slowly and painfully, that they cannot liberate themselves alone. Too many social movements have treated women, queer people and people of colour as collateral damage, telling us to swallow our suffering until the revolution is over – but somehow, that time never comes. This time is different. We are refusing to wait any longer, and we are taking the boys along, too.
CLOCKING IN, CHECKING OUT
The precious core of modern male privilege is time. It’s the time to decide where your life is going before certain people start telling you it’s effectively over. It’s the time to make money, build a career, travel the world or just learn to play the trumpet really damn well before you even have to think about finding a partner and starting a family. It’s the time to be young, to fuck up, to fail and start again. It’s the time to get distinguished, rather than grow old. It’s time.
By the time we hit our late twenties, women and girls are expected to have their shit more or less together. We are expected to have chosen the people around whom our life’s work will revolve, to have made a plan and begun to put it into practice. The word ‘young’ stops being a prefix to ‘woman’ when we are spoken about in the third person. The women we see in the public eye, the women who are celebrated and held up as role models, are overwhelmingly very young, sometimes barely out of school. This is not the case for people living as men. Miley Cyrus is castigated for being a poor role model, but Justin Bieber can trash all the hotel rooms he likes. He’s young. He’ll learn.
I’m twenty-seven years old right now, and I’m barely a functional adult. I like ramen noodles and gin and staying up late having dramatic conversations on the Internet, and sometimes I just flip over yesterday’s underwear because the washing isn’t done. I have a tax-paying job and a blazer to wear to meetings and I’m grown up about contraception and healthcare, but that is no indication of any sustained ability to take responsibility for myself or any other human being. And yet family members are already starting to make worried noises about the time it’s taking me to settle down and warm my ovaries up, even though I’m clearly in no position to take care of a baby, a boyfriend, or both. I still leave bright-pink hair dye all over the bathroom as if some cartoon character has been horribly slaughtered, but apparently, it’s time to think baby.
Other women I know who write, make art or work in politics have begun to talk, in hushed and anxious tones, about the next ten years as a time of hard, adult choices in a way that I never hear from my male friends. None of us have the kind of high-flying jobs that would allow us to think in terms of ‘having it all’ – the man, the mortgage, the baby and the briefcase – and yet we still hear the ticking of the clock getting louder. The biological clock is a social idea. It is used to reinstitute a measure of compliance in women and girls. It tells us that any freedom we have is time-limited, that we can dance all night if we want, but midnight is approaching, and when the coach turns back into a pumpkin, we’d better make sure it’s dropped us somewhere safe.
Whether or not we ever plan to have children, women’s professional potential and social value is still subtly measured along the timescale of our fertility. We are expected to slide quietly off the escalator of money and power in our early to mid-thirties, and if we refuse to do so, we are considered superwomen or cold, grasping bitches, or both. The same cultural logic that tells us that women are most desirable and exciting in our teens and early twenties, when we barely know how to order a drink, tells men and boys not to hurry – they have things to sell that aren’t based on their youth and physical charms. When they get bigger and uglier and happier, they will only be more powerful. Women fear that we will become invisible. We
CLOCKING IN, CHECKING OUT
The precious core of modern male privilege is time. It’s the time to decide where your life is going before certain people start telling you it’s effectively over. It’s the time to make money, build a career, travel the world or just learn to play the trumpet really damn well before you even have to think about finding a partner and starting a family. It’s the time to be young, to fuck up, to fail and start again. It’s the time to get distinguished, rather than grow old. It’s time.
By the time we hit our late twenties, women and girls are expected to have their shit more or less together. We are expected to have chosen the people around whom our life’s work will revolve, to have made a plan and begun to put it into practice. The word ‘young’ stops being a prefix to ‘woman’ when we are spoken about in the third person. The women we see in the public eye, the women who are celebrated and held up as role models, are overwhelmingly very young, sometimes barely out of school. This is not the case for people living as men. Miley Cyrus is castigated for being a poor role model, but Justin Bieber can trash all the hotel rooms he likes. He’s young. He’ll learn.
I’m twenty-seven years old right now, and I’m barely a functional adult. I like ramen noodles and gin and staying up late having dramatic conversations on the Internet, and sometimes I just flip over yesterday’s underwear because the washing isn’t done. I have a tax-paying job and a blazer to wear to meetings and I’m grown up about contraception and healthcare, but that is no indication of any sustained ability to take responsibility for myself or any other human being. And yet family members are already starting to make worried noises about the time it’s taking me to settle down and warm my ovaries up, even though I’m clearly in no position to take care of a baby, a boyfriend, or both. I still leave bright-pink hair dye all over the bathroom as if some cartoon character has been horribly slaughtered, but apparently, it’s time to think baby.
Other women I know who write, make art or work in politics have begun to talk, in hushed and anxious tones, about the next ten years as a time of hard, adult choices in a way that I never hear from my male friends. None of us have the kind of high-flying jobs that would allow us to think in terms of ‘having it all’ – the man, the mortgage, the baby and the briefcase – and yet we still hear the ticking of the clock getting louder. The biological clock is a social idea. It is used to reinstitute a measure of compliance in women and girls. It tells us that any freedom we have is time-limited, that we can dance all night if we want, but midnight is approaching, and when the coach turns back into a pumpkin, we’d better make sure it’s dropped us somewhere safe.
Whether or not we ever plan to have children, women’s professional potential and social value is still subtly measured along the timescale of our fertility. We are expected to slide quietly off the escalator of money and power in our early to mid-thirties, and if we refuse to do so, we are considered superwomen or cold, grasping bitches, or both. The same cultural logic that tells us that women are most desirable and exciting in our teens and early twenties, when we barely know how to order a drink, tells men and boys not to hurry – they have things to sell that aren’t based on their youth and physical charms. When they get bigger and uglier and happier, they will only be more powerful. Women fear that we will become invisible. We
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