I’m the only female in my house, even the dog is male and the recently departed
goldfish. I feel comfortable but
outnumbered.
Nobody told me what to do when I was little so I chose to do
everything, as much as I could. From
playing hospitals with my dolls to being a sub in our school footie team, - we’re
talking 70’s here. I played guitar and
recorder, messed around on a wooden handmade go kart, spent all day on roller skates
and wiped the floor with my male peers at Judo competitions. I was tall, athletic, always had long blonde
hair and liked to watch my Dad and my brother work on the car.
Then the hormones arrived, so unfair. Boys started to treat me differently, if I
wanted to work on a car, kick a ball about or heaven forbid work in IT well
then I must be a “geezabird” or a “dyke”. They’d be happy to whistle and shout
at me in the street but when I argued that they’d put the wrong type of tyres
on my old Moggy they told me I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about
and when I told them I bloody did they refused to serve me. How unlady like!
In my mid-teens women like Annie Lennox and Sinead O’Connor
came onto the scene, I took one look at them and knew what to do. I put on some DM’s, half shaved my head, coloured
my hair deep purple and copied the makeup
of Siouxsie Sioux. They had the answer. I wasn’t about to conform to the female
stereotype of the time. It was about female sexuality on our terms.
I discovered there were men who loved it and accepted it,
never belittled it and let me work on their motorbikes. I let my hair grow long and blonde again,
even got a perm but never parted with the DM’s.
In the workplace it wasn’t so easy; the men were definitely in
charge. I thought about shaving my hair
again, but why should I have to? Why shouldn’t a tall blonde be treated
equally without having senior male colleagues slap her on the backside and tell her what they liked to do to her and oh can she pick up their dry cleaning for
them. Not all the time and not every man
obviously but it was a general tone and I think it’s a tone that got worse not
better.
So much can be bought on the internet these days and viewed
and dabbled in and that includes women.
The visual and the virtual, no strings attached. So I hear that young women now are getting
together to fight it and using the internet to get their message heard. Whatever you think about the whole Sinead and
Miley tussle it was something that needed to be said, to be questioned. In this age where differences in sexuality are being more
widely accepted why is it that women are still struggling to feel equal and
respected?
And just to be clear, in middle age I still don’t like
baking, sewing, knitting, cooking or ironing. I do like cars and bikes and gardening and a
new hobby; the piano. If I ever start to
enjoy any of the former it will be the start of senility of that I am sure.
