Up Front by Emma Hart

I have a confession to make. It's the kind of confession I prefer: something a lot of people already know, and of which I am not ashamed, even though I feel I should be.

Last week I spent more on a dress than I used to make in a week.

In the last fifteen years or so we've gone from raising two kids on a sickness benefit to being able to buy our own mortgage. And slowly I can see all my old habits of stinginess starting to crumble. Behaviours that were once unthinkable are now becoming distinct possibilities – or being couriered to me from the States. And while it's nice to not be constantly stressing about money on a survival level, there's something about the changes I'm finding concerning.

It's as if the woman who used to spend $40 a week on groceries is becoming a stranger. She's being replaced by someone capable of thinking, "You know, I could buy that, because it's nice, and it's not even on special or anything." One day, I might turn into someone who just goes to the supermarket and buys things, and that thought terrifies me. Surely it's just a short trip from there to being unable to comprehend why poor people don't buy freezers so they can buy in bulk.

The attitude to food is one of the most obvious changes. Back when we were so poor that buying a dozen beer was a major extravagance, food was about fuel. It was about keeping people from feeling hungry. I had a long list of ways to feed a family of four on 300g of mince. These days our instant coffee consumption has plummeted and I've discovered I use more olive oil than ordinary cooking oil. What the hell is happening to me?

The answer seems pretty simple, if not something it's considered decent to talk about in New Zealand: I'm changing class.

Traditionally, New Zealand has three classes: the upper-middle class, the middle-class, and the lower-middle class. Which is bullshit. (I genuinely once heard the mother of one of my boyfriends describe their family as "upper-upper-middle class". She wore her collar standing up and drove an Alfa Romeo.)

Now perhaps I'm a little hyper-sensitive to class issues, because I've always felt slightly out of place. I was raised in a hard-up family which embraced the middle-class values of education, theatre and sexual liberalism. Almost all of my friends, however, came from working-class households. They had kitchen parties, bought beer in riggers and wine in cardboard boxes – and I'm talking about the parents here. Our lounge had bookshelves in it, theirs had velvet paintings of classily half-naked women, or mirrors with cars painted on them.

It's about more than money: it's about how willingly you spend what you've got, and what you spend it on. And it's about how you earn it. When we were at uni, one of our friends turned up with a couple of guys who "worked for the council". Actually in white collar jobs, but even though they made more than we did because they were working good jobs and we were students, a lot of us still looked down on them because they were Council Workers, and not properly educated. Not something anyone is proud of, but it is true. (Complicated for me not just by hovering between two classes, but also by their both being cute as little blond sexy buttons.)

There's a working-class accent, too. One of the ways Van and Jethro are differentiated on Outrageous Fortunate is that they have different accents. When I moved from a primary school in north Timaru to an intermediate down the south end, I was constantly bullied about 'talking posh'. I learned to mumble, shorten my vowels, use rising intonation and swear a lot more. For some reason I also knew odd things like perfect dinner cutlery etiquette (which is easy, and I don't understand why people supposedly struggle with it). By the time I was a teenager, I could spend an afternoon sitting on outdoor lounge furniture arguing about the relative merits of Australian car manufacturers while drinking DB, followed by an evening at the theatre discussing local body politics and, inevitably, other actors. Different clothes, different hair, different accent, different body language. Both poses to some degree faked.

Working Class Girl explains the very visceral reaction I had the first time I stayed in The Quadrant in Auckland. This was a little bit too far. I felt like I stuck out, like everyone felt I shouldn't be there as strongly as I did. Like when I left I'd get patted down for ashtrays. Which was ridiculous, because it was a Nice Hotel, so there weren't any ashtrays.

My Nanna lived through the Depression, and in many ways she and my aunt simply never stopped. Nothing was ever wasted, in case it came in handy. The ends of lipsticks and soaps were grated and melted down to make more. When the elastic in a bra started to go, you took a tuck in it. If she were still alive, my Nanna would be so viscerally disgusted by the amount of money my new dress cost, and its fundamental impracticality, that I'd feel compelled to go out smoking and drinking expensive cocktails and slutting it up with chicks in posh hotels just to rub it in.

Middle Class Woman isn't all fun, of course. I believe I'm required to start worrying about Good Schools, and property values, and my carbon footprint. I need to learn that there are more kinds of wine glass than 'red' and 'white', and to conceal my ability to drink instant coffee.

But the other day I came home, and parked outside the neighbours' house was a huge shiny Holden Monaro with a personalised plate that said "FD H8R". It gave me a warm glow, followed by a trickle of cold remembered fear. It might be a mixed blessing, but it's something I hope I never lose.

Does something nasty make you straight?

Researchers have revealed data which appears to show a link between childhood abuse and being heterosexual. In face-to-face interviews, those most likely to admit to being heterosexual were also most likely to admit to having suffered physical or sexual abuse as children.

Prominent Straight Rights groups have complained about both the methodology of the study and its sensationalist reporting in the media. As one spokesperson whined, "This is totally homonormative. It's all about the search for a cause for 'straight'. You never hear people doing research into what 'causes gay', do you? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. I find it really interesting that nobody has reported this data as 'straight children more likely to be abused'.

"Also, there's no plausible mechanism by which abuse could 'cause straight'. Suggesting it is just a way to reinforce the belief that there's something broken about straight people that can be cured by appropriate therapy: high levels of exposure to John Barrowman, for instance."

Straight Rugby Coach Sacked by Christian School

In further straight news, Middleton Grange School in Christchurch, which is partially government-funded, recently sacked its rugby coach for 'being straight'. An anonymous source told us, "It just didn't fit with the ethos of the school. We have values, and having straight people in charge of pupils just doesn't feel right. Many of our parents were very uncomfortable with having a straight man around all those boys."

The head of the national body that represents Christian schools said today, "This isn't something we have a policy on, but obviously it's a concern. At our next full meeting, I think we should have open and frank discussions about the issue, and formulate some guidelines. You'd think we wouldn't need to, given the law says we actually can't discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, but I think to mitigate that you have to understand how special we are, and just how icky and gross we find the thought of straight people being around our children. They could contaminate them with their culture of violence and drinking and cheap, often non-consensual sexual practices. It's just oooey."

Texas Mother Challenges Widow's Right to Partner Benefits

A woman in Texas is challenging the legitimacy of her recently-deceased son's marriage in an attempt to stop his widow from collecting partner benefits after the fire-fighter's death.

"When they got married," the bleach-blonde piece of Austin trailer-trash said, "he thought she'd been born a man. She never told him she wasn't transsexual, so she was deliberately deceiving him. When he found out she'd always been female, he was horrified, and left her. There's no way that lying hussy should be able to get anything from a marriage that was based on a lie."

The man's widow has protested, saying, "He always knew I was a woman, and he was fine with it. It was his family that couldn't handle it. He was a good man who loved me regardless of whether I was trans or cis. My never having had a penis shouldn't make any difference to my basic rights. We were living together perfectly happily until his death. This court case is just revenge."

And, coming up after the break, our token odd-stuff reporter goes behind the scenes to explore the mysterious world of the R.S.A, and the naming of the New Zealand roller derby team for the Hamburg Olympics.

There's a train of thought which says that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers would get more attention and sympathy if CFS was called myalgic encephalomyelitis more often. One sounds quite scary, the other sounds like you need a little lie down.

There is no word that can encapsulate the degree of 'tiredness' we're talking about. In the thirteen years since I developed CFS, I've had a few goes at trying to explain it. It's like having the flu, without the head cold symptoms. It's like when you've been ill for ages, and you try to get out of bed for the first time. It's like trying to go through your daily routine with ankle weights strapped all over your body.

No, you know what it's like? You know how sometimes after a really hard day's physical work you go to bed feeling really sort of pleasantly exhausted? Every muscle is achy, and you sink into the bed so rolling over feels like way too much bother. You know you're just going to fall asleep nicely and you've earned it. It's just like that, except that's how you feel when you wake up in the morning. It's like you've been beaten up, run over by a train and set in concrete.

Tired. I've had surgery and not been that tired. I've had pneumonia and hallucinated so badly I thought my Panadol packet was a baby dragon, and not been that tired. To get an official diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, you have to wake up feeling like that every morning for six months. A hundred and eighty days of waking up tireder than you went to sleep. It's despair.

The utter soul-destroying weariness is the worst of it. But it comes with a whole host of delightful add-ons. Fibromyalgia and its constant shifting reasonless pain. Fume sensitivity – for me it was printer's ink and petrol that I couldn't bear to be around, and bleach was dizziness and puking. For others it's perfumes, or food smells. And in the first few years of my CFS I developed, for the first time in my life, hypoglycaemia, dermatitis and migraines. I slept twelve to fourteen hours a day and lost ten kilos. You could get your fingers all the way around my collar-bone.

I won't go into the shit over doctors and trying to get some kind of treatment that wasn't anti-depressants, partly because I've touched on it before and partly because nobody wants me blubbing over my keyboard. We learned to cope, we adapted our lives to accommodate my illness, the kids started school, and things gradually got easier. We bought a bar stool so I could cook sitting down. I'd pretty much forgotten the way I used to have a good day and it felt like a total rush, simply not being exhausted, feeling 'normal'. How I used to have to be so careful I didn't do too much, because then I'd have to spend a week in bed to recover.

We got to a point where I was pretty much okay as long as I was careful, and I learned to recognise my triggers. I'd pick up the junk mail and it would reek, and that would be my cue to be extra-specially careful. If I was travelling I'd work in rest days, because an hour on a plane meant a day of being utterly shickered. Looking more or less well, people would assume I was lazy, but it wasn't worth the effort of explaining why I had to sit when older people were standing, why I couldn't go to the corn maize and walk for two hours. My illness has cost my partner and my children so much.

For the last couple of years, I've been even better than that. Well. Normal. And normality is a remarkably easy miracle to take for granted. That must be the reason that, every now and then, I need to be forcibly reminded. I forget that I'm walking on a thin layer of icy Fine over a deep lake of Oh Fuck.

My latest relapse, after a trip away and a couple of truckloads of extra stress, only lasted two days, but it was enough. Enough to remind me what it's like to be so tired and pained you can feel the muscles that move your eyelids when you blink.

I don't really want to think about it, let alone write about it. But every time I do break my initial promises for Up Front and whine about my health, someone writes to tell me how much it's helped them and the whole thing seems humblingly worthwhile. Suck on that, Protestant Virtues.

A bit under a year ago I was <a href="http://publicaddress.net/default,6074.sm#post6074
" target="_blank">telling people that, while having an MRI hadn't been unbearable, it wasn't something I'd want to do again. Last week I had my fifth.

The anxiety should have tailed right off by now. I should be one of those Old Hand Patients. Thing is, last time I did one I had a head cold, and that induced a panic attack. So my famed sang-froid wasn't really at a high. It also wasn't entirely reassuring when they had a power surge during the scan before mine.

For a lot of people, I think, there comes a point somewhere when you just get completely sick of being 'medicalised'. You get so sick of the poking and prodding and medication that you'd rather just take the risks. I've seen friends and relatives go through this, including one desperate to get off the rat poison, and damn the pulmonary embolisms. It's not logical, and we know that everyone's just trying to help and it's all for the best, but eventually the label "patient" just becomes ironic. Yes, we know it's stupid. Yes, I feel bad when I see a three year old boy in the neurology waiting room. Yes, I know I've been ridiculously lucky. It doesn't help.

So I've been impossibly childish and difficult about this. My scan in January was clear. How could I possibly need another one in June? It wasn't FAIR. I shouldn't have to. Perhaps they could make do with a picture of me I'd provided:

(Original art by Rhiana Dearden, aged 2 ½)

Anyway, apart from the bit where they had to stop in the middle and recalibrate the machine, the scan went perfectly smoothly and I lived through it just fine. To give a taste of the experience, I suggest the following experiment. Load up this:

Turn the volume on your computer up until it produces 120dB, then tie your desktop speakers to the sides of your head. Lie on your table with your head in your microwave, and play it on loop for forty-five minutes.

(OSH warning: don't do this. What, are you fucking insane? Also don't let your baby operate a chainsaw unsupervised or stick your hand in a running waste disposal.)

That wouldn't be entirely accurate, of course. Every separate scan sounds and feels quite different. Given it's not possible, with your head in there, to think about anything else, one becomes a connoisseur. Hmm, one thinks, this one makes my engagement ring vibrate and get warm, but not my civil union ring. This one appears to make the entire table shake: my head can't be bouncing up and down like it feels it is. I wonder what this will be like after I get a whole bunch of red tattoo ink on my back later on this year?

Anyway, my brain has been so well-behaved that I get a whole year off of MRIs now. An entire year. Whoop, frankly, de-fuck. What I'm hoping is that some time before I die and stop needing MRIs, medical technology will advance to the point where they can be done with a hand-held salt-shaker thingy.

I don't identify as a feminist. I used to, before I went to university, but since then I've chosen not to. The amount of writing I do on feminist issues does boggle and amuse me sometimes. I've been pretty clear about the reasons I don't call myself a feminist, and they're nothing to do with not wanting to scare off men or be seen as a humourless penis-hater. I just don't want to have arguments about the appropriateness of the label.

And then the other day I caught myself doing pretty much just that. I was reading this, a review of Sex and the City 2 which has been seriously doing the rounds lately, and I was incensed. How could people who called themselves feminists be lauding a piece of writing where 'prostitute' is used as an insult for a woman who had sex with 'too many*' men? Where a joke is made about female genital mutilation? That's not feminist!

Aw crap.

See, this just happened with Boobquake. Some people objected not to the event itself, but to labelling it as feminist, to the point where the creator changed the description to remove the offending word.

Because, you see, Jen McCreight hadn't applied to the Head Office of Feminism^™ for official permission to become a Feminism^™ franchisee. She hadn't been through the vetting process and received her special Legitimate Feminist badge. Therefore she had no right to use the word, and Legitimate Feminists had every right to order her to cease and desist. (This is also the place where every substance and happening in the world is divided into two piles: Good for Women, and Bad for Women.)

It's just as well Head Office exists, too, or we'd live in a completely chaotic world where anyone could just call themselves a feminist. Sarah Palin. Men. Ridiculous. There'd be Feminist Porn Awards. Without Head Office there'd be no-one with the power or moral authority to tell other people whether or not they're feminists. The word would start to lose all meaning if there weren't a rigid set of ideologies you could attach to it. As Nina Power says in One Dimensional Woman (with a generous hat-tip to Giovanni here):

It is clear, then, that we are not only dealing with 'right' and 'left' feminism, but with a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If 'feminism' can mean anything from behaving like a man (Miller), being pro-choice (Valenti), being pro-life (Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term

The thing is, of course, that there is no Head Office, that we do have those arguments about who and what feminism is, and that I still don't agree with Power. I don't think it's necessary to throw the word 'feminist' away simply because it covers more than one train of thought on particular issues – and has done for at least forty years. Some ideas that were powerfully and exclusively feminist a century ago are now so mainstream they are accepted by people like Sarah Palin – a woman's right to vote, to stand for election, to have a career. Why is that bad, and not simply a sign of progress?

Perhaps we need more, and better, sub-categories of feminist, because labels like 'second-wave' and 'sex-positive' are deeply problematic. They also lead to an unfortunate tendency to stereotype the 'opposing' camp: as frigid humourless man-haters on one side, and frivolous unthinking bimbos on the other. Or perhaps the problem with labelling is insurmountable, and we're stuck with the "I'm a feminist who thinks that..." paragraph.

I do understand that the label 'feminist' is important to people, that they have an emotional investment in it, and find it hurtful to be told that something they believe in is "bad feminism". I also understand that some people find it difficult to have an idea they're deeply opposed to under the same umbrella as those they're devoted to.

But. Fuck's sake. Can't we all just get along? Can't we just accept a diversity of opinion? Is the label really so important that it's worth alienating people over? I'd be much more likely to self-describe as feminist if nobody felt they had the right to tell me that I wasn't. I don't know the answers, of course, and just the questions make me

feel utterly exhausted. But in the meantime, I'll be sitting on the sidelines, as a consciously-chosen position. You know what 'we people' are like about picking which team to play for.


*I don't know how many is too many, no. Obviously.