Category Archives: feminism

The Mother Wound

Posted on by under chronic pain, feminism, history, life, memoir, Uncategorized

In my parents’ bedroom in my childhood home was a brown, metal filing cabinet. It screeched terribly when its stiff drawers were pulled open and heaved with the many documents Mum thought it necessary to keep (she had a very high threshold for throwing anything out, if the overstuffed nature of this filing cabinet was any guide). In this filing cabinet was the paper trail of our family: bills, receipts, passports, certificates. Sometimes, when I was of an age old enough to be left home alone for short periods, I would ransack this filing cabinet, scouring for evidence that I was adopted. I imagine most children at least entertain the notion. The evidence for, in my case, was my dark hair and green eyes in a family of blue‑eyed blondes, parents old enough to be my grandparents, and a sense of alienation from the people whose pictures huddled on shelves and hung from walls and who I was told were my family.

This alienation was simply a sad product of time; I joined the party too late. My maternal grandparents died before I was born. My paternal grandparents passed when I was young. My mother had only one brother and my father was an only child, and the few cousins and second cousins I could cobble together into an extended family were far removed from me in age and geography. I would stare at the pictures of people whose names I knew but whose stories I didn’t searching for any likeness that would form a tether between us. I didn’t find any. But neither did I find any adoption papers.

*

I am often asked about my family history. There are two reasons for this. The first is my unusual surname, which, when enquired about, unlocks the dramatic story of a family who escaped persecution by fleeing across empires and continents for antipodean safety. The second is because I talk to doctors a lot.

At 22, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, a form of degenerative, inflammatory arthritis. Family history is one of the diagnostic indicators of this disease, and suddenly, what I had in common with my ancestors became very clear: autoimmune arthritis. What’s my family history? A matrilineal line of pain. A great-grandmother, grandmother and cousin, all with Rheumatoid Arthritis. A connective tissue disease, forming the connective tissue between me and women who are names, and faded photos, and, in many ways, define my life today.

I didn’t want this to be my family inheritance. With each doctor, with each temptation of a new treatment that might help, I would be asked, “and what is your family history?”. And my answers would be intersected with uncertainties and hesitation because I didn’t know the people whose experiences were now so relevant to my own, and I didn’t think to ask, because I didn’t want to engage with my pain – with my difference – any longer than I had to. I just wanted to get on with life.

My cousin, the one surviving relative with lived experience of my reality, reached out with kindness, sympathy and suggestions. But, in these early days, when I was wrestling against rather than living with my disease, I couldn’t accept this connection, the way I might have if it was the outline of a familiar jawline I could trace in a photograph. And, perhaps, I couldn’t yet confront that her present – multiple surgeries, organ transplants, replaced joints, a body wracked by decades of heavy medications – might be my future.

*

There is an idea in psychology that suggests that women inherit the pain of their mothers; a burden passed through the generations, born of surviving in a society created by and for men, of being denied matrilineal knowledge and support. It describes the struggle that exists between mothers and daughters as the former tries to keep the latter safe, as the latter tries to find expression in a world that wants to keep her small. It is called the Mother Wound.

I bear this Mother Wound. But I also bear another wound passed from mothers to daughters in my family for at least three generations. My Mother Wound is what connects me to my family, and anchors me to the women I don’t know, for their stories of pain, of resistance and resignation, are also mine. And, as my resistance has shifted into acceptance, I have begun to search for the women who I know understand what I’m going through.

*

My great grandmother’s name is Martha. When my mother talks of her life there is nothing tangible for me to grasp. I smell dust and see sepia. It’s too remote, a life that began in 1870 and ended the year King George VI died. But – when my mother talks of a woman whose life gradually closed in on itself – I see her. I understand.

Martha didn’t leave the house in five years. Towards the end of her life, Martha’s Rheumatoid Arthritis prevented her using stairs, so she retreated to a life lived on the top floor of the family home. There was no life for elderly, infirm widows. She just withdrew. Her life was just isolation. Martha didn’t leave the house in five years.

There are days and weeks where my pain keeps me on a leash that allows me to shuffle only from my bed to the bathroom. I become anxious and desperately lonely, and home becomes both respite and prison. My social media usage spikes during these periods as I send cyber flares seeking company, seeking that I not be forgotten. Outside seems a very long way away, on these days. Martha didn’t even have a telephone.

My grandmother’s name is Ormey, but in the family storytelling she’s always been called Mada. She fought against her condition, Mum says. It overwhelmed her. She was subjected to every new treatment: injections of cortisone, injections of gold, being encased in hot wax, powerful drugs with terrible side effects. She refused a wheelchair, saying she’d drive it down the stairs with her in it, so my grandfather would instead throw her over his shoulder and carry her, if he had to.

Mada loved reading, Mum says. It was her only joy, really. Mada would sit on the front veranda in a cane lounge with her romance novels and the dog that loved no one but her. But then the drugs made her eyes dry and clouded but she didn’t want to make a fuss and by the time she did make a fuss her cornea had ulcerated and she lost vision in one eye.

Mada absolutely loved shoes, but the arthritis warped and twisted her feet until she was unable to fit into normal shoes and it broke her heart to buy ugly, open-toed shoes. She worried that people would stare at her feet so she didn’t like going out.

Her last years were a blur of surgeries, pain, isolation and doctors who wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t empathise, who would just write scripts and send her out the door. Except Dr Morgan. Dr Morgan had a thick Scottish burr and a way of making Mada laugh. At the end, when she weighed only 25 kg and was on so much morphine that she saw brass bands marching up her hospital walls, Dr Morgan let her choose how her last days would be spent. She chose lucidity – and with it, pain – so she could talk with her family until the end.

The woman in the photo with the sad eyes and thin smile is alive to me, now. I too have tried everything because, without cure, management is the only option. But I too have gulped the pills only to compound my problems with complications and side effects. I too have writhed against the realities of my condition, clinging to a memories of a life without boundaries until my body collapses; wearing pretty shoes that make me taller and match my outfit because that act of resistance, that shred of my old identity, is worth more than the pain I will endure in payment.

My cousin’s name is Helen. She is radiant and smart and cheeky and irresponsibly adventurous. And she doesn’t want to talk about the past, she just wants to live. It is her story, and I wonder if one day we might find a way to exchange our fragile truths to one another. But I do know that to think for too long about the darkness – the life that was or could have been – risks being swallowed by it. So, in not talking about the past, my cousin shows me how to live. I have realised that if her future is indeed my future, it promises joy and survival and success by every measure.

My mother feels guilty because it is through her that I have inherited the family arthritis. She doesn’t articulate this, but I can feel it. What she does say, often, is that she wishes she could bear the pain for me, or take the fatigue away. I don’t have much capacity to indulge alternate futures, and I don’t see that blame or regret would bring me any relief. But my heart hurts for her: she nursed her own mother in those final, tortured years and now she fears for me. I know she feels helpless. Strangely, this has softened me towards her. I indulge the soup that appears unannounced in my fridge, the daily texts, the frenetic attempts to find better treatments because I know she is doing all of this because she can’t bear the Mother Wound for me. Her burden is watching those she loves most suffer, and that, to me, would be the most unbearable pain.

*

A family’s history is not just names and dates, connected by thin, black lines. It is the colour and shadow that these charts can’t capture. It’s that my grandfather would hoist my grandmother over his shoulder and carry her, her petticoats flying and legs kicking. It’s that my great grandmother lived in a world with no space and no time for an elderly widow who dragged her leg as she walked. It’s that I couldn’t see where I fit into the familial gallery until I knew Mada loved shoes, and dogs, and reading, and had an inflammatory autoimmune arthritic disease. And it’s that my family history includes a Mother Wound that connects strong, resilient women. These are the visceral stories that link me to a family I never knew. And they can’t be found in a heavy, brown filing cabinet.

 

This essay was Highly Commended in the E. M. Fletcher Writing Award (for writing on a theme of family history) and was originally published in The Ancestral Searcher, Vol. 42 No. 4, 4 December 2019. 

In My Home I Don’t Belong

Posted on by under feminism, life, memoir, politics, travel, Uncategorized

I’ve been gone nearly as long as I lived there. Like the cliché, I left as soon as I could, at 17, heading south for university. I only applied for degrees that would put at least a day’s drive between me and the place I grew up. Fifteen years on, it’s only curiosity or the odd wedding that can lure me. It’s been two years between drinks, this time.

I was feeling dislocated from life. I wanted to run. God knows it would have been cheaper to fly to Singapore or Indonesia or New Zealand but I wanted to go somewhere that felt small and familiar.

On Wednesday, I rang the only friend who still lives there that I am in regular contact with.

“Can I come and stay?”

I was on a plane Friday morning, travelling back. Back north. Back there.

***

It wasn’t a bad place to grow up. It was just … small. Isolated. Brisbane is an eight hour drive south. Townsville is ten hours north. Nothing bigger or more exciting interrupts the drive, except the odd place to stop for a pie with mushy peas.

In the small plane, in the cloudless, electric blue Queensland sky, I fly along the coastline. Civilisation thins at the Sunshine Coast and then it’s just cobalt sea and brown land. Even though it’s only 9am, I’m getting sunburned through the aeroplane window. I press my nose to the glass as we approach. Central Queensland was in drought for all of my remembered childhood. To see it cast in tones of green makes this view completely unrecognisable. Long brown rivers that were dry twenty years ago now snake through expanses of green. This isn’t the patchwork of neat paddocks of different crops and livestock of the south. This is grazing land, all of it. It is so utterly flat but for an enormous mountain range that rears suddenly from the landscape, with a town of straight, wide streets built at its feet. This is Rockhampton.

***

Rockhampton is like the Truman Show, insulated from the outside world not just by incredible distance but by its own shell. This shell is a shimmering mirage of heat that traps the population. Upon landing, I immediately become a source of water, sweat springing and trickling from every pore. I stay coated in this glistening dampness for my entire visit. The airport suggests I might like to spend my time here visiting a crocodile farm or the bullring.

All my teenage insecurities come flooding back when I come here. In this way, I travel back in time. I wasn’t good at sport, I tried really hard at school, and did band and choir and musicals and debating. I was terribly uncool. Unaccepted. At least I didn’t panic and get a fake tan before this visit. Ahead of my last visit I did, and my sweat carved white rivulets through my orange topcoat.

***

Rockhampton is a regional centre for industries that thrive on remoteness: cattle and mining mainly. There’s huge support for the Adani coal mine here: locals are desperate to find a way back to the excesses of the resource boom, desperate to stop the good times disappearing, clinging to the sweet nothings promised by what would be one of the world’s largest coal mines. If you try to bring up the environmental impact on the nearby Great Barrier Reef, or that the Chinese economy is no longer a rapacious consumer of our raw materials, or even that investment in renewables is a more sustainable project, you’ll be told you don’t understand what it’s like in the real world.

Anti-abortion and One Nation billboards line the roads. The locally-produced, Murdoch-owned newspaper skews popularist and the only other paper available around here is the Murdoch state publication, which adopts a fiercely anti-intellectual tone. Nothing progressive permeates the Truman heat dome, resulting in a parochial and suspicious mindset. You can’t go into a newsagent and buy any paper that would use the words ‘feminism’, ‘indigenous affairs’, or ‘climate change’ without massive doses of scepticism, derision and condescension. They think Rockhampton is the real world. Whenever I visit, I am stunned by how completely different it is. My views find few allies here.

***

The friend I’m staying with has a heart of gold and a nonchalance about everything, which I find incredibly comforting. He’s one of those characters that could exist in any small town drama who, without fuss, can quietly see the truth about any situation. He’s been a meatworker since we left school and has been saying that he’ll move to Brisbane next year for just as long.

Everybody likes him, which means while I’m with him I can be assured of running into an excellent representative sample of the local population, resulting in conversations that have my friend shooting me tense glances and me clenching my teeth and taking deep breaths.

Here is a list of things that I try to carefully, but unsuccessfully, persuade my conversational partners of:

  • That gender and sex are different and why genitals are not relevant to gender (the Courier Mail’s front page that day was having a “political correctness gone mad” implosion over Queensland removing gender from licenses).
  • That Australia Day is a fraught and traumatic concept (mainly, the divide was over whether or not to boycott Triple J’s Hottest 100 due to their capitulation to lefty pressure).
  • That Indigenous Australian culture is far from primitive.
  • That the commodification and exploitation of women’s bodies in Southeast Asia is a really serious issue, therefore calling out “how much?” to your Asian neighbour is not funny.
  • That referring to anyone that isn’t white as “they” reveals subconscious – if not overt – racism and discrimination.
  • That a circulating Snapchat video of a disabled person is exploitative and dehumanising.

What the hell is this place? How can a group of white men sitting around a table defend their constant incidental use of sexist and racist language?

I ask how people voted in the postal survey on same sex marriage. And everyone, bar one guy who had never enrolled to vote so didn’t receive forms, shrugs and says it doesn’t bother them. They wanted people to have the same rights (this electorate had voted for changes to the Marriage Act by a small margin). I proffer that it was great they could recognise legal barriers to equality, but what about social barriers evidenced by the fact that most gay people I knew from Rocky had only come out after moving far, far away.

“But paying people out is a sign of acceptance,” is the reply.

***

I plan short trips to Rockhampton, partly because I cannot endure the heat for more than a few days but mostly because I always feel great sadness here, amongst those who stayed. The future seems to stretch out as flatly as the landscape. Staying in a town like this you’ll always see the same faces in the same bars. The passing of years are marked by the same sporting events amongst the same teams, by weekends spent piggin’, huntin’ and fishin’. Everyone says how boring it is. But to leave? That would be rejecting comfort and certainty. Many have left, of course. And I can’t work out a common privilege or characteristic amongst this diaspora. Perhaps a desire to be a part of a bigger world? A comfort with being a small fish in a less predictable pond?

I don’t fit in here. The insecurity of my teenage years was born from trying to contort myself into a mundane ideal, reacting to omnipresent social pressure. Now when I come back, having lived away from that pressure to be less intellectual, less argumentative, less independent, my time in my home town is teeth-grindingly, eye-rollingly, tongue-bitingly dislocating. It’s like playing a video game as a different player: the physical space is so familiar but my new certainty of self makes me being here in this place feel radically different.

I don’t know where the real world is: if it sits beneath that hood of heat that surrounds Rockhampton, or in the messier cities I feel more at home in. But when politicians utter their inane soundbites, or distance themselves from progressive politics, I know who they’re thinking of. I hope places like this are the last bastions of patriarchal certainty and white confidence: surely truth and cosmopolitanism and human rights can permeate even the most remote locations? But much of Australia’s politics seem to be made for this audience. Maybe to know the future is to know Rockhampton’s version of reality.

***

On Saturday night we go to Rockhampton’s second-nicest bar. One of the guys exposes his penis to me. Everyone laughs. “Hashtag me too,” I mumble, darkly. No one gets it. It’s time for me to go home.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

An Interview with my Mother

Posted on by under feminism, memoir, Uncategorized

On Christmas Day, my mother and I had a brief spat. The point of friction was that I was enjoying a re-run of Mean Girls and, as the time approached 7.20pm, I hadn’t turned over to the ABC yet.

“Can’t I just get it up on YouTube for you later, Mum?”

“But it’s the QUEEN! We’re missing THE QUEEN’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE!”

This illustrates the clash of cultures between a mother and daughter separated by 45 years of age. My Mum seriously still cares about the Queen.

***

I was an accident. At 45, my Mum had two sons (aged 20 and 23) who were somewhat on the cusp of leaving home. Then, the surprise of her lifetime happened. At her age, she was discouraged from continuing the pregnancy: the risk of my being disabled was 1 in 5 and Mum found herself negotiating for my life based on hypothetical scenarios. But with the fierce determination she is often underestimated as having, she signed up for the commitment of bringing up another human.

Her own mother had passed away a few years earlier, and had apparently mused that she always thought my mother would have a little girl. A demure, sweet and shy little girl.

I asked my Mum yesterday how she would describe me. Impetuous. Headstrong. Driven. Bossy.

It’s ironic that my name’s Hebrew meaning is the pleasant one.

***

I feel like we both love each other very much but there’s some invisible elephant between us, preventing the truth and honesty that comes from vulnerability. I feel that this might revolve around the question of “what it is to be a good girl”. Can I explore this with you?

– Email to Mum, January 2018

I decided to sit down with Mum and talk about the gap between us – not only of generations but of social norms.

We talked for hours. Primly, with pen and paper readied and having messaged me at least five times in advance of our ‘casual chat’ asking how she could prepare, Mum sat with excellent posture warily bracing for the inquisition. We talked about growing up in a big country town in the fifties, marrying in the early sixties and raising children for the next forty years.

***

Did Mada (my family’s name for my maternal grandmother) enjoy being a housewife?

Oh no, she hated it. Absolutely hated it.

How did you decide upon your career?

I was told to do Commercial (a course of useful secretarial skills, like shorthand, typing and accounting) and I cried myself to sleep.

But there was no resistance?

No, we just accepted it. 

***

Her posh girls’ school seems to have emphasised ladylike behaviour as much as it did education. Demureness and deference is how Mum describes it. She still tuts disapprovingly at female presenters sitting crossed-legged – a 1950s reflex she can’t shake. She still pathologically puts herself second to her husband and her children.

I can think of at least a dozen opportunities I have missed in life because I didn’t want to offend . A job at the school, teaching music… I guess I didn’t want to make a fuss.

Mum mentioned being terribly aware of the toll the Depression and World War II had taken on her family – a father fighting in PNG, a mother raising children alone terrified of invasion, of having to share an egg, a luxury, with her brother – I wonder if the vividness and immediacy of that parental sacrifice made it harder to challenge the set course of social expectation.

So many stories Mum told were laden with heaviness of duty, of lost opportunity, of barely concealed sadness. Of female teachers, ‘spinsters’, who had never married when so many men didn’t return after the Great War. Of insecurity from illness – deadly influenzas, the commonness of death in childhood. Of accepting, and getting on with it.

***

How did second wave feminism and the sexual revolution affect your life?

I wasn’t terribly aware of it. If it wasn’t in the Women’s Weekly I didn’t hear about it.

Have you read Simone de Beauvoir’s the Second Sex?

No. I don’t think that came to Rockhampton.

***

When we turned to talking about me, Mum’s internal conflict became clearer. She yearned to give me the education, freedom and confidence that she was denied, yet the impact of these things scared her. She was a product of her time, and had found safety and comfort in the roles she was given.

What worries Mum most is my anger.

In her life, if someone caused her offence, if someone did something to her that she didn’t like, she felt she had little recourse but to sit and fume. In an era where women teachers were only offered temporary contracts after marriage, in an era before No Fault Divorce, many women held very precarious positions. She wouldn’t want to be unladylike (that would lower her social worth), she wouldn’t want to make things difficult for my father. So whenever I challenge ideas, engage with controversy, speak up about disenfranchisement and inequality, demand respect for myself and my body, Mum worries. She worries I’ll be punched. She worries what people will think. She worries that I’ll make things difficult for my husband. These worries tell me everything about life in country Queensland in the 1960s.

***

After our talk, I pulled out my copy of The Second Sex. I underlined phrases that mirrored my Mum’s matter of fact description of the expectations of womanhood during her life. That marriage was to be a woman’s fundamental project. That, unlike men, women were unable to choose personal liberty (or, not without significant personal cost). That society chose for her (and she felt she had no recourse but to accept) her place as a deferential woman.

For as long as I can remember, my Mother has been the person who has given me most love, who I perhaps care about the most, and yet from whom I feel a profound separation; as though we were two animals of different species staring blankly at each other, marvelling at each other’s oddities. I have come to realise that it is not merely our 45 year age gap that causes this curious distance, but the inevitable generational conflict between competing ideas of womanhood. What Mum made it her life’s mission to be, is precisely what I rail against.

***

Mum, I feel as though your lifetime has been weighed by the mantle of a very different expectation of womanhood, and that I challenge that. And you worry for me, and try to reign me in.

I guess I should also say: As you caution me, you trigger the societal judgement that I try so hard to writhe free from, and make me doubt myself. I know I try to drag you forward, and that terrifies you. For who are you without being Dad’s second? Who could you have been had you not been forced to do Commercial when you were a musician in your heart? My impatience is born from seeing your potential, and the potential of all women, when that cloak can be shed. But equally, what you have achieved has been incredible and inspirational. You – like many women of your era – carry the emotional burden for entire families, for a generation of men who can’t express themselves. You have nursed and carried and cared. You are resilient and inexhaustible.

***

How are we similar?

Well, we’ve always had the music in common.

Mum started teaching me to play the piano as soon as I could hold myself upright. She has the discipline and patience to still practice carefully every day, to have spent 18 years collecting the music I had flung across the room in a frustrated tantrum.

At Christmas I gave my mother a book about the forgotten women of music. She would appear intermittently to give impassioned summaries of the chapter she had just read, still stewing over the injustices and losses to music of erasing women performers and composers.

I smile. I love that she shares this with me. That when we catch up she’ll always have a story that starts with “did you see/read about … [something to do with feminism]”.

She’s reaching across the chasm to me, and in sitting down to interview my Mother, I am reaching out too.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

Witches, old wives’ tales and our history of not listening to women

Posted on by under culture, feminism, history, Uncategorized

She haunts our fairytales, our tales of warning and our paperback mysteries. She lives at the edge of society, on the margins of civilisation and the foreboding forest, at the meeting point of the wild and untamed. She knows the difference between the mushrooms that are delicious and the mushrooms that are deadly. She is turned to in secrecy and at great risk by desperate women seeking to harness their bodily power, aiding or hindering fertility. Her knowledge renders her an outcast and there hangs about her a sense of danger – for why else is she always single (a spinster!), childless (barren!), uninterested in male attraction (hideously ugly!). A knowledgeable woman – woman who knows things – is a frightening thing indeed.

***

Garlic for colds. Peppermint for indigestion. Ginger for nausea. Unless I turned to the medically qualified internet, I could not be sure whether these actually work or if they’re an old wives’ tale, and yet I still add these natural remedies to my pharmaceutical panoply. Part of my scepticism comes from herbal preparations being the domain of the charlatan. Once, feeling very vulnerable, I had a very expensive trip to a naturopath where I emerged laden with all sorts of evil-smelling potions to assist weight loss. It was expensive and it worked, but I still felt as though I’d been sold a version of the emperor’s new clothes. Mostly, I think my agnosticism about anything herbal comes from the idea that it’s somehow not scientific. Not tested. Not respected. Don’t medicines come in packets and cost money? And when I scrape back some of these assumptions, what remains are duelling images of a woman in a sagging house between the village and the forest offering ginger tea, and the clinical environment of the lab coat and the degrees and the stringent research and the globally‑monestised system of pharmaceuticals. And I realise that I don’t think the woman of my imagination has real health knowledge.

This utterly hypothetical deductive analysis caused me to wonder how much knowledge we have lost – or at least, undervalued – through ignoring women’s wisdom, through assuming the advice is inherently unsound and untested, through confining old wives’ tales to whispers between generations in the corners of domestic worlds rather than something accorded a spotlight, funding, publication and circulation. What have we lost by not giving the realm of women’s learned knowledge a real chance? To be scrutinised and debated and improved? For women healers to have space and primacy to learn and teach and be believed? The 21st century specialist medical field of surgery, after all, evolved from butchery. We scoff at what has been believed, tried and tested; recommended as “medicine”; developed and matured as a field (medicinal cocaine and cigarettes, anyone?), but understanding these ridiculous beliefs is important in the historical development of medical knowledge. Yet it seems we’ve never allowed the feminine domains of knowledge to advance beyond the derisively-termed ‘alternative’ field. After all, wouldn’t the decades of qualitative case studies obtained by the women of the herbs, the centuries of stories of women as primary caretakers of the ill and injured, be an interesting starting point for more institutionalised research?

In European history, women traditionally served as the healers – their expanded social role compared with contemporary gender norms always causing some concern. But as the feudal era dissolved, the large-scale institutionalisation, protection and control of knowledge began. Churches and the nascent university system worked to own and define sources of knowledge. And, as these were the institutions of men, women healers were cast out of this structure, and derided as heretical, as witches. Centuries later, I’m still falling for this propaganda campaign.

I pause here to make myself utterly clear. Medicine is awesome. It’s keeping me alive! I use a lot of medicine! In the context of this piece I’m terribly uninterested – really – in the efficacy of these herbs. The point I’m trying to make, the story I’m trying to uncover, is how historically we have undervalued and largely sidelined women’s wisdom – not only in this field but in many others. I wonder, what could we know, in this case about herbs and witches’ warnings, if we’d given women’s ideas the same opportunity for development and maturity as a dude’s ideas? And what have we lost by belittling women’s knowledge as too simplistic, too unscientific?

Historians have found strong connections between gossip and accusations of witchcraft: women who developed and shared knowledge – social and medicinal – were slandered as gossips and burned as witches (gossip being seen as the linguistic equivalent to witchcraft), such was the masculine fear of this feminine knowledge. This epistemological dismissal of women’s knowledge continues today. Communication amongst women is often derided as idle chatter, speculation and gossip. Untrustworthy. Unreliable. But what is feminine prattle to the outer‑world is our encyclopaedia. Glenn Close, recently speaking about Hollywood’s reckoning with systemic sexual assault, said, “…Gossip is what women do to keep themselves out of danger.” It is also what women do to learn and to teach.

***

There’s another side to this story. There’s that evergreen Punch cartoon, tagged with the caption ‘That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.’​ Throughout history, bits of women’s wisdom have found themselves a male patron to carry them into the mainstream, shedding any doubt that it was ever found wanting.

Paracelsus, a Swiss physician considered one of the pioneers of the Renaissance’s medical revolution, wrote in the early 16th century, “The universities do not teach all things so a doctor must seek out old wives, gipsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them.” These lessons from the margins of society, carried into the fold by a more respectable source, could be included in the lexicon of scientific research and development. And this knowledge, from old wives and witches, ensured Paracelsus his place as one of the most influential medical thinkers of the early modern era. Now imagine if the women whose ideas have been appropriated were themselves given further space for experimentation and exploration? In this age of encouraging women’s participation in STEM, it’s ironic that we’ve really held a place in this academic chronicle for millennia.

***

I can find one silver lining; one really awesome social element to this. The wisdom of witches and old wives might not have had access to the means of widespread distribution or been enshrined in learned tomes next to their names. It might not be famed or respected. Yet, this knowledge endures. Women’s knowledge endures. From herbal remedies to how to survive in a man’s world, women’s whispers have survived through a resilient oral history of the domestic world, passed from woman to woman down generations – a surprisingly strong intellectual chain. Recipes, remedies, warnings. Just like we quietly pass on to one another which men to avoid, or how to be safe, or how to cope with the complexities of our bodies. Lessons borne from survival and experience. So while I urge for a re-examination of feminine traditions of intellectual discovery, at the very, very least, we women can comfort ourselves with our secret oral history: while they’ve not been listening, we’ve been learning.

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

A Non-Compliant Woman

Posted on by under feminism, memoir, Uncategorized

Our lives are full of shoulds. For women, these shoulds act as the hands that form and shape a lump of clay. Like clay being formed into something suddenly respected as art, we are pressed into behaviours that see us recognised as ladies. This pressing begins so young, and is so omnipresent, that it becomes an intuitive and unthinking framework for every interaction. Like how we’re so used to stepping out of others’ ways, deferring space. Like when we’re told to smile, deferring our faces.

When we start challenging these shoulds, it’s uncomfortable, it’s shocking and it’s scary – for us, and for others. These shoulds are in fact, compliance. Compliance with a world that wants to bind and conscribe our behaviours, voices, bodies and ambitions, veil them beneath manners, politeness and contentedness with the progress we have made from being the chattel of fathers and husbands.

‘You should write happier things,’ says my mother, worried about the emotional and societal implications of my ‘complaining’ all the time.

I have started watching for acts of everyday compliance – instances where I subsume my preferences or comfort for another’s. They’re everywhere. But this has become much more than proving that if I don’t move from the path of oncoming pedestrian traffic I’ll get shoulder-checked five times a day.

I understand now the myriad ways I have complied my entire life. I understand why a barely known middle-aged man rested his hand high on my seven year old thigh. Why a guy refused to wear a condom when he had sex with a friend of a friend. Why so many of us yield to accepting what is done to us even though it makes our blood chill. I understand that we have been moulded and pressed and shaped so that we are compliant and cannot resist. I need to push against the hands that want to form us into something prettier and nicer and quieter. I am trying harder and more consciously to be a non-compliant woman.

Since I started my micro-movement of non-compliance, I have been terrified of the consequences of pushing back. ‘You’re going to get punched in the face one day,’ my mother has oft said following a small act of perceived surliness or, as I like to call it, standing up for myself. I’ve been screamed at. Ridiculed. Glared at. But what I take these reactions to show is the genuine and deep-seated fear that men have when we challenge the expectation that we’ll comply.

Some examples:

1.

I hadn’t seen him for a decade, yet every few years he’d crop up on messenger and just check in and say hi. Somehow, I would fold into myself and become 16 year old Naomi, on the cusp of her first heartbreak. Anxious to do everything right lest I made something go wrong. I was so eager for his approval. I was so eager to keep him happy and not upset him.

As each conversation ended and I morphed back into 30 year old Naomi, I’d feel sick afterwards. So unaccustomed to this role of subservience, of ego-stroking. Is this what it feels like, really, underneath all the superficial male-awarded affirmation, to be a cool girl? To comply?

So it went until he caught me on a day when I was grumpy, busy and NOT in the mood to listen to white boys playing four chords on the guitar and expecting me to swoon.

‘You’re still into music aren’t you,’ he asked. ‘Wanna listen to a song I recorded?’

‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I would find it awkward. You know I’ve taken music seriously my entire life. I’ve performed professionally. For a brief moment it was going to be my career. I tend to want to offer constructive criticism. If you enjoy playing that’s great. You don’t need to know what I think to enjoy music and I’m worried that what I think won’t be what you want to hear.’

This honest response unleashed a flood of comments that I was a stuck up bitch with massive tickets on myself and that I was incredibly rude and by the way I was really unattractive.

I just really didn’t want to listen to him play the guitar.

 

2.

‘You should get a job here!’ A smartly-dressed older man beamed at me.

I broke from the conversation I had been maintaining in my head while I waited in the queue to return his comments with an expression that said, ‘Huh?’

‘Here, at Priceline! You’d look gorgeous in their pink uniform.’

I looked down at my orange, undoubtedly food-splattered shirt and to the woman behind the counter wearing a pink blouse and a humiliated expression.

‘Pretty in pink! You should get a job here because you’d be pretty in pink!’

‘I have three degrees and an important government job. But I’ll throw all that away for the chance to be pretty in the uniform of your choosing.’

‘It was just a compliment! You don’t need to be sarcastic.’

I’m guessing the correct reaction was to laugh merrily and accept his gaze.

 

3.

I was at a wedding, a handful of friends and I taking a break in the fresh air from the furious dancing.

‘Do you guys have a lighter?’ An unknown wedding guest approached our group.

‘Sorry, none of us smoke,’ I said. ‘But those guys over there were just smoking so perhaps they can help out?’

‘Are you trying to get me to fuck off?’ My new acquaintance demanded aggressively.

‘No, I was trying to be helpful. But now you’ve spoken to me like that you can certainly fuck off.’

The atmosphere suddenly shifted. His body language morphed into something larger, squarer, and stronger. His eyes narrowed on me. I saw his hand tighten around the beer bottle he was holding. Women are very, very finely tuned into these atmospheric changes.

Just as it seemed he would explode, my partner calmly said, ‘Mate, she was trying to help and you blew up at her.’

Suddenly, our friend was on more familiar footing: how two white guys sort out a little problem.

‘Oh yeah no worries mate.’ He shook my partner’s hand.

‘No hard feelings love,’ he said to me, ‘give me a hug.’

‘No thank you,’ I said, offering my hand instead.

‘I just want a fucking hug what the fuck is wrong with you.’

It was a friend’s wedding, I was already weakened by one small round of resistance. I listened to the damn guitar and gave him a hug so he would go away, so I didn’t get hit and so I wasn’t rude. It was easier.

Why not just be nice to people instead of assuming the worst? Is what I want not valid? Especially when my niceness is exploited by intentions that are clearly not the best? Why is it so much more horrible to be truthful and honest, to be a non-compliant woman, than to allow myself to be formed into something quieter, meeker, smaller and unhappier? So what if the guy told you to smile where you were in your head about a serious issue? Well, raising a defiant eyebrow might be the first step to having a framework for saying what you really want, what you really feel, when it really matters. I send a question back: why is the scrutiny not directed at those who uphold the shoulds, who react angrily to non-compliance, who exploit the expectation that someone will acquiesce to their wants, who assume we won’t ask for more than we were given. Are not they the ones who should be doing things differently?

For many women, facing the condemnation of non-compliance is too terrifying because our social worth is bound in the approval our every action is given (or not) from men. Not complying will get you yelled at or dumped or hit or raped. So they just listen to the damn guitar. It’s easier. It makes them go away. But it hurts our souls and binds the fabric of compliance even tighter. I imagine that non-compliance allows us to stretch fully, to be radiant and brilliant and powerful without limit. And to imagine the true possibility of a womanhood without shoulds is terrifying in the most beautiful way.

To look into the eyes of someone who has asked me to submit to their expectations of my femininity, and refuse, is the most powerful act of womanhood. I feel adrenaline and power and strength race through my blood. Then afterwards, the shaking, rage filled tears of doing what I know is right despite criticism to calm down and not overreact; despite snarling, warm, drunk breath spewing insults at me; despite the fear of being hit – or worse. Non-compliance is more anguishing the more intimate the hands that press my compliance are, because it is shattering a relationship that was built upon my compliance, and I see that, to some people, I am not loveable when I say no.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

Why Taylor Swift disappoints in Trump’s Dystopia

Posted on by under culture, feminism, politics

I don’t like Taylor Swift.

Her music isn’t relevant to this assessment. I don’t like her. The person. Or, allowing that she is an extremely clever performer adept at constructing a version of herself for public consumption, I don’t like the Taylor Swift that Taylor Swift chooses to have us see.

I’m not alone in this weird revulsion of someone I don’t know. As an avid reader of absolute trash (I’m not a natural blonde: I spend a lot of time in hairdressers and my hairdresser has an excellent supply of tabloid magazines), I’ve noted the sneering coverage of her relationships. But last year, around the time of the ill-fated and weirdly eager Hiddleswift display, I noted mainstream media and feminist sites joining the derisive chorus. People, it seemed, had reached peak Swift. Her all-American goodness was now making us nauseous. I shrugged. After her last album release in 2014 followed by the saturation of a world tour in 2015 followed by endless pictures of perfect days with perfect friends in perfect outfits, we’d had a lot of Swift. But the coverage was starting to seem a little cruel, a little too gleeful in celebrating any slips. I didn’t like seeing a young woman torn down for her success but I shrugged again. She’d go away, tweak her brand a little, and comeback to dominate the music that gets stuck in our heads once we’d forgotten we had been so sick of her.

She went away so completely that she wasn’t publicly seen for months. Her normally active and candid social media accounts were quiet, sharing simply the odd promotional shot or birthday shout-out. She didn’t even host her annual Independence Day party (usually replete with all her famous friends). What a master media manipulator, I mused.

And then, last month, she was back. With new music, a new style and a new boyfriend. But this time, the press was instantly savage. As was I. And it was nothing to do with her music. Editorials seemed to clutch at wild and flimsy justifications for this dislike: her music video rips off Beyoncé! She’s playing the victim card! She’s perpetuating the angry, black man stereotype by positioning herself as an innocent ingénue in her rift with Kanye! She’s an evil capitalist mastermind for telling her fans to buy, buy, buy merchandise to ensure privileged access to tour tickets! There is legitimacy in these criticisms, but, to me, they didn’t seem to explain the whirlwind of bitterness. It’s not Swift, that has changed, really. It’s society.

The world Taylor Swift has emerged from her latest chrysalis into is deeply changed from the one she ‘left’ in 2016. This is a world that brooks no ambiguity in one’s position regarding the political battlelines drawn. And yet in this most politically charged environment, Swift is silent. Swift’s is a career built on mass appeal, on statements of personal empowerment that can be interpreted to ensure they offend no one. She hails from a red state, and her mainstream domination owes much to her early success in the famously conservative country music industry. Many of her fans would have voted Trump. In this context, her silence starts to look if not self-interested at least self-protective. And why not? She’s an entertainer. Why wade into the mess that is American politics?

Except that in 2017, it seems that everything has been lit with a torch of social passion, and much of the energy of this moment is coming from young people, women, and members of the arts community. This is an age where Teen Vogue is providing some of the best political analysis of the year. This is an age where eviscerating critiques of social inequality are happening not in our parliaments but on our stages. This is a moment where to be silent is to be incredibly out of touch. Silence, in 2017, seems to be a luxury of immense privilege.

It is a weak argument to simply compare Swift to other more politically active musicians and we should not necessarily expect political leadership from pop stars – except that Taylor Swift is an avowed feminist, uses female empowerment as an extensive motif in her music and personal branding, and has invoked feminism in her criticism of others’ behaviour, including Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, and Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. So it is reasonable to be disappointed by her curious silence amidst the electrifying Women’s March movement, and her lack of engagement on the myriad social issues specifically targeting her fan base – particularly young women and the LGBTIQ community – in a Trump presidency.

Until we look more critically at Swiftian feminism that is. Taylor Swift’s is a personal empowerment brand of feminism: aspirational, mercantilist, neo-liberal. It is focussed on the achievements of the individual. It tells a story of individual talent triumphing over the odds, not of the structure that creates and protects those odds. It is ignorant of – or reluctant to examine – its own privilege: white, tall, thin, straight and conventionally beautiful and wealthy. In Taylor’s performance of female friendship, there are some brown bodies and some bigger bodies, but these are by far the exception. And all of them seem merely to be superficial accessories. Another thing to aspire to, to collect, to spend money on obtaining.

This feel good ‘feminism’ was fine for entertainment before Trump, before Brexit, before white extremists felt the world was safe for them to start publically burning things again, before Australia decided to rip itself open as it mused on whether human rights were indeed rights for all. In 2017, white and blonde and tall and thin and silent is the ultimate goal according to the new regime. Taylor Swift could be another Ivanka Trump, her individual success apparently refuting any suggestion of discrimination or inequality. Her obedience is what ensures acceptance. But for those not accepted by the establishment, to merely champion individual success, to not acknowledge and challenge systems of oppression, to be silent, is to seem complicit. In neo-liberal Swiftian feminism, it is Taylor Swift that profits, not we along with her.

There is an important and laudable exception to Swift’s attempt to stay silently uncontroversial, and a disappointing example of the feminist and mainstream media showing a reluctance to accord credit where it was due. In August this year, jurors in a civil trial agreed with Swift that she had been assaulted by a DJ during a public appearance. Swift used this decision to advocate that victims of sexual assault be believed and heard, and to defend a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Acknowledging that her wealth gave her an opportunity to pursue the case, a privilege often out of reach for assault victims, she pledged to donate money to organisations supporting victims of sexual violence. In this moment, Swift challenged the system that dismisses women’s experiences, offered courage and precedent to young women, gave a voice to those without her platform, and sought to identify and rectify the inequalities of money and legal power that protect male perpetrators. It was a rare moment of politics, of noise, and it was powerful. Perhaps we should be hopeful this experience will empower Swift to continue to engage with social issues. Perhaps we should be disappointed that a high profile victim of sexual assault chose not to link her experience with the cultural impact of a President who boasts that he can commit sexual assault with impunity.

It’s not just Taylor Swift, of course, that has fallen foul of our new expectation for socially conscious engagement. Three years ago the tall, white, thin, conventionally beautiful and straight Iggy Azalea’s first two singles achieved the kind of success that had until then only been reached by the Beatles. In 2017, Izzy’s reputation is as tattered as a post-party piñata. Any attempt to engage with Azalea’s appropriation of and profit from black culture has been met by her rebuttal that this criticism is sexist. Azalea’s failure to think with nuance about her privileges as a white woman shows that, like Swift, she grasps the feminist tenets that are most self-serving: the bits that protect the individual and the system – a system that likes female celebrities when they’re compliant, white and beautiful.

I have a sense that we’re readying for battle. If entertainers want to simply entertain, fine. But if they want to profit from engagement with the issues that are tearing Western societies apart, we expect them to have done their homework. We expect them to have an understanding of how issues of race and gender intersect to affect equality – that is, intersectional feminism. We expect that their understanding of feminism is sophisticated enough to listen to legitimate critiques of their behaviour and get better. We’re expecting a lot of our women in 2017: we want the call for equality to be for us all.

Women are taught not to make waves. And Taylor Swift has reaped great success from negotiating a fine line between celebrating women and not challenging the status-quo. And this was fine. But, as is evident from a sudden zeitgeist of criticism of Swift, this approach is becoming out of date. A violently fractured Western world has turned ‘Taylor Swift’ into a battleground, and her silent intersection with this cultural moment seems to make her complicit in our political projections onto her body. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect political leadership from pop stars, but culture and music has always been at its best when it serves as society’s truthful mirror. And in this shit show of a world, we want – we need – our heroes to be wave makers, and not just hit makers.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

Living at college in ignorance and bliss

Posted on by under feminism, life, memoir

In Latin, alma mater means nurturing mother. In so many ways, the residential college I attended was my nurturing mother. It was also the sexy older sister: seemingly confident and knowing, yet knowing so little. I started to become who I am today at college and those three years in the early Noughties are the crucible of my longest, strongest friendships, of my identity as a powerful and unapologetic professional woman.

But, ten years later, the shadows that lurk uncomfortably in my memories are hard to ignore. And it is this underbelly that has been exposed in the Australian Human Rights Commission’s (AHRC) report into sexual assault and sexual harassment at Australian universities: students who lived at college are at higher risk of being sexually assaulted or sexually harassed. And my personal experience suggests that a pernicious and resilient culture of insularity, socially constructed behavioural norms, socially encouraged high-risk behaviour and secret traditions must be addressed before colleges can truly be safe places for young people.

Released in August 2017, the AHRC report presented damning findings: around half of all university students (51%) were sexually harassed on at least one occasion in 2016, and 6.9% of students were sexually assaulted on at least one occasion in 2015 or 2016. Overwhelmingly, men were the perpetrators. Overwhelmingly, the perpetrator was known to the victim, likely a fellow student.

The survey also uncovered attitudinal and structural barriers to reporting assault and harassment, victim dissatisfaction with institutional responses when reports were made, and very low confidence amongst the survey set that enough was being done to protect students and support victims.

A particular area of concern highlighted by the AHRC report was that college students (that is, students who live on campus in residential settings owned by or affiliated with the university) represented a disproportionate number of victims: seven per cent of the survey respondents identified as living on campus, but they represented 34 per cent of students who had been assaulted.

I was not surprised. I knew those insular halls would hold the worst secrets. And I was sickened: not by the figures, but by the memories that immediately attached themselves to these figures, tugging at my conscience. Daring to be remembered beneath those happy images of friendship, and debauch parties, and sunny antics. Daring me to remember my complicity. My role as victim. My role as bystander. So here are the things that I think combine to create a more high-risk environment for sexual assault and harassment in Australian colleges.

Insularity created a permissive environment both for crimes occurring and perpetrators being protected. It created an over-confidence in our safety. I moved 700km away from home to attend university and my parents insisted I stay at college. They thought it was safest. There were about 1000 collegians all together and there was a sense we all knew each other if not personally, then we certainly knew people in common. At the very least, we knew what ‘type’ everyone was based on the college that had become their family.

From across a crowded first day lecture theatre, the ruggers and jersey that we always wore (often without shoes), the single book and pen carried (as we were so close to home), marked us out as instant allies. You’re a Jabba? I go to Women’s!  A friendship was instantly established based on mutual friends, upcoming parities and legendary rivalries. From the lecture theatre to parties and bars: what did it matter if you went home with a random guy you’d never met before? You probably knew a few guys in the hallway and you were only 200 m from home anyway. I rarely socialised with non-collegians. They thought we were weird.

The AHRC report highlights something I knew to be true: organisational contexts can play a role in increasing violence – especially sexual violence – against women. The report points to ‘all male residential colleges’ as being of particular concern. In my experience, the all male colleges were able to amplify the behavioural norms of hyper-masculinity. In the social microcosm that is the college community, we absorbed mutually created social roles and rules. We played them up and we perpetuated them. I knew of one young man allegedly sexually assaulted by his supposed brothers because it was rumoured he was gay.

Reference to his assault became a popular chant at inter-college sporting events. These colleges, so steeped in a regressive and binary view of gender, remain incredibly out of step with progressive society. While plenty of evidence exists for the ongoing importance of women’s only spaces (both for safety and ensuring opportunity), all male colleges should be abandoned by society, for in some dark and forgotten corners of these residences, a musty, out-dated and violent form of patriarchy flourishes like a fungus.

These college-constructed gender norms dictated our relationship experiences. We knew what consent safe sex were in theory. But in practice we didn’t know how to own our bodies. There was a hazy area between having fun and things going too far that none of us really knew how to negotiate. I was once pressed to do something I didn’t want to do. My demurs were couched in that faintly Victorian language that marks one as a lady not wishing to seem easy, not wishing to offend. Now it would be clear: this isn’t something I’m into so you need to stop and back the hell up. Right now.

At the time, I thought, ‘what an incredible compliment that he wants me so badly! I mustn’t ruin this and embarrass myself by coming across as frigid’.

I escaped because of a distraction. This is why – with their captured audience of young people at risk of sexual harassment and assault – colleges must teach consent beyond getting a yes out of someone eventually. That’s not consent, that’s acquiescence. Consent must be be vocal, ongoing and enthusiastic. For the latter to happen, colleges need to encourage embodied sex positivity: for all genders, for all sexualities. In that environment, I couldn’t be enthusiastic any more than I could forcefully say no. Enthusiastic is as bad as frigid in a patriarchal world.

As the AHRC report notes, college life is drenched in booze – tickets to parties where endless home-mixed drinks were served out of garbage bins; free busses to bars that offered $2 spirits.  We were in our homes with our families though, so we felt safe despite our high-risk behaviours. So many times we rescued each other and laughed about how crazy we’d been.

In hindsight things were not right. The whispers when one girl didn’t return for a second year. I heard something about her passing out in a room with a bunch of guys, about her waking up saying she hadn’t wanted that to happen. No more questions were asked. It seemed shameful and undignified. We were collegians – leading lights of the future. We didn’t get into messes like that. Now, I see clearly what really happened ­– a culture of secrecy, an expectation that we would drink to excess, boys trying to prove their masculinity with sexual conquests, girls not knowing how to say no.

In these socially pressuring environments, it is easy to see how consent would be distorted by an expectation to participate in tradition. Mascots were a symbol of these ‘hallowed rites’. My college had a doll as its mascot. Each college would try to steal mascots. If successful, that mascot would be subject to some mildly humiliating photo shoot.

A few years ago, my friends and I reunited our college’s centenary ball, the old and the new smooshed together in a grand ballroom. We were shown footage of our mascot’s recent demise. Mary – our mascot, – was strung by the neck and dangled out of a window. Residents of the men’s college were screaming sexual obscenities at her. She was dropped to the ground and a ute drove over her repeatedly. She was set alight and the assembled crowd jeered with college pride.

I shook uncontrollably and tears of rage filled my eyes. This was nothing to do with college pride and all to do with sexual assault. Yet, important person after important person (all quite famous) rose to the stage for speeches, promising vengeance on this apparently light-hearted prank. That’s the final thing wrong with the colleges: they’re self-perpetuating. Each generation goes further than the last in the pursuit of holding up the traditions, the rules and the roles we were sworn into. Colleges need to step back and critique these traditions and games. After eight years away from the college environment, I could see this problematic behaviour for what it was.

At college, I learned that women could be celebrated for their wisdom and professional success. Ambition was championed. Opportunity seemed limitless. I loved college. But. To look back on these years is difficult. With maturity, self-confidence and a better grasp of feminism, I see how toxic many ingrained behaviours and traditions were. Colleges derive their cultural strength and endurance from insularity, privilege, money, elitism and deference to accepted behaviours. Colleges spit people into society who believe this is ok.

Colleges must take responsibility for ensuring ongoing sex positive consent education, disavowing lingering sexism and privilege, critiquing and reviewing traditions, and creating a culture of belief and support for victims. My instincts are that the situation is much worse than the AHRC report tells: the college community has a way of protecting itself, of creating and sustaining culture. Those close to the problem may not realise the truth of what is going on for some years, if indeed they ever do. It took me ten years after all.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

The Power of Being ‘Not Like Other Girls’

Posted on by under feminism, life, memoir

Lately, it feels as though I am standing on the sun, so hot and furious the energy around me burns. It’s a positive energy. I am lit by it. I catch alight and pass the spark onwards. I have been set ablaze by realising the incredible power my friendships with women give me.

This championing of sisterly bonds is new. I was one of those girls who was not ‘one of those girls’. I would say this smugly. ‘Getting along with guys better’ was a lofty compliment – awarded only by the guys of course – that differentiated me from ‘most’ girls. Girls, said with a sneer. Girls, and their associations with vanity, bitchiness, vapidness. To not like other girls was to be not like other girls.

‘Getting along with guys better’ was code for being able to take a joke, being ‘chill’ – not getting emotional like ‘most’ girls who let menstruation get to their heads, being able to banter about cool music and sports results. I could be trusted to get close to the guys without swooning, unlike those ‘other’ needy, weak girls.

Starry-eyed that I’d been given the part I’d tried so hard for, I dutifully played the role through high-school: the girl who brushed misogyny away like crumbs. I think I did this because I subconsciously knew that being friends with the guys was one route to the safety and power that my gender deprived me of. I’d look across to the girls who were friends with girls and it all seemed precarious and dangerous. Difficult. So easy to be wrong-footed and punished with gossip and exile.

It seemed a strategic error, then, that I chose to move into a women’s residential college. Ahead of my move from a dry, isolated piece of Queensland to the overwhelming size and complexity of Brisbane, I inspected the various on-campus options. I was determined to live co-ed of course, I didn’t even get along with girls. But then I smelt the co-ed colleges – an unforgettable tang of stale sweat, unwashed clothes, cheap deodorant and stale beer – and compared the state of the bathrooms to those in the women’s college. It appeared that, for the sake of my comfort, I would have to start getting along with girls better.

By the time I’d finished at university, I’d forgotten about the infantile and simplistic divisions created by superficial assumptions of gender. I’d spent three years holed up in an incredible environment of women who nurtured and celebrated one another. I had moved to a new city, made friends with new people, built a wonderful, gender-diverse friendship group, but secretly still thought guys were a little less complicated than girls.

The truth hit me when I was watching Big Little Lies (the television drama adapted from Australian author Liane Moriaty’s book of the same name, with an incredible cast led by Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, where a death at a primary school trivia night ignites rumour and suspicion amongst a glittering yet competitive social set). I happened upon the first episode and stayed to roll my eyes at another depiction of the lengths to which women will apparently go to compete (secretly enjoying the all too familiar biting social commentary we will provide on one another). Well, that’s what I thought the show was about. I think it’s spoiler-safe to say I was incredibly wrong. The murder becomes a side show for the exploration of each woman’s relationship with themselves, with each other and with the men – portrayed as pale, petty or predatory – who encircle them. By the end of the series, I realised that the apparent pettiness of women (which I knew was a side-effect of the stupid expectations and contradictions of a patriarchal society) by which we are so often distracted was no match for the gravity and resilience of the bond between women.

From this moment of awakening, examples of these bonds exploded in all around me. I found myself drunkenly clutching two friends in my hallway, red wine slipping from my hand, as we each affirmed our gratitude for one another and revealed we didn’t know how we could survive without each other’s support. I knew I felt nothing but love for their strength, beauty and talent. I quieted with awe when a friend asked me for help of the most serious kind, so grateful for her vulnerability, honesty, trust and bravery. So grateful for her. I cradled a sobbing friend to my heart knowing I was barely scratching the debt I owed to her for the same support. I blossomed with pride when I nervously sketched out a dream to a friend who listened with compassion and encouragement and incredibly intelligent advice, again thinking, wow – the women around me are amazing.

The friends who celebrate my achievements as though they were their own. Who see me and believe in me more than I can myself. I look around and saw that the foundations of my happiness and my strength are my female friendships.

I also think of the automatic embrace women will provide a female stranger, so bonded by our shared but unspoken stories of survival, protecting our bodies, dealing with being a freaking woman.

Women’s bathrooms become back stage dressing rooms where we let the costumes and makeup slip, revealing the actor behind the character. We cease coolly comparing ourselves in front of scanning male eyes. Instead, we create a sanctity of warmth and protection. I know from so many experiences the instant help that will be offered if you meekly ask strangers in a ladies’ bathroom for a tampon (given with an understanding and sympathetic smile), help with a tricky item of clothing, help getting away from a creepy guy, help getting over a humiliation, help getting home safely. I’ve asked for it as often as I’ve given it.

I realise that what seemed difficult when I was a teenager was precisely what could become complexity and depth by the time we became adults. I see now that groups of women vibrate an incredible power that was terrifying in its promise – something realised by men through history who have feared the spells or gossip (which is worse?) that these women could cast upon them.

I thought I was rejecting something superficial when I said I got along with guys better, but in fact I was just blindly following the tropes set up for me, tropes designed to break down our power by teaching us to distrust, compete and judge.

And so it is now that, with the wisdom gleaned from experience and awareness, I am finding my women. Quietly, stealthily. A resistance group reforming ancient connections that we abandoned when we began to twist ourselves into something men were comfortable with. In these spaces we create, we spark the most wonderful electricity. I’ve stopped defining myself as a woman in terms of how I am seen by men. I’m definitely not that ‘cool girl’ anymore who gets along with guys better. And because of it, I’ve found my power: my warrior women.

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program. 

A Political Body

Posted on by under body image, fashion, feminism, life

 

My awakening started with the clothes.

As a performer child, I loved creating a character through costume. This was no mere dress-up game but a careful application of hair, makeup and clothing to capture a nuance or signal a mood. Initially, my inspirations were caricatures like ‘fading Hollywood star’ (to practice my wrinkles) or ‘ski accident victim’ (I loved doing bruises). As I grew up, the characters became more subtle; sometimes an expression of my mood, sometimes an optimistic projection of what mood I wanted to be in (my famed poncho of happiness – rivalling the technicolour dream coat for its loud, clashing colours – is a winter staple to forcibly inject joy into Canberra’s grim winters). When I dressed each day, the question I started with is ‘who am I today?’, and I enjoyed that my costume would provide hints to the person within.

But then I got fat.

I was a weird shape already. Very short, skinny arms and waist, and an arse that heralded the Eastern European dumpling I would become. A size 6 (unless I wanted to buy pants in which case I tried on the largest size in every store and ended up throwing a tantrum, crying, leaving, binging, purging). I wore a lot of skirts. So when my narrow bits started catching up to the wide bits the clothing options rapidly receded. As a size 12-14, there was no room to move. If it didn’t do up, you got nothing. I was still smaller in weight, size and measurements than the average Australian woman and yet fashion was clearly telling me its doors were not open to the likes of me. Keep walking past those well-lit storefronts and find the shop where everything is draped and baggy. For once you’ve fallen off the size 14 cliff you are to shroud yourself in loose fabric. I did. I hid.

I hid in the clothing fat people are told to wear to look slimmer but actually just render us bland. It was all that was available, serving as a sartorial dunce’s hat to publicly shame us for our grotesque shape. My technicolour wardrobe was crammed to the side as black, beige, more black went on high rotation. I was background while fashion took place on more deserving bodies. The fashion equivalent of playing a tree in the school play. For the odd occasion where I needed to haul an old character out of the wardrobe (the role of glamourous wedding guest, for instance, cannot be played in a jersey wrap dress), I would cram and fold myself into layers of horrible shapewear that would line my body with cruel, red indentations, and give me painful stomach cramps from holding in my soft pudge. I look back at the few photos I permitted at that time and the character I’m portraying is the invisible woman. I didn’t think people like me could be seen, should be seen, let alone celebrated.

 

I recognise that regardless of what I look like on the outside, I will always carry these seeds of a distorted relationship with my body. Even though I have now made peace with my body, I still struggle to shut out the cruel whisper that life would be different if I weighed twenty kilos less. I’m still pulling myself up on my perceptions of health. This is how I’m meant to be. But society, with its warped perception of what ‘fit and healthy’ look like, and an obsession with ‘health-shaming’ people (which is really ‘fat-shaming’ reimagined for the 21stcentury), doesn’t get that, and it’s hard to fight that society off and keep it out of my mind. Every day is and will be an internal battle to quieten that instinct. I still look at old photos and trace my protruding bones with a smile (mmm… sexy clavicle). My closest human helps me through the bad days with compassion and forgiveness that I struggle to show myself. I’m ok, and I’m safe.

 

Psychologists, nutritionists, personal trainers, doctors and gyms aren’t what got me to this place of begrudging acceptance. Not even Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth cut through my conditioning. My awakening began with Instagram. And it went back to the clothes.

I’ve always liked to look at aesthetic things, so when I first got Instagram it was filled with models and celebrities ostensibly marketing incredible fashion. But, as I had with fashion magazines, I had to block these out as they were also marketing a body shape and ‘health’ aesthetic (health is running! And gymming! In lycra! And look at the salad I’m eating! Wow!) that was so far removed from what I needed for my own recovery and reality.

Somehow, I started following a few ‘plus-size’ bloggers, and I thought they were magnificent. There was no baggy jersey here but colour, and texture, and skin, and TIGHT FITTING CLOTHING that showed dimpled thighs, soft bellies, and jiggly arms. I curated my feed so every time I looked I was inundated with something that made me joyful – creative fashion – and that recalibrated two decades of social programming of what visible bodies are supposed to look like. Of what active bodies look like. Of what clothes should fit like. It was revolutionary.

And then slowly, I started making myself visible to the world again. With the help of online brands with more sizing options, I started choosing costumes again instead of disguises. And if felt bloody amazing. So I would take a photo of it, and I would share it, because I wanted to be seen again. I wanted to capture that moment of creativity and confidence so I can revisit it on my shit days. I wanted to insert myself into a landscape that I thought I had been denied entry into.

The rest of the world is slowly catching on, though for now fashion for all bodies remains a side show. And risks abound even in this intended safe space: the curve fashion industry risks being co-opted by brands who want the social cache of concealing naked consumerism behind messages of empowerment, and the ranking of bodies’ worthiness is sneaking in, with tall, white, hour-glass bodies most likely to be deemed acceptably curvy.

We must be awake to this and we must keep critiquing what is put in front of us. But now, because of my curated Instagram with its celebration of diverse bodies wearing whatever they want, I can look more critically at ‘fit inspiration’ images, ‘health’ marketing, fashion only ever displayed on tall, thin bodies and see them for the constructed forms of control, exclusivity and branding that they are.

As an Eastern European dumpling in a world that values conformity and striving to achieve that conformity, to be seen, even if only in a curated digital world, is an act of political protest. It’s an act of radical self-love in a world that tells me to starve and purge and hide. And I love being part of the revolution.

Experiences of body shame and eating disorders are unique, but you don’t have to feel alone. If you or someone you know needs information and support, please contact a specialist organisation like The Butterfly Foundation for guidance. Be gentle with yourselves. x