This whole thing smacks of gender

Right, first of all

Hello! This is exciting! And terrifying! I’m excited and terrified! I’d been toying with the idea of writing a weekly newsletter for a really long time but for a number of reasons I’d never got around to it. I guess I thought I needed a reason to launch one, and so maybe losing my New Statesman column was a bit of a blessing in disguise. I’d got used to having to find an interesting thing to write about every week and had come to really enjoy it, so I would like to keep doing it.

I both can’t and don’t really want to make any promises on the format front, as I think I want this newsletter to be a bit like a blog. This one features a column, a random thought, some recs and a Tumblr post and maybe the others will too, or maybe they’ll feature other things, who knows. The one thing I can guarantee is that every issue will feature a column-type piece, but apart from that - who knows. Let’s see how it goes! I want to have some fun with this, and “very rigid format that never changes” doesn’t really scream “fun” to me.

On a brief serious note, I would really like it if you could take out a paid subscription. You don’t have to, of course, and the first few issues will be free anyway, but much as I love writing, I wouldn’t be doing this much of it if I didn’t have rent to pay. I enjoy freelance journalism but it can be maddeningly unpredictable, and knowing that a set amount of money is coming in every month would be extremely nice.

As you’ll soon be able to tell, I did put a fair amount of work into this newsletter, and aim to do the same every week, so it really would be swell if you could chuck a couple of quid in my general direction on a monthly basis.

Anyway - I think that’s it. I’ve definitely forgotten to mention some stuff but such is life. Without further ado -

A column!

I’ve just never felt especially strongly about being a woman, you know. I talked about it with a non-binary friend once and they suggested, like a gentle sales assistant, that I might consider whether transgenderism could be right for me. I thought about it for a while but, really, I just don’t have any passionate feelings about any of it. I’ve got a skeleton with a brain at the top; what goes on aside from that doesn’t matter to me.

I remember gender being willed into existence at some point at school, with boys suddenly going to play with boys and girls going to talk with girls, and I didn’t understand what the point of it was. I could try to pretend that I was being clever and mature and above it all but it wasn’t even that. It was just beyond me.

In some ways, it still is. I look at “girl maths” and “girl dinner” and “lazy girl jobs” and I feel like a capuchin monkey staring at a nuclear reactor. It doesn’t mean I don’t like any “girl” things: I stopped writing this for a little while because the café I work from played Lana Del Rey’s Music To Watch Boys To so obviously I had to drop everything and quietly sing along while staring out the window. Music to Watch Boys To is, in many ways, the epitome of the girl song.

What I struggle with is the jump people make from enjoying something to concluding that their gender must have something to do with it. It seems needlessly reductive, and a bit facile; there are billions of men and women out there. Turning your gender into an entire identity means reaching for the lowest common denominator there is.

It is also disheartening that it seems to mostly come from women. Feminism has spent the past few decades and centuries making the case that women are unique and complex and not to be understood as a uniform, altogether lesser class. Many of our foremothers sought to rise above their gender, gaining humanity in the process; how can this rush to see everything through a gendered lens not feel like a step backwards?

Were I to be kind and optimistic, I’d conclude that the trend, while irritating, reveals a positive truth about the world. I bristle at those memes because I grew up in a world where women still had to constantly prove themselves as equals. Younger women make them because, one would hope, they were never made to feel inferior, and so feel that they can poke fun at womanhood because it no longer is the insurgent gender.

They didn’t have to grow up in the noughties, when the two options if you wanted to be popular were to starve yourself or make rape jokes. Those who did both fared particularly well. I picked the latter at the time, both because I really loved eating and because being an edgelord came easily to me. I’d always loved tasteless humour anyway, and my breasts took a long time to grow so I’d had to rely on coarse wit to get attention.

It is now fashionable to talk about the terrible time you had in those years, how stifling they felt and how small you had to make yourself, but I don’t really remember them as such. If I’m honest, I had a pretty good time. Of course, I supported women, LGBT and BME people; that doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy turning all of them into jokes. It’s just what you did back then - you’d go on marches and protests in the afternoon then make strikingly homophobic and sexist jokes in the bar at night. Your beliefs and your gags didn’t have to match. 

I had a good time but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel uncomfortable looking back. I assumed that my actions showed that my words were hollow, but I’m not so sure anymore. I knew I didn’t think that rape actually was funny, but how about the boys I made those jokes to? How many of them went on to assault and abuse women, emboldened by the edgy quips of needy collaborators like me?

In hindsight, I was nothing but a big fat hypocrite. I didn’t really care about being a woman but that didn’t mean I wasn’t desperate for male attention. I knew I couldn’t compete on looks or, say, ability to remember to brush my hair every morning, but I had other weapons in my arsenal. I was playing a different game from the other girls, but we all fought for the same trophy, and competition rarely breeds solidarity.

Is this what I’m doing now, making fun of daintily arranged bowls of fruit and shiny-lipped girls pretending they can’t do sums? To be entirely honest: I have no idea. Maybe it’s part of it. Maybe I never moved on from being a largely sexually invisible 16-year-old, trying to find an angle wherever I can. I don’t think I can rule it out entirely; formative years are called that for a reason. 

The difference between then and now, though, is that I now know that a lot of men hate women, and that a lot of the ones who don’t aren’t especially bothered either way. There was a weightlessness to my teenage jokes because I assumed that we were all singing from the same hymn sheet. Growing up told me that we weren’t. I look at the girls saying that they want inconsequential jobs and boyfriends with millions of dollars and I think of the boys taking it in, and using it as confirmation that women really are vain and brainless. It doesn’t matter that the girls do not mean it; everything they say can and will be held against them.

I watch them construct little boxes for themselves, jokingly, and I worry that they will end up getting stuck inside them, unable to get out again. I’m not judging them, not entirely; the internet has offered us a million ways in which to relate to one another, and this bone-deep desire to feel less alone is something we all share. Hell, I laughed at the post that said that girls’ Roman Empire is the Romanovs. I’m a huge slut for Peter the Great, what can I say. It made me feel seen, and that made me feel good.

I just think that we can do better than defining ourselves by our gender, especially in a world where one of them is still struggling to escape from its centuries-old bad rep. If you think this is an infuriating state of affairs, you have all my sympathy. I really wish I didn’t have to spend my time telling women not to live their lives however they want, just because men might be watching and listening. It’s a tale as old as time. That it is still our shared reality is enough to make you want to throw yourself at a wall. It is, if nothing else, the one thing we have in common.

I don’t feel especially strongly about the flesh wrapped around my bones but I just can’t ignore the fact that I’m a woman in a world where that’s not always a great thing to be. That’s our only common denominator, all four billion of us. Until that stops being the case, there's not much point trying to rally around anything else. It’s a tough one to turn into a meme, I’ll grant you that, but what’s a girl to do?

A random thought

Sometimes I try to explain to people the extent to which the internet is an integral part of my brain, and often I feel like I can’t do it. It’s really hard to put into a words; a bit like trying to tell someone exactly why you’re in love with the person you’re in love with.

Anyway, I was extremely stressed the other night thinking about launching a newsletter and how exposed it made me feel and how high the stakes felt even though they’re not that high, really, but I just can’t help being stressed. It’s what I do.

When I feel especially overwhelmed I usually picture this guy:

because he looks exactly the way I feel: eyes blank, yelling, small, powerless.

The only problem with him - yes, for some reason I’ve given him a gender, guess we’re going for a themed edition this week - is that I first discovered him in the context of this tweet:

which means that whenever I get anxious I end up singing Summer Nights to myself. So if you ever see me gently humming “tell me more, tell me more, did you get very far?” then please know that it means that I’m vibrating with stress and probably on the verge of a panic attack.

That’s it. That’s how online I am.

Some recommendations

# recently finished reading The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin and it’s really tremendous - four kids in New York in the sixties go see this woman who tells each of them the exact date of their death, and various levels of chaos ensue across the rest of their lives

# also read a very good piece but regrettably it was written by someone who was once rude to me at an event so I’m not going to link to it, sorry, better luck next week!

Finally,