Germaine Greer changed my life. I was sixteen and disenchanted with being the cute, short girl with blond hair. I WAS the cute, short girl with blond hair but I was also so much more than that. Hamlet was my favourite play. I owned a fox terrier named Ted. I was afraid of the dark (even at sixteen). I got straight A+'s. I spoke Japanese. I'd survived the many wars that involved my respective family members. I could play the violin. I liked sushi and sci-fi and was a shit-hot debater. But I felt like all that people saw was the blond and the cute and the short. And the really horrible part of that was - I felt like I was just meant to put up with it.
But one night I was researching ideas for an art folio and I stumbled across an an extract from The Female Eunuch and it changed all that. Something exploded in my brain. It put a finger on why I felt frustrated about walking on to a crowded train carriage and not only feeling like I was there to be stared at but that I was also expected to play along, to play up to it, to look away quietly so I could be looked at. It helped me suddenly make sense of why I liked listening to Courtney Love screaming out of my stereo about being pissed off that she was made of "doll parts". It made me cut off my hair. It made me wear only Doc Marten boots for three years. It made me start sticking my middle finger up at the cars full of men who honked their horns at me when I was just trying to walk down the street with my friends.
It made me who I am today.
And I wear lipstick. I shave my arm pits. I love to wear as many items of personal apparel as possible adorned with cute little animal trinkets. But to all you haters out there who would take that as evidence to call the revolution off - it don't make me a cog in the machine. I am a feminist. And I could explain the ins and outs of that in all kinds of fancy language (and I have the degree to prove it), but I don't need to. All you need to know is that Germaine Greer changed my life. So I leave you with this. Courtesy of Grande Dame Germaine...
Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.
Respect.
