How To Be A Woman

EDITOR: Could you just do a quick phoner and ask her? Ask her when she wants to become a mother. I think the piece needs it . . .
Only with the women, though. I’ve never once been asked to do it with a male interviewee. You never get asked to ask Marilyn Manson if he’s been hanging around in JoJo Maman Bébé, touching tiny booties and crying.

line.
And there are several reasons why this is bad for everyone—men and women equally. First, in the 21st century, children and teenagers get the majority of their sex education from the Internet. Long before school or parents will have mentioned it, chances are they’ll have seen the lot on the net.
But it’s not just their sex education—which is a series of useful facts and practicalities, and the basic business of what goes where, or what could go where, if you’re determined enough—that kids are getting from the net. It’s also their sex hinterland. It informs the imagination, as well as the mechanics.
This is why—however limited, patchy, or centered on Trevor Eve the pornography I scavenged in my teenage years—there was, at least, a balance to all the stuff I was finding—a variety. I had petticoats and spies and woodlands and nuns and threesomes on sun

“That would be 14.”

“Stop being so fussy!

Maybe I would tell them that I have read The Well of Loneliness, by famous trouser-wearing lesbian Radclyffe Hall, and that they need to open their minds to alternative modes of dress.

Perhaps I would mention Chrissie Hynde, too. She wears masculine tailoring.

You don’t have to go to this bother to oppress me! I think, indignantly. I was already pretty subjugated! Honestly—you had me at “pikey.”

When Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born a woman—one becomes one,” she didn’t know the half of it.

Personally, I feel the time has come for women to introduce their own Zero Tolerance policy on the Broken Window issues in our lives—I

we live in a climate where female pubic hair is considered distasteful, or famous and powerful women are constantly pilloried for being too fat or too thin, or badly dressed, then, eventually, people start breaking into women, and lighting fires in them. Women will get squatters

Would Jane Austen’s characters have spent pages and pages discussing all the relationships in their social circle if they’d been a bit more in control of their own destinies?