Fight Like A Girl Read online

  I, on the other hand, ended up with a set of misshapen poached eggs that were obviously plopped out from tiny, angry chickens. Their position makes it clear to me that they disagreed with each another once upon a time and now languish miserably on my chest refusing to look at each other. If I push them hard enough, I can make them touch at the tips but not quite in the middle. The end result is a little bit like watching two frenemies hug by moving their hips in the inverse direction from where their shoulders are heading. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I don’t have any cleavage at all. I do. It’s just that it all happens to be on my butt. Whoever drew up the blueprints for my body obviously got distracted when it got to my bottom and trailed the pencil up about four inches too high. And you know what, I’m okay with that. Because my arse is majestical.

  The point is, women’s bodies are all different. Even women who ostensibly wear the same size clothing are predisposed to wear it in different ways. That’s how human biology works – and given that women almost qualify as human beings, it stands to reason that the same logic would apply to us. We’re not matryoshka dolls who reproduce by cracking open our midsections and pulling another one of us out, only smaller. (It would be easier and more convenient if it were the case, because then I could summon a mini-me every so often to handle Twitter for a bit so I could take a break from the man-babies whining about how feminists make their down-theres have a little cry.)

  Throughout my adult life, I’ve swung wildly between sizes. I’ve been much thinner than I am now and I’ve been a little fatter too. At the moment, I’m stuck in that frustrating stage where the clothes on high street fashion racks lie about being XL or a size 16 and refuse to shimmy up over my calves, but the smallest sizes in ‘plus size’ stores are all too big in the bazoongas and might as well be sold in a shop called Fatties Must Be Punished By Wearing Ugly Shit And Everything Fringed With Lilac, Also We Hate You.

  Look, it may come as a shock to retailers, but not every woman larger than a traditional size 16 wants to cloak her body in frills and drapes and the seemingly mandatory decoration of giant purple flowers. Nor do we all respond enthusiastically to the palate of ‘alternative’ vintage designs, with their nipped-in waists, various animal prints and general va-va-voomery. I’ll be the first to put up my hand and admit I like the sultry silhouette of a Betty with Rubble in all the right places, but it’s not one I necessarily want to emulate myself. Aside from the expense, it’s always seemed to me as if committing to the vintage aesthetic would take a lot of time. Most mornings, I can’t even be bothered brushing my hair let alone wrestling with a set of hot rollers. High heels are the devil’s way of torturing people with wide feet. And pencil skirts are not especially practical for gals with a long stride. Also, while the 1950s may have looked quite pretty, it was not an especially excellent time for women – with the exception of readily obtained Valium prescriptions and it being okay to drink before noon.

  That’s before we even address the uniformity of these ‘curves’ that vintage styles are meant to enhance. Not everyone has the naturally cinched-in waist and generous bosom that seems to be favoured by pin-up clothing. This idea that ‘real women’ are bouncy in all the right places is just as offensive and limiting as the one that asserts women have to be waifs. Because to be honest, I have more chance of whittling my body down to look like Keira Knightley’s than I do waking up one morning with the measurements of Christina Hendricks. In fact, in most cases, what is celebrated and held up as ‘real’ is just another unrealistic and limited aspiration of beauty that excludes the majority while pretending to create space for them.

  I am a unique individual, and my body is uniquely mine. I do not have perky breasts, a narrow waist and curvy bedroom thighs. Until I discovered the heavenly comfort of Kmart’s multipack of high-waisted knickers, most of the underwear I could afford to buy was too low in the back, too narrow in the torso, too close together in the cup and too uncomfortable overall. My feet are wide, which makes buying shoes a nightmare. My shoulders are broad, which makes tidy blazers impossible. And I’ve yet to find a pair of pants whose gusset doesn’t seem to want to take up permanent residency in the cupboard under the stairs.

  Like I said, women are different. And if fashion retailers weren’t so invested in trying to make women spend money by making us feel utterly shit about ourselves, they would realise that there’s probably a better chance of us spending even more of it by making us feel good.

  So here, in no particular order, is a list of suggestions for how outlets can not only make clothes that fit a diverse range of women, but also label them appropriately:

  • Big arse, small titties: dresses are for everyone

  • Hockey player calves: looks great in skinny jeans

  • Thick waist with legs to die for: rocks a miniskirt

  • Flabby arms decorated with awesome tattoos that should be required by law to be always on display: get into these singlets stat

  • Giant shoulder sockets, broad back: wants to cross her arms comfortably in a jacket

  • Bodacious bosom, tiny waist: prefers the androgynous look

  • XXL booty, chubby thighs, sway back: here are some trousers that get the job done

  • Narrow hips, enormous cans: rocks a shirt and tie

  • Legs like a gazelle, arms that deadlift the weight of a Prius: likes things in lace

  You get the idea.

  Look, bodily perfection should not be measured based on the size of our waistbands, the length of our legs, the colour of our skin or the mapping of our genetics. All bodies are good bodies, no matter what shape they come in. All bodies help us in varying ways to travel through the great adventure that is life. And all bodies are entitled to be treated with kindness and respect, regardless of whether or not they fit into rigid and arbitrarily determined ideals about what those bodies are supposed to look like. Fat, thin, tall, short, round, oblong, large-calved, giant shoulders, tiny waist, stubby neck, long neck, small breasts, massive breasts, perky breasts, saggy breasts, augmented breasts, one breast, no breasts, wide-set vaginas, small penises, short vaginas, long penises, genitals that are both a vagina and a penis, bodies that were assigned one gender at birth and turned out to be the opposite, bodies that express no gender, bodies that express both genders, bodies that use wheelchairs to move around in, bodies that use speech-generation devices to talk, bodies that use sign language to talk, bodies that have fewer limbs than other bodies, bodies that have tattoos and/or piercings decorating them, bodies that have birthmarks and/or scars decorating them, dark skin, light skin, blemished skin, sensitive skin, skin grafts, loose skin, thick hair, sparse hair, hairy armpits, hairy bush, hairy toes, hairy belly, hairy face, no hair, thigh gap, thighs that rub in the middle, knees that rub in the middle, calves that rub in the middle, butt cleavage, bodies that look like nobody else’s bodies at all – the list goes on and on ad infinitum because of the beautiful, diverse complexity of the human race.

  None of these wildly different attributes should be seen as anything other than a descriptor. By themselves, they carry no moral judgments, no ranking of good, better, best and precisely zero ability to speak on behalf of the bearer. In fact, the only thing responsible for assigning meaning to the appearance of totally random body parts is the unwanted and unnecessary input of other people. Bodies that don’t conform to generalised standards of beauty aren’t bad. But they’re transformed into something bad by the critical, abusive policing of a society that is both subject and master to the whims of capitalism and power.

  Conversely, there is nothing inherently better or superior about fitting into the ‘right’ category of body. Bodies that conform to generalised standards of beauty aren’t good – they just happen to be prioritised as such by a society subjected to the same whims of capitalism and power.

  What’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’ anyway? To herald something as ‘good’ implies a moral superiority, and there’s no such thing as moral superiority as far as bodies
are concerned. Bodies come in such vastly different shapes, sizes, expressions and identities that it’s not only impossible to declare any kind of moral superiority as far as they’re concerned, it’s also a ridiculous exercise in vanity. Diversity is what makes the world and all its inhabitants interesting, not homogeneity. And who gets to decide what qualifies as better? We might think as individuals we’re capable of determining our own tastes, but newsflash – we’re not. Pretty much everything we value is decided for us by an external source that wants either to control us or make money from us, and very often wants both of these things together.

  And here’s another revelation – no matter what we do, we’ll never succeed in attaining the ‘perfect’ body or the ‘perfect’ face. This isn’t just because perfection is an unattainable goal; it’s because capitalism relies on people being constantly unhappy so it can keep selling us the promise that consumerism will make our lives better. As human beings, it’s amazing how we allow corporations to tell us how rubbish we are while we gratefully lap up their bullshit with a spoon. I once stood in the supermarket and marvelled at how Schwarzkopf had managed to make every single one of their bottles of shampoo and conditioner sound like a necessary remedy for something more akin to snakes growing out of a woman’s head than actual hair. Buy this one for ‘rebellious, frizzy hair’. Slather this one on for ‘dead, brittle ends’. Soak your noggin in this potion to cure your ‘lank, lifeless strands’. Not a single bottle there for gals with an average barnet that just wants washing every so often.

  And it’s not just hair, oh no. Yesterday, I absent-mindedly moved to close a pop-up ad on a beauty website (don’t judge me, I ain’t done baking yet) so I could get back to reading about this season’s hottest trends in socks or eyebrows or something equally pointless. The ad was for some kind of fancy moisturiser that probably costs $900 for a fingernail’s worth because a clever marketing executive discovered that writing something about Amazonian tree juice makes people think magic is real. There were only two options in response to the question of whether or not I wanted to learn more about Miracle Face Crap. They were ‘Yes please!’ and ‘No, I don’t care about my skin’. I mean, they might as well have followed it up with a picture of that guy who chooses the wrong cup at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Look at what happens when you don’t spend $900 on a fingernail’s worth of Miracle Face Crap, you repulsive piles of stinky cow dung who think you’re too good for our product! Your entire head will literally have all its moisture sucked out until it blows away in the breeze and you die a sad, forgotten old hag! Because you thought you were too good to care about your own skin.

  Capitalism will always come after us. Once upon a time, it was nothing for a woman to have a bountiful bush marking the entrance to her lady cave. Hair wasn’t considered to be abnormal, a nosegay of stench so foul it needed to be expunged from the earth. Look at any nudie magazines or vintage porn up until the 1970s and it’s a beacon of bush.

  Now, hair is out, smooth is in and vitamin E cream is a bathroom cabinet must-have.

  Of course, it’s not just hair on your down-there that causes such offence. I mean, isn’t it funny that we’ve made it all the way past the events of Back to the Future II, when humanity was supposed to have developed flying cars and self-drying clothes (excellent for all those Busy Mums out there), through worldwide war and famine, past the development of smartphone technology and over the rainbow of how the internet even works, and the thing that still manages to both terrify and astonish us in equal measure is the sight of underarm hair on a woman. We’ll raise approximately zero eyebrows at Japanese sex robots or the thought of sending a bunch of humans to Mars in a box, but NO UNDERARM HAIR PLEASE, IT’S UNNATURAL.

  Yes, you’re perfectly entitled as a feminist and indeed as an autonomous human-being woman person to grow or remove as much or as little hair as you like. But grooming is a personal choice only in so much as everything is a personal choice – which is to say that ‘choices’ as we generally understand them aren’t made in a vacuum. Imagine you woke up in an actual vacuum one day, with no memories or concept of life outside the vacuum. On a table in front of you is a packet of wax strips. Aside from sheer boredom, do you think it would even occur to you to spend the next few hours painfully and painstakingly removing all the body hair below your neck? I put it to you, madam, that it would not.

  So the thing is, ‘fashion’ and the whims of beauty are so transient and ever-changing that it’s an almost wholly useless exercise to try to morph ourselves into something dictated by an external force. There are so many different variables and influences, and almost none of them are designed to make anyone feel good about themselves. Deeply entrenched racism, for example, has always instructed preferential treatment be given to white or light-coloured skin (check out Lupita Nyong’o’s must-hear/read speech on black beauty from the 2014 Black Women in Hollywood luncheon). Angular, skinny bodies might be considered an aspirational benchmark today, but fifty years ago those same bodies were derided as unfeminine. Instead, advertisers encouraged women to purchase products with names like Wate-On and 7-Power in order to make their undesirable skinny rigs more voluptuous. Corsetry and girdles sucked women’s waists in while pushing their T&A out, because having an hourglass figure was meant to make you a more worthwhile human-being woman person.

  The 1990s spawned both the supermodel and heroin chic, Amazonian women as tall as trees acclaimed alongside the long-limbed, slight-framed girls who began modelling almost as soon as they began puberty. If anyone questioned how using fourteen-year-old girls to sell expensive clothes to adult women was sensible or fair, it was an argument that didn’t gain much traction. In response, Riot Grrrls printed postcards and stickers calling for women to ‘riot, don’t diet’, asking, ‘Can you pinch an inch? Do you care?’

  But the problem was, women did care. Because it doesn’t matter how much you want to riot against a system that’s inherently predisposed to hate you, actually resisting its influence is a different matter entirely. Even while women were being told to ‘embrace your curves!’ by the same women’s magazines whose business models relied on them being shills for Miracle Face Crap and advising readers on How to Get a Better Beach Body, the allure of the so-called perfect chassis remained. What this actually is has never been settled on because, as I’ve said, the success of selling it and all the products required to get it secretly relies on it never actually existing. The perfect body is like the mirage of an oasis in the desert. It shimmers on the horizon as we tell ourselves that if we can just make it over the next dune, it’s bound to appear. So we trudge towards it, sweating and thirsty, wondering when this fresh hell will end and we can splash in the cool, refreshing pool that awaits us. But we will never reach it.

  In the 2000s, we were told that ‘real women have curves’. Women weren’t fat, they were ‘curvy’ because the prospect of assigning any kind of value to the word ‘fat’ was (and still is) so terrifying to people. ‘Real women’ were hailed as superior, sexier, better in bed, more attractive, more interesting, smarter (which is simply illogical as an argument), funnier, fitter etc. Real women had personalities. Real women were fun to be around. Real women ate real food like burgers, steaks and fries. They drank beer and laughed heartily. Real women were just like men, but with Sexy Curves. Men preferred women with curves because they looked like ‘real women’ and were hotter than a ‘bag of bones’ (which only dogs liked to pick at). This frequently offered explanation and seal of approval was supposed to make all of us feel better and more superior to the gazelle-like figures of the Skinny Bitches, because as everyone knows the presence of male desire always solves the problem of women’s low self-esteem. I mean, there couldn’t possibly be any other reason for self-hatred in a woman’s life than the fear that men don’t want to fuck her, amirite, ladies? Without a man to qualify our existence with an appreciative erection, what’s the point of even being alive?

  Excuse my ignorance, but isn’t the idea
that we need that validation part of the problem in the first place? Apart from the grossly heteronormative ideas behind it – i.e. that all women are interested in the sexual approval of men as if all women are exclusively sexually interested in men, and not, possibly, the mythical unicorn creature known as A Lesbian – it also assumes that the only thing standing between women and some sense of self-worth is a man’s dick. And I’m sorry, but I couldn’t give a flying fudge what a man or a penis thinks about the way I look.

  Because let’s not discount the contributions of men here. While it’s true that men can also be affected by poor body image and the number of men admitting to having eating disorders is rising, the goalposts for male beauty are still miles further apart than the ones for women. Men are given the liberty to exist in a way denied to women, and a lot of them have the cheek to turn around and act as if women are just being overly dramatic about the whole thing. They’ll very freely offer their opinions in this regard, despite the fact most women never ask them and will rarely be swayed by what they think. ‘Relax, girls!’ they instruct us casually. ‘We think you’re all beautiful! We don’t care what you look like!’

  The problem with this kind of boring, arrogant attempt at reassurance is twofold. First, the poor self-esteem and terrible body image shared by most women has nothing to do with the fear of being loathed by individual men (but what a fucking surprise that they would immediately make it about themselves). Fear of being loathed is part of it, but only because part of patriarchy’s great power is in tethering women’s identities to how men construct them. If a woman stands up and a man isn’t around to see it or comment on it or admire it or acknowledge it or criticise it or offer any kind of unasked for and unwanted observation on it at all, does anyone care if the woman actually even exists? No. Because what we’re conditioned to be afraid of is the omnipresent male gaze, and that tends to be far more brutal than jocular blokes using the internet or dinner parties or vox pops to once again position themselves at the centre of something that has nothing to do with their dicks. Now that I’m old enough and smart enough to realise how and why I’ve been taught to hate my body, I realise that my compulsion to do so is completely unrelated to whether or not Joe Average down the street wants to bone me. Perhaps I’m unusual in this regard, but I grow more and more immune to the ‘fat-and-ugly’ insults that men frequently send my way. I give zero fucks whether or not an identifiable man expresses disgust for me or my body. In fact, it would be hard for me to care less than I already do about men’s critical thoughts on women, especially what we look like.