave me, and it is more valuable than words can possibly say. It taught me that my thoughts and feelings were real. It took the edges of myself that I had rubbed out, tried to soften, tried to erase, and it made them sharp once more. It’s always been convenient to use the tropes of stereotypes to scare women away from embracing feminism, because it has the double whammy effect of diminishing the movement’s reach while reinforcing women’s subjugation. But the only people who care whether or not a woman is hairy, ugly, fat, lesbian, butch, ‘man-hating’ or aggressively opinionated are the people who are so terrified of the idea that women might be real humans in their own right that they can literally find no other way to attack them other than relating it back to whether or not a man wants to fuck them.

  I have, thankfully, long been at the point where I don’t give a shit whether or not someone wants to fuck me. The threat of some dude’s disapproval or disappointed flaccid cock doesn’t tie me up in knots anymore. There are only so many times you can be called an ugly-fat-hairy-bitch-slut-cunt-with-daddy-issues before the words become utterly meaningless. Once upon a time, the threat of those words would have been enough to stitch me into silence. Now, they just sound like the pathetic last wheezes of a dwindling breed in its death throes.

  The dull throb of learning what it means to be a girl in the world had the result of making me cower inwards. I tried to shrink myself and my opinions so as to make myself more palatable to the people around me, taking the whirligig of sadness, frustration and anger that stirred so violently in my chest and hiding it behind acquiescent giggles and Cool Girl behaviour. I didn’t know that what I felt was blessedly normal; that there were legions of girls out there just like me who wandered through this emotional wilderness with the same crushing weight of loneliness and uncertainty, fearing that there was something wrong with them, unable to see the extent of their perfect clarity or the solidarity that awaited them once they found their people.

  Nothing hurts more than realising you’ve been complicit in your own silence. Nothing feels better than unleashing your voice. Words are thrown like bombs by
people who want to hurt us. Let them throw them. Use those bombs to break the floodgates that have kept you restrained and captive, and let your battle cry soar. A friend of mine once said to me that feminism helped to figure out a way of being a girl that doesn’t hurt. I looked at her in astonishment. She’d captured everything about this movement and ideology that I had always known, but never thought to articulate. A lot of the time, being a girl in this world hurts. Before you are aware of it, it just presents as a persistent throb. A slow and steady sense that something isn’t quite right. You wonder if the world you’re experiencing is the same one that everyone else is living in. Do they see colours the same way you do? Do their senses work differently? Is there something wrong with you?

  This feeling builds and builds and – if you’re lucky – it suddenly hits you, out of nowhere. This is what it’s like to be a girl. To feel subjugated and alone, to know that the words you say, the ideas you have and the gifts you can contribute are all considered null and void unless you offer them in a way that maintains the status quo.

  In the end, this is the simplest answer that I can provide for why I’m a feminist and how I came to be that way.

  Feminism helped me figure out a way of being a girl that doesn’t hurt. It is my constant companion, my life saver, my oxygen tank. Without the collective of ideas, women and strength that feminism has given me, I wouldn’t know how to breathe. I wouldn’t know how to laugh. And most importantly, I wouldn’t know how to fight.

  I am a girl, and this is my manifesto. Welcome to the war room.

  –

  2 –

  READY FOR MY CLOSE-UP

  Before the advent of digital technology and mobile phones smaller than a chequebook (a form of monetary exchange popular among our ancestors), families used to record their precious moments on gigantic whirring bricks. These things were called ‘video cameras’, and they were able to harness the magic of space and time to record anywhere up to fifteen minutes’ worth of moving pictures, which could then be transferred to a machine called a ‘video player’. The whole process took about four hundred years from start to finish. It was truly like living in the future.

  My family got our first video camera when I was roughly seven years old. I remember being completely blown away by how cool it was. We had a video camera! We could make videos! We could actually record ourselves living our own lives and then watch it back!

  Now, unless you’re a parent, this is the kind of thought that only a seven-year-old could have about the life of a seven-year-old. I was a goober, not a Goonie. The various excitements of my day were limited to eating margarine on a spoon while standing in front of the fridge, and using my mother’s double-handed exercise tyre to pretend to be one of the Wheelers from Return to Oz. No one would have been interested in watching a montage of moments from my day with the possible exception of my parents – and I’m pretty sure even they would have taken a raincheck.

  But still, I thought this video camera was sensational. Whenever my parents pulled it out of its gigantic box and hoisted it onto their shoulders, I started prepping myself to ‘perform’. I was always ready for my close-up, preparing for the time when I’d become a famous actress, live in a mansion and suddenly look exactly like Goldie Hawn.

  Those video tapes are lost now, but some of the scenes are etched so deeply in my memory that I can replay them at will. There I am at nine, singing ‘Under the Sea’ from The Little Mermaid while prancing up and down the staircase. I am chubby and freckled, my fluorescent bike shorts stretched across my thick thighs and with a visible gap between my front teeth. I am also joyful. Clearly, this is before I started to learn that chubbiness and joy were supposed to be mutually exclusive.

  Another tape, and there I am shovelling birthday cake into my mouth. It’s a glorious pink sponge smothered in even more glorious pink frosting, and half of it is smeared around my mouth and in my hair. Save it for later, I’m probably thinking to myself, already imagining the unbridled comfort that would come from sucking dried cream and sugar off a ponytail lollipop.

  I have always loved to eat. As a child, I could consume entire packets of chocolate-covered Hobnobs in one sitting. I knew where my mother hid the sour cream and chive Pringles (top level of the pantry, behind the flour), and I’d sneak up there after school to snatch fistfuls. Terrified of getting caught, I’d quickly lick the radioactive dust off of each crisp and then mash the entire handful into my mouth. I’d hoover them down before anyone could discover me, my heart beating fast against my chest from the adrenaline (or possibly even the vast quantities of MSG). My idea of an after-school snack was mayonnaise and ham slathered on half a loaf of white bread and washed down with a litre of chocolate milk.

  I indulged in these things freely, partly because my parents’ frequent absence gave me unregulated access to the fridge, but also because I had no idea that my femaleness meant I shouldn’t. I didn’t know that girls weren’t supposed to be loud and rambunctious. That we weren’t supposed to be obnoxious or bossy, or horde our possessions and power. That girls were only allowed to love food – to take pleasure in consuming it, yearning for it and daydreaming about it – if our bodies were small enough to be granted permission.

  At seven, eight and nine, I barrelled through the world with a loud voice, in loud clothes and with a loud, large appetite. I didn’t understand yet that this way of living wasn’t considered a birthright but a crime, and that punishments awaited the loud girls like me who ate too much and took up too much space and behaved as if our place in the world was a given and not a negotiation.

  I spent most of my childhood living in the Middle East. My dad’s job had taken him all over the world (at least, to the parts of the world where gas and mining were kind of a big deal), and when I was three that meant moving to Oman, a large sultanate on the eastern border of the United Arab Emirates. It’s a beautiful country, with stunning desert landscapes and spectacular ocean coves. Our house was washed in white paint to reflect the sun and tiled with marble to radiate the cool. When I was little, my house and the haven it offered felt like the safest place in the world.

  On weekends, my family and I would drive to the beach with our fins and snorkels piled into the boot. It’s been more than two decades, but I’m pretty sure I could still find my way from our old house, across the sprawling Arab city and over the mountain that separated it from the ocean. Those last five minutes were the best part of it. As we circled down the cliff towards the sea, us kids would start to bounce in our seats a little, anticipating what was coming next. And then, just when we thought we couldn’t stand it any longer, there she’d appear, glittering in the sunlight – a marine playground. We’d pull into a park, drag the esky to one of the permanent umbrella stands, wrestle our fins on and then waddle out into the drink.

  About fifty metres out from the shoreline, a sturdy wooden raft was anchored to the ocean floor. My siblings and I liked to race to see who could reach the raft first. Plunging beneath the surface was like going to a different planet. The shelf dropped off pretty quickly from the shore and you were suddenly met with an ecosphere teeming with life. It was a magical wonderland where clownfish, angelfish, electric blue something fish and even puffer fish lived among rich coral that swayed gently in the currents. We watched them move beneath us as our legs paddled furiously, propelling us forward to claim the momentary glory of getting to the raft first, climbing up its sodden, rusty ladder and claiming the great (and rapidly forgotten) accolade of Child Number One.

  Other times, we’d hang around in the water for a while, circling the raft as it rose and fell with the waves. Floating on our bellies, we pointed out the flashes of coloured fish to each other, making sure to steer as clear as we could of the puffers.

  Sometimes I just took all my gear off and floated on my back, spreading my arms and legs like a starfish and closing my eyes against the sun. Lying in this position, all the sounds from the outside world disappeared and were replaced by the muffled pressur
e of moving currents. I liked to listen to the chk chk chk of the ocean, the magnified sound of fish talking to each other as they nibbled at the coral. The water felt cool against my skin, freed as it was from the rubbery constraints of the snorkelling gear.

  In the water, you’re weightless. And even though you’re alone with your thoughts, you’re also wrapped in a cocoon of something much bigger than them. It’s hard to feel too anxious when the sheer magnitude of your environment is reminding you how irrelevant you are to the bigger picture. As an adult, this recognition instils a very particular kind of relief. As a child, it simply feels like the long summer days will never end and there will always be more time.

  Part of the great fun of going to the beach was when we emerged from the sea, salt-encrusted and already beginning to sweat. We’d run across the blazing hot sand with one thought in mind – beg the olds for money to buy treats at the beach club. Our desires were always the same. The first was a particular packet of crisps, an Arabic brand whose name I can’t remember but whose taste I can: tomato, with the occasional burst of salt and sweet vinegar. Our second must-have item was known as a Chapman, and it came served with lots of ice in one of those imperial pint glasses that have a handle on them. A Chapman was, to me, the ultimate Fancy Drink. Later I would discover that it was nothing more than a humble lemon, lime and bitters, but back then the name alone was enough to thrill me. It aroused thoughts of highbrow salons with ladies swathed in glamorous dresses, plumes of cigarette smoke and legions of men hanging off their every word. Needless to say, it was a world I desperately wanted to join.