– A sniper bullet deployed with a wry smile and impeccable timing.
– Everyone in vicinity laughing uproariously, and then taking to social media to quote me.
– In turn, their post gets multiple likes and shares: it’s a life changing experience for all involved.
– I’ve probably said something euphemistic that a be-paunched 1970s middle manager would be proud of.
– To a colleague.
– I am laughing so much at my own wit that half of the intended audience don’t hear it.
– I am reported to HR.
Flirting
– Darting eyes, some casual shoulder touching.
– Bystanders charmed by banter.
– Attractive friend of the opposite sex walks by at that exact moment, and shows enough pleasure in seeing me to inspire a pang of jealousy from flirtee.
– Aggressive blushing + hives lead to a visage resembling nothing so much as a UKIP placard.
– Threaten marriage.
– I am reported to HR.
Desert Island Discs
– I am invited onto show, having become some sort of national treasure. IDK what for.
– My voice is an octave lower.
– I make intelligent, sensitive music choices that inspire nostalgia and appreciation from audience.
– Kirsty Young is moved to tears.
– The most listened to track on my spotify is Rupert Holmes – “Escape: the Pina Colada Song”
– No one gives a shit
Having sex standing up
– Probably outside, against a tree.
– Using a branch for leverage.
– Bit like that scene in Atonement, but with a shade less emotional intensity.
– Culminates in mutual orgasm
– Anything used as leverage ends up broken.
– Involves squatting and other sexually uninspiring body positioning for both parties.
– Requires logistical prowess and general spatial awareness that I lack
– Culminates in hand job
Being groped on the tube
– I tear the offender a new arsehole with quick-thinking witticisms galore.
– Man is thoroughly humiliated and reassesses his attitudes on sexual assault and consent.
– Whole episode is captured on fellow commuter’s smart phone, and promptly goes viral.
– Top YouTube comments include “So much respect for this woman” and “LOOOL, that guy got OWNED”
– Couldn’t be 100% sure that hand on left ass cheek was there by design.
– Even though it moved in synchronicity when I repositioned myself.
– Even though the hand’s owner took the arrival of more people into the carriage as an opportunity to stand closer, and breath deeper.
– It must be in my head.
– I get off at next stop and move down carriages feeling incredibly vulnerable.
A TFL survey from 2013 found that 15% of women and girls had experienced unwanted sexual attention on public transport in London, but 90% of those people had not reported it. I, and some close friends are a part of that statistic.
Why?
Well…I probably made it worse in my head than it actually was.
It’s not really so big a deal on the sliding scale of bad shit that happens to women worldwide.
It’s inevitable.
FUCK. THAT.
Sexual harassment may not be an extreme example male violence against women, but it’s certainly the thin end of the misogynistic wedge. And MY, what an enormous wedge that is. Seriously. It makes The Shard look like a bungalow.
So, if it happens to you, or if you witness it, please, call it out.
I can’t be alone in having experienced pre-teen years fraught with a naïve and burgeoning sexuality.
Too embarrassed to discuss my confused and ever-mutating feelings with anyone, I internalised the shit out of them, occasionally becoming over-familiar with soft furnishings. Eventually, I found an outlet by projecting the desires I didn’t know I had onto pop culture protagonists, letting TV romance narratives do the sense making for me. I guess that’s how some people get addicted to porn.
So, in the manner of a far too personal Buzzfeed list, here are the top four late nineties love stories that shaped my understanding of sexual love:
Fox & Vixen – The Animals of Farthing Wood
Fox ignited my passion for ginger men.
I was pretty jealous when Vixen was first introduced, but she won me over with her sleek bod, cunning eyes and straight-talking feist. The nuzzling, the licking, the burrow (cave) – Fox got there first, Jon Snow.
Hated weasel, little shit-stirrer.
Billy Kennedy + Anne Wilkinson – Neighbours
Mouth hanging open, still in my school shirt, the heady scent of skips on my breath and Blue Riband crumbs in my lap, this moment seemed the height of sensuality.
On reflection, it’s actually pretty creepy: cheap twangy jazz, the way he has to strain to get far enough over the sofa to touch her face with his lips, and a special shout out to the awkward reverse waddle from the scene of the crime.
Jessie Spano & Zack Morris – Saved by the Bell
This shit was illicit! What about Kelly? What about Slater?! Watching people succumb to desires against their better judgement blew my tiny prepubescent mind.
Incidentally, in my search for this nugget of SBTB glory, I came across this:
In 1997, Zac was a drumming evangelical Christian babe. The Zac era crush was a game changer for me, no longer was I to be fulfilled by the romances of TV shows, I had learnt to day-dream my own convoluted narratives, this time with ME as the heroine.
My nightly fantasy ran thus:
Hanson make an impromptu visit to my primary school (a state school with a maroon uniform in the suburbs of a provincial British town). Their main objective in coming? To discover once and for all the identity of their number one fan. Upon Hanson’s arrival, my peers feign love for the golden-haired trio (having been picked on for my fanaticism, the injustice of this part of my invented narrative still makes my blood boil). But, just as Cinderella’s slipper fits her dainty foot alone, I am the only student able to faithfully recreate this with scented gel pens:
Hanson give me their nod of approval, and perform mmm-bop in my honour at our school assembly.
Zac gets chatting to me, and realises pretty quickly that I’m fucking cool.
I invite him around to my house for a chicken kiev and some potato smiles. It’s a hot day, and Zac confesses “Back home in Tulsa it’s always pretty cold, I aint used to the heat!” Ever the opportunist, I suggest a refreshing water fight – also a chance for me to showcase my rad hosepipe spray technique.
One thing leads to another, and Zac, laughing at my exotic sense of humour, puts his hands into my wet hair, and pulls me closer. The laughter stops – for this is a sexy love moment, and we snog.
My adoration of Mr. Hanson (who, by the way, now has three children, did someone say VIRILE!) faded in tandem with my penchant for hair mascara, but the trick of constructing in-head stories that feature me in a starring role lives on. How have they changed with age? Barring the occasional morbid “What I would say at X’s funeral & what they would say at mine” bonanza, not much tbh. And if you tell me you don’t do some variation of the same, I’m not sure I’ll believe you.
Like any healthy relationship, the one I have with my vagina is built on a foundation of love, misunderstanding, and passive aggression.
One of my earliest memories is of urinating in our front garden; legs akimbo, hands proudly on hips, shouting “Call me Michael, for I am man!” Michael was an asthmatic four year old from my playgroup with scabby knees and a bright gold bowl cut. I didn’t just want to play marble run with Michael: I wanted to be Michael. As a three year old, it never occurred to me that there could be a point of difference between Michael and I insurmountable without medical intervention. But alas, there was.
Okay, so I’m a girl: I can’t pee standing up, what’s next for me to learn about myself? Well, my Mum’s a girl, and she does this thing after a bath sometimes where she unwraps the world’s least fun glow stick, and pops it up inside of her for safe keeping.
WHAT THE FUCK MUM?! WHAT IS THAT, AND WHERE THE FUCK HAS IT GONE?!
Around this time, my mother was perfecting her niche mix of early ninety’s hippy and horribly repressed catholic, exorcising irrational guilt with an arsenal of joss sticks and alfalfa seeds.
“It’s just what you do when you have a period, to soak up the blood”.
It’s totally groovy man; I’m not ashamed one bit. Oh, but disappear your used applicators with the stealth of a Russian spy – evidence of your menstrual cycle is a sight no man should have to endure.
I then went through a phase of padding out my knickers with balls of toilet roll, announcing to friends, family and teachers with the gravity of an obituary that I too, was on my period.
In a girl’s early experience of her identity, it doesn’t help that there is no one standardised term for her anatomy. Boys had a willy, everyone knew that. One of my friends had a fanny, another had a front bum (WTF), and I had a tuppence. Aside from adding an unwelcome prostitution subtext to the “Feed the birds” skit in Mary Poppins, this confused the bejesus out of me.
Well, if you thought that hitting puberty would give me the chance to finally understand what was going on down there, you’d be mistaken. The communist invasion was spreading through my peers’ Tammy Girl thongs at an alarming pace, and it was only a matter of time before I would finally understand the exquisite pain of becoming a woman.
Then I saw this:
I was mentally prepared for B-movie bloody gore, not blue shit in a shot glass being used to baptise a lady-nappy.
My thoughts ran thus:
– This must be a product that you put into your sanitary towel to make it absorb all the evil badness as it flows from the vagina. You know. Like the things posh people clip under the rims of their toilets.
– Where is it kept in the supermarket? (My best guess was with the car air-fresheners)
It did not occur to me that this holy water was meant to represent ordinary, run-of-the-mill red blood. So, much like I was still expecting my Hogwarts letter to appear halfway through year 7, I was two years into my monthlies before I gave up on the idea that someone was going to take my hand, and with the wry nod that comes of wisdom, tell me “It is time. You have proven yourself a master menstruator, and have moved with ease from the lilac to the primrose Tampax. You have even, on occasion, practiced the dark art of that most challenging of period paraphernalia: the non-applicator tampon. You are now ready for the truth my friend, behold! The blue liquid!”
And then there was fingering.
You’re a fourteen-year-old with a lush BF. You’ve been snogging for enough time for you to both appear as though you’re suffering a localised patch of eczema from chin to philtrum. He’s gotten skilled at squeezing your chest like a builder negotiating a particularly stubborn wedgee (although you don’t even know when it’s happening as you are purveying not one, but two padded bras from Miss Selfridge). And so his hand, sticky with Tangfastic residue, finds its way into your ‘cheeky’ g-string, and starts sawing away at your genitals, moving in and out with such speed and enthusiasm that you assume he must know what he’s doing.
Once enough of your peers have undergone the saw, the bat shit fucking insane rumours start. And you believe them. There was the girl who got called Kit-Kat, “coz she takes 4 fingers”. The girl who let her boyfriend put in both of his hands, “and then, she put in her two thumbs as well!”. And who could forget the girl who put a can of baked beans up there, in front of her paramour?
Unless each of these young women had a Tardis where their vagina should have been, we were spreading some pretty mental lies about each other. Why didn’t I question it? Because there’s so much cloak and dagger mystery around female genitalia and sexuality that there was simply no space to.
Over time, you grow up; you unpick the half-truths from the lies, and create a mythology of your own amongst your friends. And just when you think you’ve pieced together all there is to know about your body, how it functions, and what it can accommodate, you get called up for a cervical smear.
I went to mine, freshly showered and ready to take it all in my stride. My doctor was a Czech woman of about 55 with a facial tick and the kind of hairstyle you wouldn’t want to light a cigarette around. She told me off for turning up early, and then told me off for leaving it until 25 to have the test. Bamboozled by the paradox of being simultaneously too early and too late, she then asked those questions, which though framed in a clinical, non-judgmental way, end up sounding like “On a scale of one to ten, with one being Our Holy Virgin Mother, and ten being Russell Brand, how much of a total slut are you?”
It was then time to get strapped into the torture garden, lay back, and think of Michael…
“Oops” said the Czech between my legs, her be-latexed hands popping up to eye level like some nightmarish kids’ puppet show “I forgot the speculums!” And off she trotted, leaving the door open wider than my legs.
After what felt like 15 minutes, my carnal explorer was back, this time with a tray of plastic instruments.
“Which size?” She asks my vagina
“Erm… I don’t…”
“Which size? Big?! Maybe I’ll use small. You look small”
“Okay. Thanks”
And in it goes, followed by unpleasant creaking sounds as Dr begins to crank me open.
“Oh, drats!” I am treated to a repeat performance of “look mum, no hands” as she leaves the room once more, the door and my genitals hanging from their hinges, to retrieve some swabs.
“Here we are”. She came, she saw, she took samples. Speculum removed, I was instructed to get dressed. I watched as she happily typed into the computer, and noted with alarm that she’d chosen not to remove her now fanny-battered gloves.
Thankfully, I was given a full bill of vaginal health, but amongst my close acquaintance a high number have had complications ranging from false alarms through to multiple surgeries. And it made me angry. Angry that young girls don’t know what to call it. Angry that advertisers camouflage it with euphemism. And angry that discourse around it is still so mysterious.
If we allow people to think and talk about female sexuality in these coded terms, then we encourage them to disassociate from the very human reality of the subject. Furthermore, we remove a certain capacity for empathy, for ownership, and ultimately for equality.
So, it’s not a magical cave in which time moves in a different dimension; it’s a vagina, which is wonderful.
Big Girl Pants 