The Lady Garden

I went to a tiny, single sex Catholic school for all but one year of my high school education. When you think of a cliché Catholic schoolgirl in a heavy woollen skirt with too much hair product trying to get the attention of some boy at a bus stop after school – you are probably visualising a memory of mine. The school was too small for comfort, everyone knew your business, everyone had probably crushed on or drunkenly pashed your current/ex/future boyfriend and compliments from other girls were either given bitterly or in exchange for one back.

I remember the first time I ever had a genuine compliment from a group of other girls. I was 16 and at my boyfriend’s school play for his large, co-educational public school known for its diversity (which in 16-year-old-girl speak means ‘gay kids and goths’). Backstage during the play my boyfriend had pointed me out to his mostly female castmates, who then told them how pretty they thought I was. When he told me this later I recoiled and asked him what they wanted from me. When he looked at me with confusion and said “What? What do you mean? They just thought you were pretty.” I knew then that there had been something deeply wrong with my interactions with other women up until that point.

The following year, for my last year of secondary education, I enrolled at the aforementioned large co-ed public school. It was the best decision I’ve made in my life for many reasons, but one of the main ones was my exposure to girl love. The culture at this school was different; boys weren’t seen as distant prizes – they were classmates, heteronormativity was criticised, competitiveness between girls was seen as immature and ignorant, and every day was mufti day. Meaning that my usual routine of planning 3 months in advance for the 2 non-uniformed school days of the year so I could wear my Most Expensive Clothes was out. And good riddance.

On my first day I was taken by the hand and shown where all my classes were by a girl who was to be one of my best friends from then on. I was warmly welcomed and complimented by my new classmates, which sounds shallow but cannot be under-valued as an important part of feeling good about yourself as a teenager. I formed a strong, solid group of friends made up of boys and girls who loved each other fiercely and are still just as tight today.

Thanks to the amazing standard set by my friends, in just one year I changed from a deeply competitive teenage girl, to a young woman with an appreciation and celebration of the beauty and wit of other women. I also learned that I, like many other young women, were attracted to other women. And that this was OK. This transformation is something that spoke to my inner most ethics that had probably been there all along but was buried and confused by what was seen to be ‘normal’ (competitive) interactions with other girls.

Since discovering and celebrating girl love, I have taken it with me everywhere I have gone. Am I perfect? Fuck no. Have I still been competitive with other women? Of course. It’s hard not to when I feel like society deliberately pits us against each other. However, girl love is something I am committed to and will always strive for, because at the end of the day it’s a fuckload better than the alternative which I have lived.

That said, this bubble that I have created for myself with my amazing lady friends means that my interactions with ‘the real world’ can be very, very disheartening. In pretty much every workplace I have been in I have experienced competitiveness, one-upmanship, and pettiness from other women. Yeah sure it is probably all ‘normal office stuff’, in the same way that teen girls vying for popularity while slicing others down is ‘normal’ – but that doesn’t mean it is good for anyone. And it is disproportionately female on female.

I am an assertive, confident women who also manages to be a total bumbling goof sometimes. I am very young (always the youngest in my post-university workplaces), I am talkative and easily excited, but I work my butt off. I am curvy and fairly attractive. And to be honest, I don’t feel like these qualities have done me any favours in the workplace:

• Once I was taken aside by a senior female co-worker and told that my breasts and the way I dressed was offensive and embarrassing, and that she was leaving me out of a key workplace opportunity because of this.
• Once my boss from a former job told me in the tone of voice one would use when describing a disgusting bug that I was the most confident women she had ever met.
• Once I was told that I was a “young woman” so I should just “stop acting like I know anything”
• I was told by my current boss: “I would like to be a mentor to you if I have the time, but if it doesn’t work out I would hate to have to tell the sector all about you, because it’s a very small sector and that wouldn’t be good for your future.”

I am, however, hugely fortunate to have become involved as a volunteer with a women-centred sexual violence agency run by a group of women who have inadvertently become mentors to me, but have also created an environment of two-way guidance and support. I am so thankful for these women, and for this agency, however I wish it wasn’t such a rare find. I am not the only young woman at the beginning of my career desperately wishing that she didn’t have to look too far outside the office for guidance and support from women who have established their careers and learned a lot in the process.

I am also not the only young woman who had a nasty shock when she realised the school yard girl hate doesn’t stop in the school yard. And I’m not sure how to make it better; I’m not really sure if there’s anything I can do about it from my end. However, what I feel like I can control is how I act towards women who will be me in 5-10 years time. I am trying to take every opportunity I have with younger women to give them the girl love I would have wanted myself, and I am trying to encourage everyone else to do the same.

When I was a teenager, my English teacher used me to illustrate the difference between “immoral” and “amoral”. I’ve never been much of a one for sticking to (or rebelling against) conventional ethical or ideological codes. That doesn’t mean I don’t have one, though. I’ve just worked it out, step by step, by myself. And yes, sometimes that means taking years and years to get to where most other people started off.

One of the things about this process is that when you let yourself down, ethically or ideologically, you’ve got no-one to blame but yourself. In the last week or so, there’ve been three incidents that have really made me think about whether or not I’m failing to live up to my own ideals.

We had EQC inspectors through the house this weekend, finally. And it was all great, and the guy I was talking to was just awesome and friendly and incredibly easy to deal with. Right up to the point where he asked for the floor area of the house, I gave it to him off the top of my head, and he replied, “Wow. Not bad for a girl.”

Now, fortunately my ethical code doesn’t say “You must fight every single battle,” because honestly, I was so gob-smacked that he’d said that, that I did nothing at all. I just sort of sat there while the conversation progressed. And later I had to think about why I’d done that, why I hadn’t called him on being a sexist arsehole, and if it was worth him liking me enough to decide our kitchen vinyl did need replacing.

Scenario Two. We have these neighbours we don’t get on very well with. Mostly because they’re fuckwads. But we try to have some kind of constructive contact with them so we’re not just calling noise control and the cops and hating on them all the time. So when the guy from next door came over and asked if I wanted to come back to his house for a coffee and a couple of cigarettes, I said yes. Reluctantly, but yes.

Now, my partner wasn’t home but my daughter was. I let Twitter know where I was going. There is nothing quite like the sense that 400 people have your back. I took my phone. Why? Because sometimes the guy next door stands at their kitchen window, or on their back doorstep, and watches me get dressed.

Anyway, I started over, he met me out on the street, and suggested we drive down to the surf club. I claimed to not be able to leave my daughter. In the end, he came over to my side and we sat out on our new deck in the sun. And he asked me if I would take photographs of him in his underwear. He asked me about my own underwear preferences.

Now, thing is, when he decided to verbally harass me, he chose to play in MY field. Half an hour later we were talking about Chris Cairns’s performances in Scotland. I handled him. That’s not to say it didn’t utterly squick me out, but I dealt with it.

My problem was a couple of days later, realising that I was changing the clothes I wore in case he saw me. I was unconsciously trying to be dowdier and less attractive. I was trying to see if he was around before I went outside. And my Code of Conduct says “Don’t let the fuckers change your life.” I caught myself. I went back to being all TOFO. I’m fully aware that might seem like a dangerous choice to some people, and the previous just a sensible precaution, but it’s my life, and I will not live it like that.

Incident Number Three. After it coming up in a couple of conversations lately, I acquired a copy of Secretary, which I basically hadn’t watched since it came out, when it was quite the Big Fucking Deal for me. I mean, how often do you see a complex but sympathetic depiction of a BDSM relationship in mainstream cinema? (I was going to make a parenthetical comment here about the Invisible Dom/me phenomenon, but it might actually be another column.)

And I had to think about whether I was going to leave the file in the household general sharing media folder, or hide it somewhere so my 16 and 14 year old children couldn’t find it. (Yes, it’s rated R18. As a parent, I’ve found our certification system completely fucking useless as a guide to what I can show my children.)

Thing is, I shouldn’t even have thought about it. I’m comfortable with them seeing vanilla sexual material of that degree of explicitness. And it is absolutely core to my beliefs that non-vanilla sexuality shouldn’t be treated any differently. In the end, I left the file where they could stumble across it, but I had to think about it for days.

The point of all this being, I guess, that it’s an eternally on-going process. That’s part of the reason I’m so down on policing and so open to talking about ideas when I haven’t yet made up my mind. Finding your own path is not a one-time deal.