What happened to feminism?

We had a very interesting week a month or two ago: in the same week we went to see 'The Taming of the Shrew' at the Globe, and 'A Doll's House' at the Young Vic. 

They were both terrific productions, I thought. I've always liked the idea of playing Petruchio as a clown, someone who's unconventional but has worked out how to do it within the boudaries of society, and wants to teach Katherina how to do the same. The BBC production years ago cast John Cleese in the part, and it worked very well. The Globe's actor went rather further, and the shock value was great. Their Katherina was what's always called 'feisty' so it was interesting to see what they'd do about her final speech. You can play it as Kate taking the piss rather to win the bet, but that's a bit of a cop-out; instead they played it pretty much straight.

What was interesting, at the Globe, was to feel - physically feel - how uncomfortable this made the audience. At first it felt like disbelief - was Kate really saying this stuff? How could she possibly mean it? Wasn't anyone going to stop her? And then it slowly turned into shock - she really was going to say it, and apparently without irony, and actually all the people on stage were in agreement with her. The sense I got from the audience was that, despite everything that they'd seen in the play, they hadn't really realised that this was, once, how some people thought. It made me want to look really closely at the text to decide whether it's possible to deduce if Shakespeare is actually over-egging it at this point, or whether you can read it as a statement of his values.

What clinched it was that we had much the same experience watching Ibsen's 'A Doll's House' at the Young Vic.At the point where Torvald, the husband, talks about how he's always seen Nora as the child that he took over protection of from her father, there were gasps from the audience. How sexist! How could he say that! What was Ibsen thinking of.... I wanted to stand up and shout - "This is how it was! This is what decent people thought in 1879! THIS IS WHY WE HAD FEMINISM!"

Both were very strange experiences. Have people somehow forgotten that things were once different? Do play audiences not know that the position of women in society has changed dramatically in the last hundred years?

I suppose there's a side point too, that it's crazy to expect the work of the past to conform to the orthodoxies of the present. I've always strongly disliked the tendency of feminist criticism to accuse the works of the past of not being feminist enough – how could they have been? And you can't demand of all writers that they be politically aware. Gah!

Why make up is bad

A while ago, a friend invited me to chair a book group meeting on Catlin Moran's How to be a Woman. I was very chuffed, partly because I was flattered to be asked, and partly because I love the book to bits. It turned out to be pretty hilarious; all the women there (it was a women-only book group) were vaguely feministy in some degree (up to and including "I'm not a feminist but" where the but includes a belief in equal rights for women, but I was the only hardcore, unreconstructed, 1970s radical feminist - well, there may have been one other, but I was definitely the only person present who didn't shave my armpits (why should you? Men don't. If armpit hair is disgusting, why isn't it disgusting for everyone? Plus I think shaved armpits look horrid), which some people found so intriguing - they'd never seen an unshaven female armpit! Imagine, sisters! - that I stripped to show them. Shame nobody was interested in my pubes, really.

Anyway, as usual I digress. Next morning the friend asked me why I objected to make-up and as I wasn't really awake I said I just thought it wasted a lot of time. Sensibly - some people are so alert int eh mornings, it's really unfair - she asked me what I thought I achieved with the time I saved compared with her, as she wears a bit of make-up, every day I think. I rambled on dopily about all the stuff I do, and realised very quickly that I wasn't making much sense, plus she does loads of stuff too so it was pretty patronising. Ever since, I've wanted to think of a better answer. Here it is.

When I get ready in the morning, I have a wee, wash my face in cold water, get dressed, brush my hair and leave the house. When I get dressed up for a concert I wash, put on floor length sequins, brush my hair, and leave the house. So long as I remembered to wash and I brushed my hair (and it was reasonably clean - I've recently started washing it twice a week instead of once, but I reckon if you wash it more often it simply needs it more often) , I know I'm presentable. Now obviously this is time-efficient, and that can be bloody useful. But I think there's a more important, and that's that as long as I'm neat and clean, I'm happy. I don't have to doll myself up to feel I've made an effort. I don't feel that I can't face the world without my mascara. I don't fret that people won't take me seriously if I haven't got mascara on. I don't worry that I can't sleep with someone I fancy (harking back a bit here) because he'll see me in the morning without my hair straighteners, my lip gloss, my special bra, whatever. What you see is what you get. I'm good enough. I don't have to make an extra effort to look extra nice. That seems to me to be truly liberating.

It's also how it is for men. They wee, they wash, they shave, they dress, they're ready to go. Why would things be really different for women unless something weird was happening? Unless the rules for men and women were oddly different?

Another friend says she likes to put on lipstick when she's going out - it's a trigger: the act gets her into a going-out mood. That makes sense. That's not a need or an obligation; that's for fun. What I worry about is when it's not for fun, it's a necessity. If you can't got out without it, then it's a crutch, maybe an addiction. Certainly an inconvenience.

I have also never, ever ever ever, seen a woman I thought looked better with make-up on than without it. Call me a diehard old radical feminist, but smearing greasy crap into your face just seems bloody weird to me. It looks funny. You look great without any of that stuff. Honest.

The truth about Sasha, the ‘gender-neutral’ five-year-old

Here's what I'm telling everyone now I've had a chance to write something down:

The truth about Sasha, the ‘gender-neutral’ five-year-old

When Sasha was born, we'd asked the midwives not to tell us whether the baby was a boy or a girl. For about half an hour, we just held the baby and got to know it. When we announced Sasha's birth by email to all our friends, we just said "It's a baby!"

I tried not saying what sex Sasha was when I went to local postnatal classes, but quickly realised that people only ask because they're trying to be nice and because there's nothing else you can ask about a baby except its weight. Sasha had been a November baby and as soon as the weather got warm enough was frolicking around the garden with no clothes on anyway. So everyone in our village who knows us knows what sex Sasha is.

But I did write a blog about my experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting (and lots of other things). Because I am a writer and editor by trade, with accessibility as a key criterion, and because writing non-sexist language is part of making copy accessible, I decided to see if it was possible to write about Sasha without using sex-specific terms. To date, I have never revealed Sasha's sex online, in my blog. Some people have got the Internet muddled up with Real Life.

We can't think of any way we could have "brought up little Sasha as gender-neutral" - what would that mean? What we have done is try to give our child a gender-rich environment, with toys some people might say are girls' toys alongside those they might call boy's toys. We've also tried to make sure that dolls, for example, have different skin tones so Sasha doesn't think the world is white (Nana (grandmother) being Anglo-Indian probably helps with that too!). Kieran has a son and daughter from a previous relationship who live with us some of the time, and we have a dressing-up basket with magic wands and cutlasses, capes and and shawls, fairy wings and tiger suits, and tutus for everyone.

We also try not to assume that Sasha will be just like us, so we try not to assume that our child will be musical (as we are) or will go to university (as we did) - we don't want to set expectations that Sash might not be able to fulfil.

All we're doing is what most parents do - trying to do our very best for our child.

Beck and A

My life in magazines

So, I'm pretty excited that I'm going to be talking to Woman magazine at midday - I might nip down to Budgens and buy a copy so I can check that they're with the good guys: their journalist certainly sounds nice but as I keep telling Sasha, you can't always tell the ones that are EVIL just by their spooky red eyes.

One of A's many endearing characteristics when he first moved in with me was that he'd often turn up carrying a copy of Woman that he'd bought to read on the train. Loved that he as secure enough in his own skin not to feel he had to mind other people's daft stereotypes or prejudices. That's what both of us want for our children.

I was thinking about how you can map your life through magazines. I was born in 1965, so mine went   something like...

Pippin... Bunty... Jackie...  Punch... Cosmopolitan... Spare Rib... The Socialist Standard....

the I went to Cambridge and even the Alternative bookshop in Gwydir Street didn't get the SS. I expect I just read Stop Press, which had been Varsity and later switched back.... Punch was an odd one - my dad bought me a subscription as birthday presents, in my early teens, I think. I started by reading quite a lot of it, but by the end it was just the cartoons and that Hunter Davies column called 'Father's Day' which must have been quite groundbreaking at the time.

Then I subscribed to Private Eye for years until I realised it was actually making me a bit depressed. Oh lord - just remembered I moved to Sawston and subscribed to Country Living. I'd forgotten the incidental ones. I subscribed to Uncut for ages but never got round to reading it - oh, and I read Q for a while because I worked in music magazines. And I used to look out for launch issues - I still have the pile upstairs if anyone would like them for posterity. Does anyone remember Minx magazine? It was really, really, good - got the content and the tone spot on: sensible info given in a cheeky tone.

My first magazine job was on Home & Studio Recording, whose wonderful editor Dan Goldstein taught me everything I know about compound hyphenation. Then a great time with Sam Molineaux (now called Graham, tut tut) on Keyboard Review, her editor and me production editor then deputy editor. I did some great interviews - bought a floppy disk reader specially to upload them here but it's still the box five years later.... When Music Maker got taken over by Future I got made redundant and spent rather a sad year as a sub on Sound on Sound, out in the wasteland that was Bar Hill then. Then I got made redundant from there... I'll have to check my professional blog... Oh, I'd forgotten my first job, on BBC English magazine in Saffron Walden. I Facebooked about the horrors of superscripted ordinals and Microsoft's hideous predilection for them recently and an old colleague from there, Donna Sharp, found me, which was lovely. That lasted three months, mostly spent struggling with Ventura, a user-hostile early DTP programme - just as I was getting the hang of the bloody thing the bailiffs arrived to tell us the company had gone bankrupt. So I got made - no! the suspense! - redundant.

After Sound on Sound I moved back into information design. Applied for dozens of magazine jobs but just didn't get anywhere - I remember going to Hanover house for a sub job on House and Garden, and meeting some Voguey girl in the lift who was wearing a miniskirt and black tights who looked me up and down, and I knew I wasn't going to get it. Then the editor said she was working on an anniversary issue and someone had mentioned that the magazine was in a song - had I ever heard of it? I was so gobsmacked that she didn't know the Flanders & Swann number (on YouTube at 6.00 in) that I expect it may have shown. I was right, didn't get near it. Which magazine, that was a bugger - hours and hours of research, interviews and writing tests, it was more work than a bloody O level, then I got a standard rejection letter that didn't even get the facts right – "We regret that you have not been selected for interview" – oh do you, best hold those tears just for a moment; and they appointed an internal candidate so that was a week of my life wasted. I think it was after that I just gave up. I got a job as a freelance sub on Internet magazine, which was fun, then as freelance production ed on some business telecomms titles whose names were so odd I can't even remember them - bet there are copies in the attic. But the staff were lovely - always have been, everywhere I've worked. Do people who care about words by definition care about people?

Rugged

Gosh, I have been quiet. I had meant to boast about carrying Sasha back from Whittlesford station the other night, but needed to gather statistics - we don't have scales in the house. We finally visited a well-equipped friend and I discovered that my very solid child weighs 16kg. (You have to remember that children are always much heavier when they're asleep, but then the differential increases with their age.) According to Google the distance is 1.7 miles. I had a sling, and tried to arrange Sash to be vaguely symmetrical, as it's asymmetry that does your back in. It was partly that I didn't want to pay for a taxi, partly that it was after 10pm when all the Sawston taxi drivers go to bed anyway, and partly sheer bloody-mindedness to know whether I could do it. It wasn't too bad at all, in fact, and of course I felt gloriously rugged too. Self-reliance is very satisfactory. But is it universally so, I wonder, or do some people just not find it to be so? Is there also pleasure in being a parasite - well, that's a little harsh: does it feel good to be a wuss?

Last week I was at the Church Hall, about four minutes' walk away, and asked a woman with a baby of about six months old if she'd like to come back to my house for a cup of tea. She wasn't sure, because she'd parked her car somewhere else and didn't have her pram with her. I stood there and just nodded because it took me about five minutes to work out what she was saying - she couldn't carry a tiny baby a few yards. But in any case, words would have failed me.

Poncey

My goodness. A is reading volume 3 of the collected letters of Benjamin Britten, and I'm reading volume 2 of Dorothy L Sayers' correspondence. Get us.

Sayers is very impressive, though - so clear-thinking and intelligent, and so professional in her work. She's very good on feminism: often with a lovely quizzical air about why anyone should be so silly as to think differently. I wish I could manage that, rather than always getting indignant straight away. And I must read The Man Who Would be King, as it sounds wonderful. She does always make me feel a little sad, though, that I have never really found a proper career. I suppose at least I know what I'm good at, and have always known that I wasn't in the least creative. And I've been very lucky in the jobs I've found, and the people I've worked with (the companies who've paid my salary have generally been nothing special, but there's capitalism for you). But Sayers makes me feel that I should have been more serious about having a profession. I'll have to ponder this, and not at half-past midnight when I've just watched four episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Too much melodrama, but I was pleased to suddenly realise that the theme music is based on Erlkoenig - perfect! Ooh, someone's clever.

Nine months in, nine months out

Oh dear, it's been ages. Ah well. Sasha is now nine months old, which is nicely symmetrical. Our little prodigy has now been introduced to Shakespeare: we went to see Othello at the Globe last week. Slightly fraught, as you really can't prevent the occasional squawk and it's really quite a quiet, domestic play: lots of scenes with only two or three people in. [Info added much later - you can take babes in arms to the Globe, which is brill and authentic of them, so I took Sash in a sling. Which did, after a bit, hurt. Quite a lot. But it was worth it.]

Very good, I thought: I was interested in seeing Tim McInnerny as Iago as I only know him from Blackadder. He was certainly a change from the simmeringly evil Iagos you sometimes see: very obviously making it up as he went along rather than having some fiendish masterplan, which makes perfect sense when it's pure luck that he gets his hands on the handkerchief. As ever, the strangulation scene was absolutely vile, though not quite as awful as a Cheek by Jowl production I saw years ago in Cambridge, where Othello was really huge and Desdemona tiny, and he lifted her right off her feet. Urgh. I don't think I'd quite clocked before just how far Othello falls: he actually tries to protest his innocence to Aemilia after she's found him with Desdemona's corpse. At that point he really has lost every ounce of his integrity. A nasty, nasty play: A and I were both in tears afterwards.

I really must try to write about things while there's still time to encourage you to go and see them, though.

A few bits and pieces I've been meaning to post... If you're interested in creative writing, and particularly if you're writing spec scripts for TV (no, I've never met anyone who is, either), check out Jane Espenson's blog. She's a writer for Buffy (yes, and I found the link to her site reading footnote number 62 of the Wikipedia article on Buffy, so how sad am I? (Very, very sad, I know, what the hey.) She's very sweet and very funny, and a lot of what she says is interesting even if you're not writing spec scripts.

Also an article in The Onion which I think may be my second favourite of all time. Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does. It's so bloody true. "Shopping for shoes has emerged as a powerful means by which women assert their autonomy," says an expert... If you've never come across the Onion, do give it a try: It's very American, and very funny: really cynical, and very well written. Oooh, look! They still have my favourite article of all time. Isn't the internet jolly? This one is possibly the most over-the-top bit of prose I've ever encountered. Love it to bits. It's called This New Toilet Paper Is So Soft And Absorbent! Don't read it if you have an aversion to toilet humour is all I can say. Sample line: errr, actually, it's just too disgusting to quote, and the cumulative effect is a large part of it. Still I can assume you're not easily offended if you've read my birth story, right?

How pleasant to know Dr Greer

Oooh, ooh, I am starstruck. I just met Germaine Greer in Budgen's. Actually, I passed her in the High Street and took too long to recognise her, then dithered for five minutes before going in, running her to earth next to the cat food, and introducing myself. She was extremely nice, cosidering how weird it is to be accosted by a stranger (I know this because I occasionally meet someone who knows me because they've seen me sing, so I don't know them.): friendly to Sasha and quite chatty. She was buying a Guardian because she's got an article in today about the Australian Aborigines, which sounded suitably polemical.

I just wanted to tell her that if there was one book that changed my life, it was The Female Eunuch, which I read when I was about fourteen. If nothing else, it makes other feminist writing pale into the shadows, being both logically argued, fiercely polemical and in places very funny. I stopped buying Spare Rib (yes, cast your mind back to the eighties...) when it started carping about Victoria Wood not being radical enough and I realised that they had missed the point. Which is that humour is a far better tool for changing people's minds than aggression can ever be. Proven, in fact, by comparing the longevity of the magazine, and Wood, who seems to be turning into a female version of Michael Palin and therefore quite a national institution.

Anyway, we talked about The Thorn Birds , as she is writing about it, she said. It has interesting comparisons with Gone with the Wind, which -- in my opinion -- has interesting comparisons with Vanity Fair. Dr Greer (except I bet I'm years out of date and she's Professor Greer by now, isn't she? Rats) said she's never been able to get through Thackeray, which surprised me as I think compared with, say, Dickens, he's easy to read. And Vanity Fair is a fabulous novel: Thackeray has a wonderful narrative voice, generous but cynical, and there isn't a two-dimensional character in the book. And it has one of the most devastatingly written deaths in literature. And of course Becky Sharp is an incredible creation.

I haven't read any of his other books, mind you. Someone once told me that the others are more populist, since he felt that VF didn't make him enough money. I'll have to try one day, though.

I wonder if there are any phrases in Bunyan that haven't been used? Could you have a magazine called Slough of Despond? I suppose not...

Sasha is wrestling with a banana skin and now has a facepack of brown slime. The child seems to get rather more fun from the skin from the banana, but hey, this is a household that eschews petty convention, no? A recent visitor warned me solemnly that banana skins are poisonous. It's odd how people will do that.

And larger conventions too, of course. Apparently some people *did* object to my breast-feeding at a parish council meeting. The comment was (I'm told): "Who is that woman? And is she married?" Priceless. I told my informant I hoped he'd let them know that I most certainly was not...

A rose by any other name

Mmm -- presumably the novel The Name of The Rose gets its title from this quotation (which is from Romeo and Juliet, for those of you who didn't do it for 'O' level. (I went to a Catholic school and had a delightfully fusty English teacher, and still remember with pleasure his protestations that this was a sweetly romantic play without a trace of smut. I'd look at lines such as 'The bawdy hand of the dial/Is now upon the very prick of noon' and think, "Well, I don't know why it sounds rude," (yup, I was a very late developer) "but it definitely does."))

Anyway, my point is that I've been meaning to put a link here to a very nicely written article in the Guardian recently, which says pretty much everything I want to say about changing one's surname and giving surnames to children, without ever getting as horribly strident as I do when I have the discussion. I only know one other woman in the world who has, as I have, given her child her own surname, and I find that odd. When I put the list of new members into the Cambridge NCT (National Childbirth Trust) newsletter, I always look to see how many couples have different names. Considering that this is an 'intellectual' town, terribly middle class, and full of bolshy women (unless it just happens that those are the ones I know), it's usually amazingly few. Most disappointing. Actually, the really daft thing seems to me to be when the woman takes on the man's surname as well as her own. So they still have different names, the kid still gets his name, and she's lumbered with a whole pile. Seems ker-azy to me. If you're going to have both, why doesn't the chap have both too? But there, I'm starting to rant, and the whole point of this was to avoid that.

A said he was surprised at the whole thing too, but he was proud to be a torch-bearer. What a sweetheart. I never quite know whether the other chaps feel it's a challenge to their masculinity if a woman doesn't want to subsume a part of her identity in him (yes, inflammatory language, I know, I know, but honestly, your name is your identity and I don't see how you could dispute that), or if it's some kind of weird girl thing that the women want to, and as incomprehensible to me as a whole load of other weird girl things. I think at the root of this whole feminism thing for me is the fact that I'm really not more than 50% feminine...