Missing
ideas/chapters on how to be/become a woman:
- Gym class and locker room
- Losing her virginity – maybe this chapter is missing
because that is one “typical” way that girls become women
- Violence against women (physical and verbal)
Writing Style
- Using colons for quotes, instead of commas
- Large vocabulary
- Doesn’t focus on “poor me” and she isn’t whiney
Judy Blume wrote the books on how to become a woman when we
were kids!
Finishing the Book
One thing we discussed was that no one had actually finished
the book by the time of our meeting. What made it so hard to finish
reading? It wasn’t particularly
difficult to read. It didn’t have many
characters having conversations. It
wasn’t sad or depressing. It also didn’t
have a face-paced action plot to keep you flipping pages. But, “being a woman” is a topic that we all
have experience with. So, when she talks
about getting her period, we all remember our own stories. When she talks about being classed “fatso,”
we remember the names we were called.
So, what was your “worst birthday.”
QUOTES
“I Am A Feminist!” Page
69
I still don’t have any friends, either. Not one – unless you count family, which
obviously you don’t, because they just come free with your life, wanted or not,
like the six-page Curry’s brochure that falls out of the local paper,
advertising Spectrum 128k home computers and “ghetto blasters.”
But on the plus side, I am not alone because – as with a
million lonely girls and boys before – books, TV, and music are looking after
me now. I am being raised by witches,
wolves, and unexpected guest stars on late-night chat shows. All art is someone trying to tell you
something, I realize. There’re thousands of people who want to talk to
me, so long as I open their book or turn on their show. There are a trillion telegrams with important
information and tips. It may be bad
information or a misconstrued tip – but at least you are getting some data on what it’s like out there… You are getting input.
Books seem the most potent source (of input): each one is
the sum total of a life that can be inhaled in a single day. I read fast, so I’m hoovering up lives at a
ferocious pace, six or seven or eight in a week. I particularly love autobiographies: I can eat a whole person by sundown.
And every book, you find, has its own social group (of other
authors) – friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the
library that need never, ever ends.
Page 80
We have to remember that snidely saying, “Her hair’s a bit
limp on top” isn’t what’s keeping womankind from closing the 30 percent pay gap
and a place on the board or directors. I
think that’s more likely to be down to tens of thousands of years of ingrained
social, political, and economic misogyny and the patriarchy, tbh. That’s just got slightly more leverage than a
gag about someone’s bad trousers.
I have a rule of thumb that allows me to judge… Are the men
doing it? Are the men worrying about this
as well? Is this taking up the Men’s
time? Are the men told not to do this,
as it’s “letting our side down”? Are the
men having to write bloody books about this exasperating, retarded,
time-wasting bullshit? Is this making Jon Stewart feel insecure? Almost always, the answer is: “No.
The boys are not being told they have to be a certain way. They’re just getting on with stuff.”
Page 82
Being polite is possibly the greatest daily contribution
everyone can make to life on earth. But
at the same time, “Are the boys doing it?” is a good way to detect spores of misogyny
in the soil, which might otherwise seem a perfectly fertile and safe place to
grow a philosophy… I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas… I
would definitely put this under the heading “100 percent stuff that the men
need to sort out.”
“I Need a Bra!” Page 97
The relief of taking off a bad bra is immeasurable. It’s like a combination of putting your feet
up, going to the bathroom, having a drink of cold water on a hot day, and
sitting on the steps of a trailer having a smoke. Bad bra removal is a measure of your
friendships. If you would feel
comfortable going round to someone’s house at the end of a long day and saying,
“I’m just going to take my bra off,” you know you are intimate friends.
“I Am Fat!” Page 100
We are basically auditioning each other as friends.
Page 101-102
I’m 16, and these are my best clothes, and this is my best
day, and a loft of pigeons flash past us, wings like linen, and it’s autumn,
and the sky goes on forever, and I can wait for him… “Did they call you
Fatty?”… So that’s the first time I ever felt the world stop – although not the
last, of course… It’s a swear word. It’s
a weapon. It’s a psychological
subspecies. It’s an accusation,
dismissal, and rejection.
“I Encounter Some
Sexism!” Page 126
These days, a plethora of shitty attitudes to women have
become diffuse, indistinct, or almost entirely concealed. Fighting them feels like trying to combat a
moldy mildew smell in the hallway, using only a bread knife. Because – like racism, anti-Semitism, and
homophobia – modern sexism has become cunning.
Sly. Codified. In the same way a closet racist would never
dream of openly saying “nigger” but might make a pointed reference to someone
black having natural rhythm or liking fried chicken, so a closet misogynist has
a vast array of words, comments, phrases, and attitudes that he can employ to
subtly put a woman down or disconnect her, but without it being immediately
apparent that that is what he is actually doing… he places a packet of Tampax
on your desk. “Given how emotional
you’ve been, I thought you might need these”…
“I Am In Love!” Page
147
You are no longer an observer but a participant.
It’s amazing how much you can find to say when there’s one
big thing you’re too afraid to say: “This isn’t working.”
If it doesn’t work, it’s simply because I didn’t try hard
enough.
Page 150
The people around you are mirrors… You see yourself
reflected in their eyes. If the mirror
is true, and smooth, you see your true self.
That’s how you learn who you are.
And you might be a different person to different people, but it’s all
feedback that you need, in order to know yourself. But if the mirror is broken, or cracked, or
warped… the reflection is not true. And
you start to believe you are this … bad reflection.
“I Go Lap-Dancing!”
Page 163
I can’t believe that girls saying, “Actually, I’m paying my
university fees by stripping” is seen as some kind of righteous, empowered,
end-of-argument statement on the ultimate morality of these places. If women are having to strip to get an
education – in a way that male teenage student are really notably not – then
that’s a gigantic political issue, not a reason to keep strip clubs going.
“I Get Married!” Page
173
If we were inventing things from scratch, surely we would
decide to throw a gigantic celebration of love right at the end of the whole
thing – when we’re in our sixties and seventies, the mortgage is paid off, and
we can see if the whole “I love you forever” thing actually worked out or not.
“I Get Into Fashion!”
Page 191
All the other women buy lots more clothes, I think. They
have lots more clothes than me. They are
doing things differently. I’m not doing
what the women do… I’m not being a
proper woman, I think , staring at my wardrobe.
All the other women are “putting together outfits” and “working on their
looks.” I am just “putting together the
cleanest things.” Now I’ve got some
money again, I should sort this out.
Page 206
The following eight hours (of a fashion shoot) were the
worst of my life that haven’t ended in an episiotomy… I left that studio, eight hours later, sweaty
and in tears. It was the ugliest I’d
ever felt. Without even the aid of being
able to smile – “look mysterious, and sexy. Kind of… vague” – I was reduced entirely down to the clothes on my back
and how my body looked in them. And in these styles, rather than the ones I’ve
carefully collected as being “helpful” to me, I was a total failure.
(Movie stars) were just wearing (shoes) for
photographs. They know it’s just for photograph.
We – the customers – are the only ones who are buying this stuff and
then trying to walk around in it all day; move in it; live in it.
Why You Should Have
Children Page 218
Fairly early on in the event, you will have the most
dazzlingly simple revelation of your life:
that the only thing that really
matters in the whole goddamn crazy mixed-up word, is whether or not there’s
something the size of a cat stuck in your cervix, and that any day when you do not have a cat stuck in your cervix will
be, buy default, wholly perfect in every way.
In short, a dose of pain that intense turns you from a girl
into a woman. (Childbirth) is one of the
most effective ways of changing your life.
Page 219
You basically come out of that operating theater like Tina
Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,
but lactating.
“Role Models and What
We Do With Them” Page 249
But, of course, on being freed, people who’ve been
psychologically crushed don’t immediately start doing glorious, confident,
ostentatious things. Instead, they sit
around for a while, going, “What the fuck was that?” trying to work out why it
happened, trying – often – to see if it was their fault. They have to work out what their relationship
is with their former aggressors and come up with new command structures – or
work out if they want command structures at all. There’s a need to share
experiences and work out (a) what “normal” is and (b) if you want to be it. And , above all , it takes time to work out
what you actually believe in – what you
think for yourself. If everything you
have been taught is the history, mores, and reasoning of you victors, it takes
a long, long time to work out what bits you want to keep, which bits you want
to throw away: which bits are poisonous to you, and which parts salvageable.
Page 255
For women, finding a sympathetic, nonjudgemental arena is
just as important as getting the right to vote.
We needed not just the right legislation, but the right atmosphere, too,
before we could finally start to found our canons – then, eventually, cities
and empires.
“Abortion” Page 266
For mothers must pretend that they are loving and protective
of all life, however nascent or putative it might be. They should – we still quietly believe, deep
down inside – be prepared to give and give and give, until they simply wear
out. The greatest mother – the perfect
mother – would carry to term every child she conceived, no matter how
disruptive or ruinous, because her love would be great enough for anything and
everyone… Women should be, essentially capable of endless, self-sacrificial
love… On a very elemental level, if women are, by biology, commended to host,
shelter, nurture, and protect life, why should they not be empowered to end
life, too?
