review: How To Be A Woman

Newsflash! Feminism is not fusty, fussy and frowny.  It’s fun, funny and frivolous. After all, ‘it’s a good time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill and we haven’t been burnt as witches since 1727.’ But, as Caitlin Moran, concedes ‘a few nagging questions do remain.’

Indeed.

If the blurb on the back of the book is to be believed, Moran has the answers to the questions that every modern woman is asking. 

After finishing it, I’m not quite so sure. Some of the questions about botox and brazilians seem less like the concerns of ‘every modern woman’ and more like the kind of things you might find posited as ‘issues’ in Cosmo. 

Having said that, I do think it’s great that this book has struck a chord with many girls and women, who have found something of value in it, and have, hopefully, taken up Moran’s call to re-define themselves as ‘strident feminists.’ And if it then encourages them to take a deeper look at the serious, momentous and urgent stuff rather than simply guffawing at an anecdote about getting really drunk with Lady Gaga, then Moran will have achieved a great deal. Several reviews have already welcomed the book in this way, and I think it’s difficult to argue with the positive impact a best-selling book about feminism can have. I myself was interested in her insider's take on how the media construct representations of female celebrities as 'everywomen' (basically, by asking when they're going to have a baby all the time).

Other reviewers have, however, criticised this book because of what they perceive as its inherent snobbery and focus on the mores of a particular social set, likening it to a Victorian etiquette book in the process. More broadly, I think the book reveals the limits of individual memoir as a ground for political action. Memoir gives a writer license to retreat into the authority of subjectivity, so, in Moran’s case, one could be forgiven for thinking that brazilians appear to rate more highly than rape as a feminist issue (although I realise it’s not a zero-sum game and there is a relationship between the two). I found myself torn between interest in Moran’s memoirs - she’s lived an interesting life and spins many a funny yarn about it - frustration at her wanting to make a joke of everything all the time, and exasperation at some of the supposedly empowering solutions she trumpets (burlesque and female-centric porn will set us free apparently. Um, really?) 

Yes, the personal is  political, and (paraphrasing bell hooks) ‘there is no joy in appropriating someone else’s oppression’. The power of consciousness-raising rooted in personal experience is then to elevate it to the structural: ‘I’m only earning half as much as that doofus of guy doing the same job as me’ - ‘me too’ - ‘let’s start a revolution!’ The idea is that even those not directly affected will recognise that ‘there but for the grace of God ...’ 

All the amusing anecdotes and hilarious romps involving lots of booze, Lady Gaga and so on got a bit wearing after a while. I couldn’t help but think that while there was a lot of strategic mileage to be had out of the ‘feminism is fun, dontcha know’ schtick that there was also a disavowal of some righteous anger as well. Women aren’t meant to be angry, so it was disappointing to see Moran, in interviews promoting the book, quickly pointing out that she’s a funny feminist not a scary or awful one. 

Sure, pioneering feminists like the suffragettes might’ve shared some laughs over a gin or three, but they went on hunger strikes, chained themselves to railings, lobbied politicians, and even threw themselves under horses because they were bloody well PISSED OFF at not having the vote and not having the right to own property. Similarly, second wave feminists probably had a rollicking good time at consciousness-raising sessions, protest marches, and speculum parties. But they were also pretty incensed at being poorly paid for their work, being stuck at home with small kids all day while being treated as little more than children themselves, needing male relatives to sign documents for them, being subject to overt sexual harassment as part of daily working life, being unable to decide their own reproductive futures, and, in some cases, being legally raped by their husbands. 

Pretty hilarious stuff, when you get down to it.

And yet, there are other moments when Moran drops the quips that have a quiet power. In the book’s postscript she poses herself the rhetorical question ‘so do I know how to be a woman now?’  Instead of the expected self-deprecation, she writes ‘I distrust this female habit of reflexively flagging up your own shortcomings ... I’m talking abut the common attitudinal habit in women that we’re kind of ... failing if we’re not a bit neurotic.’ Her response to the question instead? ‘Kind of yes, really, to be honest (pp 297-8).’ Not exactly strident, maybe still a little neurotic, but progress nonetheless. 

Where the book is most powerful - and given its theme - most pertinent to this blog, is in the chapters on birth, mothering, not-mothering, and abortion. These chapters are the strongest because the amusing anecdotes and wry asides retreated - but, you’ll be relieved to know, didn’t disappear entirely - to include moments where, to put it bluntly, shit gets real. Particularly confronting was her chapter on abortion, which aimed to show that deciding one’s own reproductive fate is about more than what happens in cases of rape and incest. 

Here are a couple of selections from these chapters:

(on birth): of course, I haven’t told you the half of it. I haven’t told you about Pete crying, or the shit, or vomiting three feet up a wall, or gasping ‘mouth!’ for the gas and air, as I’d forgotten all the words. Or the nerve that Lizzie damaged with her face and how, ten years later, my right leg is still numb and cold. Of the four failed epidurals, which left each vertebra smashed and bruised, and the fluid between them feeling like hot, rotting vinegar. And the most important thing - the shock, the shock that Lizzie’s birth would hurt me so much; would make me an animal with my leg caught in a trap of my own bones, and leave me begging for the doctors to take a knife and cut me free. // For the next year, every Monday at 7.48am, I would look at the clock and remember the birth, and tremble and give thanks it was all over, and marvel that we both survived. (pp 221-2)

(on deciding to have an abortion) This isn’t who I’m going to be again: another three years of being life support to someone who weeps for me, and rages against me, and who knows, when they’re ill, can only be relieved by resting their head on my belly, and dreaming they’re back inside. My two girls ... are all I want .. I’ll do anything for those girls. // But I will only do one thing for this baby - as quickly as I can before it goes any further (p 271)

To me, these stories offer a much more powerful version of the personal is political than the chapters which preceded it. By putting herself out there in this way, Moran really has the potential to speak to other women’s experience and effect change. But that's all a bit po-faced and serious, innit?

motherhood, one year on

My baby turned one last week. Of course, she had little, if any, idea about what it all meant, beyond the fact that she quite liked the balloons we blew up and playing with (or, more accurately, near) her friends for a couple of hours. I’d been told more than once that the first, and even second, birthday is more for the parents than the baby. I definitely felt the force of this in our case, not least because we were offered just as many congratulations for making it through the first year of parenthood as our baby was offered ‘happy birthdays’.

Given that the birthday girl didn’t register the significance of having lived for one whole revolution of the earth around the sun, what might it all mean? The day itself, beyond the event we made it into, was a day like many others: wake up, get dressed, feed, play, sleep, and repeat. Next year, she is likely to be more aware of the cake, the decorations and the presents - if only to feverishly unwrap them so she can play with the wrapping paper. Commemorations - of which birthdays are one example - are solidified by repetition: as she grows older she will start to look forward to this annual event, eventually counting down the days and looking forward to her presents in the way that I was this year.

It certainly felt like a significant milestone to me. Through the days that sometimes dragged every second, or the weeks that sometimes flew by, it really does feel like we’ve come a long way. Even though I haven’t forgotten the major details of her birth a year ago, the trauma of it all is fading from my mind. I’m reminded of a passage in Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, when the narrator observes a woman giving birth:

Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. (p 68)

I don’t know about the ‘going straight home and starting another baby’ - good lord! - but this November it has become increasingly harder to remember how I experienced her birth last November. Forgetting is part of commemoration too. When countries stage national commemorations, that which doesn’t fit with the narrative of solemn remembrance or joyous celebration is erased or downplayed.

So what do I choose to remember and emphasise for this commemoration?

Seeing the angry bruise on her cheek and cuts on her forehead from the forceps which pulled her out of me.

Marvelling at the ease with which she latched on to feed. She had been kept waiting for nine hours while I was in surgery, so learned the benefits of delayed gratification early.

Hearing her first cries, one of which had a distinct ‘no, no’ sound to tell me she didn’t like something.

Having to call for help from the midwives to pick her up out of the see-through bassinet by my hospital bed to feed her, because I wasn't able to do it.

Being reprimanded by one of the midwives for having a messy room and not picking my baby up myself.

Feeling pleased that breastfeeding was going well, largely without me leading the way.

Feeling dismayed when we were told the she had lost 11 per cent, not the allowed ten, of her birthweight when she was weighed on day four, and being hooked up to an industrial breast pump so my ‘output’ could be ‘measured’ and ‘charted’.

Listening to my husband remonstrate with the paediatrician about the breast pump, and being granted twenty-four hours to feed from my breast to get her weight-gain back on track.

Feeling devastated when she didn’t appear to have gained any weight the next day, until my husband pointed out the scales were not zeroed properly. Then feeling vindicated when they showed that she had gained more weight than was expected.

Wanting desperately to get out of the hospital and feeling jealous of the everyday people I could hear talking and laughing outside my window.

Being granted permission to leave, after yet more checks, and a temperature scare - it had momentarily dipped, and they wouldn’t let us leave until she was nice and warm and ‘normal’ again.

Buckling her into the taxi on a beautiful blue sunny afternoon for her first trip into the outside world after six days that felt like forever, and feeling every bump and corner of that journey home.

Settling her down to sleep in our room and feeling both more normal and more petrified than ever.

Holding her head up for her.

Hearing her snuffly breathing in the night, which my mother thought would bother us. It didn’t. Instead, I felt reassured that she had lived through another twenty-four hours.

Worrying that she wasn’t feeding every two to four hours like she was meant to.

Hoping that she was getting enough food.

Sleeping when she slept.

Moving her around the house - from bedroom to living room and back again - in her bassinet on wheels.

Watching her sleep, which she did a lot.

Having visitors.

Being congratulated.

Drinking kiwi crush and dreading going to the toilet.

Bleeding.

Being threatened by the Department of Internal Affairs - with one such letter being dated 26 December - for not registering her birth the split-second after she had been born.

Feeling her sleep on my chest.

Trying to carry her in a sling, freaking out when it seemed like she might get squashed, and realising that baby-wearing wasn’t for me.

Looking at her fists curled up above her head in triumph as she slept.

Mentally running through everything from starting solids, to toilet-training, to learning to drive, to moving out of home, and feeling stressed.

Realising, finally, that all she wanted for now was food and sleep, and everything else would happen in its own time.

I could go on, but I wouldn’t want to bore you. And I’ve barely scratched the surface of her first few days.

I’ve been asked a lot in the last year whether or not I am enjoying motherhood. It’s a question I don’t really know how to answer, and am probably, knowing me, way overthinking. But I can’t quite reconcile ‘enjoyment’ with motherhood, in the way I might enjoy a movie, or a nice chilled glass of sauvignon blanc (both of which I dimly recollect from the distant past). My experience of motherhood so far has been both less and so much more than mere enjoyment. It has fundamentally challenged me on every level: physical, for sure, emotional, definitely, and even intellectual. I’m still not sure of so many things - how I will juggle work and childcare being the most pressing - and I’m starting to question some of the things that I thought I fundamentally believed - like whether I should go back to work at all.

Some new parents momentarily feel envious or dismissive of people without children. But I don’t. I just feel like they’re at a different place in their lives, and they should treasure what they are experiencing in the here and now. If motherhood has taught me nothing else, it is to focus on the present. The future will work itself out in good time.

More than anything else, I feel transformed. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, life will never be the same again. I will never be the same again. And learning who I am now, as she learns who she is full-stop, is a shared journey that I can’t imagine not taking. Am I enjoying it? No, I’m cherishing it. And missing each moment as they pass by too quickly, with only photos to look back on to try and re-capture them.

the personal is political

I’ve got a few things to get off my chest. So naturally I took to the net. Instead of trolling round other blogs, however, I thought I’d dust off my own soapbox. Over the past ten months of motherhood, and the nine months preceding it, I have been bombarded with all manner of messages, advice, information, conventional and alternative wisdom, and frankly it’s doing my head in. And I’m sure it’s only going to get worse.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, and subjected the blogosphere to blog 3.0 from me, was reading Zoe William’s article in the Guardian last week, ‘Come Back Superwoman: the lost ideal of combining motherhood and work.’ Although not exhaustive, it crystallised for me some of the things that have been bugging me for a while, namely, the great leap back to the 1950s we seem to have taken when it comes to motherhood and child-rearing. Suddenly, the - admittedly difficult to live up to - ideal of combining motherhood and work (aka ‘Superwoman’) is no longer as feted as it once was a few years ago. Confessing that you find breastfeeding a real drag and that you’re kinda bored stuck at home seems to require ten ‘Hail Marys’ and an ‘Our Father’ for penance.

I exaggerate, of course, and the only experience I’ll be drawing on is my own, which is both Pakeha and middle class. That experience so far has brought home to me the import of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. Practices and purchases that we make as parents, whether we actively choose them or not, say something about what we believe or don’t, what we’d like for our children and what we don’t. And these are political - with a small ‘p’ - whether we like it or not.

One of the things I’ve noticed so far in the last 19 months is the naturalising of everything: science is the new alibi for making sure women should be stuck in the home, or, if they aren’t, that they should feel pretty darn guilty about it. And science, or ‘hard-wired’ biological difference, is being invoked as the real reason why girls like pink and dolls and, hence, why women are ‘natural’ carers and nurturers. ‘Natural’ childbirth seems to be enjoying a new period of fashion too, and breastfeeding is ‘nature’s perfect food’ so why wouldn’t you make every effort to do it? Until the twentieth century, nature killed large numbers of mothers and babies in childbirth too, but perhaps we shouldn’t mention that.

Let me be clear. I am not against natural childbirth, breastfeeding, stay-at-home mums, working mums, dolls or scientific research. But, speaking as a cultural critic, it seems like something’s going on. As I try and implement my own parenting technique - the soon-to-be-patented one of Muddling Through - I aim to unpack what that might be.

As I mentioned above, I’ve got nearly two years’ worth of material stored up, and that’s before I even get to things that are irking me at the present moment. Along the way on this wild ride, I’m likely to ruminate on such things as gender performance, the politics of birth and breastfeeding, consumerism, role-modelling and the superwoman ideal, childcare and whether, how and when to go back to work. And I might even throw in some book reviews of some material I’ve been reading to try and get my head round these issues. You lucky people.