REBECCA WAS 17 YEARS OLD when she joined the Royal Air Force (RAF). She was spritely and plucky, looking for mischief as much as work. And she found it — when she found her partner in crime. She met Nina on a Thursday; Nina’s first Thursday on camp. Like the other new girls, Nina looked lost at first — she was, after all, just a teenager signing up for military service. Rebecca, being slightly older and more accustomed to life on the base, took Nina and the others out for their first boozy night on the town, to a cheesy place nearby called The Box, where the bartenders plied you with alco-pops no matter how young you looked.
From that night on, Rebecca and Nina were inseparable (except during the torturous months they were sent on different assignments and were separated by oceans). They were in the same squadron and lived on the same block, so they would work hard together during the day and drink hard together every night. It was a strange, heady time, with all the discipline of a military career by day and all the sweet abandon of underage rebellion by night. They had that inextricable type of best friendship, like they were invisibly conjoined or bound at the feet in a lifelong three-legged race. They were rarely seen apart — they became a set, a pair, a two-for-one.
One time, Rebecca and Nina turned up to a military party dressed head to toe as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. Nobody else was in costume, not one person. They could scarcely have found a better metaphor for their relationship: two beautiful idiots dressed in identical outfits, wading through a crowd of people in plain clothes. They lived by their own rules and they may as well have had their own language. Women in other squadrons used to ask management if Rebecca and Nina could join theirs; their friendship was so enviable and infectious, people just wanted to be around it.
When Rebecca and Nina were together, they moved as one. When they were sent on different assignments, to different corners of the world, they wrote to one another. Between them, they’ve got enough letters to fill a book. Rebecca’s favourite telegram from Nina is in a frame. It says, ‘Hi Muppet, we are nowhere. Miss you loads, Nina.’ Nowhere is spelt ‘k-n-o-where’ and the message would have had to go through security to reach Rebecca because it was official military correspondence. In fact, Rebecca kept every telegram, every letter, every memo between them.
The girls might have had fun, but they held onto one another through some rough times, too. Nina’s mother was an alcoholic, so there were explosive fights followed by stretches of silence between them. Rebecca wasn’t on speaking terms with her parents. Both women suffered from bulimia and depression. They each tried to take their own lives, at different times. They drank too much, they slept too little and they crashed into one another for support. They fought and made up. They kept each other alive in a hyper-masculine environment that didn’t put much effort into keeping its women safe.
It was a strange place for two women to find themselves, the RAF. It was exactly the kind of tense, lonely experience that would foster a friendship like Rebecca and Nina’s. It’s fitting that both girls would enlist at around the same time and also make the decision to leave together to pursue their true dreams. Four years into their service, around the year 2000, the girls were in a nightclub. They were on the dance floor, having a life-changing conversation at full volume, over the music. They both just said, ‘This is mad! Let’s leave!’ Rebecca said, ‘I don’t want to do this any more, I want to be an actress and a writer!’ Nina said, ‘I want to be a nurse!’ And so, in sync as always, they went straight to the administration centre the next day and registered to leave the RAF. Six months and one last assignment later, they were free to get on with the rest of their lives — together, obviously. They moved to London, where Rebecca went to drama school and Nina trained as a nurse. They both got married. Nina has kids and Rebecca is their honorary aunt.
‘We have plans to be friends forever, 100 per cent. As we get older . . . Well, Nina had a problem with her thyroid . . . I don’t know . . .’ Rebecca says, getting staccato with emotion. ‘I’ve sort of dealt with how one day your parents will die and I know that, but like, your friend? I don’t know, I can’t deal with it, it’s bigger. It’s bigger. The light in my life would go out. I’m going to cry, oh God.’
The idea of existing without Nina is so offensive to Rebecca, she gently sort of dry retches. Her best friend’s mortality is too much for her to think about, so we move on to a more general philosophy. What is it about female friendships that’s so special? What kind of chemistry is going on between two women who adore one another platonically? How has Nina become the single most important person in Rebecca’s life?
‘It’s just on a different level, female friendship,’ Rebecca says. ‘I think sisterhood is rooted in us, tribally, from generations past.’
Rebecca hit on exactly the thing I’ve been thinking about female friendship. What she has with Nina is exactly what I picture when I think of intense, lifelong female friendship. In fact, so much so, that when she said what I’ve just relayed to you here, I made a funny sort of squawking noise in response. I do that in interviews sometimes, when someone says exactly what I hoped they’d say. Rebecca, whom I liked immediately (and not just because she’s written a cabaret show about being in the RAF with her best mate Nina, though it certainly has something to do with it), just happened to back up my own theory on female friendship: that woman-to-woman friendship is entirely different from male-to-male friendship. It doesn’t matter if it’s between a pair of people, like Rebecca and Nina, or a bigger group, like, say, Taylor Swift and her ‘squad’. The very experience of being women unites us in a way men simply can’t know. We might not all be literally in the RAF, surviving it with our best buddy, but we are all, to varying extents, fighting to live in a world that still belongs to men. Friendship is the alliance we have to have, just to get through.
If you were to look at the DNA of a friendship, you’d inevitably find gender in there as a defining factor. Female friendship is a support system predicated on our experience as women. Now, I don’t imagine every set of best friends or group of girlfriends necessarily sits around discussing the suffragette movement or quoting the latest statistics on the gender pay gap to one another (I lied, I do imagine exactly that). What I’m talking about is a less formal exchange of solidarity; a more casual sort of feminist support that we offer each other.
My girlfriends and I do it all the time. We live in different corners of the world, so we have a WhatsApp conversation going between four of us: Jemma, Ayla, Sammie and me. The conversation is called ‘Bridesmaids’ because we recently wore matching dresses and cried all over each other at Sammie’s wedding. There are thousands of messages between us (WhatsApp, for the uninitiated, is an app that allows you to text multiple people at once in a private conversation that’s run through Wi-Fi rather than your phone’s network data.)
We write to each other in that group every day, one way or another. Some days it’s absolute nonsense: private jokes, bad puns, emojis and photos of dogs we saw on the street. But most days it’s a little treasure trove of advice — about everything. We talk about holidays, breakfast, clothes, depression, anxiety, Beyoncé tickets, insomnia, Taylor Swift’s relationships, cancer, men, wine, heartbreak, unrequited love, what we’re eating for dinner, some cute kids we saw at the park, TV shows we binged on, books, notable cookies we’ve eaten, Britney Spears’s comeback, candles, movies and careers. It’s a higgledy-piggledy little stash of every conversation topic we could ever need to cover. But it’s also full of conversations I’d quietly categorise as feminist: how to get through a presentation for a roomful of male executives, how to get people at work to stop calling you by a diminutive nickname, how to ask for a promotion, how to get a pay rise, how to start a professional networking group for women, how to have kids and have a career. And then there are the conversations I’d put under ‘shit women have to deal with’: guys starting conversations on public transport, dudes who touch you without an invitation, men who deliberately undermine you at work, anyone who wilfully underestimates your capacity to do something based on your biological traits. Our WhatsApp thread is full of personal silliness, but it’s also our way of constantly negotiating how to be women. It’s a private focus group of the comrades we trust the most.
That WhatsApp group is proof, to me, that we use female friendship for confirmation of our own existence. We work out how to behave and react and be in the world, as women, by talking to other women. Obviously, our differences define us too and we need people to challenge who we are and what we do as much as confirm it. I’m not saying we should seek out clones to prop ourselves up in life; I’m saying we tend to gravitate towards people with similar life experiences.
This is not all conjecture from me, by the way. You know who else is on my side, when it comes to the unique nature of female friendship? Evolutionary science. A landmark study conducted in the year 2000 argues, basically, that women have evolved to seek out female friendship in a way that men simply haven’t.
The findings came when a group of American scientists were working on a study to investigate the way women respond to fear. They wrote about it in a paper called ‘Biobehavioral Responses to Stress in Females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight’. The paper was published by the American Psychological Association in a journal called the Psychological Review, so we know it’s legit. Dr Laura Cousino Klein, Dr Shelley E. Taylor and their team’s findings suggest that women don’t necessarily respond to danger or fear in the way men do. You’ve heard of the phrase ‘fight or flight’ before; we use it colloquially now to talk about the way we respond to stress. That is to say that when we’re confronted with some sort of threat, our instinct is usually to either fight or to flee. This ‘fight or flight’ model of behaviour has been around since the 1920s, but as Klein and Taylor point out, the majority of studies in this area have been conducted on men. So what we really know is that men have a fight-or-flight instinct, but there hasn’t been enough female-specific research to know if the same thing applies to women. That’s mainly because women have periods and the hormone fluctuations they entail confuse everyone, including scientists. So, basically, for ages most tests that might include hormones as a factor were done on the males of our species. Back in 2000, Klein and team counted 200 studies that included 14,548 people and found that 66 per cent of those subjects were male, with just 34 per cent female. What if women react entirely differently to stress but we don’t actually know because all this damn time we’ve been testing so many men?
That’s precisely what Klein and co. propose. They concluded that women respond to stressful conditions with a ‘tend-and-befriend’ instinct more than a fight-or-flight one. They say women are biologically motivated to protect themselves and their babies, and that this maternal instinct actually stops women from fighting or fleeing because both those options could be dangerous for the tiny human in their care. Instead, Klein and Taylor believe women respond to stress by calming and comforting their baby, and making friends for protection from danger.
So when life throws a stress curveball in the direction of a woman, her response is to check her baby’s alright (if she has one handy) and then reach out to other women for companionship and safety in numbers. The single greatest source of danger to a woman is now, and possibly always has been, the male of the human species. Women are killed by their partners in alarming numbers the world over, so even though #notallmen is a hashtag on Twitter, women have a biological imperative to protect themselves from man-folk. This might be one of the reasons why they seek out female friends — for solidarity and protection. Men have little biological reason to fear women and they’ve always been dominant, so they haven’t developed any such mechanism.
When humans are in stress, their bodies have a hormonal response to threat, which includes the rapid release of oxytocin. It is generally accepted that oxytocin is enhanced by the oestrogen in the female body. Oxytocin can have a calming effect — and if that’s true, it explains why women are better able to make buddies in times of stress than men, who tend to react with aggression.
Klein et al. say the female instinct to make friends (or ‘strong tendency to affiliate’ as science would put it) is ‘one of the most robust gender differences in adult human behaviour’. Women crave the social connection of other women as a product of their evolutionary needs — and they will seek it out more than men at all life stages. Teenage girls, female college students and adult women are all more likely than their male peers to get same-sex support when they need it. As fully-grown humans, women rely less on their spouse for socialisation than men and appear to be generally more buoyed by a small group of same-sex friends. At every age, women are just drawing strength from other women like it ain’t no thang. They seek support, of course, but they’re also more generous in giving it. In fact, research reveals that women are 30 per cent more likely than men to have given support in response to life stressors like money and work problems, personal issues, death and health concerns.
Rhesus and squirrel monkeys demonstrate similar behaviour in the way they maintain matrilineal social systems. Mothers, daughters and sisters in primate groups treat one another in much the same way they treat unrelated females — mainly by licking them and protecting them (I know that’s how I make friends). They spend between 10 and 20 per cent of their time grooming one another, which is an expression of friendship and status. I don’t want to go on too much of a monkey tangent — I’ll only start making simian puns and nobody wants that — but suffice to say a lot of monkey research appears to confirm my whole ‘female friendships are special’ theory. And I don’t know about you, but when I put forward any kind of cultural hypothesis, I like to have monkey back-up before I publish anything.
I also wanted to talk to one of the authors of the ‘Tend-and-befriend’ paper. Partly because it was published in 2000 and surely they’ve thought of something new to add in the past 16 years. But mainly because I wanted to ask one of the female scientists whether her personal life experiences matched her research. So, on a Friday evening UK time, I skyped Dr Laura Cousino Klein, who was sitting outside a Starbucks in Colorado.
Unsurprisingly, Klein has lived out some of her own theory. When she started this research, she was a female scientist in male-dominated territory, trying to challenge something we took to be true about evolution. Since the study, and as she continues her work in the area of gender difference and resilience, Klein has become a mother and felt that biological pull of loyalty towards her family that she once wrote about in theory. At times of stress (walking into Penn State University as one of just three women in her department, multiple miscarriages, a husband who left her with three children under 12) Klein has reacted precisely the way she predicted: by tending to her children and finding solace in her friendships.
‘Since the research has been published, I have become an advocate for valuing our social relationships and finding ways to help people prioritise them,’ says Klein. ‘We’re so caught up in our computers and our work, are we really taking the time to cultivate relationships that are biologically satisfying?’
Now I want to tell you an extraordinary story that is, more than anything, all about biologically satisfying friendship. Natasha Bakht is a family law professor living in Ottawa, Canada. She wanted to have a child, so she became pregnant via sperm donor and planned to raise her son as a single mother. When Natasha was pregnant and working at the University of Ottawa, one of her colleagues — an environmental lawyer called Lynda Collins — suggested she could be Natasha’s birth coach. At the time, Lynda just thought it might be cool to see a human being come into the world. She wasn’t a mother yet herself and she was naturally inquisitive about the process — and besides, she wanted to be helpful. Natasha gave birth to a little boy, whom she called Elaan. Elaan is a beautiful child, but his arrival on Earth was not simple. Complications during labour left the little boy with severe disabilities. Six months into his life doctors discovered part of his brain was dead. He now lives with spastic quadriplegia, epilepsy, asthma and visual problems. He cannot speak. For his mothers, watching Elaan grow — he’s now seven — is both heart-achingly wonderful and devastating.
Right from the very first day of Elaan’s life, Lynda was by his side. She lived about 15 minutes away from Natasha and Elaan, and visited frequently. What started out as hour-long visits became three-, six-, nine-hour visits, where she’d just spend all day playing and hanging out. Elaan was only truly comfortable in the company of two human beings: Natasha and Lynda. Any other carer who turned up would inevitably make him despair. In every respect except biology, Lynda was as much Elaan’s mother as Natasha. So by the time Lynda started thinking about whether to have her own child, she realised she already had one. She’d become besotted and Elaan took over her life in a spectacular, unexpected way. The three of them became this totally unconventional, completely lovely family unit. Lynda looked into adopting Elaan, but because she and Natasha are not in a conjugal relationship, she couldn’t legally do that without Natasha giving him up. Still, they wanted something to officially acknowledge Lynda’s relationship with Elaan, because it truly was the connection between a parent and a child. Elaan knows Lynda as ‘Aunty Lyndy’ and nobody can make him laugh quite like she can. Conveniently, remember, Natasha is a professor in family law. She’d heard of something called a declaration of parentage, which could legally make Lynda Elaan’s mother. If they were successful in their legal bid, they’d have Elaan’s birth certificate changed to include Lynda’s name as well as Natasha’s. They were the first pair of close friends to try and become co-parents of a child in Canada and the legal process was complicated. It took two years, but finally the court decided it was in Elaan’s best interests to have Lynda as a parent as well.
So now Elaan legally has two mothers to love and adore and protect him. Two mothers to guide him through a difficult existence. Two mothers to make a perfectly delightful, if unconventional, family. He and Natasha live in one apartment and Lynda lives in the apartment directly above, in the same building. Lynda pops down in the mornings to see Elaan before school and comes around for dinner and bedtime stories in the evenings. Natasha and Lynda coordinate their teaching schedules so one or the other of them is always available, should Elaan need them during the day. They negotiate modern parenthood the same way any other set of parents would — only they happen to be friends, not romantically involved as social convention would have it.
Natasha and Lynda now have Elaan’s modified birth certificate, which is emotionally significant for both of them. It makes their little family official and that’s enormously gratifying. What we’re able to call ourselves in relation to the people we love is really important, so for Lynda to be able to say she is her son’s mother is a profoundly moving development. It makes things logistically easier, too, because Lynda is now allowed to make medical appointments for Elaan and liaise with his school, which she couldn’t have done when her status was ‘Elaan’s mum’s friend’. It also means they will have financial security for Elaan’s future, including if anything should happen to either of them. Elaan’s medical costs are huge and he is now entitled to two parents’ pensions, which could literally, at some stage, be lifesaving for him. His physical condition remains precarious and neither parent is sure how long they will have little Elaan in their lives, but for however long that may be, they will be there for him — together.
I simply cannot think of a lovelier testament to the bond possible between two women. Two buddies, doing motherhood together. It’s really affected the way I think about the future of family dynamics. I don’t know if I want to have children — I’m at that delicate stage where I’ve spent nearly three decades assuming I would become a mother and now that the biological imperative is here, I’m scared and I have no idea what I want. I like the idea that perhaps by the time I get to it, there might be different combinations of people who love each other raising children together. Single motherhood is a brave and sometimes lonely choice. Natasha chose that path, but then gave birth to a severely disabled little boy whom she adored and fretted for at the same time. She would have loved him no matter what, cared for him no matter what. But having a close friend to co-parent with you is just such an unspeakably lovely revelation in a story that could otherwise have been so different. I spoke to Natasha and Lynda separately, and they both said the actual conversation — the ‘I’d like to co-parent your child’ one — was incredibly easy. The bond between Lynda and Elaan was so strong and so obvious, the move to make Lynda a co-mom was seamless. It’s just an exceptionally charming story of female friendship and it makes me a little bit emotional, to be honest.
I love seeing our definition of family change to include more iterations of love. Why shouldn’t two women (or two men) raise a child, whether they’re romantically involved or not? A child deserves love and that’s really all there is to it. Raising children is, from what I can tell, totally mad. It’s the kind of beautiful chaos we voluntarily create in our own lives because we’re compelled by something primal, by something in our blood and our ancestry. Having a friend by your side through all the broken sleep, tears, tantrums, desperate naps, heartache, worry, teenage angst and growing up would be wonderful and I can hardly see why a straight romantic partner would necessarily be any better qualified for the job. Natasha and Lynda are my current favourite poster women for female friendship. The way they’ve both negotiated being single, working mothers is seriously inspirational and I hope we start seeing more families like theirs in the future.
Now, we’ve just seen an exceptional example of family love enabled by feminism. It’s a private, domestic manifestation of female friendship. There have also recently been some far more public demonstrations of female friendship. Now, as ever, I’d like to talk about Ms Taylor Swift. She is the most commercially valuable singer in the world right now, and it seems that part of her publicity agenda has been to promote the very idea of woman-to-woman friendship. She has invoked ‘girl power’ and for better or for worse, her very tall friends have become envoys of the cause. While the question of authenticity has lingered in the media over some of those relationships, you can’t deny that Taylor ‘Swifty’ Swift is a staunch ambassador for female friendship.
Swift has a group of powerful, uber-famous women friends: Karlie Kloss, Blake Lively, Cara Delevingne, Selena Gomez, Ruby Rose, Gigi Hadid, Emma Stone, Lena Dunham, Lorde. It’s also reported that she has maintained her friendship with her best friend Abigail, a pre-fame friend. Sure, Swift is sometimes reported as cutting and accumulating friends for publicity reasons, like many other celebrities. But I like to believe she’s human as well as famous, and motivated by the same things we are. The need for intimacy, company and support, that kind of thing.
Whatever Swift’s motives, she has essentially launched an advocacy campaign for female friendship. When she baked cookies with Karlie Kloss, walked barefoot on a beach with Lorde and threw Fourth of July parties for her ‘squad’, she started a cultural moment for female friendship. It’s not something we usually talk about a lot, fixated as we are on romance — but since Swift’s high-profile friendship rallies, we do. Swift has very publicly selected her ‘squad’ and celebrated what they mean to her on stage, in the media and on Instagram. Swift has made friendship (and love) into a type of performance art. It’s not exactly my style, but then I’m not the world’s most famous pop star either, and who knows how I’d behave if I were. Celebrity is a strange, foreign thing; you may as well have company through it.
Taylor Swift’s squad might be the most exclusive clique on the planet. It’s mainly made up of supermodels and actors, most of whom are white and wealthy. They often wear matching outfits and stand in choreographed positions for photographs. It would be easy, and probably mildly satisfying, to disregard the whole group as vacuous or staged or opportunistic. I might be naive, but I also think this group of women are a force for good.
What Swift shows us is that female friendship is one of the ways we communicate feminism, harking back to what Dr Klein has discovered in her research about the biological imperative for female solidarity in a man’s world. Swift was converted to the cause of feminism by her own famous friend, Girls creator and star, Lena Dunham. Swift used to be one of those famous women who doesn’t identify as a feminist — until she became friends with Dunham in 2014. She told The Guardian newspaper: ‘As a teenager, I didn’t understand that saying you’re a feminist is just saying that you hope women and men will have equal rights and equal opportunities. What it seemed to me, the way it was phrased in culture, society, was that you hate men. And now I think a lot of girls have had a feminist awakening because they understand what the word means. For so long it’s been made to seem like something where you’d picket against the opposite sex, whereas it’s not about that at all. Becoming friends with Lena — without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for — has made me realise that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so.’
I’ve spoken to women in their teens and early twenties particularly, who have had an entirely similar epiphany to Taylor Swift’s. Some of those awakenings were because of Taylor Swift. For a lot of young women, feminism has had a PR problem for a long time, seen as this acerbic, unfashionable movement of women who hate men. Hopefully, with the exceptional impact of movements like the #MeToo campaign, in which women shared their stories of assault and harassment after more than 100 allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, there is more widespread pride in feminism now. Feminism, of course, goes so very far beyond Taylor Swift — in my opinion, her version of it is often perilously exclusive — but she has done good work in its rebranding, for she is a master of the makeover. If there are two things Ms Swift is exceptionally good at, it’s break-up lyrics and publicity. She brought the latter to a cause that needs it, to recruit a new generation of girls. Sure, Swift isn’t a perfect feminist. Nobody is. But she is now a prominent self-defined feminist and that matters. To get women to join the fight for equality, sometimes you have to speak to them in their own language. In this case, it’s pop music and friendship.
The crossover of Swift’s friendships and feminism reminds me of a particularly great article published in New York Magazine’s ‘The Cut’, by journalist Ann Friedman. It’s about ‘The Shine Theory’, which is essentially the idea that you should befriend other women, rather than try to cut them down. You don’t shine if I don’t shine, we shine more brightly together, that kind of thing. If you live by The Shine Theory, you support other women by recruiting them as friends. Friedman wrote: ‘I want the strongest, happiest, smartest women in my corner, pushing me to negotiate for more money, telling me to drop men who make me feel bad about myself, and responding to my outfit selfies from a place of love and stylishness, not competition and body-snarking.’ It’s essentially a mini thesis for feminism-via-friendship; Friedman is calling for women to surround themselves with the strongest possible allies in the fight for success, happiness and identity. She wrote: ‘When you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you better.’
That idea is at the heart of my argument for friendship as a transformative force. It argues for the deliberate cultivation of a strong friendship group with the explicit purpose of allegiance, support and shared brilliance. It’s the ultimate way to spread and inhabit feminist ideas: one woman at a time, friend to friend, friendship group by friendship group until we meet in this glorious cross-stitch of womankind. Female friends are uniquely influential in each other’s lives and they are in the perfect position to encourage feminist action. I’m talking about encouraging career ambition, calling out sexism and racism, reporting abuse, getting rid of toxic partners, knowing when to quit, caring for children, negotiating maternity leave, navigating love, ageing, looking after family and surviving. I’m talking about who will be by your side during one or many of the uniquely female experiences: getting pregnant, getting an abortion, getting your period, losing your period. And who will be there when you’re blindsided by tragedy, paralysed by grief, bankrupt by hospital or disability costs, or you’re told your life doesn’t matter because of the colour of your skin, prosecuted, taunted, heartbroken, fired, destitute, homeless or lost. While men, politicians and church leaders believe they have a say in what we do with our bodies, how we manage our lives, what we teach our children, the worth of a life, or any other matter that directly relates to the experience of being female, we need each other for support. It’s a survival tactic as much as a thing of great loveliness. Women fighting for women is one of the most powerful forces that exists on this planet of ours — it’s why we wear T-shirts emblazoned with ‘The future is female’.
For recent proof that female solidarity is formidable, just think of the extraordinary Women’s Marches that happened across the world at the beginning of 2017. On 21 January, an estimated five million women (and their male allies) pounded the pavement together to protest against President of the United States, Donald Trump’s alarming approach to women’s rights, immigration and LGBTQI safety. The flagship protest was called Women’s March on Washington, and half a million people turned up to (peacefully) storm the political capital of America. It was the biggest turnout for a protest since those against the Vietnam War in the ’60s. Organisers estimate that 3.3–4.6 million American women protested against their new president that day, in the name of human rights.
In London, 5,894 kilometres away, I, and 99,999 other women, congregated outside the American Embassy so we could feel as though we were standing on common ground with our American sisters. Women around the world did the same thing, some in almighty numbers, others in smaller and sometimes clandestine groups because open political protest is not permitted in their country. Women turned up with their friends and colleagues in every corner of the world to show solidarity, and it was glorious. There were 673 protests worldwide, in the greatest demonstration of female anger in recent memory. Organisers in London expected roughly 30,000 people to show up in England’s capital on an uncharacteristically sunny Saturday, but it ended up being more than 100,000. The streets in central London were so crammed with incensed women, you could barely move. My flatmate and I got a bus (red, double-decker) into town, met some other badass women, took a selfie of our marching boots and set off to the beginning of the set route for the march — only to stand around for three full hours in a seething crowd of protestors about five blocks away because we literally couldn’t fit into the square by the American Embassy. It was frustrating in the most wonderful, affirming way, like a beautiful traffic jam of revolutionaries.
You probably saw photographs of some of the signs women made and carried that day. Some of the best I saw included, ‘Girls just want to have fundamental human rights’; ‘This pussy grabs back’; ‘I’ve seen smarter cabinets at IKEA’; ‘So bad, even introverts are here’; ‘I can’t believe we’re still protesting this’; ‘Grab ’em by the patriarchy’; ‘Diversity makes America great’; ‘Put avocado on racism so white people will notice’ and ‘A woman’s place is in the resistance’. And there was a baby with a sign around his neck that read: ‘I love naps but I stay woke’. Which is why you have children: to raise them as tiny members of the resistance. But probably my favourite sign of the day was one that simply said: ‘We are family. I got all my sisters with me’. Because that’s what it felt like, having the sisterhood together.
But I can’t talk about the Women’s Marches without respectfully pointing out their flaws. There was some extremely valid criticism of these protests from black women, who argued this is the first time white women have come out in great numbers, when they should have been protesting alongside them at Black Lives Matter protests before now. Comedian Samantha Bee observed that all you needed to get white women out on the streets is to give them arts and crafts to do — because one of the trademarks of this protest was the bright pink ‘pussy’ hat, which is a DIY knitting project with political undertones. The absence of white women in the fight against racism is glaring and shameful. Feminism needs desperately, urgently, to be racially inclusive and I pray to Michelle Obama that the reaction to this protest has been a wake-up call for white feminists who only march when something directly affects them. The sisterhood is incomplete so long as we ignore or sideline some of our own.
What I’m trying to say is that the Women’s March was magnificent, but we can do better. Millions of women got together around the world to send a clear message: ‘We see you, Donald Trump, and we will not sit idly by while you take away our rights’. We loudly rejected the agenda of the misogynist-in-chief of America and that felt really, really good. Walking shoulder to shoulder with thousands of other women, yelling ‘Hey ho, Donald Trump has got to go’ in chorus, was extraordinary. But there’s still work to be done — on the movement for women and the movement against Trump. We’ve reminded ourselves of the power we have when we get together, and that’s wonderful. What we’ve got to do now is continue to fight, to go into political battle together, to have millions of female hearts beat as one. That’s what female friendship is at its extreme, it’s feminist solidarity that can genuinely change the world. Those marches were made up of friendship groups, lady-dates and family outings, all smaller circles of solidarity coming together. That’s what we’re working with here, when we do female friendship properly.
That’s why I think female friendship needs a bit of a publicity overhaul. We’re all plenty familiar with the myth that friendship between women can be snarky, petty or bitter. We probably witnessed some of it in high school. What we need now is to vehemently reject that sort of behaviour and instead lift each other up. Lift, but also criticise. The most productive friendships are the ones you can rely on for truth: encouragement and support when you need it, candid criticism when you deserve it. The only reason I believe my best girlfriends when they say something lovely is because I trust them to be honest about the ugly parts of life, too. I expect my dearest buddies to hold me accountable for anything stupid or bad I do, just as they cheer me on when I do something good. The same applies to feminism on a bigger scale — we are equally entitled to be celebrated and challenged. I do not believe it should be mandatory for women to support other women purely because they are female. That’s reductive and dangerous: If we start thinking that way, I’d have to support Sarah Palin or Katie Hopkins based purely on anatomical similarities. No thank you. I reserve the right to disagree with other women and I am in no way suggesting a blanket rule of support among lady folk.
I am talking about strategic support for the women in our lives. It’s the personal-life equivalent of the ‘amplification’ strategy used by President Obama’s female aides. When Obama came into office, two-thirds of his aides were male and the women on his team found it difficult to be heard in the boardroom, as so many of us do. Men were more likely to speak up, to claim ideas as their own and to take credit for being effective. So the women put a very simple but clever strategy in place: When one woman spoke during a meeting, another woman would repeat or echo what she had said to give it extra gravitas and to stop a man from speaking over her. They called it ‘amplification’ and it worked — President Obama reportedly noticed what they were doing, took their point and started to seek out the opinions of women and junior aides. It was a rather clever antidote to the invisibility some women feel at work. It’s also how feminism spreads, via the amplification of certain ideas between women. Really, when we befriend someone, we’re asking them to amplify our thoughts, fears and ideas. We’re asking for an echo.
The other feminist thing we do in our female friendships is embrace imperfection. We allow ourselves to be fully developed characters in our own stories. I tell my WhatsApp group of girlfriends when I do something stupid, when I think I’ve hurt someone, when I worry that I’ve been awful, and when I’ve generally been a disaster of an adult human. I am the fullest version of myself with them. They know me in all my unashamed ridiculousness. They love me in moments of strength and in weakness — and I think that’s crucially important. We are bombarded with the expectation of perfection from every angle, as women — from pop culture, magazines, books, TV shows, films and our extended families. Female friendships can be our respite from all of that. Together, we can be wicked and fallible and completely ourselves — and that’s still a rebellious act.
Remember how revolutionary Lena Dunham’s show Girls was when it premiered in 2012, and Sex and the City in 1998? The novelty there was that it actually dared to represent young (white) women realistically, and make friendship the focal point of their lives. The four central Girls characters, Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna, were written with a nuanced sort of realism we weren’t used to: they’re complex, unlikable, chaotic, changeable and fallible. They have sex and fall in and out of love, but that doesn’t define them. They are allowed, as so many women in general before them were not, to define themselves. The show is an homage to female existence in all its great, aching messiness. It’s evidence that we’re starting to accept the full, inconvenient experience of being female.
Elsewhere in culture, we’re seeing a surge of stories about women. The rabid popularity of Italian writer Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan’ novels is proof that we crave deeper depictions of female friendship. The four books in the series tell the story of a lifelong friendship between two characters, Elena ‘Lena’ Greco and Raffaella ‘Lila’ Curello. Lena and Lila start their lives in Naples and remain, in one way or another, entangled, as though they cannot escape one another. Their friendship is as dark and vicious as any friendship could be, in so much as it is motivated by envy and spite as well as love. Right from the beginning, there’s something combative about the way the girls interact, and they continue in this great, wild volatility. Lena worships and loathes Lila in almost equal measure and becomes utterly fixated on her. She is unable to work out who she is without comparing herself to Lila — fearing her entire life that people see her as ‘Lila’s pale shadow’. Lila is a brilliant, cantankerous thing; a bedraggled waif of a girl who grows into a tough, complicated woman. They live through poverty, abuse, crime, sexism, violence, love and tragedy, but not always as allies. It’s more like Lena and Lila are bound to one another, unable in some fundamental way to truly exist without the other. The inevitability of their relationship is written into the DNA of both characters. In the first book, My Brilliant Friend, Lena says Lila is ‘the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged’. Theirs is a bond that neither distance nor time can break. It’s a more formative relationship than any marriage, romance or affair, any child, any job, any family member. It’s the ultimate example of a torrid female friendship; one that touches every element of two existences.
The Lena-Lila connection began as many childhood best friendships do, with a closeness that seems to exclude everyone else on the planet. In the first book, Lena says: ‘We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighbourhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two — I thought — understood one another.’ I love that Ferrante compares twelve-year-olds to old ladies — it’s the perfect way to capture that restless maturity some children reach right before adolescence. Lena and Lila were always ahead of their peers in that sense, always better with language and better at school than the other girls, always a step or several ahead of the boys. Together they have this lovely, languid maturity as children and then, in some ways, a stubborn childishness in their adulthood. Friendship has a way of stretching age and defying time like that. Intense friendship has a way of lifting two or more of you out of context: if you’ve known each other forever, you can regress to childish behaviour in moments, or slip into old habits and get drunk with the same girls you did at 21. In the same way childhood and teenage friends drag each other to each birthday like a race to grow up, old friends can keep you young. That’s what happened with Lena and Lila; they were girls who wanted desperately to be women and then, when they became old enough, they clung to jealousy and disagreement like children unprepared for what the world can do to you.
The type of friendship Lena and Lila have is rare, in real life (though it’s worth noting that there are rumours these books were autobiographical). It’s too intense to happen all the time; it’s utterly life-defining and consuming. But the very depiction of it by Ferrante is revolutionary in literature because it’s a fully developed, rich, viscous, infuriating relationship between two female human beings. Truly, how often do we get that in our stories? Barely ever. Female friendship has, until recently, been too threatening to the patriarchy to appear with any prominence in pop culture. Its emergence as a major cultural force — in the visibility of Taylor Swift’s squad in every major media outlet in the world, on the television and in the writing of Elena Ferrante — is a feminist triumph. It gives currency and validation to a hyper-female incarnation of friendship that’s previously been dismissed or underestimated. But we cannot truly understand the potential of female friendship to unite and inspire and ignite without acknowledging the knotty, dark side of it. The thorny, bitter, tempestuous parts of some friendships that can tear apart two people rather than build them up.
Again, Taylor Swift is relevant. For all her glossy Instagramworthy friendships with women, there’s one that darkens her reputation as Best BFF Ever. It’s her allegedly bitter relationship with Ms Katy Perry. If you’re not au fait with the ups and downs of celebrity friendships, Swift and Perry used to be very close, but then Perry allegedly ‘stole’ one of Swift’s back-up dancers — an act of betrayal from which the friendship never recovered. Then, during her ‘1989’ world tour, Swift invited many famous people up on stage with her except Perry. She also, allegedly, wrote the song ‘Bad Blood’ about their spat. Swift made a music video for the song starring all her real-life friends as hot warriors in a fight against an unnamed brunette nemesis speculated to be Perry, essentially a revenge fantasy. Katy Perry released a song called ‘Swish Swish Bish’, widely reported in the media to be in response to ‘Bad Blood’.
Tabloid speculation about Swift and Perry is split: Either they genuinely had a fallout, like normal human beings, or in the lyrics to ‘Bad Blood’ Swift has shrewdly slandered her fiercest competition in the pop industry. If Swift truthfully felt as though Perry was a bad friend, then she has successfully excised a toxic friendship from her life. On the other hand, she may have used the friendship of other women for the purpose of excluding Perry. We simply may never know. Perry, for her part, has tweeted that she would be open to collaborating with Swift, on the condition she is given an apology.
The Swift–Perry friendship saga makes international headlines because tabloid media have always loved a good, old-fashioned fight between women and will take any opportunity to pit them against one another. It’s also newsworthy because it hints at a darker side to femininity, to celebrity, to female friendship. Female friendship, like any type of relationship, is not perfect and there’s little point pretending it is. Women (even Swift and Perry) are more than entitled to have dark and disastrous friendships — in real life as they are in fiction.
New York Magazine published a terrific essay on intense female friendship, called ‘I’m Having a Friendship Affair’. In it, author Kim Brooks writes about ‘the intensely obsessive, deeply meaningful, occasionally undermining, marriage-threatening, slightly pathological platonic intimacy that can happen between women’. She recounts the time she met a slightly younger writer at a conference and became instantly devoted to her in an endearingly deranged sort of way. They were the only two English-speaking writers at the conference and they got on fiercely, drank together, shared their deepest fears and became inseparable. When the conference ended, they kept in contact; such constant contact that Kim’s husband suspected she was having an affair. Even Kim thought at one point that perhaps she was in love with this woman she’d just met — that’s how intense the connection was. They emailed, texted, spoke on the phone and divulged all sorts of secrets they hadn’t told anyone else in their lives. They planned trips away from their normal, adult lives and basically used each other for that glorious escapism a new relationship can give you. It was, as Kim called it, a friendship affair. And like Lena and Lila’s relationship, like Rebecca and Nina’s, Kim and her platonic partner seemed to defy age together. They became like teenage best friends, bound together in an exclusive bond so profound it felt like romantic love.
But then Kim and her new friend had a falling out. It was small, but it was devastating. Kim couldn’t eat or sleep, she was so distraught. She couldn’t believe her precious friendship might be toxic or fallible. Kim and her friend more or less patched things up but their one disagreement had fractured what they had. ‘There was a slight undercurrent of hostility that hadn’t been there before,’ Kim wrote; ‘a frightening knowledge that we could hurt each other as expertly as we could raise each other up.’
And that, to me, is the paradox at the very heart of female friendship: We can hurt each other as expertly as we can raise each other up. We can love and teach one another — and we can just as easily tear each other down. No matter how much time we spend cultivating shiny, happy, supportive friendships, we can all be capable of a Swift–Perry style conflict. Female friendships are unique and remarkable, but they’re also just human relationships — and that makes them vulnerable, changeable and imperfect. It makes them fascinating and powerful. Whether we’re trying to get by in the RAF, working for the President of the United States, writing a TV show called Girls, reading a book about acerbic best friends in Naples, or smashing it in the pop music industry, female friendships are essential. They’re our greatest refuge, our greatest challenge and our greatest vehicles for feminist action. They’re also, quite simply, rather lovely.
I couldn’t live without the friendship of women. I am eternally, feverishly grateful for my girlfriends and convinced the world is a better place when we work together. Here’s to female friendship — the mess, the exquisiteness, the power and the transformative potential of it.