Heat and the male gaze

I dropped a note idly onto Facebook the other night. I say night, it was around 3 am, not long after I woke up on the sofa (classy, Jo, classy), tangled in my giant culottes and oversized top, and crawled upstairs to a not much cooler bedroom but one where I could starfish in my pants on my linen mix sheets and think about summers past. The note was about being told, when I was younger and it was this kind of hot, to put more clothes on. I wrote it because I often think 'I should say more about X', where X is a thing I'm thinking about, and then I forget. I even forget when I write the notes in a notes app, because when I do that, I use personal shorthand, like I'll know what I mean, but when I see it again, I generally don't. But if I say it on Facebook, it has to make sense to people, so it will make sense to me. Was my logic. Around 3 am. But actually, the sense it made to others was very different. It started an interesting conversation about the limits of being able to wear what you want, the consequences of wearing what you want, the things that affect what you want to wear. And it was a good conversation, but not the one I had been thinking about. 

Because the times I had been thinking about were the ones where the clothes they wanted me to put on were the ones *underneath* the ones I was already wearing. 

Even at my youngest and most exploitable, I never wore revealing clothing. This was partly because I have skin the colour of a milk bottle, and can *feel* it burning, even with sunblock on, and we didn't have sunblock when I was at my youngest and most exploitable. So I'm used to covering up. It was also partly because I was convinced, like many young women, that my body was deeply unattractive, not least because of the milk bottleness (these were the Miami Vice years and your tan was verrrry important). But it also became apparent to me that having a deeply unattractive body (I conceded in a diary from the time that my arms were "ok") the colour of a milk bottle did not seem to stop a certain level of attention being directed at me. I had a brutalist haircut and a totally flat chest till I was about 14, and was regularly taken for a boy, so it didn't start as soon as it might have, but start it did, as it in-evi-tab-ly does. So it was also partly to minimise that attention. 

I also identified as a feminist pretty early, became familiar with (if confused by) some of the core texts of the second wave, and was in some essential way drawn to the baggy t-shirt, leggings and DMs look. So all in all, you rarely saw my fleshy edges. 

But it was *a* look, of course, and often topped with wild, wild eyes. I'd say they were smoky but they were far less subtle than that. And my hair was enormous. I modelled myself on Robert Smith, learnt how to backcomb with an afro comb, and got through more cans of firm hold Silvikrin than the ozone layer could, it turns out, really deal with. I wore second hand men's clothes (grandad shirts from Oxfam, my dad's old suit jackets), mixed with a touch of goth and a bit of Miss Selfridge, hundreds of bangles and tons of make up. Look at me don't you dare look at me, this look said. 

I think, now, that when you're 15 or whatever, anything you wear is revealing, because you are open season for the next two decades and you're finding that out the hard way. But then, I was handling it, I thought. 

But here are three stories, the ones I was replaying the other night in the heat. 

1. I'm at school. 

My school was recently demolished. I wasn't sad. There exists some kind of vestigial presence, in the form of a) a merger with another school with a fancier building a little way down the coast, and b) the form of a Memories of Jo's School Facebook group, which I follow with some fascination. There really are people who hold those days as the best of their lives, who still have their blazers and their ties, who salvaged memorabilia up to and including the *curtains from the stage in the big hall which they made into curtains for their actual house*. I say people. I mean men. 

My school was not designed for girls. I'd personally argue it wasn't really designed for children, but I can be sure as eggs is eggs on the former statement because it had been going for the better part of a century*  before it let any of us in. And when we got there, I had the strong feeling it was under sufferance. There weren't very many of us, and they often bunched us together in lessons, especially science ones, as if we might warp some kind of laws of physics / biology / chemistry if we moved around too much. I was a proto blogger even then, and some of the things they said to us (collectively, en masse, as girls) would be genuinely fucking reportable these days. 

What they really wanted, I think (apart from our Oxbridge potential, mwa ha ha), was a sort of no mess no fuss arrangement. Girls can be such a civilising influence on the main story, no? And useful in plays. So, while there were almost no female teachers (they were an even smaller proportion of the teaching staff than we were of the school population, which is batshit if you think about it for any length of time at all), there was a Head of Girls. There was no Head of Boys, because boys were the norm. No, just Girls. For the right amount of fine wine (any) I will tell you about the Sanitary Towel Experience. But we're not here for that today, we're here for the summertime. 

The Head of Girls would call you in, if you were a Girl, for any of an unspecified number of Girl related infractions. These were almost exclusively to do with what you looked like (or occasionally, smelled like). One summer term the temperature reached the level when we were allowed to dispense with our green blazers, or, if we were in the Sixth Form, as I was by this point, our grey suit jackets. Fairly soon, I was called in. 

HoG: Do you have any idea what you look like? 

Me [I'm fifteen, I have more idea what I look like than at any point in my life before or since] : How do you mean? 

HoG: We can all see that you're not wearing a bra. 

Me: Um, ok? 

HoG: I want to see you in a bra tomorrow. 

Me: But... I don't need a bra? And it's hot? 

(I didn't need a bra. I didn't really have any bras at this point. But I did start wearing a bra. Even though it was hot). 

Some days later, I am called in again. 

HoG: What are you wearing under that shirt? 

Me: A... bra? 

HoG: It's black. We can all see it. 

Me: But... I thought the problem was that you could see that I wasn't wearing one? 

Now. I knew to a little tiny extent what I was doing here. I knew that no mess no fuss (white) girls wear nice white bras under their nice white shirts and I knew I was fucking with the HoG a bit. But I also profoundly believed that the person most upset by my lack of bra and/or visible bra was the HoG herself. I really did not *need* to wear a bra** at that point in my life. If the tiny breasts of late developers bother you, please, just don't look at them. If you want to look at them, that's on you. It's not the job of young women to police themselves. I have written about this before. 

2. I'm at work. 

I have left school, and am working in a restaurant kitchen over the summer. My job is the worst one in the building, I'm on wash up. I am very happy to have this job, as it enabled me to leave my previous job, in a bread shop which was run by sex pests. Nobody in the restaurant kitchen appears to be a sex pest, and this is progress. So I'm pretty cheerful, on the whole, as I load plates in and out of a red hot dishwasher and scrub pans in the sink. They bring me beers and fries. It's quite convivial. We all get a share of the tips. I'm gradually getting to do bits of other things - this is the place where I first see a whole cauliflower, learn how to peel garlic, and work out that I am a proper vegetarian. (This last part doesn't last, but I had to wash enough bloody chopping boards and scale enough sardines to see me through for a while). 

We all have some kind of uniform, and mine is a white overall with a long white apron. The chefs have whites, and the waiting staff are in white shirts, bow ties and the same long white apron. The aprons are also the tablecloths, from a laundry perspective it's pretty efficient. 

But it's really, really fucking hot in the wash up (which is a portacabin) that summer, and I basically stop wearing anything under my overall. (I mean, I wear pants, and usually leggings, but sometimes shorts). You can see where this is going. 

I must make it clear, I still had naff all by way of breasts. If you only met me during the last 30 years that may sound hard to believe, but honestly, they arrived fully formed the second I went on the Pill (and never went away). Before that, I used to own a badge that said 'Small Breasted Women Have Big Hearts'. (Might still be true, who knows). 

Anyway, there I am, in the sweaty Portacabin, washing up all of the things, swigging on a newly fashionable Becks, and in comes the boss. He's one of those shouty chefs, but he's not a bad man. I can sniff out the bad men by now, for I am seventeen and have met enough of them. 

Jo, he says. I need to say something. 

Sure! I say. Hot, isn't it? 

People are noticing... he says, that you're, well, not wearing anything under your overall. 

Philip! I say. I am wearing pants and leggings. 

That's not... what I mean, he says, but I know, and he knows I know. 

Who is bothered? I say. It's not like the customers see me. I'm just here, out the back, in the hottest place, doing pretty much the hottest job. 

He doesn't have an answer for me, and to his eternal credit, he leaves it be. 

Later that summer, maybe even that same week, there was a shift where it was so hot I was putting ice down the back of my neck and running my head under the tap. And then the weather broke and there was a thunderstorm and a massive downpour. I banged the dishwasher on, walked out the back door, and by the bins I pulled my overall open to the waist (it had poppers), threw my arms up to the sky and stayed there till I was rain-soaked and cold. Then I reassembled myself and went back in to get on with it. 

I imagined that I probably didn't look that different as I'd been soaked with sweat for hours (in a way that is coming back to me now in the menopause, weirdly) and I was bang-crashing away when I heard a little knock at the same back door. It was a boy maybe a year or two younger than me, absolutely scarlet faced, who'd been sent from the restaurant we shared our yard with to ask if they could borrow some garlic. I did suddenly realise that he must have seen me howling bare chested at the rain. I was really nice to him. 

3. I'm in hospital. 

Well, now I'm 22 years old. And I do have pretty decent sized breasts, I think I'm a C or D cup by this point. I'm travelling with my Significant Ex, and in Thailand we have a 'couples massage' where I take my (M&S basic, unpadded) bra off and the lady masseuses hold it up to the light and pass it around in incredulous, hilarious wonder. I have arrived, on the top half, and I dress accordingly. 

Somewhere in between Thailand and Malaysia, I contract something which may or may not be typhoid (I have had my jabs, so tests are inconclusive though my symptoms are consistent). I am actually pretty fucking ill, and after a long week of mad fever, weakness and dehydration, I end up in a teaching hospital in Kota Baharu. 

I have nothing but respect for the people who got me there (my SE himself, of course, but also the couple who ran the guest house we were staying in when I fell ill, and who cared for both of us and got me medical attention on an increasing level of intensity, including, ultimately, driving me to hospital. I sent them Christmas cards for over a decade). 

Anyway, here I am, on IV fluids and antibiotics, in a hospital ward I arrived in barely coherent. The ward is open to the air - by design - the walls are slatted, and I am starting to feel better. They have given me a hospital sarong outfit and I have worked out how to take myself to the squat toilets - the drip stand is fixed to the bed, so I have to hold the bag up with one hand and the sarong with the other (and if I get them the wrong way round and hold my bag up with my drip hand the blood comes out into the tube and I slide, faint down the wall till someone rescues me or I sort it out myself, anyway I generally manage it, and hang the drip bag on the hook in the bathroom stall and use both hands to hoik up my sarong to have a piss and then do it all again in reverse. 

It may or may not have been typhoid, as I say. One of the other things they thought it may have been is dengue fever - you get this from mosquitoes, and we'd spent a very bitey night on the floor of a train from Surat Thani. One of the symptoms of dengue fever is a rash on the chest. A steady stream of male doctors appeared at my bedside, asking to check for this. Honestly, I'd say, your colleague just looked, there's no rash. I think I'll just take a look, they'd say. Just to be sure. Fine, I'd say. I mean, it was company. 

But actually, this one isn't about my spotless breasts. On day, I don't know, three? I was in there for about a week I think, my Significant Ex turns up at visiting hour, bearing V8 juice and Marmite (I still love him for this) and I don't know... sanity? I'm definitely on the mend by this point and can see that on one level he's doing a lot of the heavy lifting, not least trying to stop my mum getting on a plane to Malaysia. We're both pretty sure that I'm not going to die, and we're kind of back in the game as a team. 

He is sitting next to my bed, and the husband of the woman opposite is sitting next to hers. She takes time every day, before visiting hour, to check her face and put a headscarf on. The husband calls my SE over. Words are exchanged. 

He comes back to me, pulling a face that says 'you're not going to like this'. 

What did he say? I ask. 

What he said was: tell your wife she is exposing herself. 

Dude. I'm in actual hospital. I'm on a drip. It's a women's ward. It's open to the actual air. I'm wearing the actual clothes they give women to wear in here. You have an issue because you can see my pants? Honestly, just don't fucking look. 

These little stories, over and over. These are just three. These are just mine. And it literally doesn't matter what you wear, so you might as well wear what you want. 

In the original conversation, someone asked me about the female gaze. I've been thinking, but I haven't got a lot to say about it really, at least not mine. Summer brings out the sort of man who likes to hang out in a beer garden with his top off. We see a lot of male flesh at this time of year. I generally mutter dear god, put some fucking clothes on, but I guess the same logic applies: if it bothers me, and often it does***, I take my gaze, and I avert it. 

joella

* I managed to top this by attending a Cambridge college that had been going for over four centuries before admitting women, and all I can say is it can be fun being a trailblazer, but you better not bleed anywhere.   

** These days I am pleased to see there are things called bralettes. I'm way past the market for them, but when I would have been, all we really had was A cup versions of the overengineered things most of our mums wore - mine would elaborately remove hers from under her top as soon as she sat down after tea (a useful skill, which I also have). There is progress. It does exist. 

*** I'm fine with actual naturism. It's the performative tatts out look that I struggle with. But your body, your choice. 

Breaking the McDonald's seal

Christmas 2003, we went to India for a month. It was one of the best resettings I've ever had, and not just because it was a long one. We did a small group tour with Intrepid Travel, which was organised in partnership with Oxfam Australia, and we visited a bunch of NGO and community projects, including spending a full five days in rural Orissa with Gram Vikas, whose work tilted my world on its axis a little.

Intrepid are an Australian company, and our group included quite a few solo Australians, including three women who bonded with each other pretty quickly and were excellent life and soul value. I generally love the Australian women I have met on my travels. They are hilarious while remaining humane. They don't give a shit, while managing not to be dicks. They drink a lot of beer, and they taught me the phrase 'breaking the seal': it's the first time you go for a wee in a drinking session. Once that's happened, you'll be running to the loo all the time, like a proper girl. It resonated hard. My bladder control is on the excellent side, but only till it's not. Oh mate, they'd say, you're breaking the seal. They'd hold on waaaayyyy longer. But everyone's seal breaks in the end.

I have found it to be an adaptable concept. I didn't eat meat for 30 years, with hardly any breaches - and those were mainly politeness-based. Eventually I was someone who didn't eat meat because she didn't eat meat, even though my reasons for not eating any meat didn't fully hold anymore. I used to argue that the people who don't do something because they don't are important - you have to stand for something or you'll fall for anything etc. And I still think that's true - you need the unbenders in lots of situations, to keep you thinking and keep you honest. But I came up against some of the truly unbending, and my contrary self broke the seal.

And I'd like to tell you that every bit of meat I have eaten since has been pasture-fed and out-door reared and organic and free range, but while a lot of it has, you know and I know that would be a big fat lie. I have had an American Hot. I have had a Steak Bake. I have had a gala pie. But till t'other week, I had gone the entirety of the 21st century without a Big Mac.

Till December 2019, I had, in fact, only once been to a McDonald's in the 2000s. It was at 6.30am in January 2002 in Huehuetenango, Guatemala. I was there on a work trip, it was freezing cold, it was literally the only open place in town, and the project officer accompanying us had no idea why two of us hovered on the threshold, wondering what the Spanish for 'we don't visit McDonald's on principle' was. We quite quickly got over ourselves and had a coffee and an Egg McMuffin, but it felt, even in the circs, unpleasantly transgressive. These guys, these guys are part of the problem, we felt.

But there's problems and problems. I mean, look at the Labour Party. And about a month ago, we seemed to be at it again here in Ecoville. It's a long story, and it's been going on a long time. I have written about it before*, but not for a while, not for years. Mainly this is because I know there are people who don't like me writing about it. Or, possibly, anyone writing about it. Which is a challenge, as it's such good material - so good that we actually got covered by a real magazine this year. Which is a good read, I think. But it might have stirred something. Something did, at any rate, as a little bomb went off.

The timing was unfortunate. To live successfully in a place like this you have to work out how to play the long game. You get knocked down, and you get up again, but it can take a while. It's always been important to me to be making a contribution, and I've always found a way to do that. There are low-exposure and high-exposure jobs (which broadly, but not perfectly, equate to low stress and high stress) and there are jobs that anyone can do, and jobs that only some people can do. A few years ago, while I was still very much licking my Food Wars wounds, I found myself a low-exposure job that needed specific skills (treasurer of the co-op that buys stuff for our on-site food and household goods store). This role is actually Quite Hard, but also Mostly Appreciated, and can, if necessary, be done anywhere there's an internet connection. It was a good fit, but I was getting a bit tired of it: sometimes it involves chasing people for money, and I hate that part; there are some bits that are wildly inefficient, by design; and also I just felt it was all a bit staid. A bit wholemeal. I wanted to be a bit more creative with what we bought and where we bought it from. But no one else was interested, not really. You have to pay attention to that, in the long game. Pick your battles, Jo.

So I was thinking well, things feel quite stable at the moment, we're doing ok. M is currently well, my job is going great, my dad's not been in an ambulance for a bit. Maybe I should be offering a bit more. We are, as one of my neighbours beautifully put it, all crew.

We elect company directors every year - lots of people have done the job (it's a two year term) but it's very much at the high exposure end of things. There are never quite enough people willing to stand - certainly not in recent years. I think we could have up to 12, and there are currently five. So if you decide it's a thing you can do, you're pretty much guaranteed to get the job. So. Hey, I'm a company director! Go me. So is M. Go us. We thought about it a lot, and figured it was our turn to take some of that stuff for the team. He's done it before, I haven't, but when he did, it was all in the house anyway, whatever he was dealing with, so I figured it was worth doing it together. Deep breaths, I thought. We're growing up and growing past and growing on.

BLAM!

(Actually, maybe it was that that was the trigger? It's fine to do the books but not to make decisions about [checks agenda] firewood and trampolines? I don't know).

Also - and this has happened several times - like a lot of people, we're supposed to do a lot more communal meal cooking than we actually do, and it's a point of some contention in our house. I know I should try harder, but how we eat together, or don't, is at the absolute heart of a lot of my own sadness, anger and frustration about living here. It's the main thing I am trying to grow past, so I can focus on the joyful, creative, productive parts. But it takes me actual months to build up the energy and the enthusiasm. And then... just when I do, (and I try, I really do - this time I'd sourced a special ingredient from a kosher deli, ffs), BLAM! Someone says something, someone does something, and I think oh fuck it, I am not giving this a day of my life, and we invite people we like around for sausage pasta** instead.

Instead (and I do get the inherent tension here, so don't even think about explaining it to me, I'm not in the mood, I'll never be in the mood even when I'm in my best mood) there was a proposal for a Saturday morning conversation whose framing included the question "Do you think that a public blog is a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community?" No. Of course it's not a useful way to initiate discussion and facilitate change in a community. But hey fellas, neither is a lot of the other stuff that's happened around here, a lot of it more in your face and screamy than that, and some of it pretty gangy-uppy, at least in my experience. Specifically, men claiming exclusive knowledge of the concept of inclusivity really. pushes. my. buttons.

And I have buttons. Your correspondent tried to do all the things she was supposed to do. She joined the teams. She turned up for the discussions. She explained why she was unhappy with the things she was unhappy with. She engaged with every single process at every single point. The above things happened anyway (most of them before she wrote a single blog post about them).

And this time she tried again. She lost a lot of sleep in the build up to the conversation, and did not practise her best self care. She may have drunk too much wine, stridden around the house ranting about 'this fucking place', done some sobbing and wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but she got some wise counsel, she calmed the fuck down and she showed the fuck up.

As did around 20 other people, which is pretty impressive for a Saturday in December. She proposed a reframing of the questions, because she thought they were the wrong ones. We need to be talking about how to deal with conflict before it becomes a cold stale deposit in our arteries, congestion in our lungs. We've unpacked the shit out of this, years after the events, and it hasn't really helped, so why dwell?

And we took that forward, the kind, thoughtful people who'd shown up wanting to move this on, and we had four separate conversations about different aspects of the challenges ahead, and it was hopeful and energising and actually, maybe, worth the angst. (Jury's out on that one, I was planning a calm December and did not get one, but whatevs.)

Two hours we were there, and then four of us went to McDonald's. I had a Big Mac Meal with a full fat Coke, and I enjoyed every inch of it. The following week, I went to London for work, and thanked my colleagues for helping me learn more about systems and how they work, and how important it is to ask the right question, diagnose the problem whose addressing will have actual impact.

The last night I was there, I left the pub four pints deep and made my way back to the YHA. I got off the bus outside the Oxford St McDonald's. Yes! I thought, and I ordered a Filet-O-Fish from a machine. It arrived, about 45 seconds later, and I ate it, surrounded by girls from many nations and women of all classes. It tasted like very heaven.

Another seal done gone.

joella

* Links available on request
** One of our very favourite comfort dinners. It's by Jamie Oliver, and the recipe is here. It's not vegan, vegetarian, kosher or gluten free and it has wine in it for extra points.

Season to taste

A couple of weeks back, when ex-Saturday-job-comrade N and her family came to stay, we went to the Elder Stubbs Festival. We'd probably have gone anyway, it is a highlight of the East Oxford summer calendar. But it was even more fun with a bunch of Lancastrians-turned-Mancunians, who boggled gratifyingly at the patchouli-and-patchwork people, the wicker sculptures, and the bands who all sound like Hawkwind. This scene somehow blends seamlessly with whatever the collective noun is for upscale off-road pushchairs full of Boden-clad kids. We played NGO X bingo, and it didn't take long to get a full house.

But the festival's raison d'etre is mental health awareness. The allotment site has strong links with Restore, a fine organisation which also runs a cafe, garden and craft shop round the corner from us. The party bag contained a copy of One In Four magazine, which I found myself reading in bed the other day. It had an article about SAD, which I thought was a bit odd, as *I* struggle with summertime, but I thought I was unusual.

But then I realised that the magazine was nine months old. Maybe it's because we got there late.

And then I carried on reading, and discovered there is also 'reverse SAD': rare but real, apparently. I wouldn't claim anything like full-blown depression, it's more that some days are edged with black. The sunnier the day, the deeper the edging. As soon as there's a chill in the air, I rest a little easier, despite the price of gas. So yeah, I can vouch for the existence of the summertime blues, and minimal research confirms I'm not alone.

But I can also vouch for the therapeutic value of growing stuff. Or, for that matter, just having your hands in the earth. I have spent hours over the last few days digging the summer's spent allotment beds, breaking the big chunks into little chunks, pulling out the couch grass roots and making a pile of weed spaghetti. The soil needs to be in the right heart (as I believe it's called) before you can do this ... too dry and you'll never break it up, too wet and it sucks you down. Right now, our soil is perfect for it. Most people don't do it by hand, but I'm cool with that. Then I put my jumper on and smile inside.

joella