Well, my poet friend says, wrapping up an open-hearted conversation, that’s the underlying female fear, isn’t it, being too much, that’s really what we’re all worried about.
She’s talking, this time, about her own rumination after a possibly unguarded conversation with her boss and my reflections on diet culture. She’s worried she didn’t police her speech adequately and I’m regretting decades of policing my appetite and my body, but as I cycle home I think about the very wide application of her insight, and how the opposite, the fear of being not enough, shapes masculinity.
I hope it’s different for younger women, but for my generation part of the challenge of professional life is to be assertive and confident enough to succeed without being ‘bossy’ or ‘feisty’ (I’ve yet to hear either of those applied to a man). Growing up, we had equal opportunities as long as we didn’t take them as a licence for equal behaviour or equal self-esteem. We were told to stay inside at night so men wouldn’t attack us, though far more violence against women takes place at home than on the streets. We were told to watch ourselves constantly, to watch how men watched us, to police ourselves before someone else did it for us.
I grew up understanding that women’s appetites were shameful, that women’s food was not a biological need but a ‘guilty pleasure’; a smaller body a sign of discipline, self-control, appealing fragility, and indeed women in smaller bodies were – are – more likely to achieve promotion and higher pay. You could compensate for ‘bossiness’ by staying small, for a strong mind by a fragile body. Mine was the first generation in which girls outperformed boys in exams, which was seen as a problem, an indication of a ‘crisis in masculinity.’ No one had announced a ‘crisis in femininity’ when it was the other way around.
Men are deemed more masculine for taking up more space, women more feminine for taking up less
Only mothers who find recognition in professional life seem to be guilty of ‘having it all’
Some say you’re not a writer if you’re not willing to sacrifice your family to your art. Not me
Being English in Ireland, I often sense I’m being too frank
I think about the parallel pressure on men and boys to be big and loud and assertive, to fill space and take control and exert authority, how hard it can be for a man to say ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I’m afraid’ or ‘I can’t do it’ – all things most of us could usefully say on a regular basis. One of my discoveries as the mother of boys was the hierarchy of height for men; until my teenagers were reaching their adult heights I had not fully understood the strange charge of a physical characteristic over which there is no control. Men are more masculine for taking up more literal and metaphorical space, women are more feminine for taking up less. Binary categories hurt everyone, especially those whose natures or physiques are non-compliant.
I think again about my resistance to the recent excitement about the perimenopause. I’m 49, in the thick of it, and deeply, instinctively, opposed to the idea that the female body is innately broken, in need of technological repair.
Part of my antipathy, I realise, comes from the way the new discourse obeys and amplifies the ‘female fear’. Many of the ‘symptoms’ that now invite medical intervention relate to being too much, too noisy, too big. Left untreated, women might put on weight, and not even attractively in the right places but around the belly, the site of so much female self-loathing. We might grow hair in the wrong places. Our bodies might provoke displeasure, even disgust. We might get angry, emotional, anxious, inconvenience god-fearing men and children with our ungoverned feelings. We might – angels and ministers of grace defend us – experience and even express rage, and all this without even the compensations of being pretty and providing babies. Every one of these fears relates to women being too much, existing beyond what patriarchy can tolerate.
[ I’m not against HRT but are we once again medicating women for being angry?Opens in new window ]
As I have said before, I am not ‘against’ HRT: everyone should have access to thoughtful, individual healthcare, and anyone seeking safe and effective treatment for symptoms causing distress to the sufferer should receive care.
I am against the idea that women should be medicated for becoming ‘too much’ for other people’s convenience and desire, that the answer to disruptive women in non-compliant bodies should always be silence and discipline rather than making space for us to grow, right up to the end.