‘Nice knowing you, enjoy your degree (NOW MAKE ME A SANDWICH,
BITCH! LOL jk).’ Looking back on a yearbook makes you realise: school was
a tough'un, wasn't it? When I was eight, after several rather unsavoury incidents
ie me generally being a dick, my parents decided to relieve the school and
plonk me into a girls' one. Almost nine years later I plonked myself right back
out again because, despite loving my friends I just couldn’t keep up with the
competitive starvation, the acquisition of products, and statements like: ‘I
LOATHE the Clapham Junction Waitrose’. At sixteen I considered myself pretty
badass (this one time, we let off stink bombs in the art room! We clingfilmed
the bogs! We created giant, food-dye-menstrual carnage, teehee!) I figured the
transition from a single-sex environment to one where girls comprised 30/500
students in the sixth form would be a doddle. I'd own it, right? One week in
and I was the only girl in every subject I took, sticking out like a sore pair
of tits and getting increasingly pissed off. Toto, we weren't in Kansas
anymore: stuff had got real.
For two years of my life, lazy, easy, misogyny was tossed
around like an over-inflated beach ball, bouncing off the heads of students and
[some] teachers. I never fully realised the numbing, hardening effect this had
had until I got out and stopped walking around in a permanently splenetic rage,
barking at people and giving deathstares to anyone who offered me a seat on the
tube. We were encouraged not to 'act like girls'; warned against writing
answers in exams that gave too much away too soon, ‘like a slut, y’know,
wearing a crop top and a short skirt?’ This was from a teacher, all in the name
of winning popularity, of making a shitty cloaked joke, of appealing to a room that
didn't know any better and certainly won't now. No wonder we still have so much
to moan about, if this is what some education systems churn out to the
workforce! These people were the moral custodians of future minds! Guys, sort
it out!
Second month in, and I walk into the loos to find two of my
friends perched on the sinks, chowing down on their packed lunches. Food, in a mostly
male environment, becomes a Big Thing. At best you’ll be told, smirkingly, that
you’re looking ‘pretty involved’ with that panini [I would shun anyone NOT
involved with a panini, whatever its filling, FYI]. I remember one of my best
friends eating a piece of very ill-advised quiche in front of Some Boyz we were
spending a bored Saturday with: ‘All hell broke loose,’ she remembers sadly
when I ask her about it, grimacing into a three day-old glass of Cava. And it’s
true, you were up the creek without a bone if you decided, at that age, to eat
in front of men. Suddenly (and kind of inexplicably) this all changed
afterwards. Now it’s perfectly acceptable - alluring, perhaps, in some
situations - to be tonsils-deep in spag bol in front of your manfriend, nay,
for this to serve as a totally legitimate act of foreplay.
And booze? Whilst it was normal for the blokes in my year to
get rat-arsed and come into History the next morning with a blazer smelling so
strongly of vom they'd have to dangle it from the window, for the gals? No
dice: you were branded a mess, it wasn’t funny; it was just sad. Later, again,
things changed, and it was no bad thing to be covered in garlic mayo and paying
for the bus with thirty-five cents and a green marble. It was fine. Men – or
the ones I know anyway - are for the most part gentle, kind, and
un-judgemental. We’re just all in the same, pissed-up boat together. Of course,
once you've left school you’re freer to choose who you're going to hang out
with. Back then, if someone irritates you, you'll still have to sit beside them
four times a week in Maths for the next year. He’s a prick who copies my
homework and openly stares at my tits, but look, there’s a seating plan, OK?
After school, you needn't fraternise or engage with the knobs. There’s simply
no need.
Recently I went along to my old school, to see my sister in
a play. She’s seventeen now, has a cracking group of both male and female friends
and didn’t seem too fussed by any of what I’d warned her about before she
started. With more girls being admitted to the school every year, I thought,
maybe something had changed, some slight but noticeable shift. And so to the
first scenes: boys, lots of boys. Ok – it’s primarily a boys’ school, after
all. Fine. I waited for a female character and, after some time, one appeared.
She shuffled onto the stage, clearly nervous, and was greeted by endless
catcalls, whistles and jeers. This continued every single time a woman came on stage,
to the very end of the performance when my sister – my bright, confident sister
– struts on wearing ONLY THE SCHOOL FLAG, and I have to sneak over to the bar
to hide in gallons of Bloody Mary.
I suppose the result is that, at seventeen, I was an angry,
angry bitch, constantly trying to prove a point. If asked where I was going I
might have responded, loudly, that I was off for an enormous dump, even if I
wasn’t. Keeping a room full of men up to speed on every bodily function/mishap
you can imagine, just to prove that having a vagina does not exclude you from
any of the un-penis-related bodily problems or experiences IN THE WORLD, is
exhausting. Each day was a slog, one where I knew I’d be pissed off by the
first break and positively fucking fuming by 4.30. And it got to my
then-boyfriend, too – someone who was, by all accounts, sweet and interested
and didn’t see me as a woman but as a person. Or, I should say, he saw me as a
woman in all the fun, sexy ways you’d want the person you’re sleeping with to
see you, but never in any of the grim ways. So. Where did this leave me? I was
a dick to him: all the frustration which –understandably – was leaking out of
my pores I barked out at him. Mean! Not his fault! But – crucially – not mine,
either.
The worst thing is, once these boys leave school, they go
off to wherever life takes ‘em and things are a little different. Hell, they’re
a lot different, or we’d hope they were. It was a ball-ache for me, but these
sorts of environments only breed the worst attitudes in men. It’ll be as shite
for them, now, as it was for me then, as women continue to walk away from them
after five minutes. Nowadays,it’s generally we who smirk back at them, or raise
our eyebrows pityingly as all their boys’ school bullshit bubbles to the
surface. Back then I had a giant rucksack – the nerdiest nerdster – with which to
boff them with in the corridors; now I’m a laydee I’ve updated to a cheeky
clutch thing (River Island, £8.99, with secret hiding compartments for gin).