The F Word...The R Word Too While We're At It

In the last year or two the F word has become a huge talking point. At the grand old age of I’m from a time when you didn’t have to say you were a Feminist, you just were one.

Now there’s a whole bunch of young - well younger than me anyway - women telling us all how to be Feminist and what traitors we are to our vaginas if we’re not their kind of feminist. The problem as far as I see it, is that there’s not a ‘one size fits all’ version of Feminism. 

Katie Price says she’s a feminist, women who pole and lap-dance consider themselves feminist. Who am I to deny their claims? If you’re living life on your own terms and you’re happy with where you are, then nobody has the right to tell you what you are (or aren’t).

I have to say this whole eruption of ‘new feminism’ took me by surprise. I thought we were ‘there’, the work of the women who came the generation before me was done. As I look around me I see that’s far from the case. 

My male peers are earning far more than me and my fellow women for espousing similar opinions. They get bookings we don’t because corporate bookers deem the same words coming out of our mouths as ‘unsuitable’ or ‘outrageous’ or even ‘offensive’. 

Of course the plight of the female comedian is well documented and until recently I avoided discussing it like the plague. Starting out I had as many breaks as my male counterparts, if not more, because in those days people paid lip service to the notion of political correctness, and a ‘bird on the bill’ ticked an important box. 

That was 20 years ago though, now it’s gone full circle, men can make jokes about mingers, rape, ugly birds - stuff that would’ve got them drummed out of the ‘Alternative Comedy’ fraternity even a decade ago. Now it gets them on the various topical tv shows. They’re ‘edgy’ and ‘provocative’. 

These days I'm sad to say I consider the notion of 'sisterhood' to be a bit of a pipe dream.  In my time as a comedian the biggest blocks to my career have been placed there by my 'sisters'. I still get surprised by the random acts of sabotage at the hands of other vagina people. I do think its part of a bigger picture, while the women are busy infighting, the men can carry on eroding the freedoms our predecessors fought for (and won). This is happening everywhere in life, not just comedy. 

Newspapers love to fuel this divide, to turn women against each other, because let’s face it while we’re slagging off Kim Kardashian or Jordan, our eyes are off the ball. I get sucked in, reading the sidebar of shame, judging the way KK wears a frock or Katie Price’s latest media outburst.

The Daily Mail - that "bastion of all evil" - is particularly brilliant at this. They have a roster of self-hating females ready to sell their souls for the (admittedly huge) fees the Mail pays. For a long time it was just poor, disturbed Liz Jones who was held up as an example of the ‘silly spoilt bitch’ but she’s got a whole gang over there in Derry Street now. Samantha Brick and her astonishing beauty, Katie Hopkins and her frankly disturbing views on everything, some woman bragging about how she never cooks for her family and doesn’t fuck her husband, Shona Sibarry who every week seems to pen a piece about how revolting she is. It’s like the demons of Kensington High Street have built a ‘harpy factory’ in the basement to churn these creatures out. The women I know don’t behave, think or speak the same language as the Mail’s ‘Witches of Fleet St’. 

It’s working too, at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, some women who should know better debated the ‘varying degrees of rape’. It’s bad enough when some crusty old male judge derides a rape victim as ‘asking for it’ because she had the audacity to leave the house in a mini-skirt. That bullshit phrase rears it's ugly head with depressing regularity. 

‘Asking for it’. Let’s take a look at that shall we?

When I was 17 I was raped by two men.  Before that night I was a virgin. Afterwards I was as abused by their words as their actions. They told me not to bother going to the police as I'd been seen earlier in the company of one of them. Drinking and flirting. In their words I was 'asking for it'. I wasn't. I was a young woman on holiday in a foreign country, enjoying all that life had to offer. I wasn't asking to be held at knifepoint for over 8 hours, and raped repeatedly as I cried, screamed and begged to be let go. 

When I hear women say those words it breaks my heart. 

The women who say that a young girl in a short skirt is asking for it (btw I was wearing bondage trousers when it happened to me - don't judge me it was 1978) are the same ones screaming from the rooftops about the horror of Muslim women being 'forced' to wear niqabs. Don't they see the flaws in their diatribes?

There's a clear enough fucking line from berating a gal in a pussy pelmet when she gets attacked to demand she cover all but her eyes in a black shroud because her sexuality is so overwhelming men can't resist her wiles. What about men being taught to keep it in their fucking pants until we ask them to take it out?