Chapter 1
Redefining Womanhood Through Humor and Honesty
In 1988 Wolverhampton, I celebrated my 13th birthday in a crowded house with five siblings, my sister Caz refusing to acknowledge the occasion, and my mother presenting a Philadelphia-filled baguette as my "cake." That night, sharing a bed with my three-year-old sister, I updated my "Bad Points" list and created a new "By The Time I'm 18" list including losing weight, having good clothes, and making friends. The stark reality had hit me: I was 13, weighed 13 stone, had no money or friends, and went to bed at 7:15pm on my birthday. As Simone de Beauvoir said, "One is not born a woman - one becomes one." But I had no idea how to make this transformation. Becoming a woman felt like becoming famous - suddenly everyone bombards you with questions about your body, sexuality, and identity. Modern feminism had ground to a halt, becoming academic discussions rather than addressing everyday issues women face. Like the "Broken Windows" theory of crime prevention, we needed to address the smaller indignities before they led to bigger violations.
Chapter 2
The Bloody Beginnings of Womanhood
I had assumed menstruation was optional - something I could simply opt out of through sheer unwillingness. It didn't look fun, and I couldn't see how to fit it into my schedule. I'd only discovered periods four months earlier from a Lil-lets leaflet found in a hedge, and my mother's only guidance when I asked if periods hurt was "Yeah, but it's OK" before the baby started crying.
When my period arrived during a library trip, I suffered silently for three months with cheap Pennywise sanitary towels that felt like mattresses between my legs. I developed anemia that caused fainting and blue fingernails, but never told Mom, believing I'd used up my one question about menstruation.
My salvation came when I turned 13 and got my adult library card, allowing me to check out books with sex in them. Almost as an afterthought, I borrowed Riders by Jilly Cooper because it had a horse on the cover. This random selection changed everything - it was "filth gold" filled with explicit sex scenes that introduced me to masturbation. When I first tried it, I felt "amazing... clean, and light, and happy... a bit, well, beautiful."
I became an "amazingly dexterous masturbator," putting phenomenal time and effort into this new hobby that "doesn't cost anything, doesn't make me fat, and doesn't require leaving the house." My sexual education continued through late-night films on BBC2 and Channel 4, especially Wish You Were Here, where Emily Lloyd's character treated sex not as something dark and dooming, but silly and fun.
Twenty-two years later, I find the internet's "porn mono-culture" troubling - what I call the "Tesco Fuck" or "Microsoft Windows screw." This uniform approach has infiltrated mainstream culture through Brazilians, plastic surgery, and MTV crotch-shots. The problem isn't pornography itself - which has existed since Neanderthals drew men with enormous willies on cave walls - but the porn industry. We need more variety in pornography, especially something showing sex as mutual pleasure rather than something that "just happens to a woman when she has to make rent."
Chapter 3
The Complicated Language of Female Bodies
Adolescence is supposed to be an incredible unfolding. I've done my research in the library, reading Gray's Anatomy for the "juicy bits." I understand how teenage neural development works - when sex hormones kick in, the brain essentially explodes, with white matter establishing "motorways of reason" and the brain lighting up "like the Eastern Seaboard at dusk." At 14, I am an experiment, being resurrected from within.
But honestly, I'm too busy fire-fighting all the physical changes to focus on my potential genius. My body is transforming from something that just poos and does jigsaws into a magical department store that will someday vend babies. One morning, I wake covered in livid red marks - stretch marks that have torn my skin as I've grown, covering nearly every soft part.
Caz and I have hit a rare moment of peace. We're actually hugging because we've just had a two-hour conversation about what to call our vaginas. "I can't say it," I admit. "I'd rather pretend I don't have one than say 'vagina'." The problem with "vagina" is that vaginas seem to be bad luck - they get torn, examined, evidence is found in them. So we brainstorm alternatives, from family pet names to the downright bizarre.
Finding what to call your genitals is a formal rite of passage, as significant as menarche. I compile lists of vagina names I hate - "hole," "honeypot," "twat," "bush," and "vag" - and ones I like - "minge," "flaps," "foof," and "The Saarlac Pit." Once you start with silly names, there's no reason to stop. "It's all going off at West Midlands Safari Park and Zoo," I'll say during cystitis, or on happier days, "The mist is really rolling in on the Mull of Kintyre tonight."
Breasts are equally problematic to name. Scarlett Johansson calls hers "my girls," which is perfect - playful, possessive, feminine - but now no one else can use it without seeming like they're referring to Scarlett's. "Breasts" are too clinical, "bosom" sounds like Les Dawson, "cleavage" doesn't work anatomically, and "tits" struggles to transition from casual day use to intimate night scenarios.
Chapter 4
The Revolutionary Power of Feminism
In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer suggests tasting your menstrual blood. "If you haven't tasted it yet, you've got a long way to go, baby," she says. I've tried it - better than Inter-city buffet food and certainly ethically sourced. But what I will urge you to do is say "I am a feminist" - preferably standing on a chair and shouting it. Everything's more exciting from a chair. If you can't say these words, I'd be alarmed. It's as important as "I love you" or "No! Do NOT cut me a fringe!"
I was 15 when I first said it, looking in the mirror: "I am a feminist. I am a feminist." I still hadn't accomplished most items on my "Things To Do By The Time I Am 18" list, but books, TV and music were raising me now. Books seemed most potent - each one a life inhaled in a single day. Reading fast, I hoovered up six or seven lives weekly through autobiographies, eventually discovering Dorothy Parker, the first funny woman, an evolutionary step as significant as opposable thumbs.
I noticed most women who held their own with men seemed unhappy and died young. Popular opinion claimed women were fundamentally unsuited to competing with men - they couldn't handle the big-boy stuff. But examining their undoing - despair, self-loathing, exhaustion, lack of opportunity - I realized they were all dying of being stuck in the wrong century. These earlier ages were poisonous to women.
Then I found Germaine Greer. I'd presumed she was stern and angry like a nun, but seeing her on TV, I wrote in my diary: "She's NICE!!!! FUNNEEEE!!!!!" Greer said "I am a feminist" calmly, logically, with entitlement and pride - like the solution to a puzzle. After reading The Female Eunuch, I discovered Greer wrote about being a woman the way men sing about being men. She wrote paragraphs like piano solos, her feminism simple: everyone should be more like her - scornful of bullshit, new, fast, free, laughing, fucking, and unafraid to call anyone out LOUDLY. LIKE ROCK MUSIC.
So here's the quick way to know if you're a feminist: a) Do you have a vagina? and b) Do you want to be in charge of it? If yes to both - congratulations! You're a feminist. We need to reclaim the word "feminism" badly. Which part of "liberation for women" isn't for you? The right to vote? Equal pay? Madonna's "Vogue"? Jeans?
Chapter 5
The Uncomfortable Truths About Our Bodies
Indeed, the panoply of underwear across ages and cultures is notable for the extraordinary fact that nearly all of it looks hot. We just, to paraphrase Will Smith in Men In Black, make this shit look good.
The magic of good underwear - underwear so good you want to call it 'lingerie' in a French accent - is endless. When you get the Olympic standard gear, straight girls can have their heads turned by other straight girls in it. Let us hymn lingerie - stockings allowing spontaneous sex; French knickers with ruffles; cami-knickers in outrageous colors; the egg-white joy of tulle; silk slip-sliding like oil; blood rushing through lace; the black line from calf to thigh; hook-and-eye with flesh swelling beneath.
But modern underwear has become difficult because knickers have become smaller - much smaller. A friend once admitted her knickers were so skimpy, her front bottom had eaten them entirely: "I'm currently wearing them on my clit - like a little hat." This isn't right! Women need underwear that clings to their exteriors like a starfish, not gets pulled into their insides. I'm pro big pants. Strident feminism NEEDS big pants.
As for bras - they have power all their own. A good bra is one of a woman's greatest aids. At 35, my breasts are like peaches you'd find forgotten in your handbag - with key indentations and bus tickets stuck to them. Breastfeeding two colicky babies has left them "bust." But with the right bra, I can mold what's left into two lovely lady-lumps, coiling my shattered tits like a fire hose.
But if you live by the bra, you die by the bra. Sometimes they turn evil like Saruman in Lord of the Rings (but with a bow in the middle - Sarumam). As Courteney Cox explains in Cougar Town about not clubbing anymore: "At this time of night, all I want to do is take my bra off." For people who've never worn one - men, children, animals, Agyness Deyn - it's impossible to describe the raw pleasure of removing certain bras.
Chapter 6
The Weight of Being Female
It's 1991, I'm 16, and I'm sitting on St Peter's cathedral lawn with Matthew Vale, smoking. Matt is the coolest adolescent in Wolverhampton - he owns the entire Byrds back catalogue, wears baggy charity-shop jumpers, and has proper dance moves copied from the Supremes. Of course I fancy him. God I fancy him. We've had an exciting day: bought Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night for 50p, shoplifted deodorant from Boots, and represented all over town.
Then Matt asks, "Did you have a nickname at school?"
"Yes."
"Did they call you Fatty?"
The world stops. Everything cold and still and bright for one second. A flashbulb moment. I thought I'd hidden those extra four stones carefully under my new shirt and waistcoat. I thought I was talking too fast for him to see it.
I am 16 and 16 stone. All I do is sit around eating bread and cheese, and reading. I'm fat. We're all fat. The entire family is obese. We don't have full-length mirrors at home, so when I want to see myself naked, I go to Marks & Spencer, pretend to try on a tartan skirt, and look at myself in the changing room. My body is this vast, sleeping, pale thing - standing awkwardly in the mirror like it's waiting to receive bad news. It is the bad news.
In my family, we never say the word "fat." It's like an eruv for the slow and soft. But the silence is oppressive - a stoical acceptance of all we can never be part of: shorts, swimming pools, strappy dresses, country walks, roller-skating, vest tops, high heels, flirting, being kissed, feeling confident. And ever losing weight.
The word "fat" has become furiously overloaded - in conversation, it often prompts a scared flurry of dismissal ("You're not fat!") when someone clearly is fat and just wants to discuss it. We need to drain the heat from the word "fat" like fever from a child. We need to stare clearly and calmly into the middle of fat, and talk about what it is, why it's become the big topic for Western women in the 21st century. FAT FAT FAT FAT.
Ironically, after smashing my heart on St Peter's lawn, Matthew Vale knocked four stone off me in four months. On Thursday and Friday nights, we'd climb over railings to a pub and dance for five hours to NME-approved bands. He got me smoking ten Silk Cut daily, leaving no money for lunch. I discovered my body was right under my head all along! I could make it spin and leap, and though my invisible maracas dance move kept me a virgin another year, it was fun having arms, legs, and a little belly.
But why did I get fat? Why is being fat treated as somewhere between facial scarring and Nazi collaboration? People overeat for exactly the same reasons they drink, smoke, or take drugs. Overeating is the addiction of choice for carers - you can still make packed lunches, do school runs, and stay up with sick children, unlike if you're smoking skunk or drinking quarts of Scotch. It's a way to self-destruct while remaining functional. That's why it's women's common addiction: quietly eating mums, office drawer KitKats, late-night fridge moments.
Chapter 7
Navigating Sexism in a Man's World
I've lost weight, I can wear a dress, and I've got a job. I am now - as I cheerfully announce to everyone - The Least Important Person At Melody Maker, the weekly music paper everyone confuses with NME, which is far more famous but, we think, less cool.
The music industry is a tiny world - essentially a village congregating in the same five or six bars and venues every night. Things start happening in the office I feel uncomfortable with. One writer fills that week's gossip column with barely concealed references to the fact I got off with another writer. When the section editor asks me to sit on his lap to discuss my 'promotion,' I think, more fool you, dude, and plonk down on him heavily, then light a fag.
These days, sexism is a bit like Meryl Streep in a new film: sometimes you don't recognize it straightaway. Very often, a woman can have left a party, caught the bus home, washed her face, got into bed before she puts the light back on again and shouts, 'Hang on - I'VE JUST HAD SOME SEXISM AT ME!'
For even the most ardent feminist historian, male or female - citing Amazons and tribal matriarchies and Cleopatra - can't conceal that women have basically done fuck all for the last 100,000 years. Nearly everything so far has been the creation of men. Pretending that women have had a pop at all this before but just ultimately didn't do as well as the men gives strength to the belief that women simply aren't as good as men. When the truth is that we haven't begun at all.
Melody Maker is filled with good, liberal men. But they tie themselves in knots trying to square their ardent belief that women are equal to men, with the evidence that there just aren't that many great records made by women. Every six weeks or so, they'd despair, 'Jesus, we've got to get some women in the paper!'
What we were all thinking, but were too embarrassed to say, was that women simply had less to say than men. There was still no female rock band to rival Led Zeppelin, or Guns N' Roses. The disparity was laughable. But we could never, ever mention it. The truth sounded sexist.
Based on my own personal experiences, 100,000 years of male superiority has its origins in the simple basis that men don't get cystitis. We are, physically, the weaker sex. We're not as good at hefting stones, killing mammoths and rowing boats. In more primitive times, the winners were always going to be anyone who was both physically strong enough to punch an antelope to the ground, and whose libido didn't end up with them getting pregnant, then dying in childbirth.
Chapter 8
The Complicated Reality of Love and Relationships
A year later, and I am in love. He's The One. Obviously, I thought the one before him was The One, and the one before that was The One, too. Frankly, I'm so into the idea of being in love that anyone out of about three million could be The One.
But, no - this, now, is definitely The One. The very One. I am walking down Monet-grey pavements in Hampstead in March, hand in hand, and I am so in love. Admittedly I feel terrible, and he's a total arsehole, but I am in love. Finally. By sheer force of will. I've got a person, all of my own.
'You walk funny,' he says, in an oddly needling way. 'You don't walk like a fat girl.'
So yes, he's a boy in a band - the first boy in a band I could get. Insanely talented, very beautiful, but also very lazy, and definitely troubled. His band gets nowhere because he refuses to do 'shitty gigs' he thinks are beneath him. Even though we are going out with each other, and he's moved into my flat, I don't think he likes me. When I write, he sits next to me on a chair, and explains at great length how he's more talented than me.
My family hate him: when my brother Eddie comes to stay with us, he accidentally spills a bottle of strawberry-flavoured Yop on my boyfriend's suede jacket, and my boyfriend goes absolutely mental at this 13-year-old boy. Eddie cries. We have to leave my house and sit on the steps, outside, smoking fags while I apologise to Eddie over and over again.
Caz is very brisk about him: 'He is a cock. You were better off when you were just cohabiting with the mice in your kitchen. He's a short man with a girl's name - and that's trouble.'
Along with underwear, love is a woman's work. Women are to be fallen in love with. When we discuss the great tragedies that can possibly befall a woman, it's the idea of being unloved that we wince over most. Language tells us exactly what we think of the unattached woman - it's all there, in the difference between 'bachelors' and 'spinsters.' Bachelors have it all to play for. Spinsters must play for it all, and fast.
Given the importance women know is attached to being attached, it's little wonder we're obsessed with relationships. Within any workplace, there are obvious flirtations, but if men could read women's thoughts, they'd be terrified by our previously concealed levels of insanity. That normal section manager typing an email? She's actually planning an imaginary mini-break to Paris with a colleague she's barely spoken to, worrying about umbrellas, tights, and how they'll hold hands in the rain.
My relationship with Courtney finally ended during an Ecstasy-fueled night with Caz at a recording studio. We stared at each other until I mouthed: "I hate him." She mouthed back: "That's because he's a knob-skin. They're all knob-skins." Everything suddenly looked like a scene on television - a play I'd been performing in but could now see clearly from outside. When Courtney approached and politely asked us to stop with the maracas we were playing, Caz replied with equal politeness: "I'm afraid we can't." When he asked why, she simply stated: "Because you're a total dick." I laughed - a gigantic, unsexy honk with my Wolverhampton accent - and agreed joyfully. "A total dick!" I realized I couldn't even break up with him because "I was never going out with him in the first place. I've been imagining the whole thing."
Chapter 9
The Politics of Female Bodies and Choices
I have no idea what to wear to a strip club. When I call Vicky to ask what she's wearing, we debate whether matching boots might make us look like a lesbian act. "No one would believe you're a lesbian," Vicky sighs. "You're offensively hetero-sexual. You fancy Father Christmas."
It's the year 2000, and strip clubs have become socially acceptable again. Britpop and Loaded magazine have repackaged working-class tropes - pubs, greyhound racing, "birds" - and strip clubs fall under this heading. "Ladettes" now enjoy nights out at classier strip joints, with Spice Girls and radio DJs attending strip-club hen parties.
The Evening Standard has asked Vicky to spend an evening at Spearmint Rhino to see what the fuss is about. Despite my feminist principles calling these "arenas of abuse," the promise of complimentary champagne all night convinces me to join her.
From outside, the club looks like a "putative Titty Disneyland" with ornate gold mouldings and red walls. I'm surprised how confidently the male customers enter - no guilt whatsoever about paying "very young women to reveal their labia." For the first hour, we treat it like a pub with occasional floating breasts interrupting our conversations. After two hours, some dancers join us, and we're all gossiping together - Vicky in her cardigan, me in my jacket, them in diamante bras and thongs.
By 1am, we're tipsy, have received a private dance that left us "discombobulated," and heard scandalous stories about a famous TV presenter. When the PR person leaves, we stay to finish our champagne, but security suddenly approaches. "It's time for you to go, ladies," they insist, hustling us out. On the pavement, they explain: "We know your game. You're prostitutes." Apparently, Russian prostitutes often pick up clients at the club, and the bouncers can't conceive that we might be anything else. In their world, women operate on a binary system: stripper or whore.
Any argument in favor of strip clubs is fallacious. Interviews with young women paying their university fees by stripping aren't empowering end-of-argument statements - they're gigantic political issues. If women must strip for education when male students don't, that's a problem, not a justification. "Girls, get the fuck off the podium - you're letting us all down."
Strip clubs let everyone down. Inside them, no one's having fun. The women hate the men. The men can't possibly have kind feelings toward these women. Every dance is a small unhappiness - "the bastard child of misogyny and commerce." On the high street, a strip club looks like "a tooth knocked out of a face."
Chapter 10
Embracing Womanhood On Your Own Terms
Looking back at my journey of womanhood, I resist the self-deprecating urge to claim I still don't know how to be a woman. Yes, there are still many things I haven't experienced and skills I lack, but I distrust the female habit of reflexively highlighting our shortcomings.
Women often see themselves not as well-meaning humans but as endless lists of problems to solve, spending fortunes trying to "fix" ourselves. My feminist awakening's greatest revelation was simply not giving a shit about these supposed "problems."
What hamstrung me at 13 was the princess ideal. Despite modern "alternative princesses," the tropes remain harmful. The most liberating thing has been accepting I'm just an ordinary woman who must work hard rather than magically transform into a princess.
I don't want some alpha-y patriarchal brute. Modern women don't need the old-fashioned notion of desirable men - we want geeky, nerdy, polite and ridiculous mates who are also madly attracted to us. Princesses never run in gangs or have mates - they miss out on the joys of friendship, museums with sisters, pub afternoons, and silly games like "I Am Burt Reynolds."
By 16, I'd abandoned princess dreams for wanting to be a muse - to inspire songs, characters, paintings. I'd drunkenly beg musician friends to immortalize me in song, arguing it would be revolutionary to "write a song about a gobby bird." Eventually I realized I'm not muse material - I'd have to actually DO something instead of just BE something.
In the 21st century, women can bring about change without risking imprisonment or death. Simply being honest about who we are is half the battle - rejecting magazines that make us feel shitty, shaming colleagues who frequent titty-bars, ignoring expensive wedding pressure, admitting we can't afford luxury items.
If women's liberation truly comes to pass, men benefit too - the patriarchy must be knackered after 100,000 years without a break. Feminists don't want to take over from men, just have our fair share. I want CHOICE, VARIETY, MORE WOMEN - not because it would be fairer, but because it would make the world better and more exciting.
In the end, what I really want to be isn't a woman in some perfect sense - not a princess, goddess or muse - but simply a productive, honest, courteously treated human. One of "The Guys." But with really amazing hair.
