I was in a restaurant recently and I overheard a date happening beside me. Or rather I listened in. I always listen in to conversations I hear strangers having. I find it helps with my work but I liked to do it before I started writing too. I suppose I just find it interesting.
For example, this weekend I also listened in on a rich American family talking about where their children were headed for university. “If they’re so rich, why aren’t the kids off to Yale or Harvard?” I asked my boyfriend after.
“You always get so much more Belfast when you’re drunk,” he said. He went on, impersonating me: “If yous are so rich, why are yous not going to Yale!” A very accurate impression.
But anyway the date. I took this couple to be on a first or second date and I could not believe how boring the man was being. He had a terrible sausage voice and hair like Tin Tin. Based on looks alone she was out of his league completely. He was going on and on about various longitudinal studies into the economic benefits of bank holidays conducted in different countries. He talked about it for such a long time. He said some economic advisors say they are expensive but others contest that they have intangible benefits because workers return well rested and revitalised by having had the chance to spend time with their friends and family. He said a version of this statement again and again and again.
On and on he went like this, with basic common sense arguments for and against bank holidays that I expect even a child in primary school would be able to articulate without reading any studies. She responded cheerfully and tried to move the conversation on to a different topic, although he always seemed to find a way to drag it back to the bank holidays. At one point I heard her say: “Yes, I suppose there are upsides and downsides to everything. That’s life isn’t it.” I wondered if she was trying to find an upside to the date. (I am sorry if you are the sausage man reading this but it really was tremendously boring).
I admired her patience and good humour. I probably would have just made an excuse and left. Although maybe not. I suppose it would depend what kind of mood I was in. I imagine she may have figured she was already there on the date and may as well try to make the best of it. I can understand this approach to dating. If you get dressed up and travel to a bar, even if the person is going on and on about bank holidays for more than an hour in a sausage voice I can imagine thinking: Well I’m here now, I might as well just get on with it.
I always feel a great affinity when I see a woman in a situation like this, valiantly trying to make the best of it. I don’t think many women would dare to be this boring on a date, and I don’t think many would tell a man like this how boring he was being. I actually think this is a good thing. I like that women are (broadly) socialised to be considerate and mindful of other people’s feelings. I wish more men were socialised to be this way too. I think it would be to their benefit as much as anything else.
I think far too many men are told from a young age that they are special, a genius, brilliantly funny and so on. When I used to tutor the children of rich families I always noticed the way the parents would talk about their sons. Boys who were palpably and verifiably bad at maths were, I was often told, really so smart that they were bored by the class and thus couldn’t motivate themselves to bother trying. Then we would spend Saturday morning after Saturday morning trying to work through basic fractions together and getting nowhere and I would sort of wonder what the point of it all was.
Why would it be so hard to accept your son was simply, despite his myriad advantages, bad at maths? And that narrative too, that the boys simply weren’t trying. Why was it better, I wondered, to have a son who was lazy rather than one who was not good at maths? Some people do just find things harder than others, that’s life. Laziness is surely a more troubling personal failing than the fact your brain does not, for reasons outside of your control, find it easy to process or interact with certain kinds of information.
I felt sorry for these boys too, having to sit with me every Saturday morning pretending to be lazy and not just bad at something. I worried about the kind of adults they would become, when they had been trained to have this fantastical self image as children.
I notice this idea of laziness in boys is generally presented as one of the reasons that girls tend to do better in school now. Whenever GCSEs and A-Levels come back and girls have done a bit better on average there are all these pieces about how it's because everything is coursework now and girls will be very diligent and fastidious with their coursework whereas boys are more madcap genius types who respond better to exams.
Maybe this is true, these pieces never include any data about, for example, coursework scores compared to exam scores for the same cohort of children. If it is true that girls are more fastidious and hard working it is interesting to me that this is framed as a negative thing. The fussy, hard working girls compared to roguish genius boys. To me a good work ethic seems like socialised behaviour we could stand to see a little more of. (If yous want to get to Yale, etc etc).
But then this is the way it is with women always. We get kicked whatever we do. Positive achievements or attributes can almost always be framed in a negative light or minimised or just rewritten entirely.
I even find that with this substack actually, whenever someone is trying to minimise my career they always say that I write a weekly substack and don’t list any of the many publications I write for, as if this substack is the majority of what I do instead of the least of it. It never occurred to me that this would happen. But I suppose that’s because I wouldn’t do that to or about anyone else. I write this because I mostly write for American magazines where we talk about an idea and then the piece takes a while to come out and sometimes I don’t want to work on something for that long, and because I don’t think every idea fits into the more rigid magazine essay form. But I think that should be obvious to anyone with a brain. Why should I have to be on guard constantly for the worst possible faith interpretation of everything I do?
I was almost impressed to read a piece about myself recently which described my career as me having “written several essays”, no publications listed. (Then I found out the man who wrote it literally went to Eton, is older than I am and is still writing exclusively for blogs called Mottled Wings and the like for free.) It had all the usual “kick woman” tropes used at present too, that my writing is “cold and distant”. No examples of course, and I can not think of a worse description of what specifically I do than “cold and distant”. But that’s how it is for women’s work, you just say “cold and distant” or “sad girl” or whatever and then write about that instead of what you find in the book. I suppose I find this depressing mostly because of how boring and anti-intellectual it is.
It’s like the man who said I wrote my book as a response to the TV show Girls, and then wrote an essay about why my book doesn’t work as a response to the TV show Girls in this sneering, hectoring tone. All the supercilious embellishments couldn’t cover up the fact that he read a book about Belfast by a woman from Belfast and the only comparison point he could think of was a popular American TV show, seemingly simply because both things have women in them. Post conflict intergenerational trauma is one of the major themes in my work, where is this in Girls? Likewise the financial landscape of Girls, in which every character is bankrolled to live in New York by their parents while they find their feet, is totally alien to my characters. (And, although I shouldn’t even need to point this out, to me.)
There are too many other differences between Girls and my book to list here. No sensible person could possibly think they have much to do with each other. In fact the comparison is so juvenile that, again, it never occurred to me that anyone would make it. But this is the thing with kicking women. It is treated as an inherently elevated response, and so nobody ever seems to worry about saying something stupid or being a philistine while doing it.
I remember before my book came out I did have a bet on with my boyfriend that I would get compared to another writer because we are both women. He said it wasn’t possible because our work has nothing to do with each other, we plainly don’t read the same books, etc etc etc. When of course I was I never even bothered collecting my winnings. I felt too much like a black jack dealer who had hustled a toddler into a casino.
If you ever complain about how silly all this is you are bitter or hysterical or you are being a “sad/cool/distant/scary girl” or whatever. Always girl, always a child, never an adult woman. In all this girl discourse I have found myself wondering if I ever felt like a girl. I didn’t really have that kind of childhood. Likewise I often think of the spoilt little boys I tutored and how insulated from the real world they were and likely always will be. I wonder if they ever find themselves or their work labelled “sad boys”. But fine then, so be it. In that case I am bitter, hysterical and an “[insert adjective] girl”.
I don’t think it is all men who kick women, and certainly it is not only men. There are women who do this too. One of the issues I have with the way “me too” played out is that I feel it sparked a confused conversation about gender relations which ended up apportioning blame for everything women have to deal with pretty unevenly. (I could write much more about my issues with the way that all panned out and I will elsewhere).
My feeling is that, as one example, working class men (I use that term loosely here to mean men without a lot of financial, social or cultural power) got a pretty raw deal, with a lot of discourse about builders wolf whistling and the toxic dangers of lads mags. Meanwhile the kind of men who went to public schools and have three degrees all paid for by parents, and who could quickly learn precisely what they are allowed to say and do while still being awful to women got off very lightly. I guess they always do.
Maybe these men don’t behave any worse and I just personally find them infinitely more tiresome and wearying. But I can’t be the only woman who feels like this and why should our feelings on the matter count for less than those who would have it the other way around?
If girls do work harder at school maybe it is because they don’t expect to ever get much without having to work for it. I would say this is a smart assumption. I would even say suggestive of a roguish, streetwise genius. A formidable cunning.
Happy International Women's day for friday xxxxxx
You can buy my novel, Lazy City here.