As a girl growing up in the suburbs of Irish, working-class Birmingham, I learnt very quickly the fastest way to gain acceptance was doing as I was told. Having an independent opinion didn’t occur to me, or anyone else I knew for that matter. I have no horror stories, no complaints against my family – we were all just really good at gallantly accepting our imposed limitations. Society’s pecking order and its economic confines meant we didn’t know how to access the power of our voices. It was an environment in which to talk about yourself was boastful and unbecoming, where to be assertive or have self-belief was a form of arrogance.
My childhood experiences and the career that followed created contradictory perceptions of my supposed self – at times causing problems when seen through the eyes of other women – and, ultimately, my complex relationship with feminism, including Me Too.
As I advanced through school, I remember hearing my first teacher, a woman, saying it was a good job I was a pretty little thing because I’d never be bright. By the age of four, I had been absolved from any expectation to succeed and I took it lying down – literally, in the corner of the room where my ability to withdraw was cultivated. By the age of eleven, my maths teacher sat face-to-face with my parents and told them in my presence that I’d never achieve a GCSE grade because I was just no good at it. I assumed he had to be right because he was in charge.
Boys were another hurdle. I can still recall hearing, “Don’t talk to her, she’s got no tits,” accompanied by a swift fist grabbing at my buttoned-up-to-the-neck school blouse. They taped sanitary towels to my locker, publicly announcing my body’s reluctance to fully hit puberty, and took every available opportunity to diminish my confidence. Some boys pierced everything I owned in sight – books, my packed lunch, my fragile ego – all symbolic attacks on my intact virginity. Being vilified and humiliated were considered entirely normal punishment for not being a boy. This set a pattern for so many aspects of my life.
I left home at 18 and embarked on a career that had chosen me. I remember the day I was spotted by a model scout: she told me over and over again I was “uniquely beautiful”. She complimented parts of me I knew I already hated – my nose, my neck, my longer-than-long legs. “You look so aristocratic,” she said. I was given an identity that denoted power and confidence before I’d even worked out what it was. I learnt quickly that this new career was a balancing act and I learnt how to satisfy and pacify in equal measure. By this point, compliance was second nature. Over the years, I’d learned to be good at it, to master it even. A good girl from the get-go. A good girl for God. A good girl at school. A good girl in my industry.
Ironically, I became known, via the press, as an “anti-beauty”. I possessed a look that was both intimidating and androgynous: a look that was, yes, desirable, but with an asexual personification too. I was never the girl who stood in front of the lens being innately beautiful. I wilfully performed the hell out of the narrative in my head. To me, my job wasn’t about interpretation, but a project that required the utmost physicality. During my career, I have been a matador, a pharaoh, a monk, Salvador Dalí, a swan, a goddess, Marie Antoinette and a woman who could, it turns out, walk on water... Each role, each photograph, has required its own performance, whether on a magazine shoot or on a red carpet.
Each of these characters was iconic-looking – and was symbolically or historically powerful – but still my voice was not required. For every larger-than-life figure I embodied, there was a feeling of a loss of identity. The costume was powerful, but the person inhabiting it was still trying to make the connection.
My professional life has represented the “final” image: beautiful, desirable, intoxicating, addictive and (once or maybe twice) misogyny in its most beautiful disguise. My six-foot body meant that I shielded my shyness and presented a manufactured poise to the outside world.
I ended up reflecting on all this recently when the Me Too movement came up in a meeting. A knot of nauseous thoughts about compliance, feminism and my own voice proved hard to disentangle. I walked out of that meeting feeling confronted, not by someone else but by my own inward battle.
The struggle was this: how could I talk about this immensely complex issue while also acknowledging my own reticence? I did not lack commitment, but rather I was questioning my own feminism in an uncomfortable way. This subject is so prevalent and important, so why did I not feel more present? Why didn’t I already have a perfectly formed viewpoint? In the days after, I began to dwell on feminism and why I was staying away from the argument rather than using my public platform to join the movement.
Lately, I have faced the unabashed fury and eloquence at the typing hands of women I admired: women who’ve been confident, strident and remarkable in what they’ve both said and done in the public sphere; women who’ve been pivotal in shaping, adding to and representing a diverse and fully formed set of sides to this movement.
So why was I still afraid to be in charge of my own thoughts and articulate them? Recent encounters had rendered me silent; my experience with feminism – or rather public intellectual feminism – had been stunted. It wasn’t always that way. As that insecure teenager, my ability to source a kinder opinion of myself came via the words of great feminist writers. They gave me guidance and reassurance. Then, as an adult, I was thrust into a world where I had direct access to writers who I considered my heroines. On one particular televised debate – a round-table on body image – I was looking forward to speaking with a feminist I admired. She refused my outstretched hand and said, “I hear you’ve got a problem with me.” Hell. Burning tears were concealed, the cameras rolled and I felt as if the world was about to fall out of my backside.
This has happened too many times, when my job – and my past – seemed to get in the way. The job that had elevated my status and offered freedom and financial reassurance had further crushed my self-esteem. But that didn’t matter. The fact that I worked in fashion and wore clothes for a living apparently excluded me from having my say. I received admonishment for not being more like the women from whom I’d learned so much.
My thoughts are still preoccupied by these women. The fear of admonishment still takes centre stage whenever I try to air my true feelings. But now it is impossible not to speak up. This year’s conversations about gender and power have echoed through society in such a powerful and necessary way.
Up until now I haven’t been on a march. I have trudged daily, believing in my own feminism, but couldn’t find my place in the movement. What changed?
Fundamentally, I haven’t changed, but the way I look at the Me Too movement has. To be blunt, my initial reaction to Me Too was that it was mainly glamorous noise from Hollywood. For every black dress swishing into focus, I feared we weren’t having conversations about everyday autonomy. How do we reach women whose daily existence is filled with fear, anguish and hopelessness, women who are trapped and punished and stifled because of being born the wrong race, the wrong class, the wrong sex?
But when I came to make my feelings public, I was full of trepidation. Ironically, it was the very thing I felt uncomfortable writing about – Me Too – that changed everything. Firstly, I had to ask myself a question: why was my attention on the women in black making a stance, rather than the perpetrators around the world who necessitated the desperate need for women to say, “Yes, Me Too”? Where did I need to focus my feelings? Who did I need to look to?
And then I realised it’s not about me having anyone to look to, but about the new generation of feminists currently coming through. As Gloria Steinem said, “If you have more power, remember to listen as much as you talk. And if you have less power, remember to talk as much as you listen. That can be hard when you’re used to hiding... Talk to people, don’t get isolated, and remember to empathise, because almost everybody can be changed and transformed.”
We’ve all got things to say, but sometimes we don’t feel we are qualified to be heard. I wasn’t trusting of the noise coming out of Hollywood. I’m stubborn. I didn’t want to feel pressured into support for a hashtag without understanding the real, underlying meaning behind it. But then I looked to that meaning. In this case, the power and the words of the originator of the movement, Tarana Burke, a social activist who first used the phrase in 2006 to give room for survivors of sexual violence to voice their experiences, specifically when it came to women of colour in underprivileged communities.
Then I went in search of other voices. I watched a recent debate titled “Has The Me Too Movement Gone Too Far?” The second speaker, Baroness Helena Kennedy, talked with relentless passion and precision about how critical it is for older women to embolden the next generation. Bingo.
She talked about how far-reaching one hashtag can be, how powerful it is for women to come together, be it online, at a rally or in the press. For women who don’t have access to support, and crucially the chance to be listened to, this movement is about instantaneous solidarity.
I now believe the inspiration this campaign provides for women all over the globe can only have an enormously positive outcome. It’s up to all of us to realise that this is a shared, inclusive conversation, one in which equality – social, economic, racial and political – is at the core.
Yes, I said “all”. One of the other things I’ve spent time thinking about is men.
The men in my life have been both instigators of the positive and purveyors of the negative. As a young woman I allowed it to happen, finding solace in my own conspiratorial silence. It made me feel sad, but I just accepted it. As an adult I’ve stormed many a raised platform and still felt utterly powerless, pedestal included. Equally, I’ve been reduced to a metaphorical pedal bin: to the heckler on the street, the stalker, the trolls on Twitter, the man with the wandering hands on a plane.
I want to raise my son to understand women, to be compassionate and not limited by expectations of gender. I want him to look to the plurality of other voices, stories and experiences. I want him to be part of a generation that leads this change, with love, respect and liberation.
The pressure of patriarchy hurts everyone. It’s in everyone’s interests to pull it down. This has to be a goal all genders take responsibility for. One that prioritises equality in all circumstances, from equal pay to sexual consent to cultural messages about gender.
I was wrong about Me Too. I started out bobbing nervously in the shallows, but now I’m happily diving in headfirst. Really, I’ve always wanted in. I just didn’t know how to go about it. My experiences had been blighted by a need to conform and a sense of being judged. I came to think of feminism as a movement that didn’t want me.
But we have to be willing to be wrong. I had thought of a small handful of arbiters as grumpy old aunts, ferociously safeguarding the intellectual battlements. But I was missing the point – so busy not feeling heard that I wasn’t responding to the urgency of hearing the collective voice of a new wave of feminism, one that, crucially, isn’t just composed of a few white, privileged voices, but rather incorporates an array of standpoints.
A willingness to listen is a willingness to change. And now I feel wholly determined to celebrate and promote Me Too and the many narratives it holds. I want to hear those future generations. I want to learn from them and see their battles won.
Feminism is too often perceived as a barrier, but what it should be – for all genders – is an enlightenment. These days I’m unwilling to yield to that “imposter” voice that was never my own, but created by those who would have me controlled and silenced.
Self-esteem did not come easily to me. It continues to be hard-earned through adversity, determination and humility. And while I’m working on mine, I want to promise to continue to bolster yours, in whichever way you choose to prevail. And so, finally, Me Too, I’m with you.
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