As a humorous hypothetical, I have oft hallucinated about a different destiny if I had a cock instead of a cunt. I’ve written ad nauseum about the covert conspiracy to control me; believing as I do that much of that was because I did not adhere to traditional and socially approved norms as a female. Moreover, I too controlled myself at times because of my gender; curbing my outspoken, aggressive albeit passionate temperament because I unconsciously felt it ‘alarmed’ people. My sense of being female took several years to reckon with and understand, realizing in my late twenties that I was a ‘threat’ to the acceptable, subordinate status of women, sadly, as much to women (if not more so) than to men. My father told me when I was nearly 28-years-old that I was a radical and non-conformist; he did not qualify these words by female, so I’ve pondered whether my radicalism (as my father termed it) and non-conformist philosophy of being would have impacted on my destiny irrespective of my gender. Or did he understand me as a non-conformist because of my gender? I can’t answer that, I didn’t ask him what he meant (more fool me!), but I realized he had really ‘heard’ me.
With a boring proliferation of feminist diatribes against men as patriarchal, powerful pundits preaching pervasive prayers from the pulpit that enshrine misogyny as female misfortune (as if that’s the root cause of our problems), I worship from my own alter of apposition that ascribes real importance to mind over matter. Intellect transcends biology; having a cock is actually hard to imagine as I’ve tried many times in my life, without ever really trying to think it through. I am now. Maybe as a suggestion to create a genuine gender revolution, young primary age school children should be asked to write an essay about ‘Imagine You’re the Opposite Gender (genitalia-speaking with all its assumptions, too)) and it might just help identify those incipient sexists so we can educate them for a really better world. We could ask them to consider many themes of supposed gender difference; are boys cleverer than girls, more aggressive and tough, even more violent (?), and do boys naturally inhabit a more powerful and leading planet than females? Are they ‘naturally’ and innately stronger, tougher and more resilient than their female counterparts? Can they indulge in sex with impunity while females must submit as the second sex? Are males the first sex, setting the agenda for us females to pursue? There are also questions, in reverse, to ask females about their perceived and understood ‘role’ in our society; it would involve an intriguing leap of imagination to gain important insights about future destinies of our planet. Sexism is not just about the so-called male opposite sex, but part of an ideology too often internalised by females about themselves, thus contributing, albeit, unconsciously, to their own subordinaite status.
I’m instantly aware of one great difference having a cock would have made for me, and that’s about playing football, but as a child asthmatic, pre-Ventolin, I’m quite sure that after running for five minutes chasing the ball I would have expired on the field half-dead. It wouldn’t have made any difference. I attended the football anyway, but I would have of course passed entrance to the players’ rooms after the game. I did try once to ‘blind’ the gatekeeper, but he pulled my duffel coat hood off my head and pronounced the rooms were a male-only domain. Still, I did run onto the ground after the games, pat them on their backs, ask for their autographs (I provided the biro, I used to write down goals and behinds scored by all the players on The Record), and then have to wait patiently for my male cousins to leave the rooms so we could all go home. I was jealous of their cocks, though those appendages weren’t the reasons I was angry. They should have been, but in my young teens, it was more about being a girl rather than being a boy. Despite my nascent awareness of some gender realities in the 60s in Melburbia, it was more to do with being banned as a female than wishing I had a cock. My latent feminism started kicking in, hitting me right through my head like a sledge-hammer.
That was my first cognisant experience in gender warfare; I was just 11-years-old and football has remained a passionate and permanent fixture in my life. Being male, I might have developed into a commentator, football writer and author; I listened avidly to multiple radio broadcasts in the 50s and 60s when I couldn’t attend due to asthma or bronchitis (I was afflicted as a young kid), and I have tried at different intervals in my life to ‘work’ in the football arena. On all occasions, I believe my femaleness has discriminated against my knowledge, wisdom and passion for football, as well as my appearance; female of course, but I’m not a blonde, dolly-bird wearing caked make-up, false eyelashes (I should have learnt how to bat them at gullible and vulnerable men whose brains reside below their beer guts; sadly I was never taught that subtle skill) and slinky tight dresses. I love tight blue jeans, sloppy jo jumpers that reveal no tits at all, and my make-up amounts to a smudge of grey eye-shadow, soft beige foundation, light-weight mascara and no red lipstick. I often hide my non-lustrous hair under a hat, in winter and summer. I look elegant; hair irrelevant. I only waved the white flag (or gave up in my pursuit of fame in football) last year when I approached a footballer to write a book with me. I’ve lost count of how many men I’ve approached to write this book with me over the past18 years, but rejected again at 64, I accepted that my destiny as a female in football had reached its final destination. I have lost interest because dealing with the blatant sexism is irrational; and in legal parlance, now irrelevant and immaterial. I watch the game contented that a lot of the time, I am as clued-up, as smart and knowledgeable about football as many males respected for their acumen and understanding, including male non-players, too. I know I know almost as much as them, and now, in my ripe old age, I do reckon that if I was male, I would have had much more of a fair chance and opportunity to compete in this arena. My cunt got in the way of their cock, more significant than my mind. For them, it was matter over mind. Such has been my destiny as a female.
Football was my primary passion, but politics ranked alongside it. Would I, could I, have been a politician? This is more difficult and complex to attribute to basic gender issues, as I am unsure as to whether I could have (would have) sacrificed my individual political ideology to toe a party line. I wrestled with that conundrum for many years in my twenties, acknowledging that politics was also a ‘nasty’ business that my more sensitive nature may not have coped with. Moreover, I was also disillusioned with the ‘political game’; the rot setting in at just 19 when I was a junior reporter covering Victorian State Parliament. Certainly, my femaleness counted in that domain too, but it paled into insignificance against the backdrop of political bastardry I witnessed in the chamber. I read now about quotas being introduced to increase the numbers of female politicians, but over the years, I have realised gender is not the significant issue about politicians. Male or female, it is a ‘nasty’ game, or certainly can be, and maybe my father’s perception of my radicalism would have stopped me from ever venturing into that business as a way of life. I don’t believe having more female politicians would make any difference to our society; of whatever party or political persuasion, it is ‘politics’ that count in this arena, not gender per se. We have had celebrated women as political leaders for decades, firstly in Sri Lanka and just 36 years ago, in Britain, Australia in 2010. Have these powerful women managed to achieve (and did they want to?) change for women? I don’t believe so, believing their ascendancy to the throne was more to do with power and control than any altruistic concern to change the gender imbalance in wealth, power and status in our world. It is just as irrelevant in America when Hilary Clinton becomes, or doesn’t become, the first female president of the United States. Her gender SHOULD be irrelevant as far as I’m concerned. It is a complete nonsense to believe that a female per se in politics will be necessarily any different to a male; too many women on the world stage have supported that notion as realistic and factual. I too would have been able to make little difference as some men have changed laws to create more female equal opportunity, but the reality is legality per se guarantees nothing as proving discrimination on gender grounds seems almost impossible. Entrenched social attitudes are hard to erode, despite being enshrined in law. I might have been ‘heard’ somewhat better, or listened to more intently as a male, but ultimately, I don’t believe I would ever have lasted in politics as a male more than as a female. I stopped wanting to report politics at 19 and I’ve never regretted the choice I made.
Now to my gender genitalia; my cunt ‘outbiolgising’ my brain as perceived and assumed by others, and simultaneously, absorbed by myself in my younger years. There were times in my youth when my brains were as much in my cunt as men’s might have been in their cocks as I was as sex-mad as they were. What is significant however is that I really did cop a lot of contempt, slander and abuse for my sexual behaviour, sadly, more from other women than men, though both genders could never accept my sexual proclivities, and/or my interest in sex per se as an intellectual passion not just as a pornographic pastime. Perusing the pages of newspapers and watching the odd shows about sex on TV, it is indeed lamentable that social attitudes towards females and sex don’t seem to have changed much over the decades, as much for females as males. The slut/stud divide still seems to be alive and well and thriving, albeit encompassing a disrespect for women who do and respect for those who don’t; the damned whores and god’s police of Australia’s pioneer history still underpinning our attitudes to sex more than 200 years later (Thanks Anne Summers, it’s a brilliant book but you lost the plot a long time ago). Indeed, I was called ‘a fucking whore’ by a boyfriend in 1971 for being unfaithful and a ‘whore’ by a girlfriend’s mother after she agreed to have sex with a boyfriend. What else is new now? I was also condemned as a ‘slut’ many times by male work colleagues, castigating me for who I fucked. Later, I was labelled a ‘man-hating dike’ for my appearance as an overweight, somewhat smelly women who said ‘no’ to pretentious pseudo-intellectuals I didn’t fancy, speaking out loudly and vehemently about the need for change and equal opportunity. I was a closet man-hater for daring to affirm my supposedly selfish and self-centred needs, not just wants, to be an equal in mind; my matter irrelevant. Having a big appendage might have made some difference in my destiny now as a broke, single, unemployed woman of 65, as I walked out of many jobs over their low pay (I did at times regard these paltry wages as doe to my gender), sexist innuendoes and disinterest in my mind. My cunt and how I used it took far greater precedence than my mind; deemed worthless by the money I earned; indicative for me of how my really good work, effort, experience and intelligence was irrelevant compared to my sexuality. My appearance was also of interest as I lost weight, stopped my BO, washed my hair and for these ‘frightened’ men, they couldn’t believe the transformation. Clearly, I was manic; deluded and distorting all reality. I walked out of this ‘appearance madness’ and have paid the price for the rest of my life. I still pay it, not by a low income, but by none at all, except taking the ‘entitlement’ of a pension. However, I also know, unbeknown to these superficial sexists, that I wanted to write; not stay cooped up in a closet office 9-5. The low wages, pervasive denial of my good mind and the appeal of my sexuality were not the only factors influencing my decision to walk out of jobs on a regular basis; I was bored and unstimulated and having a cunt not a cock may not necessarily have been the significant issue. I’ve known some men who also have been similarly bored et al, but they didn’t walk out but too often masked their boredom and intellectual frustration with too much drink and drugs. I walked out not because I was female, but because I am an artist of sorts; the bourgeois, middle-class 9-5 existence never part of my dreamed destiny. It is difficult and complex to disinter whether mind or matter comes first, but that’s only in personal and intimate relationships. At work, it was always my mind for me; my ‘matter’ the concern of others and I’ve never lost sight of that perspective for myself. The others might have, and I did ‘suffer’ for that. but my own strong sense of self always succeeded when they didn’t. My head always won, and still does.
The great thing about my life is that while I may have no money, am legally bankrupt and considered a loser or failure by so many others, I still enjoy the football, discussing and dissecting politics and engaging in intellectual dialogues about sex et alia. My gender may have cost me some money, even status and prestige, but I understood at just 30-years-of age that these were not my priorities in life. Yes, it’s been bloody hard and tough to withstand the gender status quo to be a subordinate woman, but I’ve never succumbed to it and now at 65, I get by with a little help from my friends for whom my gender is irrelevant. Glad to be female!