Is it just me or is everything a bit ‘womanny’ at the mo? Apart from all the uncovering of paedophiles, weird racists gaining electoral ground and other world stuff, it seems like there’s a lot of wotnot about us birds going on in the mix. I wrote my cute little rant about Page 3 last week, didn’t I (bless me), and read a lot of stuff about women and Page 3 and FGM and inequality in pay and famous women being patronised and pitied for not getting married and sprogged up. I thought about all that, and I thought about all this female energy like an electrical charge in the air, and I swelled with love for all my male friends who are as outspoken on these issues as women, and I swelled with love for my former female students who I see out in the world, being brilliant.
Then I did something I would have once thought unconscionable. I cut a person from my life on a gut-instinctive whim. A chap I know had posted a picture of Yasmine Bleeth the Baywatch actress, who had been seen out in public for the first time in years, “back on the beach, but this time in baggy sweats” (the audacity of it), supporting her husband who had just done something fitness-based in the ocean. The chap was aghast at how she now looked, and said that men everywhere had had their fantasies ruined. Then another droll little chum of his chimed in saying that Yasmine and her partner in swimsuited life-saving Pamela Anderson were now ghoulish shadows of their former selves and that he was really annoyed about it. They then swapped smutty inferences about how they reckoned they could make Yasmine lose the weight and get her back to her former glory. Presumably they thought they could fling her about like a kama sutric ragdoll leaving her cardio-vascularly astounded by their artful manfulness until she emerged once more like a sexy butterfly from a chrysalis of podge and woe. Perhaps, less creatively, they thought they could piston-fuck her with their big man sticks of joy and virility til all her fat literally fell off from the force of it or something. I don’t know what these dicksplats thought they could do to a woman who’s probably had more satisfying coitus than they’ve had cups of tea, but I know what I saw in her pictures. SHE’S 46, MARRIED TO SOMEONE SHE LOVES, DOESN’T WANT TO GET HER WHAMMERS OUT, AND HAS FINALLY LOST THE COCAINE ADDICTION THAT WAS THREATENING TO MAKE HER NOSE GO A BIT DANIELLA WESTBROOK. SHE IS HAPPY, YOU FETID RECTUM SWAMPS.
And I got riled and I blocked him. I think the only person I’ve blocked before was a paedophile. I even felt mean doing that. But sometimes you have just got to strap one on and do the do, don’t you?
After I’d huffed about being cross for a bit, I got to wondering about what is fad and what is not. Humans don’t seem able to keep things up for very long. Pop culture enthusiasm, diets, political issues, peace. We seldom sustain. We can’t keep all our balls up in the air, all of the time. Women themselves are fads. One minute hot in red bikinis, the next – O V E R.
Then I worried that this sort of new feminist spirit we are enjoying at the moment might also be a fad. That us gals will turn around in a few months time and realise that our ‘little efforts’ are now the sociological version of the tamagotchi or the budweiser frog. So Ova. Perhaps that is what will happen with this wave of popular feminism that is whirling around like a gust of crisp packets. We’ll have this burst, then it will die down a bit, and there’ll be something else that whips up our fancy, and there will be a select hardcore of people who remain, who keep doing what they always do, but people will listen slightly less and it will all just have that strange suspended hush around it; that non-sound you get after snow. Maybe not. Maybe actual change is happening and what we have afterwards will be the clarified disbelief at an old way that is now as criminally inexplicable as stealing entire nations into slavery, sending nine year olds down mines, or not letting people with vaginas have a say in who is Prime Minister. Perhaps these things do come in waves. Some lap quietly at the shore, others rolling in like giants; the small waves just as crucial as the big ones to keep the oceans moving.
I hope what we are left with will be an inbuilt strength in our individual responses. Like finding you are no longer the kind of woman who worries herself into insomnia about being ‘mean’ when telling a douchebag to fuck himself off out of her awareness, who can wipe the stain and move on.
Maybe that’s the real result of this new feminism, or maybe it’s just me growing up.
Sadie Hasler 