Things your mama never told you

Extract taken from Fifty Shades of Feminism by Lisa Appignanesi and published with permission from Virago Press (an imprint of Little, Brown)  and Jonathan Ball publishers.

Scroll down to the bottom for more information about the book and its various contributors.

The world is unequal.

Throughout your childhood, through your teens and for most of your twenties, you will believe the world is a generally good place to be a girl. You will do better than boys in school; you will be smarter, more articulate and more interesting.

When you reach adolescence, people will start to treat you like a grown-up. In contrast, the boys in your class will be busy fighting and farting through their teens. They will smell bad. They will mumble when spoken to, and treat their limbs as if foreign objects, flinging them about like harpoons and breaking things.
 
However, at some point, probably between college and your first job, you will realize that the cards are stacked against you. It may start with a very small thing, for instance being interrupted at a meeting at work; or something quite significant, such as the discovery that your salary is less than your male counterpart’s.

Men will take up more space, and breathe more oxygen than you. You will let them, to avoid appearing butch, or even worse, aggressive.

You will start to see the world differently, and realize that every moment of your life, every experience has been coloured and influenced by your gender.

You will continue to love men and be attracted to men.

Men are wonderful. They are powerful, gorgeous creatures. They sail through life with élan, luxuriating in confidence.

If you are heterosexual, you will be attracted to them no matter what bruises they may have inflicted on you in the past, and you will crave partnership and commitment and engagement with them for all the days of your life.

At some point you will become someone’s wife.

Note, I did not say, ‘At some point, you will get married.’ Becoming some- one’s wife is very different from getting married.

It can happen at any time in a heterosexual relationship.

It happens when you start to take over the domestic responsibilities of the house. You will start doing the laundry and the dishes and handling the household bills. You will organize your and your husband/boyfriend/partner’s social life.

You will throw parties in which you will cheerfully entertain all the guests and refill their wine glasses and discreetly take their plates from the table at the end of the meal. You will be involved in your husband/boyfriend/partner’s work.

You will encourage him and big him up and make him face every day with new found confidence. You will praise him and make him feel good all the time. You will do all of this while also maintaining your own life and your own career.

When you have children, you will have to be their mother.

When you have children, you cannot be the gregarious, occasional influence who swoops in and makes everything brighter and more fun.

You will be the baby’s host before it is born; your body will have to bring it into the world, and your body will feed it and keep it alive. Later, you will be responsible for organizing childcare and ensuring there is enough food in the house to feed yourself, your partner and your children.

You will be in love. It will be blissful, euphoric, incandescent, but also exhausting, debilitating and life-altering. There is no equivalent in a man’s life, no event that will categorically change his relationship to his body, his work, family and identity.

This is a journey that you will love. But if you choose to embark on it, you will have no choice of roles. You will have to play the mother.

You cannot be angry.

You will want to be angry. If you are angry, you will be called An Angry Young Woman, or worse, An Angry Old Woman, or even worse, An Angry Feminist.

You will be called a bitch. You will take comfort in the company of your women friends, but sometimes you will feel painfully, irreparably alone.

This will happen to you whether or not you are in a loving relationship with a man. Treating men like the enemy is going to get you nowhere; at least, not the individual men who are your intimates; instead, you will collaborate, invent, learn, grow and octopus your way through life.

In Japan, men read pornography on the subway. Nuff said.

Your female friendships will keep you sane.

You will be tempted to spend all your time sucking up to/sleeping with/worshipping/trying to please men.

But your women friends will pick you up after you have a break-up or gain weight or lose your job or go through a dry spell with your husband or have a miscarriage or start the menopause.

Without them, you might possibly go mad, or accept more compromise than you should, or take a hard line you shouldn’t, or forget that you are a clever, magical being with a boundless capacity for love.

If this is your world, you are lucky.

If these are your problems, you are unaccountably fortunate.

If you grew up in poverty, in a war-torn country, in a feudal society, in Saudi Arabia or Yemen or South Sudan, you will know that being a woman compounds and multiplies any horrors you might face in your life.

Your body will be vulnerable to abuse, mutilation and the sex trade. If you want to go to school, you will be hunted down and shot. If there is a war, you will be raped and your daughters and your mother and your grandmother will be raped.

You will go hungry, be denied an education, and have no control over who you marry. Your life as a wife will consist of servitude and violence and non-consensual sex.

You will be fed lies about this being your lot as a woman, and worse, when you have daughters, you will find yourself repeating this lie to your daughters because by the time they are born you will have no choice but to believe it.

Every day of your life is an opportunity to reverse the long and ugly history of inequality that has dogged our existence since the dawn of time.

About Fifty Shades of Feminism
The antidote to the idea that being a woman is all about submitting to desire. There are many more shades than that and here are fifty women to explore them.

In this volume, fifty women young and old - writers, politicians, actors, scientists, mothers - reflect on the shades that inspired them and what being woman means to them today.

Contributors include: Tahmima Anam, Joan Bakewell, Bidisha, Lydia Cacho, Nina Power, Shami Chakrabarti, Lennie Goodings, Linda Grant, Natalie Haynes, Siri Hustvedt, Jude Kelly, Kathy Lette, Kate Mosse, Bee Rowlatt, Elif Shafak, Ahdaf Soueif, Shirley Thompson, Natasha Walter, Jeanette Winterson - alongside the three editors

The excerpt is published with permission from Jonathan Ball publishers and Virago Press (an imprint of Little, Brown) .

To purchase a copy of this book, head on over to Kalahari.com.

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