S is for … Sisterhood

So, a woman campaigns for a notable woman to appear on the British currency and as a result of her success, she’s had threats of rape made against her online. In light of that, now seems as good a time as any to state this: I am a feminist. I am not "a feminist but >>insert odd, mealy mouthed clarification here<<". I am a feminist, and that is that.
Things seem to be on the slide in the arena of equality, this latest news is just one of the litany of stories of abuse women receive for doing even the most inoffensive of things - look at the nasty comments Mary Beard received for being a bit clever about Classics on the telly. The message appears to be, if you’re a woman, you’re successful and don’t give a fuck about trying to meet the impossible, cartoon-porn standards of attractiveness for beauty, you have to accept that people can and will send you messages threatening rape.
There are two things here - first of all, rape has nothing to do with sex, or sexiness. It’s about sadism and control - basically bullying writ large on a woman’s body, which appears to be the modern day battle ground for issues of equality. Secondly, when did it happen that this kind of abuse was OK, or just par for the course? How does it ever get described as “banter”? None of this stuff is OK, and we have to say so. Women before laid down their lives to get us the vote, and we let that sacrifice slide every time we think this is just the way things are these days.
It’s not just the latest twitter furore that bothers me; I know enough to keep those in some perspective. Abortion remains an issue for debate and pro-choice seems to be losing ground to a frothing-mouthed moral majority that believes they have a divine right to tell other people what to do with their bodies. People still think a single woman is a failure - a dusty spinster with “issues” - while a bachelor has cleverly avoided the old ball and chain. People still think it’s OK to ask a woman when she’s going to have kids, and consider her selfish if she doesn’t want them. People also think it’s OK to complain about women who do want kids and decide to give up their jobs to bring them up, or sneer at a woman who is stylish and fashionable as an airhead. (On that - it appears to me that being able to match your shoes to your handbag is at least as useful a skill as manipulating a blue hedgehog in red trainers on a computer screen to do whatever it is happens in computer games that many chaps spend their time doing and no one considers them idiots just on this basis.)
I have two nieces and as they grow up, I want them to be what they want to be - I hope they are kind, hard working, passionate, determined and successful in whatever they decide to do. I want them to live in a world where those traits don’t open them up to abuse, where people don't view them through the lens of whether or not someone wants to sleep with them, or where they think they should tone it down just in case someone doesn’t like a woman being smarter, or funnier, or better at maths than them.
That’s not acceptable: we have to stand up and say, “I am a feminist and I will not accept this shit.” and not shuffle off making apologies or qualifications in case the rest of the world decides we’re not girlfriend material for talking about it.
If you are a woman then you better start saying it, louder than you ever have before.
“I am a feminist.”
Full stop.

R is for... Rumination

I actually wrote this a little while ago, intending to post it on time for this letter, then failing to as I'd decided it was a little too personal (and quite frankly, doesn't really make me look too good). However, on reflection I've figured that, partly inspired by Zoe's piece about standing by what you write, that inevitably things won't always look great, so it will do me good to post this regardless, trusting that you will be able to see this is an isolated moment (and not some demented cry for help). :)  Also, it's the first bit of prose I've written for a while, and I'm not even sure I've ever just freewritten like this for the blog until now, so going back to the original purpose of the blog... here's something I wrote one day when speculating on the letter R.

Katy sat across from Bea, her tea steaming between them. Bea was another rogue acquaintance, part of the process of meeting new people and accepting every invitation, and like each of these occurrences she found herself experiencing the vague sense that she had nothing to offer. Bea was older, with a shock of red-gold curls, and had the assured confidence of someone who’d battled workplace sexism and lived to tell the tale.

‘You just need to tell them what to do,’ Bea was urging, while Katy nodded agreeably. ‘Don’t let them dictate to you. George doesn’t really know what he’s doing when it comes to telling a story about his company – he needs you to tell it for him. So step up and take charge – he’ll thank you for it.’

Katy felt like she was sitting on the bottom rung of the protégé ladder, when in actuality she had been pretty successful once – as successful as she’d ever wanted to be, anyway. But living in a new place had stripped her of years of confidence, leaving her pink-skinned and naïve before every challenge, naked as a mole-rat. She didn’t really know what to do, couldn’t remember how she’d ever cultivated those years of friendship, nurtured a life filled with depth. Sitting there before Bea she was a novel amateur, maybe just tolerated because they had to work together; it really could be little more than that. Katy couldn’t see how friendships grew from such intangible beginnings, how they took root. She didn’t have a handle on any one of her ‘friends’ so far – who they really were, what their favourite books were, where their politics resided, what guilty-pleasure film or tv series cheered them up after a shit day... the kind of things she felt defined so many of her friendships; that intrinsic knowledge of somebody. She couldn’t slip into a conversation easily anymore, and she always wondered when her calls home would start to become stilted, when she would begin to feel herself becoming untethered from her remaining comfort zone, the familiarity of the long-distance phone call.

Bea had ordered them another drink, taking charge. Katy felt a small voice in her well up to start explaining her anxiety, and suppressed it quickly – it was neither professional, nor appropriate, to expose herself as too weak, plus she had a feeling that her shy demeanour to date had already done enough damage on that front.

An hour later they left the café, and Katy trailed to her car, armed with a new to-do list. She couldn’t face returning to the office so she drove home, planning to write her notes up there and make a few plans for the following week. That evening she had her first book group meeting, with another new friend (and not even a friend through work – this was someone she’d discovered on the internet through the library) and she was yet another person she hadn’t quite fathomed, though reassuringly they had a few things in common (books!). There was also going to be another new person there, who she’d never even met – which she knew was a good thing, but the thought of more introductory chit-chat made her feel instantly tired. She suspected she wasn’t embracing the opportunity of the new in quite the way she should be.

The truth was, she didn’t see a way past the perpetual conflict within her – she wanted to feel at home and surrounded by the comfort of friends, but at the same time she felt as if she were betraying her ‘real’ friends back home by seeking new ones, as if to replace them with a caricature army of trusted confidantes. She knew this train of thought was dark and tainted with all her worst qualities, a twist on her fear of change, and not for the first time she wondered if she had severely overestimated her ability to build a new life – all for the want of a country vale.

Guilt was her new companion – oodles of people had it worse than her, and she also knew that, quite frankly, she was being a coward, a wimp, and potentially a failure. She was part of a cosseted age where feeling unhappy about seeming trivialities was commonplace, and yet she knew that it wasn’t as simple as lecturing herself that at least she wasn’t in late-70s Cambodia, or trapped behind enemy lines in the last desperate throes of WWII, or an Indian with a spear in a sea of Cowboys with guns. She hadn’t stood on a land mine, or been in the wrong place at the wrong time when the sea or the earth behaved out of character and wrought bloody havoc on the nearby populace (though arguably she was treading on that front-line a bit more now). Maybe depression was the 21^st century malaise, and maybe it shouldn’t be that way, and maybe she simply had too much time on her hands to contemplate scenarios that fed her ruminations like a relentless ouroboros, but her feelings were real (to her at least). Perhaps her stamina was failing her.

R is for... The Rialto

So I’ve done something I never thought I would - I’ve submitted my poetry to a well-respected poetry magazine to be considered and very likely rejected. It’s a magazine I love, too - hearing back from them with a negative is going to be like your Mum telling you that new haircut really doesn’t suit you. But the important thing for me here is that I’ve done it, and the achievement for me feels twofold.
First of all, the writing itself. I’ve worked hard at this, harder than I ever imagined I would in my childhood when I read so much and dreamed one day of writing poems and stories just like them. I’ve completed courses, attended Saturday workshops and used precious funds and holiday time to further my skills. I work at it on weekends and evenings when other people are with loved ones or out having adventures. Don’t get me wrong, I do it because I love it and I have no regrets about the choices I’ve made. I can feel the improvement in my writing over the past three or four years and there is little joy greater to me than finally cracking the format of a villanelle, or finding that perfect epithet to describe a character. It’s why we all do this, I think - the terror of the blank page goes hand in hand with the joy of one filled exactly as it should be.
Secondly, you probably can’t imagine the upswing in confidence it has taken me to do this. I never thought I’d consider myself good enough to submit to a well-respected magazine, and it’s a testament to my hard work and also my friends for getting me to this level. I remember years ago on my Skyros holiday when I was having a general meltdown on a beautiful Greek island, I tried to explain to my group of similarly lost souls that I never felt good enough. And the lady leading the group said the most amazing thing to me - “Good enough for what, Zoe?” It’s not really a question I could answer, but it’s something worth considering if you have similar doubts. If you’re holding yourself to some intangible and most probably mythical standard, chances are you’re never going to achieve anything you’re happy with. Confidence in my writing also comes into play when considering what to put into the public arena, should it get that far. Of the five poems I submitted, four are about other (real) people. Some of them know they’ve been written about and some of them don’t. One of them is long dead, so we won’t waste time worrying about him. To take the risk that these might go public means I have to stand by my writing in an absolute way and that comes down to confidence that I’ve written with kindness and a certainty that comes from my own perspective, spoken in my own voice. That is all I can ever ask of myself.
So, wish my poems luck on their way to The Rialto. They may end up coming right back, but at least they - and I - have taken a first few faltering steps out of my head and into the world.