3:45 P.M.
I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF AN IMPORTANT WORK DEADLINE—AND SO, obviously, on my knees, trying to winkle a swollen lemon pip out of a hole in the dishwasher spray arm with a pin—when my daughter, returned from school, comes into the kitchen.
“What do you think?”
I look up.
There comes a time in every young woman’s life when she must experiment with expressing her sexuality. When mine came, it was July 1992, I was seventeen, and got on the 11:43 a.m. Wolverhampton–Birmingham New Street train in a black-lace negligee, with a black-lace dress over the top, and torn tights.
My friend Matt—who was two years older—refused to sit next to me on the train, because he “couldn’t handle the hassle” of me “dressing like a hooker,” and, in the end, insisted I wear his raincoat “to cover up the epicenter of the problem. Because I can see your epicenter in that dress.”
“I’m dressed like Madonna in the Justify My Love video,” I said, indignantly, buttoning the coat up.
“Yeah, but Madonna wouldn’t wear that to the Bullring Shopping Center to buy a secondhand sleeping bag, would she?” he said, quite reasonably. For this was, indeed, our quest for the day.
A small part of me was grateful—(a) it was very cold and (b) the cheap petticoat was ferocious with static electricity—it clung to my legs whilst making the odd crackling sound, as if Michael Faraday had moved into lingerie. I was quite happy to cover it up.
Another part of me, however, was deeply shamed that he was shamed by this first, tentative outing for my burgeoning sexuality.
My understanding was that there comes a day where a young woman’s hotness must be exposed to the world—her Cinderella moment, where she appears at the ball, or Wolverhampton train station, and the assembled people gasp: They had no idea the sexiest woman in the world lived here! Tales of this day will be told for generations to come! GASP! Excitement! Worlds changing! The princess has arrived! She is a woman now! The best kind of woman—a sexy one!
There is no telling of the Cinderella story where she turns up at the ball, and the guests all just sigh, “Put it away, love,” as had just essentially happened to me. I was confused. In some ways, I still am.
And now, here, today, in what feels like the mere blink of an eye, I have gone from “young woman dealing with the turbulent expressing of her sexuality” to “old woman dealing with a young woman dealing with the turbulent expressing of her sexuality.”
And, as it turns out, my full descriptor is “old woman dealing with a young woman dealing with the turbulent expressing of her sexuality—and doing it very badly.”
“Oh!” I say—a sound that I issue when desperately stalling for time to think.
“Honest opinion?” she says, twirling.
She’s wearing torn fishnet tights, white ankle boots, and a very short dress which is—I can see now that she’s twirling—backless, and so reveals her bra. She is fourteen and is going to an after-school science lesson.
“Very glamorous,” I say. “Very . . . edgy.”
I can hear what my voice is doing. It’s saying the words glamorous and edgy like the sentence is actually, “Very inadvisable. Very dangerous and terrible.”
“You’re doing it again, Mom,” she says. I have deflated her Outfit High, which has made her feel vulnerable and now, therefore, angry. “This is just like the photo shoot, all over again!”
“The photo shoot” was a series of pictures she posted on Instagram last week. As part of an art project on “fragility,” she did a shoot where she was naked from the waist up, smeared red lipstick across her face, and wrapped POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape around her breasts.
“You could—pop on a cardi?” I suggested, tentatively.
“Mom!” she said. “Don’t you get it? It’s appearance as political comment—because a woman’s body is so often the scene of a crime, yeah?”
Shit! Shit! You see, this is the problem with raising strong, clever, argumentative feminist daughters—the first person they practice being strong, clever, argumentative feminists on is you—and you are so much more tired and worried than them.
“Darling, I love the statement, and I’m totally down with it from a political point of view,” I said. “Right on. But, as your mom, I want you to think about who’s going to see those pictures on your account, and what their response will be to them. Because most people googling for pictures of teenage girls with tape around their tits aren’t looking to debate the semiotics of crime-scene accessories, juxtaposed with fragile female physicality. They just want to have a wank.”
It was a cunty thing to do. There’s absolutely no need to say semiotics to a fourteen-year-old girl during breakfast. Indeed, I would say that is my first piece of advice for parents of teenage girls: Never use the word semiotics during breakfast.
I was trying to crush her with big words and phrases.
And of course, if you try and crush someone with big words and phrases, they will try and crush you back with some big words and phrases of their own. The guns are out! It’s a Lexicon Standoff!
“Don’t slut-shame me!” she had said then, as she says now. “You’re slut-shaming me! And you say you’re a feminist!”
And now, as she did then, she runs back to her room, and slams the door behind her.
I stare down at the dishwasher. Where the fuck do all these lemon pips come from? And what psychopath invents a rotor-arm with no service hatch? It’s basically a rotating cul-de-sac of bullshit.
“DON’T SLUT-SHAME ME!”
IF YOU HAVE twenty-first century teenage girls, you are going to hear this. A lot. And almost certainly roughly twenty-four hours after PayPal informs you that someone in your household that isn’t you—or, as far as you’re aware, your husband—has spent one hundred and forty-seven pounds on body-con dresses at asos.com.
When it comes to matters like this, it’s useful to regard things in two time frames: the short game and the long game. The long game is that, of course, it should not matter what a young woman wears to jaunt around town or buy a secondhand sleeping bag. When the Feminist Utopia happens, everyone will be able to wear exactly what they want, without fear of judgment or reprisal. It will be understood that a teenage girl, on a hot day, wearing short shorts and a crop top, is no more demanding to be catcalled, harassed, and assaulted than a toddler, dressed up for Halloween in a nurse’s hat and apron, is volunteering to give passersby a tetanus booster and a leaflet about cholesterol.
However, the problem with being a hard-core feminist teenager is that we don’t yet live in a Feminist Utopia. We live in a world that contains many, many arseholes. You, as an elderly hag mother, understand this. Your child does not.
Years later, I have a better understanding of these first feminist-on-feminist standoffs that are a hallmark of raising strong girls who read jezebel.com. Of course, personally speaking, I was absolutely not trying to slut-shame her. As far as I’m concerned, any and all of my children can come down for spaghetti bolognese in a gimp mask and three bits of tinsel, and I would just be like, “Wipe-clean PVC! How practical!,” and then pass the parmesan. No one can be too slutty in my house. When the cat licks its nunny, I’m like, “You get in there, girl. You have your time. Have a good old rootle around for me, dude.”
However, part of the job of being a parent is to be by way of a proxy for the outside world. You are the invisible, loving membrane between your offspring and the world they will eventually be in, alone, and your job description contains passages that could be titled things like “Breaking it to them gently that not everyone is as lovely as Mommy and Daddy” and “Allowing them to test-drive aspects of their personality on the private racetrack of your home, before they join the mad, old Motorway of Life.”
Of course, if you’re a teenage girl in a tiny dress—looking for affirmation that you look newly sexy and amazing—it’s hard to grasp that the parent in front of you is not, when they talk to you, being your parent but is putting themselves in the shoes of imaginary pedophiles online in Cousinfuck Idaho. Or some bloke in a white van who’s going to drive past you shouting, “Nice tits, love!” Or some boy at school who’s going to pass round a picture of you on his phone whilst sniggering—because there is always a boy who will do this. Every school is provided with one by law.
As a parent, it is a dereliction of your responsibilities to allow your children to leave the house wearing an outfit that will provoke responses they are just too young, and inexperienced, to handle.
I can’t tell you how many awkward mornings and evenings I had, standing in the hallway, watching a girl I loved cry as she put on her coat, because my response to her outfit had been “Personally, I love your knickers—but I don’t want anyone else you meet today to be able to say the same thing.”
In the event, what made our “slut-shaming years” end happily was the discovery of RuPaul’s Drag Race. On the show, Mama Ru—the world’s first supermodel drag queen—loves and nurtures all the contestants but also doles out affectionately acerbic critiques of their outfits and endeavors.
As drag is the art of taking the signifiers of femininity and turning it into a competition, it’s the perfect thing to watch with girls who are themselves engaged in learning what “being a woman” is, and deciding what to reject, and what to embrace. It’s all there on the screen! Each episode is a lesson!
It was watching Drag Race with my girls that made me realize what this phase of parenting is. In essence, you have to become the door bitch of an edgy nightclub, testing the punters to see if they are sassy enough to handle what’s happening inside.
Post-Drag Race, when my daughters came clip-clopping down the stairs in some “challenging” new outfit, I would assume the persona of RuPaul and throw the kind of comments at them they might expect to receive, once they left the house.
If my, “Hey! Sweet-ass!” provoked instant weeping, and a retreat to the bedroom, we all knew it wasn’t, perhaps, the right time yet to be wearing it.
But as soon as the reply was “That’s Dr. Sweet Ass to you—I am fully qualified in having both a left and a right buttock, and hold a professorship from the Kiss My Ass Institute of Massachusetts,” we knew it was time to let the hot bird fly the nest.
OF COURSE, IN many ways, dressing sexy is an aspect of becoming a woman wholly disproportionate to its eventual usefulness. There are, obviously, times when “looking sexy” is the right and necessary thing to do. How will you know when those times are? It’s when you absolutely know you have to look sexy, right now, because that is the thing you want to do. I can’t stress how important it is that we recognize “because you really, really want to” is absolutely enough reason for a girl to do a thing. When you’re going to the right place with the right people, and you know looking like Absolute All Hotness is at the top of your to-do list, there is no valid argument on earth against it.
What is useful is being aware of how surprisingly few times there are when “being a sexy lady” is actually fun. Sexy schoolgirl, sexy business lady, sexy hen-night crew, sexy shopping look—nine times out of ten, twenty minutes after you’ve left the house, you will feel a sudden, weary rue for the look you chose. Why? Because it’s quite exhausting to be sexy. Sexy shoes require a strut, sexy dresses need a wiggle, and sexy makeup needs an air of “Yes, I am a goddess.” If your sexiness has its logical effect—making people look at you with an air of “you look sexy,” or coming up to you saying, “hello, sexiness”—you suddenly have some admin to attend to: deciding whether to encourage or rebuff these responses. That can take up time you had otherwise put aside for dancing, talking, falling over, etc. It can absolutely shank your schedule—particularly if it includes multivariable calculus.
On the days where you don’t have the energy to do this, you end up being the girl who’s constantly trying to pull her dress down over her legs, and up over her tits, and hobbling in her heels until she finally takes them off, and spends the rest of the night padding around in her tights, wishing she had flip-flops.
Speaking as The Sexiest Person Alive, I would estimate the amount of time I find myself with the right amount of energy to spend all night being A Hot, Sexy Bitch is around four hours a month, tops. Your mileage may, obviously, vary, but the reason it’s important to be honest about just how infrequently you will be able to engage fully with “being supersexy” is because “being sexy” is often the default option. Prom? Sexy. Party? Sexy. Clubbing? Sexy. It often seems like the only other option is “sensible,” which involves dressing like e.g., a sparrow.
This is why—episodes of slut-shaming aside—I spent a great deal of my parenting years passionately marketing some other clothing options to my girls: “jolly” and “comfortable.” In a world so loaded against female physical comfort—a world where comfortable is never mentioned on fashion websites, or on the front covers of women’s magazines, or even in conversation—to instinctively discover and embrace comfort shows you at your best: confident. At ease. Finding your own things. Ready for anything. That’s why comfortable is one of the two greatest descriptors of what a woman is wearing.
And “jolly?” Why is “jolly” good? Because “jolly” shows you’re choosing happiness as the main thing you project. Jolly means that, against all the odds, you radiate joy that you are you. You like your foundations. You have a vague idea where you’re heading. And that your instinct—your bright, correct instinct—is that the person who enjoys that journey most is not coquettish, or red-carpet ready, or heroin chic, but just . . . comfortable. Jolly. “Comfortable” and “jolly” take no energy to project; they find no unwelcome responses. “Comfortable” and “jolly” make the wearer, and all those who see them, do only one thing: smile.
A couple of years after Slut-shaming-gate, my daughter attended her school prom.
My girl wore a hot-pink trouser suit with hot-pink hair and carried a pink, fluffy clutch bag with pictures of Selma and Patty—Marge Simpson’s sisters—on it.
When she came downstairs, I was on my knees, trying to get a swollen sunflower seed out of a hole in the rotor-arm of the dishwasher with a pin. Keeping those nozzles free is a goddamn full-time job.
“What do you think?” she said, twirling. “Because I know how I feel: comfortable and jolly.”
She beamed, like the sun.
Then she opened her jacket and showed me the black push-up basque underneath.
“And this is for when the vogueing starts,” she said, grabbing an apple, and leaving.
I knew my work was done.
THE MICROBREAKDOWN
I am on my knees, trying to remove a dead mouse from under the fridge. On the one hand, I’m kind of pleased—I knew I could smell maggots! My ability to detect a flyblown mammal corpse remains top-notch! Bitch still got it!
On the other hand, I’m unhappy, because I am removing a dead mouse from under the fridge. My daughter enters the kitchen. She appears to be made of rain clouds and sorrow.
“Oh, Mama—everything is terrible. All my clothes are wrong, I feel fat even though I’m not, I think my friends secretly hate me, I’ve got too much schoolwork, the duvet in my bedroom is depressing me, I don’t even know who I’ll vote for in two years’ time, and all the whales are so sad.”
THIS IS “THE microbreakdown”—a common occurrence in the teenage years. It’s not to be confused with any long-term, lingering problems—which we’ll come to later—but to be recognized for what it is: an acute yet temporary state of affairs. The “microbreakdown” is the dolorous psychological equivalent of “the minibreak”: it’s not a proper holiday breakdown, merely a weekend away in extreme self-loathing.
Usually lasting no more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours, a parent’s handling of a microbreakdown requires an understanding of three major principles. The first is that nine times out of ten, your child is not having a nervous breakdown at all—it just needs a nice cup of tea and a biscuit. As soon as you hear your child’s “microbreakdown voice”—and you will know it: it has a sad, baaing quality, like a lost lamb on a hillside—you need to put the kettle on, and get the biscuit tin out. Don’t say a word until they’ve finished their first Bourbon—just nod, whilst squeezing the teabag. Teenagers often simply don’t recognize when they have low blood sugar, or that they’re hungry, or tired. It’s not actually the end of the world—it’s just the end of the day. Feed them. Also, remember that you often still don’t know when you’ve got low blood sugar, and have meltdowns exactly like this, and you’re forty-four. Really, Fitbits should be telling us this shit. What’s the point of having robot overlords if they aren’t telling you, at the point where you start crying to EE Customer Service because your 4G is “feeble,” that it’s really time for a brew?
The second is just keep nodding. Just keep nodding in a sympathetic, slightly dumb way—like you’re a stereotypical mom in a sitcom, for whom, as usual, the writers could not write any interesting dialogue or characterization. I’m sorry to break this news to you but, when your children enter their teenage years, what they need—in many ways—is for you to become quite stupid, yet loving. Imagine a lovely Jersey cow called Buttercup, wearing some Whistles jeans. That’s you, now. Are you actually a dynamic, alpha, problem-busting lawyer with martial art skills and the ability to quote apposite passages by Auden when the occasion demands? My friend, you must bury that woman, for a while. Amal Clooney is not the droid you are looking for right now.
Being a brisk, practical, and problem-solving maven—an intellect that truly bestrode the world—was the correct thing to be when your child was seven, and crying because their art project papier mâché pig was still soggy. You used your gigantic brain to pop the pig into a low oven, then sat back and enjoyed a world where crises could be solved with action.
When your child reaches its teens, however, being a dynamic, alpha, nigglebuster is a character trait you need to unlearn, or else die of the ensuing arguments. Your child does not want you to be a clever problem solver anymore.
The reason why is obvious: This is the time where they have to turn into a clever problem solver. If someone else in the house already fills that role—and has an extra thirty years of experience, to boot—then they can’t step into those shoes. They will have to remain in a state of childlike dependency—always running to you for answers. And that will make them furiously resentful. You know all the arguments you have when your child comes to you with a problem, you provide the solution—sitting back smugly in your chair, puffing on your pipe, like a lady Sherlock Holmes—and they suddenly and ferociously start explaining to you why your solution is shit? And you’re like “What? What is going on here? You came to me with a problem! I sorted it! THE FUCK?” And then they start saying mad, wild shit: “You think I’m stupid,” or “You always think I’m messing things up,” or “Your pipe is smelly, and I hate it when you play the violin.” And you’re like “But I was just trying to help.”
Well, the rules have changed, now. You can’t help by helping anymore. Your job, during these years, is to be a calm, benign sounding board to their own problem-solving. For when you provide your child with a solution to their problems, you kind of are saying that they’re stupid—because it seems you have no faith in them being able to solve it themselves. I know! I know—they looked like they wanted you to sort things out. But they don’t. They want you to help them sort it out.
So, three: triage the situation. As they drink their tea and eat their biscuit and tell their tale of woe, you need to address the primary problem that they feel bad. Acknowledging that they feel bad is half the solution—you need to be aware that sitting around your kitchen table are you; your child; and, on the third chair, their anxiety or despair.
“Oh mate, this all sounds fucking horrible. I can see how worried you are,” takes half the heat out of the situation immediately. Often, their body language immediately shifts from “I am going to throw myself off a cliff” to “I am going to throw myself off the bottom two stairs—maybe onto a beanbag.”
Then you need to, sympathetically and succinctly, repeat their situation back to them: “So, your best friend is freaking out and you want to go and see her—but you also have a lot of homework. Man, that’s tough.”
This both shows you’ve been listening and allows them to see the simple facts of their problem. Nine times out of ten, when a teenager has their problem repeated back to them, they instantly start coming up with solutions: “I guess I could do one more hour of homework, then have a sleepover with her” or “I could do my homework during playtime tomorrow, and go see her now.”
At this point, you just need to nod at them in a wise yet delighted manner—as if they have just started singing an amazing song of cleverness—possibly ending with a little round of applause, and a “I knew my girl would sort this out.”
With a solution now decided upon by the child, you will now, as a parent, actually be able to help them—because their solution almost always involves getting a lift to Kensal Green, being lent a tenner, or borrowing your nice Acne boots “for reasons of morale.” Your full job description, at this point, is sounding board, chauffeur, cooperative lending society, wardrobe, cheerleader, tea lady. That’s what “being a mother” means now.
IN THE TENTH instance—when repeating the question back to them results in “Don’t repeat the question back at me, you shriveled, old hag! Help me! Break into the DVLA and change my test results to ‘pass,’ or else I swear to God, I will set fire to everything that has ever existed”—you are within your rights simply to leave the house, go straight to John Lewis, and touch all the folded towels, which is always very soothing.
The third option—if everything else fails—is to shout “EMERGENCY CHRISTMAS!,” make everyone put on their pajamas, get under a duvet on the sofa, and watch Elf. There isn’t a microbreakdown alive that can withstand seeing Will Ferrell caught in a revolving door wearing green tights.
AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS
The dishwasher is, for once, working; so far today, no mice have died; and I’ve got a Cauliflower Cheese Surprise in the oven, a sweet ten minutes away from being done.
I am now, therefore, sitting on the sofa, on a supertight deadline, trying to write a 3,000-word think piece about what Benedict Cumberbatch’s face means, when I see the sadness trudging into the room. I internally sigh, and close my laptop.
One thing I have learned about teenagers is that—unfairly but inescapably—their unhappiness is like one of those rare plants in the rainforest, that live for a thousand years, but only bloom for twenty minutes every decade. A child can be unhappy for a long, long time—but remain utterly mute as to its cause.
When their misery does finally bloom, into something now speakable, it’s for the briefest period—and you just have to be there, or you miss your chance to bear witness to it. I finally understand why my friend, who was very high up at The Times, resigned when her children hit their teenage years.
At the time, I had very young children and was utterly confused by this.
“But the teenage years are the easy years!” I said, almost crying. “Surely! They can make their own breakfasts, they can shit without involving you in any way, you don’t need to stop them falling down the stairs. For the love of God, tell me those are the easy years. The thought of that is all that’s keeping me going right now.”
“The teenage years are when they really need you,” she said, clearing her desk. “You. No one else.”
Now my children are teenagers, I get it. No childminder, or after-school activity, can deal with an existential crisis. You just have to be there, hanging around—so that when the sad flower finally emerges, the right and sole expert is on hand to deal with it. The time is now—and now only. The cure is you, and no one else. It is the ultimate heavy privilege. It’s the proof you are parenting well. You must congratulate yourself, even as you put your laptop away—only briefly and bitterly thinking, I bet Ernest fucking Hemingway never had to stop midsentence because his kid had a “sad emoji” face.
“You’re sad,” I say. “Say what you see, and keep it simple” is rule one of dealing with unhappy teens.
“You’ll think I’m stupid,” she begins, in the tiniest voice, hugging the cat.
“Well, that goes without saying, you big bum . . . but tell me anyway.”
There is three minutes of silence, and then, finally, a sigh.
“I’m just . . . ugly,” she says.
Her voice is factual, and sad. Like a newsreader would be, when they said, “Sir Richard Attenborough died today. He was ninety-one.”
I am so astonished I am silent for a minute. This is the wrongest thing ever said!
“You are not!” I finally say, outraged. “Who said that? Who do I need to kill?”
That was the wrong thing to say.
“Stop thinking I’m a victim,” she says. There’s another few minutes of tension. I remain silent, and stroke the cat, hard, as it’s the only thing I can do. (We’re going halves on the comfort animal right now.)
“I’m sorry. I’ll shut up. Just . . . tell me.”
She takes her phone out of her pocket. Ah. Someone has been cyberbullying her. She’s going to show me messages. In my head, I’ve already written to her teacher, the head of pastoral care, her headmaster, Childline, and the Minister for Education. I’ve run a successful campaign to bring back the death sentence, and whoever has sent her this message is going to be electrocuted, tomorrow, in advance of me dancing on their grave. I will happily take the time off work to do all this. I am ready to go to war.
She hands me the phone. I am braced to read something abusive, which I will refute every line of, and show her the truth—that she is unbelievably beautiful—and we’ll all be eating cauliflower cheese in ten minutes. Thank God—the next few minutes will be sad, but the worst is nearly over.
Then I look at the phone. It’s a picture of her and her friends. They’re all in the playground, posing for the camera. Her friends—clearly ready for the picture—are all pouting, but she is just smiling a happy, guileless child smile. Her eyes are scrunched up in happiness, and her beam is as wide as a pumpkin lantern. She looks joyous. She looks—
“—ugly. In that picture, I’m ugly. I’m so confused—because I didn’t think I was. But now I know I am. I’m clapped.”
And she sits there, looking utterly deflated. I look again at the pouting girls, and then the smiling girl at the end. I look again at the picture that has broken her heart.
In Neverland, whenever a child says “I don’t believe in fairies,” a fairy dies from sadness.
I think whole cities of Neverland fairies would die, instantly, if they’d ever seen a good, good smiling child—the kind that wants to save the world—say, “I am ugly.” The world would end.
My girl thinks she’s ugly. And I know this isn’t a problem you can solve in ten minutes. That cauliflower cheese is going to go cold.
I THINK, AS a mother, you fear your daughter saying, “I’m ugly” more than you fear them saying, “I’m in love with a boy called Emo ‘Knife’ McMurderer” or “I’m pregnant.”
If they’re pregnant, and they don’t want to be, it’s a problem that can be resolved. However unpleasant it may be, there is a way through. You can pick up the phone and fix things. You can change things, for the better, very quickly. You can stop your girl from feeling like her life is ending.
And if she has a bad boyfriend—well, you’ll just frame him for a crime he didn’t commit, and then move the whole family to Canada. These are problems that can be remedied.
But if your daughter feels they’re ugly? If, every time they look at a picture of themselves—of their happy, smiley face—their hearts break? It’s like that bit in a horror film, where they go, “The call is coming from inside the house.” The call is coming from the inside of their house. Their inner voice tells them they are ugly. They are bullying themselves. You are both facing an enemy who has hidden in the one place neither of you can attack it—inside your kid’s brilliant, brilliant bones.
What are you going to do? What can you fight? Who can you call? You’re now just some impotently furious person who wants to pick an argument with 10,000 years of history; every book, movie, and magazine in existence—for it’s a problem that circles the entire globe. All over the world, girls right now are thinking they aren’t beautiful enough. It is an emergency and a stain upon our souls. So, what are you going to do, when this wrongness comes to your house, and your girls? Hijack the entire earth, drive it into deep space at 10,000 miles per hour whilst screaming, “I swear to God, I will not return you to the Milky Way until you re-evaluate your entire value system for women!”
You don’t have time. Your kid’s crying. Otherwise, that plan would totally work.
I can tell you what doesn’t work, though: sitting on the sofa and telling your sad kid they are beautiful. They’re very logical about this. Although you will say, “You are beautiful”—how can you not? It’s impossible? They are!—it won’t do any good. Watch.
“Oh my love, that’s just wrong. You are so, so beautiful. So beautiful, my heart bursts.”
Sad, young woman in the darkest tones ever: “You have to say that—you’re my mother.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s beautiful,” you reply. “I totally know. Look: Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis equals beautiful. Nigel Farage having a poo equals not. I’m qualified.”
“But I don’t look like this, do I?” they say, scrolling through their Instagram, and showing hundreds of pictures of girls with kissy mouths, and Gothic-arch eyebrows, and immaculate olive skin, living in the kind of bodies—tight, long—that go with everything. God, these women have such confidence and grace.
She pauses on one, who appears to have been built by some kind of award-winning tit-and-bum architect.
“But she’s a supermodel, babe—she’s paid to look like that,” you say, comfortingly.
“That’s not a supermodel! That’s a girl from my school!” she howls.
“Fucking hell—how old is she?”
“Fourteen! She’s called Anna!”
God. I feel intimidated looking at her, and I’m both her economic superior, and on acquaintance terms with e.g., Dan Stevens from Downton Abbey. How can a fourteen-year-old cope with being around someone so beautiful?
Fucking Instagram. Fucking contouring. Fucking Kylie Jenner’s lip fillers, and the belief you can have no pores, and the battle between the Kardashians about which is the hottest sister. Fucking twenty-first century. Fuck this woman-hating world. It has never been more difficult to be a young girl.
IT’S 1989. I am fifteen. It’s the twentieth century. My parents are hippies, so we live in a house with no mirrors. There’s no internet, no Instagram, no contouring, no lips of Kylie Jenner. Neither pores nor eyebrows are yet “a thing.”
And yet—I am ugly. I know I am ugly. My face is very round and pink—“Like a planet made of ham,” as Caz says, helpfully, one day, as I struggle for the words—and there are no round-faced girls in movies or on TV. They all have oval-shaped faces, instead. That’s the shape a girl’s face should be. My lips are quite thin, and my hair is neither one color nor another, and, when I smile, my eyes crinkle up, leaving just a couple of lines—exactly like the eyes on the worms in the Mr. Men books. And the smile makes my mouth stretch wide, like a pumpkin lantern. I’ve seen it in photos. When I am happy, I have Mr. Men worm eyes and a pumpkin mouth.
The photos kill me—because, all the rest of the time, I can pretend I am a beautiful girl. But when I look at photos where I am happy, I know what category of girl I would be filed under.
I know I am a smiling, ugly girl.
And I know exactly what that means.
WHY IS IT important for a girl to be beautiful? Because it is. You know it is. Having people believe you are beautiful is like having money—it’s always useful. What’s the first thing we say to baby girls? “You are beautiful!” Whenever a woman is introduced on TV—whether it’s on a comedy panel show, or to give an award at a ceremony—the MC will always say, “And now, the beautiful Emma Watson,” just after he’s called Ben Affleck, “The talented, the dynamic, the one and only!”
“Beautiful” is so common, when it doesn’t turn up, the absence looks like the product of a very harsh, existential meeting, followed by an outright declaration of war. I once watched a panel show—I think it was Have I Got News for You—where the young female comedian was introduced as “the beautiful!,” but fellow-contestant Germaine Greer, in her seventies, was not.
This raises all manner of questions. Why? Why? Was Greer not called “beautiful” because of her age? Or was it because she was a feminist—and it might be seen as “non-PC” to call a feminist beautiful? Or was it because they just didn’t think, when they looked at a seventy-year-old woman sitting on that chair, that she was beautiful? Would that imaginary conversation have taken into account that Greer had been objectively beautiful, once? For, as a younger woman, Greer was, by any index, indisputably and ragingly hot. That conversation would, then, have logically had to cover exactly when it was that Greer had stopped being beautiful—which, if made public, might well help us compile official guidelines on when, exactly, women tip over into “hag,” unless they are Helen Mirren or Dame Judi Dench, who simply become, as they age, “luminous,” instead—like a talented and incredibly well-respected lamp.
There isn’t a workable alternative for women to being beautiful. You just . . . have to be beautiful. If you’re not beautiful now—if you have not managed it by eight, or ten, or twelve—then you certainly must be beautiful later. Your arc is to work toward the day that you do something new to your hair and take off your glasses, and walk into a room, and everyone says, “But—you’re beautiful!” Beauty always has to happen in the end. That’s the only story, for a girl. To either be born beautiful, or to become it. There are no stories about ugly girls, plain girls, normal girls who stay ugly, plain, and normal all their lives. Or at least, there aren’t stories where those girls are at the center. There is one place an ugly girl can be, and I know where it is.
This is why, at fifteen, I am wild with fear—because, if I am an ugly girl, the one place I will exist is at the end of other people’s jokes. That is the only place we see ugly girls. You get to be the punch line. You get to be the girl in the montage of some guy’s terrible dating history—before he meets Meg Ryan. The girl in the gang of school losers the heroine momentarily has to hang out with, when things are going wrong. You get to be someone else’s disappointment. The booby prize. A thing no one wants to win. You have no market value.
THE IDEA OF what makes a woman beautiful is cruel—because so much of what we deem to be traditional beauty is down to luck. And, even if you are lucky enough to be born with it, it’s down to yet more luck if you can keep it. Hormones, acne, a broken nose, alopecia, stretch marks, growing “too tall,” or “not tall enough.” So much of what makes us sad about not being beautiful is, actually, a deeply buried, righteous anger: an anger about not being able to control our faces and bodies. An anger about not being able to control other people’s judgment of you. An anger that the world made up its mind, a long time ago, about what beauty is—and you didn’t get to sit on that committee, and neither did any of your friends. You did not get to put a value on yourself, or what you hold admirable. That’s why we’re angry. That’s why we cry, i.e., beauty is a tax we are asked to pay, in a system we have no vote in.
“You are beautiful,” your friends will say, and mean it—but what use is that if they can’t change other people’s minds? If they don’t get to make films, adverts, TV shows, and catwalks where what they think is beautiful is represented? If they can’t change things so everyone else thinks you’re beautiful, too?
Or, perhaps, they will say something else: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”—but that is a useless thing to say to a girl who is sad. What? You will only ever be thought of as beautiful by people who love you—thus, making one task (being beautiful) suddenly double in size (got to make someone love me as well)? Fuck my life.
But there is a trick to this. It is saying something that is true as soon as you say it. It is, I think, the single most magic sentence a woman can hear. Are you ready? It’s this:
You are the beholder.
Realizing you are the beholder is a spell that sets you free.
You are not the beauty. YOU ARE THE BEHOLDER.
You are not to be “beautied”—you are to see it. You are the one who gets to point at beauty, define it, ENJOY IT. To write about it, photograph it, sing about it, rejoice in it, and see it in others. Isn’t it more fun to look at beauty than be it? To be beautiful often causes problems. To look at beauty causes none. To decide what is beautiful gives you power.
I say this to my daughter, and every other woman in the world: People don’t need you to be beautiful. It is not necessary for the functioning of this world that you be hot. You affect literally nothing if you don’t look like a model. As author Erin McKean said: “You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your coworkers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female.’”
You are the beholder. Your job is to go and behold stuff.
And once you realize you are the beholder—once you become the eye, instead—then the whole power structure of beauty dissolves, because you decide what beautiful is. That’s your job now. That’s part of becoming an adult.
And when you have decided what beauty is, this is where the magic of makeup and clothes and hair become wholly joyous and benign. Who do you behold to be beautiful? I would guess you would pin on your wall Frida Kahlo, and Siouxsie Sioux, and Tess Holliday and Zadie Smith, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Lana Del Rey, and Billie Eilish, and Barbra Streisand, and Lizzo, and Cleopatra. You would have your friends on there, and your aunts, and your grandmother, and your cat. Pictures you just found of a woman with an amazing nose, a tilt of the jaw, fierce eyes. And it wouldn’t be just people—you would put beautiful things there: pictures of a lilac tree, a blue lake, slate in the rain, a minaret. You amass wonderous thoughts: the quotes, lyrics, and poetry—the deathbed confessions and declarations of love—that make your bones fill with electricity and light when you read them. You collect what you wish to behold on your bedroom wall; it would be personal to you: for a bedroom wall is by way of a blueprint for your future, a map of how you wish to get there, and a chronicle of your heart and soul.
If you want to see what a teenage girl is, look at her bedroom wall. That’s what she is, or what she will be. These are the tools that she has found, with which she is building herself. What she sees, then, in the mirror is a curator of beauty—not the beauty itself. She is constructing her own judgments and standards. Her own laws.
I SOMETIMES THINK that it is too complicated a question to say, “What is a woman? How should she be? How can she make herself?” The words girl and woman are so freighted with a million different arguments, meanings, and history that it feels like a terrifying endeavor to embark on at age eleven, twelve, or thirteen. To become a woman? A whole woman? A thing that bleeds, and births, and works, and thinks, and fights, and loves, and plans—a thing that has so many assumptions and rules bound up in it that you do not even know where the invisible lines, boundaries, restrictions, and taboos lie until you bump up against them—often shamingly, or humiliatingly, in front of others?
These days, when I talk to young women about the task of constructing yourself, I find that it’s a calmer, easier thing to suggest you begin thinking of yourself as a small museum, instead. One of those small, private ones that started in the Age of Enlightenment, perhaps—little more than a townhouse where an individual started to amass all the curios and wonders they had encountered, during their travels. You are your own museum, and you exist for your own inspiration, comfort and delight.
And now, as you wander around your museum, you might see things in your collection that you wish to manifest on yourself. Perhaps, you would be oddly satisfied if you had a green skirt printed all over with woodland leaves; perhaps, you wish to smell of roses yourself. Maybe you will do your hair like this statue of Nefertiti or this woodcut of Grace O’Malley, Queen of the Pirates.
And, when you look at your pictures of the women you love, you see many who take joyful delight in a bright headscarf; a round Afro; a red lip; a tramline of eyeliner; hair dyed blue, black, or red.
And because now you are the beholder of beauty—now you are the committee that decides what is beautiful, and what is not; now you are the one who calculates value—you can adopt these things you behold as your own, if you wish them. You can cut your hair short or curl it; you can paint stars under your eyes or put opals in your ears. You can paint your lips red, blue, or pink, or leave them as they are; wear your skirts long or short; wear overalls, or boots, or tights covered in stars. There is nothing destructive in a woman wanting to be beautiful if she has decided what is beautiful and knows why it makes her heart sing. If she is paying tribute to those who inspire her; if the things she does are cultural signifiers, to say: I love this singer, and that artist. Look! I wear a gray streak in my hair, so you know I love either Susan Sontag or the Bride of Frankenstein. Or, powerfully, both.
How you look is the first silent communication you make when you walk through a door, if you wish it to be. The way you choose to be “beautiful” says, “These are the things I love,” not—as so many people mistakenly think—Love me. Once you know this, all the pressure disappears. You are free to enjoy being yourself, whatever you decide that may be.
These are the conversations I have with my girl, in the weeks following her sad declaration that she is ugly. No matter how clever, a mother cannot give an answer, or a solution, to the heartbreaking statement “I am ugly!” But she can give a question, instead: “What do you find beautiful? What would you like to collect around you, and on you, that gives you joy?”
“IF YOU THINK you’re ugly—and you’re wrong—then what would you like to look like?” I say, as we both continue to stroke the cat. “There are a million things we can try and do.”
“I tried wearing makeup once,” she says, still looking impossibly small and sad. “But I think I got it . . . wrong. A boy said I looked try-hard and fake. And some girls said I was a hypocrite.”
“What?”
“They said, ‘You keep saying you’re a feminist—but makeup isn’t very feministic, is it?”
I ask for these girls’ name, and then put them into my mental feud jotter. They, too, will die. This is one of the things no one ever tells you about motherhood—that you will have to become by way of a part-time assassin. Oh, the knives and crossbows I will have to buy! I will need a bigger handbag.
“One said, ‘Why are you wearing makeup?’” and I said, “Because I want to?”
“And did they leave you alone? Did that work?”
I don’t need to hear her answer—which is, inevitably, “no.” A woman saying, “Because I want to” is never enough. For every decision she makes—even if it’s putting on mascara—she must have a carefully thought-out manifesto with citations and quotes, ready to be brought out in front of any self-declared committee at a moment’s notice. Being a woman is like writing a GCSE coursework essay on Macbeth. You can’t just read it and enjoy it. You have to be able to pull it apart and show how it works—despite the fact it’s successfully been Macbeth for five hundred years. Oh, how the world would change overnight if a woman saying “Because I want to” was enough.
“I didn’t really care about the boy, because . . . boys. But the girls . . . is makeup not feminist? Is makeup fake?”
Is feminism against makeup? No! How could it be? I wear makeup, and I’m a feminist, because—how could my makeup be against the social, political, and economic equality of women, when I apply it for the simple reason that I want to look like charismatic seabird the puffin? For that is what my go-to makeup look—bright, iridescent blue eyelid, thick black eyeliner, and super-super pale skin—is attempting to do. It is a homage to a creature I feel a great affinity toward, due to its adorable waddling gait, love of sardines, and fondness for laying eggs on cliffs.
Most of the time, I wear makeup because I like colors. I want to look pretty like a garden, or a seashore, or a sunset. I can’t see how feminism wouldn’t want me to look like a sunset. Or Elizabeth Taylor. Feminism, surely, loves both Elizabeth Taylor and sunsets. How could it not?
And if feminism feels like it needs one last reassurance that makeup isn’t a tool to oppress women, then let us consider David Bowie. If it is wondrous for David Bowie to wear makeup—if we adore drag queens, Adam Ant, Boy George, RuPaul, and Matty Healy from The 1975, who kohls his eyes until he looks like a Persian prince—then it is good enough for me. In the twenty-first century, the best feminist argument for the magic of makeup, and dressing up, is that if powerful, funny, clever boys are rejoiced in for wearing it, then surely twelve-year-old girls should be, too?
“Let’s try some of Mommy’s MAC eyeliner,” I say to Nancy. “Whose eyeliner do you like?”
“Amy Winehouse,” she says.
I pause for one second.
“Then—let’s Amy Winehouse you.”
And I draw a line across her lashes and out, out toward the freckle on her temple. And she smiles. We have decided what beautiful means. We have a vote in the system now. We can cut off the call that is coming from inside the house. When the existential crisis came to call, we could reply: “Not today. Not in this house. Not in this girl.”