‘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 inter- ested 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 in- ternally, 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 un- common (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 parti- cipate 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?
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 admit- tedly 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 indi- viduals – 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.
Reproduced with the permission of Allen & Unwin. Fight Like A Girl is out now.
