This week, while hiding from the rain, I listened to women shouting about their periods and developed a theory
A few nights ago I formulated a theory on feminism that you’ve never heard before. And that’s saying something, because it’s all been said before. Over and over again. I did this whilst sitting in a vegan café, where feminist ‘spoken word’ was taking place. Apart from being utterly pointless and belaboured, feminist spoken word is excruciatingly dull. My friends and I were staying sane playing a game of my inventing, creatively titled ‘Feminist Spoken Word Bingo’. We would have just left, but as you may have noticed, this week has been especially chilly. Also it was raining. It’s a tough call, but in a choice between driving sleet and no feminist spoken word vs warmth and feminist spoken word, the latter wins. Just. The rules of Feminist Spoken Word Bingo are simple. Make a bingo card for each player. On each card are words and topics, various which will inevitably pop up during an evening of angry hairy ladies shouting. These words and topics included (but were not limited to) pubes, kitchens, weight (loss or gain), masturbation, periods, any metaphor involving water or oceans, patriarchy, absent parents, the glass ceiling, the word minge, the word dyke. There was also a separate bonus round devoted to the word cunt. Guess how many times the word cunt will be used in the evening. Winner gets a box of tampons, super absorbent. Part of the game was not letting any of the angry hairy ladies know what we were up to. This involved a great deal of stifled giggling and hiding our playing cards under the table like naughty kids at the back of a maths class.
Perhaps inspired by strange flashbacks to secondary school maths classrooms, my theory suddenly occurred to me while the compère of the evening mounted the stage to announce the next act. “Christ!” One of my friends, probably my favourite lesbian ever and current champion of Feminist Spoken Word Bingo, exclaimed, “Next to her I look straighter than Mary Magdalene.” I probably imagined the steely look she gave us … Anyway, my theory goes something like this. Imagine you had a friend who went around all over the place insisting to everyone how not-racist they were. You’d probably assume they were a big fat racist, right? And the more they tried to insist otherwise, the more you’d start to say to people, ‘Hey, is it just me or is Bob a total Nazi?’ Until the inevitable day that old Racist Bob demolishes his already crumbling not-racist credibility by starting a sentence with ‘I’m not racist, but …’.
Do you believe in gender equality? Ok, so do I. Oh, so I’m a feminist, too? Ok, that’s nice. Can I eat my veggie burger in peace now? Thanks, lady. If only this was how it worked. Unfortunately, it’s somehow not suspicious or disingenuous at all to say “I don’t hate men, but …” because somehow the subject of feminism is so excruciatingly complex that there’s an excuse, an academic get out of jail free card, for almost every extremism. Whatever, I’m not going to discuss the socio-economic disparity of men and women and the semantics of whether hating a gender is the same thing as hating a race (it is). But, a bit like how Racist Bob will tell you the same stories about his one black friend over and over, the spoken-word feminists seemed very keen on telling us about their single, wonderful male friend, and in the next breath, about how women are the bringers of life, the creative force of the universe, and so on. It reminds me of when I’m extremely hung over on the Underground, mentally repeating the mantra, “I’m not going to be sick, I’m not going to be sick.” All it means is that the middle aged man in a suit sitting opposite had better get out of the way, fast.
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