Some of you may be aware of the new Lily Allen video, which has kicked up a bit of controversy because of its message about the way women are portrayed in music videos. This is by no means the first time a pop star has sparked controversy and it won’t be the last, but it has certainly inspired me to write this blog post because I keep hearing the old argument about women who don’t make the right feminist statements, or make them in the right way. There are a lot of ideas about what constitutes feminism and what politics you should or do conscribe to when you decide to call yourself feminist. The idea that it’s the same for everyone is laughable, or that, in defining ourselves in this fashion, we are upholding the whole great sweeping umbrella of women’s inequality in order to bring about radical change.
For most women, being feminist means having an opinion about the situations they have seen around them in which they have witnessed oppression and inequality and have been, in some way, personally angered or otherwise inspired to act. For women who have not witnessed these things then, or simply not noticed them, feminism will not mean very much and, unless you really study it, as a subject, the wider scope of it will probably be a mystery to you. It certainly was for me before I went to university – where, as an MA and PhD student, I was treated to the overbearing and, apparently, better trained opinions of tenured professors whose business it was to write and study the developing phenomenon of feminist and post-feminist culture.
I was an abysmal student of feminism – although I did get better over time - but I was, I discovered along the way, a feminist of a sort. I have, and have always had, opinions on gender politics and the unfair divisions of responsibility and rewards between men and women. I was brought up by a single mother, whose attitude to my father was always bitter because, as she said, he shirked his responsibility and did not pay nearly enough child support while, at the same time, he expected to be hero-worshipped for the little help he gave us.
I have probably made everyone aware of the problems I have with both my parents, and I’m not going to get back into that here, but, in this, I can see my mum’s point. My dad did shirk a lot of his responsibilities and was able, by the privilege of being male, to avoid having to take most of them because, let’s face it, in most families (and I am saying most, because I know it’s not always this way) it’s the women who raise the kids. So, I was brought up to see the inequality of the sexes in an implicit and obvious sort of way, and, as such, I thought I was pretty qualified to talk about women and inequality because, hey, my view was as valid about that as anything else.
But, as I quickly discovered when I attempted to write about feminist criticism for my PhD supervisors, this is not enough. Because one person’s feminism is another person’s segregation; or so I was informed. If you describe any issue to do with women from your own perspective, there will always be someone else with another perspective who thinks you’ve excluded someone and, as a rule, there will always be someone who wants to make a fuss about it.
This is what’s happening with Lily Allen now. She’s being criticized because her video, which does make a good point about the images of women in music videos and does hit back very well against all the stuff in the media about her looks after she had two babies, is not good enough for some of the hardcore feminists who’ve watched it. They reckon it’s too much concerned with the images of white women and their particular experience of objectification, while the video itself features Lily surrounded by black female dancers who are performing a dance routine of the same style seen in a lot of the misogynistic videos that the song comments on. All of this is ironic, of course, and meant to show how shocking those images are and should be. And she has got people talking about it by doing it, hasn’t she? Because her point is that men should not be allowed to make those videos and sing those sort of lyrics and get away with it and that if a woman makes a video like that it makes her look like a slut. Hence the references to Miley Cyrus and whoever else it is she comments on.
She’s not defending or supporting any part of that world, she’s pointing out a double-standard, and doing it in a really strong way that will get attention.
Unfortunately though, this is easy enough to misconstrue and, despite the obviousness of the message and the plainness of the lyrics, people are still debating what her video and song actually say about the problem.
On the UK radio programme, “Woman’s Hour”, this week, there was a discussion, featuring several feminist women, about the impact of the video and the overall achievement (if any) that it made for women. Things about Lily’s own double standards, and her ignorance about racial inequalities as well as a part of feminist debates, were thrown around on this programme and one of the guest speakers became quite aggressive in her dismissal of the video as a whole, saying that it didn’t send any sort of good message simply because it did not support certain groups of women and seemed to be providing only a very narrow viewpoint.
Well, ok, this is the thing that bothers me. Actually, it’s several things.
As I said above, there will always be something that an individual opinion does not cover, and the whole point of “feminism”, as a term, is that it covers a broad and ever growing range of issues, people and opinions. It is an umbrella term. So, to talk about what kind of feminism a person subscribes to and then criticize them for being too narrow or lacking in support of other women, seems overly harsh to me.
Lily Allen is a singer, a woman, and, most importantly, an individual who possesses both a brain and a valid opinion. Her music video is her way of expressing that, as all her music has been – if you refer to her other albums, you will see that she has always had something to say on the issue of feminism and social hypocrisy as a whole. She makes good points usually. But she’s not a professor with a lot of degrees in this stuff; she probably hasn’t read every single feminist text since Simone de Beauvoir and she probably hasn’t seen everything there is to see of women’s inequality across the world. Who has??
This is my point:
Feminists who are well versed in feminism, who call themselves feminists publicly, who maybe even write on the subject regularly and have strong, political views that go with it, are always very quick to judge women who do not define themselves in this way and who are not similarly versed. There is a type of snobbery among these people, as though they believe that, by having a much broader knowledge, they are more qualified to make the necessary points and that, if other people are going to do it, they should at least get it “right”.
But there is no right. Feminism is not an academic subject – or, at least, it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be about political factions and the careful wording of every statement so as not to offend and exclude other people. Just like in politics, everyone has an opinion and has the right to an opinion, but not everyone wants to be a politician do they, and many would say that that was a good thing! For most people, feminism is something that comes out of life experience. You say what you’ve seen and, hopefully, you keep an open mind that there are things in the world that you haven’t seen and know nothing about. But that’s it. That’s my kind of feminism: the things I notice in my day-to-day life and the things that directly affect me or other people I know go into my general stream of consciousness about feminism and women in society. But I don’t know much about anything beyond that and I don’t feel especially obligated to go and discover it all.
I don’t have strong views on porn for example, or its removal from certain national newspapers (neither do I support it, I should add, it’s just that I generally ignore it and it’s not a part of my life), but, if I see an advert for Spearmint Rhino on the side of a bus shelter right outside a school full of impressionable kids (featuring a woman with her tits out no less) then I see a problem and become worried. I pay little attention to gyrating women in music videos and have no real interest in the impact that they have on younger people, because that’s not part of my consciousness. But if someone points it out to me I’ll think it’s in poor taste, of course. Some people might call me ignorant based on this, but it’s just that these things are not in my sphere of notice; it’s not that I ignore it I just can’t be expected to pay attention to everything. I have a life.
And so, as we all know, thanks to the popular press, does Lily Allen. She has a life, and two children and a busy career and she can’t be expected to pay attention to everything either, she’s just making a point about something she’s seen that has made her angry. She’s expressing an opinion, which we are then allowed to take or leave or argue with/about if we choose to. That’s the whole point. We’re not supposed to criticize her for what some people perceive to be her narrow-mindedness, or lack of broader understanding, or overall thoughtlessness in constructing the video (which, incidentally, probably wasn’t down to her anyway), or . . . well, whatever the hell it is that people have a problem with here. Because how does that help?
The radio show I listened to was asking the question, “Does the video mark a feminist triumph or does it just fall a bit flat?” But I think that’s a stupid question because it’s not up to Lily Allen, solely, to score a feminist point or triumph over the male dominated music industry that makes women look like hookers. It’s up to all of us to change that and it’s up to all of us to have opinions about what we see. So who exactly has been left out here? Everyone whose interested has now seen this video, they’re all talking about it, and they’ve all formed an opinion because, crucially, we are all allowed to say what we think. So it’s opened it up, hasn’t it? What’s the problem?
If black women find the video offensive that’s a valid view and I don’t want to take that away from anybody. But it’s important to realize that it’s not Lily Allen they have to take issue with here, it’s the producers and directors who make the decision to have half-naked and gyrating women in their videos and who, for whatever reason, have not chosen white women to fill those roles. Again that’s a comment on the industry, not an offensive, segregating statement about black women. And it gives all types of women across the world a chance to put their view. If you hate the video and find it offensive then good, that’s the point. If you then say so then great, that’s also the point. You are being given a chance to speak right there.
Really, for me, the feminist sniping and constant bickering about what types of feminism people subscribe to, and what kind of feminists individual people profess to be, really gets me down sometimes, because that’s just in-fighting and it doesn’t help to solve any of the real problems. That’s if the real problems are, in any way, solvable. While we’re all bickering about this shit, there are men standing around with their arms folded laughing at all the ruckus we’re making while, simultaneously, planning to carry on with the age old misogyny and double standards that we’re all saying we want to get rid of. Women everywhere have a voice, if you’ve got something to say stand up and say it but don’t bitch (yes I used the word in a non-offensive sense!) about the fact that other women in other walks of life and other parts of the world are leaving you out, because they’re not, they just don’t know you’re there. Either that or they don’t have the time available to point you out. They expect you to stand up for yourself and join the fight.
Feminism isn’t going to work unless we realize that we are all parts in the machine, no one stands up for everyone, we all have to chip in if we want to get anywhere. We’re all on the same side, right?
Friday, 15 November 2013
Wednesday, 13 November 2013
People Pleasers
I am one. I’ll admit that up front. Try as I have for many years, I still find this to be true about myself. But, hypocritically, when I see this behaviour in other people, I hate it.
Let me explain to you what I think a people pleaser is. It’s someone who, in every situation, tries to ingratiate themselves in really obvious ways: liking the same things you like, going out of their way to find out about all the things you like and then professing a personal interest and even encyclopaedic knowledge of them.
Another thing you might have encountered is people complimenting you on your hairstyle or clothes all the time because they think that, by giving you this small amount of satisfaction in yourself, they are serving a purpose for you and that this will, eventually, lead you to think of them as indispensible.
Or maybe it’s people who offer to do things for you when it’s clear they only want praise from you for doing it. Or people who give you expensive or personalized gifts for your birthday when they hardly know you, just because they really want you to think they’re a nice, thoughtful person, just right to be your friend.
Crawlers, basically. Bootlickers.
I have been one of these people before now and I can only hope that the severity of this has lessened over time. I recognize it as a hateful problem and try not to do it any more, but there are people who don’t see that they have this problem, or ever acknowledge how lonely, sad and desperate for attention they are.
I don’t want to spend the rest of this blog post writing about how much I hate crawlers . . . although I do . . . Instead, I want to try to analyze where this impulse to please other people comes from and why, even when you recognize what you’re doing, it is still impossible to stop.
With me, I think it goes back to childhood. If you come from the kind of family where your mother didn’t love you enough or make you feel secure enough in her love and appreciation of you then you do, automatically, seek out the approval of other people – it’s a natural impulse I think. That, of course, is where the teacher’s pets and school suck-ups come from. They are people who go out of their way to meet the “model student” requirements so that their teachers will like them and, perhaps, simulate the sort of parental love that those students crave. It’s something a lot of kids do. They view their teachers as sort of surrogate parents, or grandparents if they’re really old, and they like the comfort and security of being the good child and having a daily routine. Being presided over by a smiling, appreciative adult is just the icing on the cake there.
When I was a little kid I had a primary school teacher called Mrs. Timbergen. She was kind of old and she had grey hair and, I think, somewhere in my imagination, I equated her with my Granny. She was my favourite teacher and I was this nauseatingly nice child who always tried to be her special little pet . . . Oh, how other people must have hated me! But that’s where it started I think, and I’ve done it ever since. When I was first at university one of my friends actually accused me of being the favoured pet of one of the female lecturers and it was kind of true – I did go out of my way to try to make that woman like me. (I was still trying to make her like me years later when I was a PhD student and she was helping me through the final stages of my terrible thesis. That was about the time I finally snapped and realized I didn’t actually like her!)
So, when I analyzed my own need to please people I realized that, all through my life, I have tried to be this good child and model student, and, weirdly, I realized that I have mainly done this for older, stronger, nicer and more successful females. This only occurred to me very recently after I finished my PhD, having failed to gain it. The problem with my thesis, in the end, was not that it was based on a bad idea, or that I was a particularly bad researcher (although I certainly wasn’t the best), it was just that the argument I had made was solely constructed based on what other people told me they hoped to see in my writing.
This is mistake number one with writing. You should NEVER write what other people want you to; you will only get confused. This is why I now write for myself, as a “selfie”, and have no real inclination to have either an editor or a mainstream publisher breathing down my neck. It seems to me that all those people ever do is tell you that your ideas don’t work and that you should try theirs instead. And, the thing is, if you’re going to write anything that means something to you, you have to stick to your original ideas and NOT be derailed by other people. This was what I learned during my PhD really. I can’t write if I’m around other people because I’m far too susceptible to other people’s opinions and I will, inevitably, try to tailor my words according to what I think will impress them.
If I could give advice to other people, I would say: “Don’t be a people pleaser.” It gets you nowhere and you end up with no personality of your own. Added to which, you don’t actually secure anybody else’s liking or respect by doing it; people just feel sorry for you and laugh at you behind your back. It’s a way to become bitter and not produce anything of your own. (I guess I’m talking about writing and life together here.)
But the real problem for me is that I can’t seem to stop myself, in certain situations, from slipping back into those old teacher’s pet habits. I do it more with my mother than anyone else now. I tell myself, consciously, that I no longer have to do anything for anyone else, and that I no longer have to take any crap from other people; but then someone asks me for something, and I find myself, immediately, starting to think that I have to. Someone says “jump” and my impulse is to ask “how high?”
So I guess I still am really insecure.
There are things I know that I need to do about this, but bringing myself to do it is tricky. Making breaks with things that have screwed me up and are still screwing me up. But there is so much of this process to get through and there is, for all us, I think, a need for other people to give approval. We get frightened about what will happen to us on our own, so we try to keep people sweet so they won’t leave us. The best of us do it. But if you push it too far it really becomes a problem and people just start to see that, aside from the clinging attentiveness and simulated interest in other people’s lives, you really don’t have one of your own.
I suppose the easiest cure for all of this would just be to round up all the people in my life and treat them all to one giant blast of “FUCK OFF!!” before storming off into the sunset . . . But I can’t. The fear of the aftermath always stops me; especially with my mother, because she fucking terrifies me on a very deep and primal level. I’ve mentioned she’s schizophrenic right? If you tip her over the edge, she really GOES over it. The inner child in me will not face up to this and it’s just easier, always, to give her what she wants. The tricky thing about her is that she’s never pleased by anything, so I spend a hell of a lot of time doing things she says she wants and then discovering that she really wanted something else. Nothing I do is good enough, nor ever has been. But, like I said, the inner child keeps hoping.
This is where people pleasers come from then. They need to be liked and, if they are not, after a very long time of trying, they become bitter. . . . I don’t think I’m bitter exactly, except towards my mother, as you might all have gathered. But I’m not really bitter towards other people because I understand that they have real lives and don’t have the time, space and resources to make me feel better about the emptiness in mine. People are nice, usually, but I’ve always felt like kind of a charity case around people who professed to be my friends, and so, now, if I’m being really nice, I tend to just leave them alone. Now I keep away from people and just talk to a handful of old friends on Facebook or Twitter. With these people, I think, I really do have some things in common. Although, again, it may be that I am fooling myself about this. Maybe later I’ll realize that nobody likes me at all for myself because, in fact, there is no real me and just a simulated mish-mash of other people’s influences . . . Oh, incidentally, possible next blog post topic:
What is the self? Does individuality really exist or is it just a delusion that we give ourselves so we don’t have to realize that we’re all just randomly copying each other out of desperation?
. . .
Or not. Maybe that’s a bit heavy? What do you reckon?
I’m kind of interested actually about what people think of this blog. I don’t know if I have regular readers, although I suspect probably not, but if you’ve been reading consistently, or even if you’ve only read a couple of my posts, you might have picked up the running theme of sarcasm, depression, or perhaps out-and-out craziness.
I’m not admitting to any of these things here, nor will I deny them. And I wasn’t going to do this actually, because I thought that maybe it would be better just to write this thing for myself and, possibly, slip in a few plugs for my books (WHICH ARE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON – HA!). But I guess I should probably find out if it’s actually of interest to other people, or whether it’s just making everybody think I’m nuts.
Because, if you think I’m nuts then that’s ok. Sometimes I think the same thing.
And, somehow, this blog has become less about my writing and more about me and my personal problems. Actually, everything I do always DOES become about me and my personal problems, somehow or other . . . So maybe I am a complete mess after all! :-/
This is not me presuming that the rest of the world is going to want to hear my sob story. The most hits I’ve ever had for this blog in a single day was 27. Admittedly that’s better than nothing but it’s hardly the world and its wife, is it? So I’m under no illusions that I’m going to reach people with tales from my sad little life, or that I can make people feel sorry for me. But I am interested as to whether I sound like someone you’d want to keep reading, or whether my insanity is just a bit too much.
Suddenly though, it occurs to me that this might only facilitate my people pleasing problem. Or maybe it would cure it? . . . Oh I don’t know. Just tell me what you think of me and I’ll try not to cry.
Thanks.
Let me explain to you what I think a people pleaser is. It’s someone who, in every situation, tries to ingratiate themselves in really obvious ways: liking the same things you like, going out of their way to find out about all the things you like and then professing a personal interest and even encyclopaedic knowledge of them.
Another thing you might have encountered is people complimenting you on your hairstyle or clothes all the time because they think that, by giving you this small amount of satisfaction in yourself, they are serving a purpose for you and that this will, eventually, lead you to think of them as indispensible.
Or maybe it’s people who offer to do things for you when it’s clear they only want praise from you for doing it. Or people who give you expensive or personalized gifts for your birthday when they hardly know you, just because they really want you to think they’re a nice, thoughtful person, just right to be your friend.
Crawlers, basically. Bootlickers.
I have been one of these people before now and I can only hope that the severity of this has lessened over time. I recognize it as a hateful problem and try not to do it any more, but there are people who don’t see that they have this problem, or ever acknowledge how lonely, sad and desperate for attention they are.
I don’t want to spend the rest of this blog post writing about how much I hate crawlers . . . although I do . . . Instead, I want to try to analyze where this impulse to please other people comes from and why, even when you recognize what you’re doing, it is still impossible to stop.
With me, I think it goes back to childhood. If you come from the kind of family where your mother didn’t love you enough or make you feel secure enough in her love and appreciation of you then you do, automatically, seek out the approval of other people – it’s a natural impulse I think. That, of course, is where the teacher’s pets and school suck-ups come from. They are people who go out of their way to meet the “model student” requirements so that their teachers will like them and, perhaps, simulate the sort of parental love that those students crave. It’s something a lot of kids do. They view their teachers as sort of surrogate parents, or grandparents if they’re really old, and they like the comfort and security of being the good child and having a daily routine. Being presided over by a smiling, appreciative adult is just the icing on the cake there.
When I was a little kid I had a primary school teacher called Mrs. Timbergen. She was kind of old and she had grey hair and, I think, somewhere in my imagination, I equated her with my Granny. She was my favourite teacher and I was this nauseatingly nice child who always tried to be her special little pet . . . Oh, how other people must have hated me! But that’s where it started I think, and I’ve done it ever since. When I was first at university one of my friends actually accused me of being the favoured pet of one of the female lecturers and it was kind of true – I did go out of my way to try to make that woman like me. (I was still trying to make her like me years later when I was a PhD student and she was helping me through the final stages of my terrible thesis. That was about the time I finally snapped and realized I didn’t actually like her!)
So, when I analyzed my own need to please people I realized that, all through my life, I have tried to be this good child and model student, and, weirdly, I realized that I have mainly done this for older, stronger, nicer and more successful females. This only occurred to me very recently after I finished my PhD, having failed to gain it. The problem with my thesis, in the end, was not that it was based on a bad idea, or that I was a particularly bad researcher (although I certainly wasn’t the best), it was just that the argument I had made was solely constructed based on what other people told me they hoped to see in my writing.
This is mistake number one with writing. You should NEVER write what other people want you to; you will only get confused. This is why I now write for myself, as a “selfie”, and have no real inclination to have either an editor or a mainstream publisher breathing down my neck. It seems to me that all those people ever do is tell you that your ideas don’t work and that you should try theirs instead. And, the thing is, if you’re going to write anything that means something to you, you have to stick to your original ideas and NOT be derailed by other people. This was what I learned during my PhD really. I can’t write if I’m around other people because I’m far too susceptible to other people’s opinions and I will, inevitably, try to tailor my words according to what I think will impress them.
If I could give advice to other people, I would say: “Don’t be a people pleaser.” It gets you nowhere and you end up with no personality of your own. Added to which, you don’t actually secure anybody else’s liking or respect by doing it; people just feel sorry for you and laugh at you behind your back. It’s a way to become bitter and not produce anything of your own. (I guess I’m talking about writing and life together here.)
But the real problem for me is that I can’t seem to stop myself, in certain situations, from slipping back into those old teacher’s pet habits. I do it more with my mother than anyone else now. I tell myself, consciously, that I no longer have to do anything for anyone else, and that I no longer have to take any crap from other people; but then someone asks me for something, and I find myself, immediately, starting to think that I have to. Someone says “jump” and my impulse is to ask “how high?”
So I guess I still am really insecure.
There are things I know that I need to do about this, but bringing myself to do it is tricky. Making breaks with things that have screwed me up and are still screwing me up. But there is so much of this process to get through and there is, for all us, I think, a need for other people to give approval. We get frightened about what will happen to us on our own, so we try to keep people sweet so they won’t leave us. The best of us do it. But if you push it too far it really becomes a problem and people just start to see that, aside from the clinging attentiveness and simulated interest in other people’s lives, you really don’t have one of your own.
I suppose the easiest cure for all of this would just be to round up all the people in my life and treat them all to one giant blast of “FUCK OFF!!” before storming off into the sunset . . . But I can’t. The fear of the aftermath always stops me; especially with my mother, because she fucking terrifies me on a very deep and primal level. I’ve mentioned she’s schizophrenic right? If you tip her over the edge, she really GOES over it. The inner child in me will not face up to this and it’s just easier, always, to give her what she wants. The tricky thing about her is that she’s never pleased by anything, so I spend a hell of a lot of time doing things she says she wants and then discovering that she really wanted something else. Nothing I do is good enough, nor ever has been. But, like I said, the inner child keeps hoping.
This is where people pleasers come from then. They need to be liked and, if they are not, after a very long time of trying, they become bitter. . . . I don’t think I’m bitter exactly, except towards my mother, as you might all have gathered. But I’m not really bitter towards other people because I understand that they have real lives and don’t have the time, space and resources to make me feel better about the emptiness in mine. People are nice, usually, but I’ve always felt like kind of a charity case around people who professed to be my friends, and so, now, if I’m being really nice, I tend to just leave them alone. Now I keep away from people and just talk to a handful of old friends on Facebook or Twitter. With these people, I think, I really do have some things in common. Although, again, it may be that I am fooling myself about this. Maybe later I’ll realize that nobody likes me at all for myself because, in fact, there is no real me and just a simulated mish-mash of other people’s influences . . . Oh, incidentally, possible next blog post topic:
What is the self? Does individuality really exist or is it just a delusion that we give ourselves so we don’t have to realize that we’re all just randomly copying each other out of desperation?
. . .
Or not. Maybe that’s a bit heavy? What do you reckon?
I’m kind of interested actually about what people think of this blog. I don’t know if I have regular readers, although I suspect probably not, but if you’ve been reading consistently, or even if you’ve only read a couple of my posts, you might have picked up the running theme of sarcasm, depression, or perhaps out-and-out craziness.
I’m not admitting to any of these things here, nor will I deny them. And I wasn’t going to do this actually, because I thought that maybe it would be better just to write this thing for myself and, possibly, slip in a few plugs for my books (WHICH ARE AVAILABLE ON AMAZON – HA!). But I guess I should probably find out if it’s actually of interest to other people, or whether it’s just making everybody think I’m nuts.
Because, if you think I’m nuts then that’s ok. Sometimes I think the same thing.
And, somehow, this blog has become less about my writing and more about me and my personal problems. Actually, everything I do always DOES become about me and my personal problems, somehow or other . . . So maybe I am a complete mess after all! :-/
This is not me presuming that the rest of the world is going to want to hear my sob story. The most hits I’ve ever had for this blog in a single day was 27. Admittedly that’s better than nothing but it’s hardly the world and its wife, is it? So I’m under no illusions that I’m going to reach people with tales from my sad little life, or that I can make people feel sorry for me. But I am interested as to whether I sound like someone you’d want to keep reading, or whether my insanity is just a bit too much.
Suddenly though, it occurs to me that this might only facilitate my people pleasing problem. Or maybe it would cure it? . . . Oh I don’t know. Just tell me what you think of me and I’ll try not to cry.
Thanks.
Monday, 11 November 2013
The Politics of Being a Kid
When I was a kid I had the sort of set up where my dad lived in one house and I lived in another one with my mum. It was a flat, actually, with my mum . . . we didn’t have a house until much later and that was only when we had to care for my Granny. At one time, these two “homes” were presented to me as places where I would always be welcome and without me having to do anything to earn admittance. But, as I grew up, I realized that this was only an illusion.
If you live, or have lived as part of this type of family, you will know what I mean. It is not something idyllic and amicable, usually, and the feelings of the parents will often get in the way and ruin the child’s illusions completely. This is what happened with me.
My mum was always the one who took care of me, managed all the practical stuff, etc. whereas my dad did none of this. My mum was the one responsible for taking care of me when I was ill, making sure I went to school, making sure I ate properly . . . She wasn’t much good at any of these things, but she did the best she could.
But she was also the one who put on airs and told me to behave like a nice, well brought up young lady. She told me to speak properly and not to associate with what she called “riff-raff”. My mum has a lot of prejudices, whereas my dad has none. My mum hates my dad, I think, for this and many other reasons – she considers him to be part of the riff-raff, and nothing he ever did could change her opinion. He just wasn’t good enough for her, basically.
If you’re reading this, you might already have got the impression that my mother is some kind of high-class snob. But I should set you right on this. She is a snob, but she is not high-class and is actually just as common as my dad. Like I said, she puts on airs.
So, with my mum, I had very little fun and, suffice it to say, really didn’t like her very much. At my dad’s house I was allowed to be a kid. He was a funny man who liked kids and who, by rights, should have been father to a small army of them. He didn’t get the chance though, because he met my mother, who didn’t want children at all and who had me, grudgingly, because people told her that giving away her child would be something she would regret in later life. She didn’t marry my dad and he wouldn’t have wanted to be married to her, especially since, not long after I was born, she went completely mad and was eventually awarded the title of paranoid schizophrenic. She resented me, she said I’d made her ill, and she made me feel guilty because of all that. Neither my dad, nor my mum, had any more children and I suppose this might be evidence of how badly burned they felt by the experience of having me.
It was a difficult situation.
I was brought up by my mother, and I was always told to be loyal to her. She’s the sort of woman who hangs on to her petty, childish jealousies and rivalries, and she expects complete loyalty from other people. She’s a vicious person really, when she wants to be. She wouldn’t countenance me siding with my father in any way and I spent most of my childhood either trying not to say anything good about him at all, or, worse, trying to please my mother by saying something evil about him that I’d heard her say previously.
I wanted to be with my dad though; laughable and worthy of derision as my mother found it, I loved him.
So, this is the thing about being the only child of separated parents, your whole life becomes a political balancing act. Your mother is usually the one you end up being loyal to because it’s usually her who does the looking after. And, in cases like that – certainly in mine – you always have to maintain an image and have a strong policy on the level of preferment you give to each parent. It’s the reverse of parents having more than one child and then having to be even-handed with all of them – you can’t play favourites, someone will complain, and, most likely, it would be my mother doing the lion’s share of the whining.
In dealing with this, you might end up choosing one parent over the other, and then spend the rest of your life regretting it, or, failing that, you have to work a complicated coalition in which you are the lynch-pin and overall peacemaker. There are many types of family and many ways of working this out; maybe some people’s parents are easy going, I don’t know. Mine weren’t. As I said though, you have to decide on a policy early and, whatever you do, you always have to stick to it so that one or other of said parents won’t turn around and complain about your inconsistency. Otherwise it’s a bit like politicians who get into power and then revoke all their political promises. It doesn’t go down well.
I won’t lie, it’s a delicate situation that I never quite learned how to handle. And I love my dad dearly, but I no longer have a relationship with him. My particular situation became precarious some time ago and I had to pledge my loyalty solely to one parent: my increasingly hysterical and semi-senile mother.
True to say, I feel a lot of anger towards my dad, for various reasons, but deep down I can’t forget how much I loved him. He was my whole heart when I was a kid. My mother is now, was then, and probably always will be a selfish, manipulative, nerve-ridden woman with about as much sense of other people’s feelings as a lump of stone. She is only ever concerned with her own interests and cannot comprehend when someone says that they don’t care about her problems. It just never occurs to her that she isn’t the centre of the universe.
I have always put this down to the schizophrenia. Schizophrenic people believe that the world – meaning the people around them – is conspiring to hurt, kill, or otherwise damage them. They often have raging paranoia and a continual distrust of other people, and so, by believing that everyone in the world wants to hurt them, they must also believe that they are the whole focus of attention for other people. If you try to explain that other people do not notice them, or are not remotely interested in their lives, they will not believe you. When my I was a child, and a teenager, my mum constantly used to ask me what my father said about her behind her back and would fail to believe me when I told her that he had, in fact, said nothing. While I accept that many people might recognize this behaviour from their own parents, my mother took it further by believing that my father would actually spy on us, or hire other people to spy on us; she believed that he would do things to ruin her life, or maybe even that he would hurt her if she did not give him access to me. All of which, I can assure you, was based on nothing because my dad doesn’t have money, or power, and he is not a vindictive or cruel man in any way. (I should say that she also developed an extended paranoid delusion that the neighbours were plotting to steel her lawnmower and that the perfectly harmless neighbourhood kids kept looking through her windows during the day as a prelude to a break-in.)
It was difficult with my mother – it’s STILL difficult – and it requires a lot of patience and dutiful-daughter behaviour from me. As a kid, of course, I was entirely dependent on her and I was afraid that she wouldn’t take care of me if I didn’t agree with everything she said. Other people might not have chosen this tactic, and most of you probably don’t have the burden of a mentally ill parent. But that’s not why I’m writing this.
I wanted to write this blog post because it occurs to me that other people, whose parents might have separated at some point, might recognize some of the political shifts and loyalties that I’m describing. I am the only child of two people who met, had a very brief relationship resulting in my mother getting pregnant with a child she did not want, and then decided to split up. Needless to say, I have never lived in a house with both my parents and I have never had a bread-winning, authoritarian father whose job it was to fight my corner when my harridan of a mother started breathing down my neck. My mother was my provider, my father was the shiftless, selfish, self-sufficient man who took me to the beach in the summer holidays and fed me too many sweets when I stayed at his house. He wasn’t interested in my personal problems, or in taking responsibility for me. He only remembered me when he had free time, and he took my clinging adoration of him as some kind of ego-boost – he didn’t realize how much and how badly I needed him. For the most part, he left me with her and she turned me against him.
It’s sad. It makes me sad.
I don’t know what people with proper fathers, and “normal” or stereotypical families, think about their parents, or what kind of ties they have to each of them. I have always assumed that people who have always lived with both their parents under one roof and never known anything except that sort of family life take it for granted that their parents are one unit, “mumndad”, not separate people, Mum . . . and Dad.
The only picture I have of my parents together was taken when I was a baby, probably not long born, and they are sitting so far apart that you could fit two other people in between them. Body language is very telling, I think; so, that’s how I’ve always thought of them – separate, distant, and, if they could possibly avoid it, not even linked by me. There is mum and me, and then there is dad somewhere else, and, much as I love him, I can never have a very close relationship with him because my mother, I have been taught to believe, is the one I need.
Who else feels like this about their parents? I think it must be fairly common for people whose parents are either divorced or separated, whether it happens in early childhood or later life, whether they are only children or not, whether the parents themselves are mentally healthy or not? That situation always requires the kids to pull in one direction or another; it always requires them to have a policy and pick a side.
This is something I wanted to write for all the kids out there who have felt that they are walking a tightrope and living only to please other people. This is for the kids who have grown up having to toe a line for one parent, while, simultaneously, cutting the other one out of their lives.
I was an angry kid and I am an even angrier adult. Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage . . . Ok, I know, this is no time to steal song lyrics, but, what the hell, it fits! Living with that situation for so many years makes you angry. It twists you up. And it never leaves you.
I’ve lost my dad because of my mum. I can’t ever get him back, and she’s so far gone into schizophrenic La La Land that she doesn’t even see that that’s happened, or that it’s got anything to do with her. She still asks me if I’ve seen him, as if we’re back in the old days and she thinks I see him all the time. Like I said, she’s self-absorbed and semi-senile and she doesn’t see that other people have feelings or that she might affect those feelings in any way just by being herself. She doesn’t think she’s ruined anything.
Other people might be luckier than me, because maybe their parents get to see, eventually, that they have torn their children in two, and maybe they apologize for it. But so many people don’t ever see. I’ll never be able to make my mother see. And that’s why I think it’s so hard to be a kid. You have to be tough to survive something like this, you have to grow up quick and grow up clever. Most people just want their parents to grow up as well. That’s all I ever wanted for mine.
If you live, or have lived as part of this type of family, you will know what I mean. It is not something idyllic and amicable, usually, and the feelings of the parents will often get in the way and ruin the child’s illusions completely. This is what happened with me.
My mum was always the one who took care of me, managed all the practical stuff, etc. whereas my dad did none of this. My mum was the one responsible for taking care of me when I was ill, making sure I went to school, making sure I ate properly . . . She wasn’t much good at any of these things, but she did the best she could.
But she was also the one who put on airs and told me to behave like a nice, well brought up young lady. She told me to speak properly and not to associate with what she called “riff-raff”. My mum has a lot of prejudices, whereas my dad has none. My mum hates my dad, I think, for this and many other reasons – she considers him to be part of the riff-raff, and nothing he ever did could change her opinion. He just wasn’t good enough for her, basically.
If you’re reading this, you might already have got the impression that my mother is some kind of high-class snob. But I should set you right on this. She is a snob, but she is not high-class and is actually just as common as my dad. Like I said, she puts on airs.
So, with my mum, I had very little fun and, suffice it to say, really didn’t like her very much. At my dad’s house I was allowed to be a kid. He was a funny man who liked kids and who, by rights, should have been father to a small army of them. He didn’t get the chance though, because he met my mother, who didn’t want children at all and who had me, grudgingly, because people told her that giving away her child would be something she would regret in later life. She didn’t marry my dad and he wouldn’t have wanted to be married to her, especially since, not long after I was born, she went completely mad and was eventually awarded the title of paranoid schizophrenic. She resented me, she said I’d made her ill, and she made me feel guilty because of all that. Neither my dad, nor my mum, had any more children and I suppose this might be evidence of how badly burned they felt by the experience of having me.
It was a difficult situation.
I was brought up by my mother, and I was always told to be loyal to her. She’s the sort of woman who hangs on to her petty, childish jealousies and rivalries, and she expects complete loyalty from other people. She’s a vicious person really, when she wants to be. She wouldn’t countenance me siding with my father in any way and I spent most of my childhood either trying not to say anything good about him at all, or, worse, trying to please my mother by saying something evil about him that I’d heard her say previously.
I wanted to be with my dad though; laughable and worthy of derision as my mother found it, I loved him.
So, this is the thing about being the only child of separated parents, your whole life becomes a political balancing act. Your mother is usually the one you end up being loyal to because it’s usually her who does the looking after. And, in cases like that – certainly in mine – you always have to maintain an image and have a strong policy on the level of preferment you give to each parent. It’s the reverse of parents having more than one child and then having to be even-handed with all of them – you can’t play favourites, someone will complain, and, most likely, it would be my mother doing the lion’s share of the whining.
In dealing with this, you might end up choosing one parent over the other, and then spend the rest of your life regretting it, or, failing that, you have to work a complicated coalition in which you are the lynch-pin and overall peacemaker. There are many types of family and many ways of working this out; maybe some people’s parents are easy going, I don’t know. Mine weren’t. As I said though, you have to decide on a policy early and, whatever you do, you always have to stick to it so that one or other of said parents won’t turn around and complain about your inconsistency. Otherwise it’s a bit like politicians who get into power and then revoke all their political promises. It doesn’t go down well.
I won’t lie, it’s a delicate situation that I never quite learned how to handle. And I love my dad dearly, but I no longer have a relationship with him. My particular situation became precarious some time ago and I had to pledge my loyalty solely to one parent: my increasingly hysterical and semi-senile mother.
True to say, I feel a lot of anger towards my dad, for various reasons, but deep down I can’t forget how much I loved him. He was my whole heart when I was a kid. My mother is now, was then, and probably always will be a selfish, manipulative, nerve-ridden woman with about as much sense of other people’s feelings as a lump of stone. She is only ever concerned with her own interests and cannot comprehend when someone says that they don’t care about her problems. It just never occurs to her that she isn’t the centre of the universe.
I have always put this down to the schizophrenia. Schizophrenic people believe that the world – meaning the people around them – is conspiring to hurt, kill, or otherwise damage them. They often have raging paranoia and a continual distrust of other people, and so, by believing that everyone in the world wants to hurt them, they must also believe that they are the whole focus of attention for other people. If you try to explain that other people do not notice them, or are not remotely interested in their lives, they will not believe you. When my I was a child, and a teenager, my mum constantly used to ask me what my father said about her behind her back and would fail to believe me when I told her that he had, in fact, said nothing. While I accept that many people might recognize this behaviour from their own parents, my mother took it further by believing that my father would actually spy on us, or hire other people to spy on us; she believed that he would do things to ruin her life, or maybe even that he would hurt her if she did not give him access to me. All of which, I can assure you, was based on nothing because my dad doesn’t have money, or power, and he is not a vindictive or cruel man in any way. (I should say that she also developed an extended paranoid delusion that the neighbours were plotting to steel her lawnmower and that the perfectly harmless neighbourhood kids kept looking through her windows during the day as a prelude to a break-in.)
It was difficult with my mother – it’s STILL difficult – and it requires a lot of patience and dutiful-daughter behaviour from me. As a kid, of course, I was entirely dependent on her and I was afraid that she wouldn’t take care of me if I didn’t agree with everything she said. Other people might not have chosen this tactic, and most of you probably don’t have the burden of a mentally ill parent. But that’s not why I’m writing this.
I wanted to write this blog post because it occurs to me that other people, whose parents might have separated at some point, might recognize some of the political shifts and loyalties that I’m describing. I am the only child of two people who met, had a very brief relationship resulting in my mother getting pregnant with a child she did not want, and then decided to split up. Needless to say, I have never lived in a house with both my parents and I have never had a bread-winning, authoritarian father whose job it was to fight my corner when my harridan of a mother started breathing down my neck. My mother was my provider, my father was the shiftless, selfish, self-sufficient man who took me to the beach in the summer holidays and fed me too many sweets when I stayed at his house. He wasn’t interested in my personal problems, or in taking responsibility for me. He only remembered me when he had free time, and he took my clinging adoration of him as some kind of ego-boost – he didn’t realize how much and how badly I needed him. For the most part, he left me with her and she turned me against him.
It’s sad. It makes me sad.
I don’t know what people with proper fathers, and “normal” or stereotypical families, think about their parents, or what kind of ties they have to each of them. I have always assumed that people who have always lived with both their parents under one roof and never known anything except that sort of family life take it for granted that their parents are one unit, “mumndad”, not separate people, Mum . . . and Dad.
The only picture I have of my parents together was taken when I was a baby, probably not long born, and they are sitting so far apart that you could fit two other people in between them. Body language is very telling, I think; so, that’s how I’ve always thought of them – separate, distant, and, if they could possibly avoid it, not even linked by me. There is mum and me, and then there is dad somewhere else, and, much as I love him, I can never have a very close relationship with him because my mother, I have been taught to believe, is the one I need.
Who else feels like this about their parents? I think it must be fairly common for people whose parents are either divorced or separated, whether it happens in early childhood or later life, whether they are only children or not, whether the parents themselves are mentally healthy or not? That situation always requires the kids to pull in one direction or another; it always requires them to have a policy and pick a side.
This is something I wanted to write for all the kids out there who have felt that they are walking a tightrope and living only to please other people. This is for the kids who have grown up having to toe a line for one parent, while, simultaneously, cutting the other one out of their lives.
I was an angry kid and I am an even angrier adult. Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage . . . Ok, I know, this is no time to steal song lyrics, but, what the hell, it fits! Living with that situation for so many years makes you angry. It twists you up. And it never leaves you.
I’ve lost my dad because of my mum. I can’t ever get him back, and she’s so far gone into schizophrenic La La Land that she doesn’t even see that that’s happened, or that it’s got anything to do with her. She still asks me if I’ve seen him, as if we’re back in the old days and she thinks I see him all the time. Like I said, she’s self-absorbed and semi-senile and she doesn’t see that other people have feelings or that she might affect those feelings in any way just by being herself. She doesn’t think she’s ruined anything.
Other people might be luckier than me, because maybe their parents get to see, eventually, that they have torn their children in two, and maybe they apologize for it. But so many people don’t ever see. I’ll never be able to make my mother see. And that’s why I think it’s so hard to be a kid. You have to be tough to survive something like this, you have to grow up quick and grow up clever. Most people just want their parents to grow up as well. That’s all I ever wanted for mine.
Wednesday, 6 November 2013
Writing and Image
I have a good grounding in women’s writing and in feminism. I did an MA in Contemporary Women’s Writing and a PhD on Iris Murdoch (which I never finished . . . :-/). I have also mixed with a lot of feminist writers/bloggers/people in general and I have heard countless arguments and counterarguments about the female inferiority complex in the literary world.
There is a theory that women writers, either in defining themselves as women writers or simply as defining themselves on a lower level than “serious” men who write “serious” fiction. There is also a theory that women writers tend to play down their own status as writers, or cover up their gender in order to get people to read their work. Case in point, J.K. Rowling, who was famously told that she should use her initials instead of her name in order to secure a broader range of readers – male readers and boys being statistically less likely to read a book by a woman, thereby, as we can now see with the benefit of hindsight, depriving themselves of one of the best series of books in the history of literature.
Rowling has since received a bit of a backlash in feminist quarters for bowing to this command and I know several women in the literary/academic world who get quite hot-headed on the subject of women who sell out and try to make themselves fit in with misogynistic literary trends.
It’s an old argument; it’s been kicking around for a while and I’m only writing about it now really, because it keeps coming up in discussions – either with people I actually talk to, or just whenever I turn on the radio. There seems, always, to be somebody talking about it.
I had rather lost interest in the subject actually, until I noticed that, even though everyone seems to know about this problem, it has not gone away. I got out of my PhD a few months ago and have since junked most of the stuff I had that related to feminism or women’s writing. But I still remember it all and it seems that it’s still relevant to me because I, also, chose to use my initials when I self-published my work.
Nobody has accused me of inferiority complexes as yet, and it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that this was how it might be construed. But I thought about it more when I heard the old argument again on the radio – on a regular feminist/women oriented program that is on during the week in the UK – and, looking at my online pages. It seemed to me, then, that I had created a kind of writerly persona for myself online that might, to some, seem a little bit pretentious and maybe a bit aloof.
This was conscious in one way and not in another. And it’s not something I’m going to apologize for. I’m writing this, I suppose, to straighten out for myself, and anyone else who might be interested, the fact that I do not feel ashamed, as a woman, to write what I write, and neither do I write what I write because I am a woman. (If that makes sense?!) I don’t see that my writing is what it is because of my gender and I don’t think that the gender of the author is relevant when you look at the work they produce, (I mean, unless they conform very obviously and openly to a gender stereotype like, you know, Barbara Cartland, Andy McNab, Norman Mailer . . .). The reason I chose initials, rather than just using my name, was nothing to do with wanting to cover up my gender, it was just that I could not, for some strange reason, imagine using my own, ordinary, hum-drum name in conjunction with a piece of fiction. You can call that inferiority, if you like, but it has nothing to do with gender and it’s not in comparison with anybody else. It’s just that my name didn’t look like a writer’s name. Or it didn’t before anyway.
I was going to use a pen-name actually. I had one all picked out – Elizabeth Beaumont – because I thought that that would sound better. Maybe if I write something wildly different in future, or if I get an actual publishing deal, I can make use of that pen-name. But for now, I use initials.
And I know, for a fact, that this is something that other writers have done. A lot of my work at university was concerned with mid-twentieth century British writers, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, people like that; I’m very familiar with the kind of old-school, staid British novelist who just tried to write quite good novels that would provide light entertainment. They were only interested in doing it because it was a kind of highbrow amusement that might, in some circles, be appreciated as an art form. It had nothing to do with image, or money, or trying to get famous.
One of the things that A.S. Byatt always says about her own choices as a writer, was that she opted for initials because it gave her a more serious sounding presence as an author; it was just what people (men AND women) did before feminism came along and mucked it all up by questioning the gender politics of everything. Because then writing was a craft, practiced by quiet, usually fairly studious people who had no expectation that the media would pay them any attention whatsoever; the publishing world was not tainted by a million and one genres and subgenres that have now sprung up in response to who wrote the books, what political standpoints they take, and who or what they were copying when they constructed their work.
Now it’s all about image. The writing world used to be considered to be male, that’s true, but it could also be androgynous, and people, in the main, just believed that writing should speak for itself. Now everyone seems to believe that it has to advertise something. Women’s writing has to be female identified, men’s writing is expected to be masculine and feature spies or police or action heroes. If men write “women’s books” that’s ok, but then that’s another sub-genre in itself and has to be identified as such. If a woman writes a spy thriller then that’s probably another category as well.
My point is that we’re all so hung up now on getting writers to say what they stand for and bawling them out if they look like they’re avoiding something. So if J.K. Rowling didn’t want to be obviously female by publishing as “Joanne Rowling” then that’s bad because, apparently, she’s let down a lot of other women writers who do use their full names and who then have to continue struggling against a maintained prejudice. Somehow people always want to point the finger at people who let the side down while they go about the individual process of bucking a trend. But can’t it just be that people write what they write and do what they do because that’s what suits them?
I don’t like genres any more, or categories that go beyond the basic – crime, thriller etc. – because I think that, in this day and age, we’ve kind of moved beyond the need for them. Now we’re moving into an age of writing where everything can morph and mutate into new, pastiched, or, as I sometimes think of them, cut-and-shut forms; where everything can be patched and stitched together, with scraps from different books coming to make something else.
It’s not new exactly, because it’s all recycled and given a new twist. But it does spell the beginning of an age where people can write whatever the hell they like, basically, and where anything can mean anything and be made to be anything, and people will always be able to find a medium for it.
Because it’s all opening up now. Social media is opening up people’s ability to publish anything, to collaborate on anything, to make new things out of old stories and have the ability to re-write and overwrite and get feedback on what they write. Nothing is fixed any more. So how can we have genres?
When I wrote my first novel, “Jewel”, I tried to define it as a bit like Terry Pratchett and a bit like Gormenghast, and it is . . . sort of. Or at least it was going to be when I was writing it – it was going to be like a lot of things to be honest. But that was as much as I could come up with to describe it, genre wise. Because it’s that sort of fantasy . . . the kind of undefinable fantasy that is set in another world, a lot like our own, but not quite, and it features fairy tale princesses and all that. But it’s not sci-fi. There’s no magic, there’s no aliens, there’s no turtle with a giant flat disc on its back. It’s not THAT sort of fantasy. And it’s not, as I said, gendered in any particular way, because, although it has princesses in it and has some pretty heavy references to feminism, it’s not really a fairy-tale or a didactic feminist utopia/dystopia. I think it has just as much male content as female. So what is it? I don’t know, exactly, it’s just broadly fantasy.
And that’s kind of the way of things now, unless you want to write to a fixed format, which a lot of people don’t, then it’s hard to define who and what you are as a writer, or what your books are in terms of content. I think that soon, if we are going to continue to try to define things, we are going to have to accept that there is a genre for just about every individual writer – because nobody does exactly the same thing as anybody else now do they? The only thing most books have got in common is the fact that they ARE books.
And I don’t know what I do want my books to be defined as, actually; I always supposed that I could leave that up to my readers. Let them decide what they think it is. I reckon that’s what Terry Pratchett did with his Discworld books; he’s said countless times that he often finds his books shelved in different parts of the book shops he goes into, and, as far as I know, he never really argues one way or the other. I’m ok to let people think what they like, but I do, actually, really hope that people don’t try to work out MY standpoint on women based on the persona I’ve chosen for myself as a writer or the books that I write.
NB. That’s not inferiority or some feminist move to get you to see me as androgynous, it’s just a little piece of individualized vanity, I think. I’m of the same mind as A.S. Byatt. For me, initials sound better. That’s all.
There is a theory that women writers, either in defining themselves as women writers or simply as defining themselves on a lower level than “serious” men who write “serious” fiction. There is also a theory that women writers tend to play down their own status as writers, or cover up their gender in order to get people to read their work. Case in point, J.K. Rowling, who was famously told that she should use her initials instead of her name in order to secure a broader range of readers – male readers and boys being statistically less likely to read a book by a woman, thereby, as we can now see with the benefit of hindsight, depriving themselves of one of the best series of books in the history of literature.
Rowling has since received a bit of a backlash in feminist quarters for bowing to this command and I know several women in the literary/academic world who get quite hot-headed on the subject of women who sell out and try to make themselves fit in with misogynistic literary trends.
It’s an old argument; it’s been kicking around for a while and I’m only writing about it now really, because it keeps coming up in discussions – either with people I actually talk to, or just whenever I turn on the radio. There seems, always, to be somebody talking about it.
I had rather lost interest in the subject actually, until I noticed that, even though everyone seems to know about this problem, it has not gone away. I got out of my PhD a few months ago and have since junked most of the stuff I had that related to feminism or women’s writing. But I still remember it all and it seems that it’s still relevant to me because I, also, chose to use my initials when I self-published my work.
Nobody has accused me of inferiority complexes as yet, and it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that this was how it might be construed. But I thought about it more when I heard the old argument again on the radio – on a regular feminist/women oriented program that is on during the week in the UK – and, looking at my online pages. It seemed to me, then, that I had created a kind of writerly persona for myself online that might, to some, seem a little bit pretentious and maybe a bit aloof.
This was conscious in one way and not in another. And it’s not something I’m going to apologize for. I’m writing this, I suppose, to straighten out for myself, and anyone else who might be interested, the fact that I do not feel ashamed, as a woman, to write what I write, and neither do I write what I write because I am a woman. (If that makes sense?!) I don’t see that my writing is what it is because of my gender and I don’t think that the gender of the author is relevant when you look at the work they produce, (I mean, unless they conform very obviously and openly to a gender stereotype like, you know, Barbara Cartland, Andy McNab, Norman Mailer . . .). The reason I chose initials, rather than just using my name, was nothing to do with wanting to cover up my gender, it was just that I could not, for some strange reason, imagine using my own, ordinary, hum-drum name in conjunction with a piece of fiction. You can call that inferiority, if you like, but it has nothing to do with gender and it’s not in comparison with anybody else. It’s just that my name didn’t look like a writer’s name. Or it didn’t before anyway.
I was going to use a pen-name actually. I had one all picked out – Elizabeth Beaumont – because I thought that that would sound better. Maybe if I write something wildly different in future, or if I get an actual publishing deal, I can make use of that pen-name. But for now, I use initials.
And I know, for a fact, that this is something that other writers have done. A lot of my work at university was concerned with mid-twentieth century British writers, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, people like that; I’m very familiar with the kind of old-school, staid British novelist who just tried to write quite good novels that would provide light entertainment. They were only interested in doing it because it was a kind of highbrow amusement that might, in some circles, be appreciated as an art form. It had nothing to do with image, or money, or trying to get famous.
One of the things that A.S. Byatt always says about her own choices as a writer, was that she opted for initials because it gave her a more serious sounding presence as an author; it was just what people (men AND women) did before feminism came along and mucked it all up by questioning the gender politics of everything. Because then writing was a craft, practiced by quiet, usually fairly studious people who had no expectation that the media would pay them any attention whatsoever; the publishing world was not tainted by a million and one genres and subgenres that have now sprung up in response to who wrote the books, what political standpoints they take, and who or what they were copying when they constructed their work.
Now it’s all about image. The writing world used to be considered to be male, that’s true, but it could also be androgynous, and people, in the main, just believed that writing should speak for itself. Now everyone seems to believe that it has to advertise something. Women’s writing has to be female identified, men’s writing is expected to be masculine and feature spies or police or action heroes. If men write “women’s books” that’s ok, but then that’s another sub-genre in itself and has to be identified as such. If a woman writes a spy thriller then that’s probably another category as well.
My point is that we’re all so hung up now on getting writers to say what they stand for and bawling them out if they look like they’re avoiding something. So if J.K. Rowling didn’t want to be obviously female by publishing as “Joanne Rowling” then that’s bad because, apparently, she’s let down a lot of other women writers who do use their full names and who then have to continue struggling against a maintained prejudice. Somehow people always want to point the finger at people who let the side down while they go about the individual process of bucking a trend. But can’t it just be that people write what they write and do what they do because that’s what suits them?
I don’t like genres any more, or categories that go beyond the basic – crime, thriller etc. – because I think that, in this day and age, we’ve kind of moved beyond the need for them. Now we’re moving into an age of writing where everything can morph and mutate into new, pastiched, or, as I sometimes think of them, cut-and-shut forms; where everything can be patched and stitched together, with scraps from different books coming to make something else.
It’s not new exactly, because it’s all recycled and given a new twist. But it does spell the beginning of an age where people can write whatever the hell they like, basically, and where anything can mean anything and be made to be anything, and people will always be able to find a medium for it.
Because it’s all opening up now. Social media is opening up people’s ability to publish anything, to collaborate on anything, to make new things out of old stories and have the ability to re-write and overwrite and get feedback on what they write. Nothing is fixed any more. So how can we have genres?
When I wrote my first novel, “Jewel”, I tried to define it as a bit like Terry Pratchett and a bit like Gormenghast, and it is . . . sort of. Or at least it was going to be when I was writing it – it was going to be like a lot of things to be honest. But that was as much as I could come up with to describe it, genre wise. Because it’s that sort of fantasy . . . the kind of undefinable fantasy that is set in another world, a lot like our own, but not quite, and it features fairy tale princesses and all that. But it’s not sci-fi. There’s no magic, there’s no aliens, there’s no turtle with a giant flat disc on its back. It’s not THAT sort of fantasy. And it’s not, as I said, gendered in any particular way, because, although it has princesses in it and has some pretty heavy references to feminism, it’s not really a fairy-tale or a didactic feminist utopia/dystopia. I think it has just as much male content as female. So what is it? I don’t know, exactly, it’s just broadly fantasy.
And that’s kind of the way of things now, unless you want to write to a fixed format, which a lot of people don’t, then it’s hard to define who and what you are as a writer, or what your books are in terms of content. I think that soon, if we are going to continue to try to define things, we are going to have to accept that there is a genre for just about every individual writer – because nobody does exactly the same thing as anybody else now do they? The only thing most books have got in common is the fact that they ARE books.
And I don’t know what I do want my books to be defined as, actually; I always supposed that I could leave that up to my readers. Let them decide what they think it is. I reckon that’s what Terry Pratchett did with his Discworld books; he’s said countless times that he often finds his books shelved in different parts of the book shops he goes into, and, as far as I know, he never really argues one way or the other. I’m ok to let people think what they like, but I do, actually, really hope that people don’t try to work out MY standpoint on women based on the persona I’ve chosen for myself as a writer or the books that I write.
NB. That’s not inferiority or some feminist move to get you to see me as androgynous, it’s just a little piece of individualized vanity, I think. I’m of the same mind as A.S. Byatt. For me, initials sound better. That’s all.
Sunday, 3 November 2013
Writing
Writing is bloody hard. It’s kind of like giving birth, I think, but the birth canal runs from your head to your fingertips. It’s easy enough to do it when you’re not thinking about it, because then your body just takes over mechanically and your hands just type the words that are in your head.
When that happens it’s like speaking or breathing and it’s effortless.
But when that doesn’t happen, and you stop and think in between sentences and realize just how grindingly hard it is to churn them out, then it becomes painful.
There are days when I cannot stop writing and there are days when I cannot force myself to sit at my computer for more than a couple of minutes without feeling like all my limbs are itching to move. Sometimes I’ll shut out the world, happily, so I can focus on my work and other times I’ll find just about any excuse to get away from it. And those sorts of days can happen back to back. I’ll have one really good day where I get lots done and then a day when I just can’t bring myself to look at it.
I know what everyone says about needing a rest period. But what can I say? I’m a workaholic – have been ever since I did my PhD – and I like to throw myself into things so I won’t realize just how boring my ordinary hum-drum life is. Writing is my thing now. I do it so I won’t have to live in the real world with everyone else. If I have a day off from it, it really grinds along so that I feel like I’ve just wasted my time.
But the truth is that it’s just not possible to be creative all the time, and even less possible to do it on demand. It’s tricky, you’ve got to want to do it. And it’s got to be natural, or it won’t be any good. It’s like being hungry or wanting to have sex or something; it’s an urge. It doesn’t happen at prescribed times, it just happens. And then it goes away for a while and comes back.
But this was not what I wanted to write about. What I really wanted to talk about was that feeling I get when I can’t write. As if I’m trying to squeeze something out of myself that just doesn’t want to go – blood out of a stone, all that sort of stuff. It feels like a shutter has slammed in my head and I just can’t think. Or it might be that I just have too many ideas in my head all at once and I can’t sort them out properly.
Sometimes I do just get deluged by things that go whizzing through my head and there’s so much of it that I just know if I sit down to write it all down I’ll be there for hours, possibly all day, and that fear that comes with the prospect of commitment – you know the thing where you know you’re signing yourself up for a headache and, as soon as you touch the keyboard, you just know that you can’t face it – that comes upon me and then, unless I really force myself to take the plunge and wade in, I just can’t do it.
Writing is a weird thing. It’s sometimes like you hit the pain barrier before you even start and you have to push through a wall and just keep going so that you don’t notice what a great gargantuan effort you’ve just made. Once you’re on a roll it’s fine, away you go. But it’s that first sentence, that first paragraph, that first bit that gets you going – that’s what’s hard.
The trick is to keep going. That’s what I think. Just start. Start with anything. And then write what’s in your head. Talk to yourself in your head, imagine a scene, and say what you see. Write it all down, as much as you can.
And don’t stop until it’s done. Just keep on going.
And going . . .
And going . . .
That’s all I’ve done here. And I’m stopping . . .
Now.
When that happens it’s like speaking or breathing and it’s effortless.
But when that doesn’t happen, and you stop and think in between sentences and realize just how grindingly hard it is to churn them out, then it becomes painful.
There are days when I cannot stop writing and there are days when I cannot force myself to sit at my computer for more than a couple of minutes without feeling like all my limbs are itching to move. Sometimes I’ll shut out the world, happily, so I can focus on my work and other times I’ll find just about any excuse to get away from it. And those sorts of days can happen back to back. I’ll have one really good day where I get lots done and then a day when I just can’t bring myself to look at it.
I know what everyone says about needing a rest period. But what can I say? I’m a workaholic – have been ever since I did my PhD – and I like to throw myself into things so I won’t realize just how boring my ordinary hum-drum life is. Writing is my thing now. I do it so I won’t have to live in the real world with everyone else. If I have a day off from it, it really grinds along so that I feel like I’ve just wasted my time.
But the truth is that it’s just not possible to be creative all the time, and even less possible to do it on demand. It’s tricky, you’ve got to want to do it. And it’s got to be natural, or it won’t be any good. It’s like being hungry or wanting to have sex or something; it’s an urge. It doesn’t happen at prescribed times, it just happens. And then it goes away for a while and comes back.
But this was not what I wanted to write about. What I really wanted to talk about was that feeling I get when I can’t write. As if I’m trying to squeeze something out of myself that just doesn’t want to go – blood out of a stone, all that sort of stuff. It feels like a shutter has slammed in my head and I just can’t think. Or it might be that I just have too many ideas in my head all at once and I can’t sort them out properly.
Sometimes I do just get deluged by things that go whizzing through my head and there’s so much of it that I just know if I sit down to write it all down I’ll be there for hours, possibly all day, and that fear that comes with the prospect of commitment – you know the thing where you know you’re signing yourself up for a headache and, as soon as you touch the keyboard, you just know that you can’t face it – that comes upon me and then, unless I really force myself to take the plunge and wade in, I just can’t do it.
Writing is a weird thing. It’s sometimes like you hit the pain barrier before you even start and you have to push through a wall and just keep going so that you don’t notice what a great gargantuan effort you’ve just made. Once you’re on a roll it’s fine, away you go. But it’s that first sentence, that first paragraph, that first bit that gets you going – that’s what’s hard.
The trick is to keep going. That’s what I think. Just start. Start with anything. And then write what’s in your head. Talk to yourself in your head, imagine a scene, and say what you see. Write it all down, as much as you can.
And don’t stop until it’s done. Just keep on going.
And going . . .
And going . . .
That’s all I’ve done here. And I’m stopping . . .
Now.
Friday, 1 November 2013
Anorexia
I wasn’t going to write about this, because I think that I’ve whined about it to rather a lot of people already.
But I saw something in the news that got me riled up about it again. So here goes . . .
There was an article in my online news stream about a woman who now works as a plus size model, but who was previously told that she was too fat to work despite having previously dropped to a size zero as a result of anorexia. The story is probably not an original one, but it angered me anyway. The woman detailed how she would live on one apple a day and described how she became very thin and very depressed, to the degree where she hated herself completely.
And this woman’s story really got to me because I just thought, with genuine sympathy: “Ooh, this must have been hard!” Because, unless you’ve actually tried it, I don’t think you’ll necessarily realize just how physically painful starving yourself is. I know what that’s like, because I have done it. I have been anorexic. In fact I have suffered from all manner of eating disorders at various points in my life – it just depends what I’ve convinced myself of at any particular time – and I still don’t have a particularly normal attitude to food even now. I struggle with it and it stays with me no matter what I do. And it is actually a problem.
But the biggest problem, I suppose is that I hate my body whether it is fat or thin.
When I was at my most skinny I was relatively pleased with being able to fit into child-sized clothes, but that was all the enjoyment I got out of it. I could never really enjoy being thinner and lighter than I had been before because I was always so obsessed with not putting on weight again. I used to tell myself, in quite a commanding, fear-inspiring voice, that I couldn’t eat a particular thing because it would make me fat and that would be like the worst thing in the world (worse than death). Sometimes it would just be specific foods and then, when it got really bad, I was telling myself, literally, to stop eating. I really didn’t eat much of anything for several years during my twenties and I think I was, at one point, living on boiled carrots and apples . . . oh, and beetroot. (Don’t ask!) But at that point I was also suicidal, either because I wasn’t eating properly or because I couldn’t bring myself to, or just because life was really bad at that time, and the starvation was no longer just about being thin but actually killing myself.
I did a real number on myself basically. It started as a self-improvement thing and then it just became a great big downward spiral into self-destruction. By the end I really wanted to die and starvation seemed to be the quickest and easiest route – I was already halfway there anyway and I was used to the pain. Slitting my wrists would hurt more because it would be new pain that I would not be used to. That was my logic. But I reached breaking point and my body just wouldn’t let me do it to myself any more.
As I said though, the anorexia was only one phase of my eating disorders; I have also had phases of binge eating (this followed directly on from the anorexia I think – I would eat breakfast cereal by the box load when I was first “recovering”, it wasn’t pretty) bulimia (which interspersed the anorexia and, I think, carried over when I started the bingeing), crazy diets that involve eating only one kind of food, drastic exercise regimes that saw me vacuuming the whole house and moving out all the furniture before I would allow myself a tin of peaches and some apple juice for breakfast, and so on and so on.
I have been on some kind of diet since I was a teenager and I have been made to feel self-conscious about my weight since way before that. I don’t want to blame my mother entirely, because there were a lot of other people who contributed to this. But I think it started with her because she fed me all the junk food in the world to make up for all the insecurities I had as a child (of which there were many) and I suppose she thought, in the immediate stage, that this would make me feel better. The problem with this was that she then contradicted the act of giving me the junk food by complaining that I was getting too fat and then rapidly removing it and forcing me to live on salad. I ate what she gave me but she was always telling me I was eating the wrong thing and that this was somehow my fault and not hers. So I got a complex. I became confused about food – what was right and wrong, what should I eat or not eat, whose opinion should I listen to? Because I was never told to follow my own instincts or listen to my own body, I was always led to assume that it was up to other people to dictate to me what I should eat but, crucially, if they got it wrong and I ended up getting fat or sick, I could not blame them because it was my body and my choice.
So then, later, I got a complex about my weight because my mother told me I was too fat and the other kids at school told me I was too fat, and I started to get the message that this was unacceptable. All through my life, really, I have been given that same message, that the main reason I was so unacceptable to other people was because I was fat, and that my life would be so much better if I just got thinner and fitted in with all the other normal-sized, pretty people.
I’m not going to lie, there was a certain logic to this. Confidence does a lot for you and being thin to the point where you finally believe you look like everyone else gives you a lot of confidence. The trouble was that, in order for me to do this, I had to become very very abnormal in the way I ate and the way I behaved. Eating disorders are really quite antisocial things to have because you can’t eat most of the food that other people eat in public and, if you do, you usually have some totally abnormal and really quite disgusting way of doing it. The bingeing thing is probably the most common one that you will see in public; people who stuff themselves full of food at the table and then excuse themselves and run to the bathroom to throw up, or worse. But, I mean, I went through some pretty horrendous phases with mine; eating vegetables in great raw lumps, like a savage when I was starving – usually in front of a mirror so that I could verbally abuse myself while I did it – and then taking laxatives to get rid of it all a.s.a.p. It’s mad! And it’s not something that you can do with people around because they would easily, and rightly, call you mad and think you were some disgusting freak.
I know that these things are not normal. But, here is the problem as I see it: I can’t lose weight by eating like a normal person. I’ve tried. Every time I try to eat a healthy, balanced diet, for whatever reason, my body fights me on it every step of the way and ends up ballooning to the size of . . . well, a hot air balloon. I know nobody gives much credence to food intolerances any more, but I am convinced that my body just will not process certain kinds of food – bread, pasta, cheese, that sort of thing – and that I have to cut them out if I’m going to have a hope of keeping off all the weight.
Basically then, I ruined my relationship to food entirely when I became anorexic because I only allowed myself what I called “functional” food – stuff that I thought would do something for my body, or go through my body quickly and make me lose more weight. Most of what I did eat was pretty horrible, a lot of it was hard to eat and my digestive system did not thank me. But you will eat anything when you’re starving. Nevertheless, after a few months of doing this I just gave up and stopped eating completely.
Like I said, it was a long and complicated process. But the interesting thing about that time was how angry and embittered I became. It wasn’t just anger at myself, but anger at the world as well. Because people didn’t notice what was happening to me – well, my mum did, of course, but no one else. All the other people I knew – if they saw me at all – just told me how good I was looking, commenting on how much better I appeared to be now that I had grown up and stopped being the scowling fat freak that they used to know. I had something of a reputation as a teenager for being moody and overweight and people still remember this about me and laugh as though it’s hilariously funny. But they never thought to ask why I was like that; they never once guessed that I might just have been truly fucking miserable and feeling abject hatred for myself. And, more crucially, they just never saw that they had had a hand in this.
And this is what made me angry when I saw that article, because I know what that woman went through. I have been through it, albeit under different circumstances. And it just made me angry at the world, in general. Because people in this world, we must realize, just don’t tolerate body fat. They hate it, actually, as if it was something so horribly offensive that it should be eradicated from the planet. People have evil attitudes to fat people and will say and do evil things to the point where they can make people hate themselves and want to destroy themselves.
But why?
You could say that those people hate themselves; certainly when I was thinner and starving all the time, I became very mean towards other people. I would look at other people’s bodies and think to myself “How dare she look like that?”
If I saw an overweight woman in the street I would think smugly to myself about how good I looked in comparison, and then I would think something evil about what a fat cow I thought she was. I know how twisted this was now, but I did it because I thought, “Hey, I’m doing all this work to try to and keep myself skinny – and it’s a full time job. And if I have to do it then why shouldn’t other people be forced to do it as well?”
Equally, if I saw a skinny woman walking along the street stuffing a chocolate bar or a sandwich into her mouth I would feel rage because I couldn’t understand how such a woman could possibly dare to rub my face in her ability to eat and not get fat. I hated other people, basically – I sized them up and psychologically eviscerated them. I was seething with anger all the time and if you’d seen the things inside my head you’d have been horrified. So I think that’s why a lot of thin people, and particularly thin women and girls, hate fat people. It’s not because there’s anything actually wrong with being bigger, it’s because those thin people are probably obsessed with their own weight and can’t understand how the same rules and pressures that seem to apply to them don’t apply to other people who just eat whatever they want and then buy bigger clothes.
What I’m saying, I suppose, is just that thin people are mean. But they’re mean because they’re hungry; they’re denying themselves so many things, and they’re doing this because they think they have to. And then it becomes a vicious cycle, because those mean people destroy the happiness of other people and turn them into equally obsessive and mean individuals, and then the cycle starts again, and again.
I wish that I could go back to my school days and show those girls, the ones who called me horrendous names and humiliated me in public, what damage they did to me. I wish that I could have gone back in time in my anorexic state and shown them the bones sticking out of my arms and back, the visible tendons underneath my skin, the scary angles of my elbows, wrists and ankles, or my skeletal fingers. I used to think about them and get so angry and think that if I could just see them again then I could make them bloody sorry for all the crappy things they made me think about myself.
But then, of course, they wouldn’t feel anything in response to that, would they? Because people say things without thinking. They don’t think about what impact they’re going to have on other people’s lives; and then they just go on with their own lives and forget all about it. They don’t pay any attention when they hurt someone else because hey, someone else’s private and personal pain is their business right? All that matters in the outside world is appearance. You just have to look like you’re happy and beautiful and then everything’s ok, because really nobody cares what goes on inside you or how miserable you are, even if they caused it.
Personally, I’ve always been wary of people who tell you they like/love you because you’re beautiful. If that’s the first reason someone gives you as to why they’re with you then you should leave them immediately. Because that’s not enough. Beauty, aesthetic beauty anyway, is not a reason to like or love someone; that’s shallow and myopic. There is an infinite world of things inside each and every person and, whatever they look like on the outside, you should not write this off.
This world stinks, because of its prejudices and because it teaches us all to be so prejudicial and to turn all the hatred for ourselves outwards so that it impacts on other people. And that damages people and drives them to do crazy things to themselves just so that they can fit in and feel normal.
Why??
That’s all I want to know. WHY THE FUCK DO WE DO THAT?
But I saw something in the news that got me riled up about it again. So here goes . . .
There was an article in my online news stream about a woman who now works as a plus size model, but who was previously told that she was too fat to work despite having previously dropped to a size zero as a result of anorexia. The story is probably not an original one, but it angered me anyway. The woman detailed how she would live on one apple a day and described how she became very thin and very depressed, to the degree where she hated herself completely.
And this woman’s story really got to me because I just thought, with genuine sympathy: “Ooh, this must have been hard!” Because, unless you’ve actually tried it, I don’t think you’ll necessarily realize just how physically painful starving yourself is. I know what that’s like, because I have done it. I have been anorexic. In fact I have suffered from all manner of eating disorders at various points in my life – it just depends what I’ve convinced myself of at any particular time – and I still don’t have a particularly normal attitude to food even now. I struggle with it and it stays with me no matter what I do. And it is actually a problem.
But the biggest problem, I suppose is that I hate my body whether it is fat or thin.
When I was at my most skinny I was relatively pleased with being able to fit into child-sized clothes, but that was all the enjoyment I got out of it. I could never really enjoy being thinner and lighter than I had been before because I was always so obsessed with not putting on weight again. I used to tell myself, in quite a commanding, fear-inspiring voice, that I couldn’t eat a particular thing because it would make me fat and that would be like the worst thing in the world (worse than death). Sometimes it would just be specific foods and then, when it got really bad, I was telling myself, literally, to stop eating. I really didn’t eat much of anything for several years during my twenties and I think I was, at one point, living on boiled carrots and apples . . . oh, and beetroot. (Don’t ask!) But at that point I was also suicidal, either because I wasn’t eating properly or because I couldn’t bring myself to, or just because life was really bad at that time, and the starvation was no longer just about being thin but actually killing myself.
I did a real number on myself basically. It started as a self-improvement thing and then it just became a great big downward spiral into self-destruction. By the end I really wanted to die and starvation seemed to be the quickest and easiest route – I was already halfway there anyway and I was used to the pain. Slitting my wrists would hurt more because it would be new pain that I would not be used to. That was my logic. But I reached breaking point and my body just wouldn’t let me do it to myself any more.
As I said though, the anorexia was only one phase of my eating disorders; I have also had phases of binge eating (this followed directly on from the anorexia I think – I would eat breakfast cereal by the box load when I was first “recovering”, it wasn’t pretty) bulimia (which interspersed the anorexia and, I think, carried over when I started the bingeing), crazy diets that involve eating only one kind of food, drastic exercise regimes that saw me vacuuming the whole house and moving out all the furniture before I would allow myself a tin of peaches and some apple juice for breakfast, and so on and so on.
I have been on some kind of diet since I was a teenager and I have been made to feel self-conscious about my weight since way before that. I don’t want to blame my mother entirely, because there were a lot of other people who contributed to this. But I think it started with her because she fed me all the junk food in the world to make up for all the insecurities I had as a child (of which there were many) and I suppose she thought, in the immediate stage, that this would make me feel better. The problem with this was that she then contradicted the act of giving me the junk food by complaining that I was getting too fat and then rapidly removing it and forcing me to live on salad. I ate what she gave me but she was always telling me I was eating the wrong thing and that this was somehow my fault and not hers. So I got a complex. I became confused about food – what was right and wrong, what should I eat or not eat, whose opinion should I listen to? Because I was never told to follow my own instincts or listen to my own body, I was always led to assume that it was up to other people to dictate to me what I should eat but, crucially, if they got it wrong and I ended up getting fat or sick, I could not blame them because it was my body and my choice.
So then, later, I got a complex about my weight because my mother told me I was too fat and the other kids at school told me I was too fat, and I started to get the message that this was unacceptable. All through my life, really, I have been given that same message, that the main reason I was so unacceptable to other people was because I was fat, and that my life would be so much better if I just got thinner and fitted in with all the other normal-sized, pretty people.
I’m not going to lie, there was a certain logic to this. Confidence does a lot for you and being thin to the point where you finally believe you look like everyone else gives you a lot of confidence. The trouble was that, in order for me to do this, I had to become very very abnormal in the way I ate and the way I behaved. Eating disorders are really quite antisocial things to have because you can’t eat most of the food that other people eat in public and, if you do, you usually have some totally abnormal and really quite disgusting way of doing it. The bingeing thing is probably the most common one that you will see in public; people who stuff themselves full of food at the table and then excuse themselves and run to the bathroom to throw up, or worse. But, I mean, I went through some pretty horrendous phases with mine; eating vegetables in great raw lumps, like a savage when I was starving – usually in front of a mirror so that I could verbally abuse myself while I did it – and then taking laxatives to get rid of it all a.s.a.p. It’s mad! And it’s not something that you can do with people around because they would easily, and rightly, call you mad and think you were some disgusting freak.
I know that these things are not normal. But, here is the problem as I see it: I can’t lose weight by eating like a normal person. I’ve tried. Every time I try to eat a healthy, balanced diet, for whatever reason, my body fights me on it every step of the way and ends up ballooning to the size of . . . well, a hot air balloon. I know nobody gives much credence to food intolerances any more, but I am convinced that my body just will not process certain kinds of food – bread, pasta, cheese, that sort of thing – and that I have to cut them out if I’m going to have a hope of keeping off all the weight.
Basically then, I ruined my relationship to food entirely when I became anorexic because I only allowed myself what I called “functional” food – stuff that I thought would do something for my body, or go through my body quickly and make me lose more weight. Most of what I did eat was pretty horrible, a lot of it was hard to eat and my digestive system did not thank me. But you will eat anything when you’re starving. Nevertheless, after a few months of doing this I just gave up and stopped eating completely.
Like I said, it was a long and complicated process. But the interesting thing about that time was how angry and embittered I became. It wasn’t just anger at myself, but anger at the world as well. Because people didn’t notice what was happening to me – well, my mum did, of course, but no one else. All the other people I knew – if they saw me at all – just told me how good I was looking, commenting on how much better I appeared to be now that I had grown up and stopped being the scowling fat freak that they used to know. I had something of a reputation as a teenager for being moody and overweight and people still remember this about me and laugh as though it’s hilariously funny. But they never thought to ask why I was like that; they never once guessed that I might just have been truly fucking miserable and feeling abject hatred for myself. And, more crucially, they just never saw that they had had a hand in this.
And this is what made me angry when I saw that article, because I know what that woman went through. I have been through it, albeit under different circumstances. And it just made me angry at the world, in general. Because people in this world, we must realize, just don’t tolerate body fat. They hate it, actually, as if it was something so horribly offensive that it should be eradicated from the planet. People have evil attitudes to fat people and will say and do evil things to the point where they can make people hate themselves and want to destroy themselves.
But why?
You could say that those people hate themselves; certainly when I was thinner and starving all the time, I became very mean towards other people. I would look at other people’s bodies and think to myself “How dare she look like that?”
If I saw an overweight woman in the street I would think smugly to myself about how good I looked in comparison, and then I would think something evil about what a fat cow I thought she was. I know how twisted this was now, but I did it because I thought, “Hey, I’m doing all this work to try to and keep myself skinny – and it’s a full time job. And if I have to do it then why shouldn’t other people be forced to do it as well?”
Equally, if I saw a skinny woman walking along the street stuffing a chocolate bar or a sandwich into her mouth I would feel rage because I couldn’t understand how such a woman could possibly dare to rub my face in her ability to eat and not get fat. I hated other people, basically – I sized them up and psychologically eviscerated them. I was seething with anger all the time and if you’d seen the things inside my head you’d have been horrified. So I think that’s why a lot of thin people, and particularly thin women and girls, hate fat people. It’s not because there’s anything actually wrong with being bigger, it’s because those thin people are probably obsessed with their own weight and can’t understand how the same rules and pressures that seem to apply to them don’t apply to other people who just eat whatever they want and then buy bigger clothes.
What I’m saying, I suppose, is just that thin people are mean. But they’re mean because they’re hungry; they’re denying themselves so many things, and they’re doing this because they think they have to. And then it becomes a vicious cycle, because those mean people destroy the happiness of other people and turn them into equally obsessive and mean individuals, and then the cycle starts again, and again.
I wish that I could go back to my school days and show those girls, the ones who called me horrendous names and humiliated me in public, what damage they did to me. I wish that I could have gone back in time in my anorexic state and shown them the bones sticking out of my arms and back, the visible tendons underneath my skin, the scary angles of my elbows, wrists and ankles, or my skeletal fingers. I used to think about them and get so angry and think that if I could just see them again then I could make them bloody sorry for all the crappy things they made me think about myself.
But then, of course, they wouldn’t feel anything in response to that, would they? Because people say things without thinking. They don’t think about what impact they’re going to have on other people’s lives; and then they just go on with their own lives and forget all about it. They don’t pay any attention when they hurt someone else because hey, someone else’s private and personal pain is their business right? All that matters in the outside world is appearance. You just have to look like you’re happy and beautiful and then everything’s ok, because really nobody cares what goes on inside you or how miserable you are, even if they caused it.
Personally, I’ve always been wary of people who tell you they like/love you because you’re beautiful. If that’s the first reason someone gives you as to why they’re with you then you should leave them immediately. Because that’s not enough. Beauty, aesthetic beauty anyway, is not a reason to like or love someone; that’s shallow and myopic. There is an infinite world of things inside each and every person and, whatever they look like on the outside, you should not write this off.
This world stinks, because of its prejudices and because it teaches us all to be so prejudicial and to turn all the hatred for ourselves outwards so that it impacts on other people. And that damages people and drives them to do crazy things to themselves just so that they can fit in and feel normal.
Why??
That’s all I want to know. WHY THE FUCK DO WE DO THAT?
Wednesday, 30 October 2013
Halloween
I don’t get Halloween. What’s it for exactly? I mean, I get that it’s supposed to have some kind of supernatural angle to it; maybe it was once considered in a serious light and thought of as a night on which the ghosts and spirits rose up to taunt people. But, I mean, we all know that that’s not going to happen now, right? So what’s it for?
Maybe it’s me, but all the holidays and traditions (in the Western world at least) have just become so commercialised and merchandised that it seems that that is now their only purpose. Christmas is almost as bad, but at least that does have a deeper significance for some people than just dressing up in stupid costumes and eating too much. (I’m not actually a huge fan of Christmas, as regular readers of this blog might have seen, but I can at least accept that there was a legitimate reason for having it before the shops starting marketing the hell out of their products in preparation for it.) But things like Halloween really stump me – Valentine’s day, Pancake day (if you’re British you will know what this is and if you’re not you won’t – so I’ll leave you to wonder :-)). Bonfire night in particular (another British one) makes almost no sense to me. Sometimes I think we just create these days as an excuse to behave stupidly and give ourselves a day off from being serious. And, ok, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I still don’t like Halloween.
*Puts on grumpy old killjoy voice* Ahem . . .
Let me tell you why that is:
Firstly, stupid costumes that obscure the appearance of ordinary people so that they look like monsters are not fun, especially when said people go walking around in dark streets, banging on doors and scaring the living sh** out of jumpy, anxious, quiet-living people. I was never allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid and I came from one of those families where it was completely acceptable and even prudent to turn off all the lights, lock all the doors and pretend to be out of the house whenever the kids came round clamouring for sweets.
Halloween is a scary time for me, largely because it’s so noisy and so full of boisterous people who refuse to behave like orderly, civilized human beings. I don’t understand the impulse there. We spend all the other days of the year positively demanding that people behave in a calm, orderly manner; if people ran wild in the streets like that on any other night they would be considered as causing a public disturbance. So why, on this night, is it suddenly allowable, forgivable and even, in some people’s estimation, fun, to do just that?
I realize that, by now, I am sounding very much like a killjoy, and I don’t begrudge people a good time – really, I don’t. But why does it always have to involve so much public uproar? Why can’t people have fun in a nice quiet way and leave the rest of us to do the same?
I don’t know what it’s like in America, although I’ve seen all the stuff on TV about mass trick-or-treating expeditions around suburban neighbourhoods and people making jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins. How accurate this is I do not know. But we’ve kind of picked up on it here, despite the fact that it doesn’t really go with our usually staid and reserved style of living. . . .
Incidentally, what is it with American people and pumpkins? I’ve never eaten pumpkin, but it seems to me that they feature in quite a lot of end of year festivities over there – pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving and all that. Honestly, why pumpkins?
. . .
Well, anyway, whatever it is we’re trying to emulate from the American traditions, we have adopted Halloween quite seriously and taken it to our hearts. And it’s loud and it’s disruptive and I don’t like it. Sorry America! :-/ I think it’s worse in this country because not only do we have Halloween at the end of October, but the disruption tends to continue after that because we also have a little thing called Bonfire Night (mentioned above) right at the beginning of November.
I should probably explain this – although I wasn’t going to – because not everyone around the world will know what this is; it’s a very British thing and it remains a mystery even to some of us. People question the sense of it every year, and yet we still do it. It’s just as noisy and disruptive as Halloween but it has a completely different origin.
The historians amongst you might know who Guy Fawkes was, but, for those of you who don’t, I will enlighten you. He led a little revolutionary group at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the purpose of which was to blow up the Houses of Parliament using a shed load of gunpowder. The intention of this was to murder King James I of England and the rest of his government, although his reasoning is probably too complicated and boring to go into right now.
The upshot, anyway, is that Fawkes was unsuccessful, but his memory – as a potential assassin of the King – has lived on for the last 400 years and it is now a tradition in this country, every year on the 5th of November, to light bonfires in public places and burn effigies of this man while eating hot dogs and other barbecue style food and setting off fireworks – presumably to commemorate the whole gunpowder plot thing.
Most people don’t consider the origins of this day any more, since it’s just considered to be fun to light fires and set off noisy sky rockets that make pretty patterns in the sky. But, like I said, this is just more noise and disruption and, being so close to Halloween, it sort of gives people in this country a licence to spend almost the whole week in between behaving like hooligans. Bonfire Night is probably worse than Halloween I think; they actually have to issue warnings every year to tell people how to handle fireworks safely because it is, traditionally, one of the busiest nights for all the hospitals in Britain. They invariably have to treat people for burns and other injuries and, occasionally, people die. (NB. I’m really not making this up!)
Suffice it to say then, it baffles me that we still have these holidays and traditions when all it really does for anyone is cause mayhem and get people injured. I’d rather stay indoors – but then I suppose I am very boring that way – but seriously, who invents these things, and what the hell are they thinking when they do?
In my nightmare vision of the future every day has been turned into some kind of commercial holiday or otherwise stupid commemoration day. That will soon be all we do – it could be a revolution of sorts, or it could just be the end of the world as we know it? Nevertheless, I would like to scrap Halloween. Who’s with me?
No?
Oh well . . .
Maybe it’s me, but all the holidays and traditions (in the Western world at least) have just become so commercialised and merchandised that it seems that that is now their only purpose. Christmas is almost as bad, but at least that does have a deeper significance for some people than just dressing up in stupid costumes and eating too much. (I’m not actually a huge fan of Christmas, as regular readers of this blog might have seen, but I can at least accept that there was a legitimate reason for having it before the shops starting marketing the hell out of their products in preparation for it.) But things like Halloween really stump me – Valentine’s day, Pancake day (if you’re British you will know what this is and if you’re not you won’t – so I’ll leave you to wonder :-)). Bonfire night in particular (another British one) makes almost no sense to me. Sometimes I think we just create these days as an excuse to behave stupidly and give ourselves a day off from being serious. And, ok, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I still don’t like Halloween.
*Puts on grumpy old killjoy voice* Ahem . . .
Let me tell you why that is:
Firstly, stupid costumes that obscure the appearance of ordinary people so that they look like monsters are not fun, especially when said people go walking around in dark streets, banging on doors and scaring the living sh** out of jumpy, anxious, quiet-living people. I was never allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid and I came from one of those families where it was completely acceptable and even prudent to turn off all the lights, lock all the doors and pretend to be out of the house whenever the kids came round clamouring for sweets.
Halloween is a scary time for me, largely because it’s so noisy and so full of boisterous people who refuse to behave like orderly, civilized human beings. I don’t understand the impulse there. We spend all the other days of the year positively demanding that people behave in a calm, orderly manner; if people ran wild in the streets like that on any other night they would be considered as causing a public disturbance. So why, on this night, is it suddenly allowable, forgivable and even, in some people’s estimation, fun, to do just that?
I realize that, by now, I am sounding very much like a killjoy, and I don’t begrudge people a good time – really, I don’t. But why does it always have to involve so much public uproar? Why can’t people have fun in a nice quiet way and leave the rest of us to do the same?
I don’t know what it’s like in America, although I’ve seen all the stuff on TV about mass trick-or-treating expeditions around suburban neighbourhoods and people making jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins. How accurate this is I do not know. But we’ve kind of picked up on it here, despite the fact that it doesn’t really go with our usually staid and reserved style of living. . . .
Incidentally, what is it with American people and pumpkins? I’ve never eaten pumpkin, but it seems to me that they feature in quite a lot of end of year festivities over there – pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving and all that. Honestly, why pumpkins?
. . .
Well, anyway, whatever it is we’re trying to emulate from the American traditions, we have adopted Halloween quite seriously and taken it to our hearts. And it’s loud and it’s disruptive and I don’t like it. Sorry America! :-/ I think it’s worse in this country because not only do we have Halloween at the end of October, but the disruption tends to continue after that because we also have a little thing called Bonfire Night (mentioned above) right at the beginning of November.
I should probably explain this – although I wasn’t going to – because not everyone around the world will know what this is; it’s a very British thing and it remains a mystery even to some of us. People question the sense of it every year, and yet we still do it. It’s just as noisy and disruptive as Halloween but it has a completely different origin.
The historians amongst you might know who Guy Fawkes was, but, for those of you who don’t, I will enlighten you. He led a little revolutionary group at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the purpose of which was to blow up the Houses of Parliament using a shed load of gunpowder. The intention of this was to murder King James I of England and the rest of his government, although his reasoning is probably too complicated and boring to go into right now.
The upshot, anyway, is that Fawkes was unsuccessful, but his memory – as a potential assassin of the King – has lived on for the last 400 years and it is now a tradition in this country, every year on the 5th of November, to light bonfires in public places and burn effigies of this man while eating hot dogs and other barbecue style food and setting off fireworks – presumably to commemorate the whole gunpowder plot thing.
Most people don’t consider the origins of this day any more, since it’s just considered to be fun to light fires and set off noisy sky rockets that make pretty patterns in the sky. But, like I said, this is just more noise and disruption and, being so close to Halloween, it sort of gives people in this country a licence to spend almost the whole week in between behaving like hooligans. Bonfire Night is probably worse than Halloween I think; they actually have to issue warnings every year to tell people how to handle fireworks safely because it is, traditionally, one of the busiest nights for all the hospitals in Britain. They invariably have to treat people for burns and other injuries and, occasionally, people die. (NB. I’m really not making this up!)
Suffice it to say then, it baffles me that we still have these holidays and traditions when all it really does for anyone is cause mayhem and get people injured. I’d rather stay indoors – but then I suppose I am very boring that way – but seriously, who invents these things, and what the hell are they thinking when they do?
In my nightmare vision of the future every day has been turned into some kind of commercial holiday or otherwise stupid commemoration day. That will soon be all we do – it could be a revolution of sorts, or it could just be the end of the world as we know it? Nevertheless, I would like to scrap Halloween. Who’s with me?
No?
Oh well . . .
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