DECK THE HALLS! Drunk or not drunk, no woman is any kind of ‘game’

The Christmas do. A yearly occurrence for most of the employed of the UK – and seemingly a grim time of year for women. YAY!

Pub. Friday. We were not on a Christmas night out. A large group of drunk office workers started to make themselves known. Standing on stools to sing along to the jukebox, falling over each other, dominating the space. Men in suits, women dressed up for a night out. A man at the bar half stood on me, half leant on me. When I asked him not to stand on me, he looked surprised there was a person there at all, and did step off me. He was so drunk he had literally not seen me.

We all got on with our respective nights out. Later, we were all distracted when a woman, in tears, was rooted to her spot by a colleague leaning one arm over her shoulder onto the wall. It was so uncomfortable to watch, he was drunk, sweaty and leery and there was something so wrong about it. Why did he need to take such a domineering stance? One of my friends went over under the guise of going to the toilet, stepped between them and asked if she was ok. She was and thanked my mate; he was annoyed she was ‘interfering’. Back at our seats, two men had now descended on the girl, and she wouldn’t have been able to move without pushing them out her way. We kept her within sight and made it clear if she wasn’t ok she was to let us know. No one else from the same night out noticed.

Eventually, she did try to move, she wanted to get her bag from across the pub. The men restrained her, not with much force, but enough. My turn. I got up and explained I would feel more confortable if this lady was allowed to get her bag. Once she had her bag, I said I would be happy to leave them to their night.

Small things I know. Anyway – it escalated. Several of the men used their unspent testosterone (boke) asking me why I interfered, and trying to start a fight with the guys in our group. We left the pub a short while later feeling like vigilantes having seen the girl in the centre of the prey party go home with a female colleague. The story of the scuffle had already become legend in the men's toilet.

I am not apologising for what happened. Nor will anyone else I was in the pub with. I do consider people might ask ‘why get involved’ – but I know exactly why we did. We were watching what could have been a mate, sister, hells - a work colleague being coerced when vulnerable, and I hope to buggary if the same thing ever happens to me, someone else will be there to give me the opportunity to escape it. 

I wasn’t going to write about this. But then I came across this in the guardian today and it chilled me to the core. The very idea that the men on Saturday night could not see clearly when we intervened that their behavior was unacceptable speaks volumes. Drunk or not drunk, no woman is any kind of ‘game’ and if I see you in public treating her like she is, every fucking time, I’m going to get involved.

I think there’s something stupid about moaning about the inevitability of getting older (I mean, but yes, things get scarier)

I got really annoyed this week at a feminist commentator asking people to stop referencing the fact she heading towards her 30th. She’s younger than me (and Gaga with whom I share a birthday week) and it was the first time someone moaning about turning 30 annoyed me. Cos, ok, each new decade is a right of passage. BUT one: you’re in the public eye people are going to know your age. And two: own it, and don’t say with one breath 'will people stop mentioning I’m 30 it’s not a big deal' and with the next say, 'actually turning 30 is a feminist issue as being 30 is so different for women than for men'. GAH.

I think there’s something stupid about moaning about the inevitability of getting older, boo fucking hoo. I mean yes things get scarier – will I have kids – will I meet someone who is sexually and intellectually fulfilling – will work be ok – why does everything I read in the news break my heart – will everyone realize I’m a fraud – will I get a dog – is it necessary for my periods to reach levels of world ending pain – am I ever going to stop pretending I may one day be a Blue Peter presenter? But hey there are questions all the time about everything. They only get more urgent if we allow them too. There’s a solution to every problem and sometimes it’s the solution we least expect.

And all this with a pinch of the LOL salt – as I’m still not very old at all. But things are changing… some are magic, some are a bag of balls. My cheekbones have appeared, they are now right there on my face not hidden beneath two inches of puppy fat – bones generally seem to be appearing, collarbones, knee bones, hand bones, shin bones. BONES. I am strong. I feel strong and aware of my body, I’m ‘devil may care on my bike’ as a boy told me last week. But I can balance on high things, and do that stand up from being on my toes dirty dance thing, and do a whole gym class without feeling dizzy. I feel like if I wanted to, I could try a cartwheel. (I won't, I'll damage myself. BUT I COULD)

I can recall songs in pub quiz rounds, this is a whole new skill – I have a huge encyclopedia of brain pop but have never been good at recalling it. I am now.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and feel like I’d like to wear a balaclava until the day I die. But more often than not I’m kinda cool with what I see. I joke ‘I only need to lose weight for the people that look at me’ and I mean it, as far as I’m concerned, what I got ain't bad. It does walking and talking and my hair is fucking cool.

Older men and younger men flirt with me. LOLZ. Silver foxes and gorgeous twenty year olds with loads of hair. Some men still find me terrifying; these men now make me laugh. Some women find me terrifying; and I want to be friends with them so I try, and don’t worry when I don’t succeed.

Look. Things can be rubbish, really rubbish, but getting annoyed with people for merely recognising AGE as a thing is plain silly. I’m NEARLY 30 and I'm saying ain’t nobody got time for that.

It must be so difficult when you're a sexy young man and your girl is just causing problems by being alive

What do you mean.

A phrase often employed to find out what, exactly, someone is referring to. But more recently a lyric, set to music, performed by a young Canadian laddy who has also taken to getting naked on balconies. Said Canadian has legions of followers on twitter, over 68 million, 73 million on facebook and his fansicles are called Beliebers. So I’m led to belieb.

What do you mean? Catchy huh?

Better make up your mind what do you mean.

The young man in question is struggling to work out what his girlfriend wants. Honestly, this is probably because he’s not making her feel at ease. If you feel comfortable with someone you’re more likely to just come out and say, ‘Oh yes, this is what I mean’. You wouldn't even start with indecision – you’d just be like, ‘oh I’m quite happy with dinner in tonight and Strictly: It Takes Two and then some Netflix. God Jay is good isn’t he’. (And he would recognise Jay is quite good as this is not an area where indecision is ever a factor.) Done.

It must be so difficult when you're a sexy young man and your girl is just causing problems by being alive.

I don’t know if you’re happy or complaining. RING THE ALARM! You can’t tell if she’s happy OR complaining? ARE YOU LOOKING AT HER? Oh god. Don't tell me this is a whatsapp relationship. COMMENCE MESSAGING: Girrrrrl  you are so hot. Girrrrrrl I wanna see you. Bae bae bae. (three hours pass.) OH. I was napping. Sorry. You’re so hot… and it rolls on. The Canadian is so one of those boys that messages nice things and then takes a nap without wrapping up the chat politely.

You want to make a point but keep preaching. Well, maybe if you were patient she would get to her point. You’re all distracted aren’t you? Avoiding eye contact, skirting around the issue, turning away, murmuring and fidgeting. Pulling a hoody over your stupid quiff. Don’t get me started on your clothes young man.

You wanna argue all day and make-a love all night. UH YES. BECAUSE THERE HAS TO BE SOMETHING FUN TO DO WITH YOU, YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME ANYWAY. Plus you stop whining when we do it.

K babes, there's room for us to be more straightforward (sexy reverb whisper at 3.05) with our communications. But chicken. Sometimes it starts with you? What do you mean? This inability to be straightforward is not one-sided and frankly you can be a wee monkey, acting up and generally being bloody annoying.

I have taken the bieliberty of applying your phrase in some simple dating situations. Don't say I'm not about equality. Maybe it does have an application after all.... what do you...?

‘I’m sorry I didn't make it over to yours I was having a nap’
What do you mean?

‘I just don’t think we want the same things, but I don’t know what to do about it’
What do you mean?

‘You’re really hot, but I like her too and want to see if it works out with her, it might not and I’ll call you? Ok?’
What DO you mean?

‘SORRY I WAS NAPPING’.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

‘I actually really like you and this is exciting and I think you’re really beautiful and would like to see you again.’
Wait. What? Eh? What do you mean?

A date is basically a series of lubricated lies - so lolz to playing the feminist card.

 

I am fully paid up feminist – and I am a big fan of the term ‘equalitist’ too.

The thing I come back to all the time as a feminist, is seeing it as a means to support other women. I find the fight comes quite naturally to me – I want us all to have the same opportunities as men without having to push for them but the fight is often required to avoid blatant disadvantage. This is still the big split isn’t it? The ingrained advantages that men are just born with and can chose to live by without having to ask for anything different.

I have been writing about what dating is like as I go, navigating my generation's current identity stramash. And then I saw a comment is free, YES ACTUALLY, about dates with male feminists, UH HUH, and once I'd done being annoyed at how stupid it was and the death of journalism... well....

All in all I actually realised I’m a bit shit at dating. I am generally unimpressed by men, oh, and anyone that isn’t a mate. AND I can’t hide what I am thinking from my face. #winning

The thing with guys playing the feminist card on a date, is it’s the same as ANYTHING EVER anyone says when there’s sexual tension or an expectation of sex. It becomes game-play. It’s all about bravado, showing off, the display. Chatting feminism on a date has just become a new kind of peacocking. It doesn’t mean nada. And this is the thing, (staying outside the debate of whether men can actually be feminists) – any political movement we sign up to, can only be demonstrated by our actions and the way we treat the people around us and that we interact with day to day.

The funny things ‘feminist’ men have said to me on dates, on sofas, in bars, beds, shoe-less walks home, line up exactly with the stupid things men who have not declared an interest either way. And I’m sure the stupid things I’ve said to try and get laid match up the other way round. (I DON'T LIKE TO CYCLE ON GRASS... I SAID THAT ONCE. Me either.) I’m sure Swifty is working on a new single about this.

You can read the comment is free thing here. I keep a note of the stupidest things I say on dates, and the oddest things said to me. A date is basically a series of lubricated lies isn’t it? In the same way tinder is kinda msn messenger but you’re not even chatting to people you like.

I am a feminist – and I live by a code that I like to think is about equality, and I get angry every day about how things work verses how they could and should work. But there is one sacred place for lies and putting together sentences you would never dare say with a serious face to anyone you actually trust. And that place is date-land. Let’s not change that. How else am I going to gather stories to entertain all my friends?

Oh and guys, if I smile and flick my hair, I wouldn’t rate it. I’m just trying to get in your pants. See, you play the feminist card; I can play my feminine card. Natch.

Amy, Amy, Amy.

I remember turning Tears Dry On Their Own up so loud the speakers almost broke in the old ford ka I used to traipse around in. Back to Black – we only said goodbye in words, I died a hundred times – a phrase I understood from my first one night stand. I knew what she was talking about – I don’t want to be with you, I don’t need you, but this is more than words – let’s respect each other and what happened here. Can you let me have that? I want to see this a new way.


I went to see Amy this week.


There’s something about Amy’s assumed strength that is galling in ALL THAT footage. Her loneliness was excused, her drug habit her own problem to pull herself out of, she’s gobby and witty and she can handle herself. So she CAN handle herself. What if she couldn’t? What if the loneliness and the need for a overruling strength was too much. The push pull with her husband, family and drugs definitely says that. It’s clear her girlfriends from school adored her and fought hard to rescue her.


I see why the family are upset by how they come across – I can’t imagine how they couldn’t be. But they come across ok. Dealing with a soul that strong isn’t straight forward, we are taught to respect strength and let it soldier on. My strength was batted back into a box – or you’re labeled as gobby, try hard, forward, bossy, alpha. It’s different for men. It is – we’re still taught to be scared of a strong women. Amy had strength in spades. That sings through the whole 90 minutes. An unfaltering honesty and magic that only the most brilliant people can pull off at seventeen.


When life hurts – and it does for us all in so many ways – when life is skipping from giddying highs to pathetic lows – when we don’t have a schedule that repeats repeats repeats, a structure, but rather when we know our friends are waiting at a distance to mop us up, we feel invincible. I’ve lost friendships to drugs. You just wait it out. Some you get back, some you can’t repair.


It’s very difficult not to be cynical about Amy. Or presume there’s a dark art in peeling back so much and showing so much very personal footage. A young woman off her face, out of her mind on crack and smack - downing Jack Daniels like JD have said there are only four barrels left and they need drinking today. But we all have our vices and our dark moments – we post only the good online. We aren’t supposed to share those dark moments with wit or honesty and a wry smile as we’re only supposed to be performing the right kind of role.


We’re not supposed to grow up behind a lens. We all do now, but we self-curate. Amy didn’t have the curate option. The force stronger than her in her life was the mob waiting for her, her management’s bank balance, her voice, her fierceness, her strength was also her most dangerous vice as everyone presumed she was ok.


I spoke to an ex-paparazzi friend of mine about the film this weekend. He said ‘we stopped sending people to Amy, or selling Amy pix, the scrum was so big they weren’t exclusives and only worth £50’ – he was genuinely saddened by the whole thing.


It’s tough being a strong woman. It’s tough being a woman. It’s tough being in a world where all anything counts for is money. I would love to hear what Amy was going to write next, we all would. But I think as a log of her tenacity and talent, Amy goes a long way to sharing what she had achieved in too few years. And I’m pretty sure she would fucking hate it. Which makes me smile. RIP lil’ lady.



The title of this blog is a reference to a Frank album track, Amy, Amy, Amy.

Being a bad feminist

Being a bad feminist.

Writing those four words made me smile. I was scared of feminism when I was turning 20 – and had no excuse as I was on a uni course where we talked about everything and studied cultural movements and literary theory over beers and curly fries.

I think I probably did say ‘I don’t need feminism’ – not realizing that I was the most bolshie ‘women can do shit too’ defender I’d ever met. But it’s tough being someone who doesn’t take no for an answer, who when she fails just dusts herself down and goes ‘ach well, something cooler will come out of this’, someone who’s not afraid to accept failure but as equally uninterested in being told how to do anything. It just happens I am a guuuurl and I fudging love it. It has meant I’m obstinate about feminism and presume everyone has that experience.

I once said to my wisest feminist friends Lauren and Hana ‘I’m not scared of sexual harassment as I’ll just run/kick and I don’t want to live in fear’ and they explained to me it’s not as simple as that. Ok ok. Of course it’s not. Finally I feel like I’m part of a dialogue where my white, self-starting, we’re gonna just do this attitude is brilliant but doesn’t define my feminism. I recognise I am extremely lucky, my job involves liking people and theatre and talking about things and these are my three boldest natural attributes. I’m lucky I worked out what I want to be at this stage in my life. I’m also lucky no men want to be theatre publicists – am I right ladies?

I have gained a terrifying propensity to see what I want and run at it – from work through to play – but again I realize this isn’t how every woman’s experience is or can be without some kind of seismic change.

On my flight to Australia for work as/for a company I’d set up (madness) I sat next to a Jordanian 29 year old. Born in the same year as me, on the other side of the world there sit two wee newborn girls. She was now a UN escort for refugees with legal and diplomacy degrees in bundles, fluent in four languages, travelling the world for work on a weekly basis, responsible for the future of people’s LIVES and yet she’s not allowed to have a boyfriend. She watches her friends get married so they can do it and have a partner and then watches that partner sleep around and take his wife for granted while she’s trapped – as ‘women don’t end marriages’. This is madness.

Here’s me, strident British feminist having just ended a relationship with a perfectly wonderful man as we knew we didn’t want the same things, feeling my heartbreak keenly but knowing we’d given it the best chance and that we were making a mutually aware CHOICE. AND THEN – I hear first hand my co-passenger isn’t even allowed to have that chance to try it out.

When I arrived in Adelaide I met the Hot Brown Honeys who I have the extraordinary privilege of working with. They stick a hot poker of ‘fuck yous’ into the feminist debate. All women of colour, they take stereotypes and expectations and toy with them until all lies shredded on the floor of a wooden tent. I love them. I love the anger and the messiness and the skill and the laughs and the tears and, I just love it all. And there is this moment, this chill that runs through one in that tent, a chill that makes the grin spread itself back across my face. A moment that says, now is over, change is coming, and it’s everyone’s job in everyone’s world to be a equalitist and fight for it.  

International Woman’s Day 2015

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.” Audre Lorde

International Woman’s Day 2016.

“2016? Wow. Are we still doing this?” Erm. Me.

We need to keep meddling and fighting and arguing and being bad feminists. Word.

Those are my chimney tops.

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We got the email on November 28^th. It quite simply stated the owner would be taking over the property in 2015 and we needed to be out by 22 January 2015. I remember exactly where I was standing down to what I was wearing, black dress, black mottled leopard print tights and my smart camel and black felt jacket which has lapels like Cheryl Cole circa 2013.

All those years. If I could slot in a reference to London 2012 I would cover all the big events that had happened from the base that was my home most securely and definitely of anywhere I’d ever lived since 1997.

I moved into my Deanhaugh Street flat with Laura in March 2012. The week of my birthday. We had looked at the ad for the flat online in the pub below, in the window seat, not realising the bay windows of that pub, Hectors, swung round to meet what would be our front door for two years and mine for another after that.

I didn’t know then it was going to be the first place where I really felt like I belonged, to become my office when I quit my sensible day job and set up a company; a party flat, fitting sixteen people into a kitchen that on a grumpy Tuesday night didn’t seem to have room for two; the place I got into cycling; the place that meant I afford to buy a nice duvet; the place I got round to putting my own framed pictures up on the wall. Laura’s huge tapestry from India pinned up in the huge hall immediately lent warmth and colour. The place I could have a cupboard of all my cosmetics in the bathroom and twelve different moisturizers I never used. It didn’t matter what the flat was filled with as it was mine.

I loved the flat mostly as it was so strange. Long and thin, freezing cold, top top floor and a level above all the other high-street tenements so it felt like one was in the set for chim-chiminy from Mary Poppins. I owned those chimney tops. No one else had that view. From the back rooms, a glimpse at a far off Edinburgh Castle and skittles and layers of houses and flats rising up and up into the city centre, also the side of the flat that caught the sunrise. The front end of the flat, sitting room and the big bedroom looking out onto the busy high street caught the sunset. This meaning twice a day one end of the flat was bathed in the warm, pink light of magic hour and the other end was bathed in the pinky reflection of the sun waxing or waning.

The front end of the flat lent the best people watching of anywhere I’ve ever been let alone lived. If you like watching people – live on a high street or on a street that reaches long into the distance – this flat had both. I remember when friends came to stay when at 2am one night a couple of the staff from the pub below left work and he – out on the street – declared his love for her. We craned our necks out of the window in silence to listen. I got in a lot of trouble for making a noise that may have alerted them to our eavesdropping. I have watched people dancing home with headphones in at 9pm on a Friday after after-work drinks, I have watched men locked out of their flats by flatmates, partners, parents wandering listlessly drunk round in circles before turning round and going back to try their luck at the intercom.

That flat watched the Yes campaign gaining speed. I sat in my front room with the windows open on the evening of the referendum soaking up the carnival of tooting horns and exuberant chatter. Yes’s and No’s sprinkling the windows of the flats and flats and flats stretching down the road.

The night we finally emptied the flat out and moved a Subaru of residual crap round to my friends spare room where we are to pitch for the foreseeable – we watched Chris Nolan’s Intersteller. A film about dimensions, relativity and time and space and home – the story centres on a bookshelf in a home that no one can bare to let go of.

In all of the time and space and possibilities, time moves at a speed relative to activity. Those three years in that flat feel like decades. The eight weeks notice dragged and tripped me up, rendering me incapable of picturing a reality beyond not being in my home. It’s not mad to cry and scream and holler at someone taking your security away. It’s fairly mad not to. I feel a pang when I take a tent down that I’ve stayed in for a weekend. I’ll find a new home, that no-one else wants as it’s weird and long or tall or cold or hot or high or bright or similar to the set of a childhood film if I were able to wander out the windows without falling three floors – but for now I reserve the right to wonder how my sitting room is without me chatting on the phone gazing out the window. If my neighbours are wondering why my bike has gone from the hall. Why my evenings aren’t bathed in a pink light – and who’s going to clamber over the rooftops in their mind, tripping over chimney pots and slipping on tiles, gazing into skylights, sneaking at other people’s top floor lives and disturbing birds’ nests.

Maybe I’ll reserve that right just for me.  In my own dimension.