Up Front by Emma Hart

Let me be frank. Up front, if you will. Next week I turn thirty-nine. Not "thirty-nine", actual thirty nine. The year before forty, which is supposed to be A Really Big Deal if you're a woman, and I am.

For me, this raises an interesting question: when am I supposed to stop dressing like this?

It's complicated, because I've just sorted through my mother's wardrobes (yes, plural, I shit you not) and there was some stuff in there that makes me look, well, quite hot. And she was in her eighties. Partly, her clothes are sluttier on me than they were on her by dint of the two cup-size difference, but still.

Most of my 'slutty' clothing was given to me by mother, so I always figured that when the general flesh-exposure theme stopped, that was her letting me know that it was Time to Desist. Now who will tell me when my style of dress becomes inappropriate for my age?

It was different for my mother, of course. She was tall and lean and graceful, and her elegance was timeless. I am not, so much. She moved like a dancer. I move like a pole-dancer. In the kind of elegant long-line draping that suited her so well, I look like a bunch of puppies fighting in a circus tent.

I have more of an hour-glass figure than she, and the sand is starting to pool in the bottom. I don't mind ageing, or looking my age. It'd be ridiculous to look twenty-five when I have a fifteen year old son. I rather love my wrinkles and gray hairs. But my body doesn't respond like it used to the last couple of years – to exercise, to alcohol, to sleep deprivation and jumping up and down and screaming. I used to look good. Now I look good 'for my age'.

My body has fucked me about a bit over the years, and I've come to regard it with a sort of detached fascination as an alternative to anger and despair. The slowing down of my metabolism is good in a way, because it tempers my hypoglycaemia. The down side is that I have to do an awful lot more crunches to achieve the same result. Or I would, theoretically, if I could be bothered.

At some age, there has to come a point where I am too old to show as much cleavage as I am, say, right now, without looking ridiculous. And it's not that I'd immediately stop, I'd just like to know where it was so I could make my own call. I mean, I've never been sure what an "appropriate" amount of cleavage was anyway, so I'm hardly more likely to grasp the concept of "appropriate for a thirty-nine year old".

There is one thing I do know, though, in my cloud of ignorance of proper girl-stuff. I hid my body for far too long when I was younger, out of shame and insecurity. That was when my choice of clothing was overly-influenced by social expectations, not on Tits Out For Ourselves Day. My confidence to dress as I please is precious, and I think it's feminist, and I'm not going to put it away in a hurry. And apparently, as long as we're still having this argument, exposing boobage is practically activism. (About twenty years ago, I did enter a wet t-shirt competition. I knew exactly what I was doing and why, thanks.)

So, some time between this birthday and my seventieth, there'll come a point where I should start covering my chest, and my arms, and not wearing white near my face, according to my mother. Maybe someone will help me work out when that is. Tell you what, though, it won't be soon.

Dear Mum,

It's alright, I haven't gone crazy. I know you're dead, and you can't hear me. But if people continue in some way as long as others remember them, and with the intensity that they remember you in particular, then I reckon you'll be around for a while. It comforts me to talk to you, too, and I know you'd approve of that.

It's odd how conscious I am of shaping the memory of you. I particularly notice it with the house: what we keep, what we throw away. The stories we choose to retell, the things we all learn from each other. I have your Public Service Exam papers from 1943, your testimonials from when you went to Teachers' College, those astonishing swimsuit photos Peter took of you. We can only choose from the things you chose to keep yourself, of course, and I can't help feeling slightly relieved that you weren't well enough to use that shredder you bought.

You'd've liked your funeral. I mean, you did plan most of it yourself, but still, I don't think we did a bad job. People kept telling me maybe you didn't want that swimsuit photo on the service sheet, but you know what? You kept it, and that flirty exuberant fun part of you was always there. That's what people told me I'd inherited from you, you know: your sense of fun. Well, that and the legs.

You picked your own speakers at the funeral too, though they pretty much picked themselves, and I have to say, given there were four of us, you got a pretty good spread of sexual orientation there. It's okay, we won't tell Probus. Bev pointedly didn't tell all those stories from when you and she went hitch-hiking round Australia in the fifties. But you should know I know the semi-trailer story now. Again, we won't tell.

You didn't get clean away, though. With help from the Drama League, they put together a pretty bloody rocking series of photos and film clips, and there you are sashaying your way down the catwalk in your seventies and four-inch heels. And then we completely blew your cover with you singing "Getting a Man In" from Dirty Weekends.

Thank you, you know, for letting me share that part of your life, the League. We carried you out to "Hallelujah" (the 'correct' version, of course, the boys were very insistent), and when it got to the chorus they all started singing. We did what you wanted. We cried and we laughed and we sang.

Then I came back home to Christchurch, and Mum, it was so hard. I've heard people talk about losing someone, and going to tell them something, or thinking they'll do something for them, and then belatedly remembering that they're gone. I can't do that. It's like I carry your death around inside me, and it is so heavy. Don't worry, it's not like I'm sad all the time, or I cry, or I think about it all the time. I'm just always aware of it. I'm still working out how to live my life carrying it.

I feel it most when I'm in the garden. I stopped out there the other day: moving, thinking, everything. I only realised because a spider spun a web on me. Sometimes I find that I'm standing and walking more like you, more upright. You were always so elegant. It seems impossible that it hasn't even been three weeks since you died. It seems like so very long.

You're hard to describe. I'd like to be able to share you with people who never met you, not least because it doesn't seem fair on them to have missed out. Everyone liked you, but it wasn't because you were nice, or kind, or gentle or soft. You were strong, and your compassion and service was always backed with a staunch pragmatism. You were so intelligent and insightful, and so good at speaking out in an entirely respectful and cool-headed way. You were clever and witty without ever being cruel. You were full of life and energy too. We thought you were going to live forever. Even with the cancer, until the last month you were pretty much yourself, just a little shorter of breath after the tumors spread to your lungs.

And then you started to fade, physically and mentally, and I knew you wanted us to let you go. You had that last Christmas that you wanted, out of the hospice for the day, with all of your children and grandchildren, and the boys even behaved themselves. Your sons, not your grandsons, but you knew that. I'd sit with you in the hospice while you slept, and do the crossword. Like we always did, I'd get stuck two clues from the end, but you weren't there to ask. There to love and care for, but not there to ask. We weren't there when you died, and I regret that, but I've also been about that banged up on morpheine, and you wouldn't have noticed. I'm sad about that for me.

I'm sad that you're gone, for me and for everyone who loved you, and Mum, there are so many of them. You did so much that you've left such a huge emptiness behind you. You died in the holidays, too, so people are going back to picking up the patterns of their normal lives, and finding your absence. Strange that a lack of something can carry so much weight.

There are things still to come: our first Christmas without you, your next birthday, the selling of the house. They will be hard, but I will bear them. You know I will. And whatever happens, I will always, always be your daughter.

 

(Hazel) Audrey May Hart (Cone, Kearins)

22^nd  March 1928 – 3^rd January 2011

Okay, let's say your semi-lucrative career in politics or the media has drawn to a close. You decided it was time to walk away. Well, someone decided it was time for you to walk away. Here's the good news: your twatcockery is still an asset. You can become an opinion columnist. Newspapers are always looking for cheap content and recognisable names, and you get a small stipend and, far more importantly, you keep your name on the lips of the populace. No matter how many expletives are involved.

In fact, if you follow these few tips, you don't even have to already be famous. You'll still get to have people swearing at you – even if they can't remember your name.

The first thing to remember is that you are an opinion columnist. Having an opinion is a basic requirement for the job. The more opinionated you are, the better. Given you'll have to produce a column a week, it would help if you could instantly have opinions on things you've actually never heard of. You may think you have more than enough opinions as it is, but even the most misanthropic old bastard is going to run out of lawns to keep kids off eventually. If you do start running short on ideas, try applying what I like to call Micael's Law. Find out what someone else has said that's got people really offended, and then write about that, but try to be even stupider than the guy who had the idea in the first place.

The second thing to remember is that you are an opinion columnist. This is not to be confused with journalism. Your columns are supposed to be full of opinion, and completely devoid of fact. If you should ever have to incorporate factual matters into your columns, however tangentially, it appears to be de rigueur to get them wrong.

Just make shit up: that's your job. If it's inconvenient to your purposes for an accident to have happened at dusk in the rain, change it. If the law on vehicle hazards doesn't say what you need it to, change it. It's not your job to present facts, and it's frankly just confusing to your readership if you do. If the effects of prostitution decriminalisation don't suit your thesis, just lie. After a while, you won't even notice you're doing it. You don't even, apparently have hedge by saying "I think the Green Party support gay marriage because they want to reduce our population." Just say they do. Who the hell cares, anyway?

On that note, I wouldn't get too hung up on correct spelling or grammar or sophistimicated sentence structure. It doesn't appear that editors even read this stuff. They certainly don't fact-check it. After all, what generates more debate and controversy than something that's simply completely wrong?

Now, it can be a pretty rough-and-tumble dog-eviscerate-dog world, the columning game. The important thing to remember is that you're the only person who's real. If you're making generalisations about groups – women, gays, cyclists, prostitutes – they're certainly not people. They're groups. Collective nouns don't have feelings.

And if you're talking about the tragedies of individuals, they aren't real people either. They're happenings. They couldn't possibly read what you write. They're just names, in the news. They exist to provide fodder for your prejudices. Which is just as well, because there's really no way you could do your job if you constantly had to think about the effects of your robustly-expressed opinions on the people you're opining about.

You're still real, of course. So if people make comments that hurt your feelings, it is perfectly fine to get all publicly offended by them. It's not like you actually called anyone a bad parent, or a slut, or a traffic hazard who deserved to die. It's completely unfair and unjustified for anyone to get personal at you. After all, you're entitled to a platform for your opinion, right?

My mother and my cousin were teachers, and teaching was the profession I was most often asked if I would take up as a child. (Ridiculous. I was clearly going to be a veterinary archaeologist.) The last time the three of us got together, we ended up discussing some of the things my teachers had said to me, and whether or not they were Appropriate. My third form music teacher telling me my boyfriend wasn't good enough for me: Inappropriate. Everything my biology teacher ever did or said: appropriate, dammit. I swear.

So let me draw on their decades of teaching experience, and mine of both being and having a bitchy teenage girl. There are no circumstances in which it is even close to Appropriate for a teacher to tell a student that she looks like a slut. None. Not even if she's wearing an "I am a massive slut” badge.

It has been suggested that there are valuable lessons a young girl can learn from being slut-shamed, and that the person doing the slut-shaming only had her best interests at heart. Unless the lesson to be learned is "It's perfectly okay to judge the character of other women by the way they dress, and then abuse them because of it," the reply to that can only be, "Bollocks." Seriously, I'll stand by that judgement myself; you don't even have to ask my mother or daughter or any other of my attached females.

It is nice that this particular form of bullying (and slut-shaming is bullying just as much as punching is) has a name these days. The Dom-Post editorial says, quite patronisingly;

Ms King's language was injudicious, but it is worth noting she did not call Amethyst a slut. She told her she looked like one. There is a difference.

If she is guilty of anything, it is probably of caring. Her words sound like those of a teacher stretched to the end of her tether trying to get through to a pupil who does not want to listen.

No, no they don't. They sound like a Concern Troll. This is one of the forms slut-shaming has always taken, though more usually from peers: "Oh, I'm just so worried that if you keep dressing/behaving/talking/walking/breathing like that, other people will think you're a slut." Run through the Girl-Bullying Translator, what that means is this; "Slut." From the impact on the person being bullied, there is, in fact, no difference at all.

Ms King is also wrong. Being branded a slut has very little to do with what you wear. Or how you behave. And has about as much relation to how many people you've slept with as it does to the cleanliness of your doorstep. (A while back, I reminded an old friend of the exact number of people I'd had relations(hips) with at varsity, and he said, "It seemed like a lot more." I think this is a Slut Indicator.)

I'm honestly not sure what the factors are that ensure some girls and women are constantly slut-shamed and some never are. I had it worst in my seventh form year, when I mostly wore loose jeans and baggy sweatshirts, tried not to look up, and didn't have an acknowledged sexual partner.

Equally puzzled, my friend Sinead and I sat down once and really tried to work it out. For the record, and visualisation purposes, Sinead is shorter, thinner, hotter, Canadianer and more red-haired than I, but we have similar interests and personalities. We've also both repeatedly been on the receiving end of slut-shaming from women.

So far as we can work out, if a woman doesn't want to be slut-shamed, the length of her skirt is totally irrelevant – except as something that can be easily singled out by your bully, teacher or Listener journalist. Same with cleavage. What you shouldn't do is have male friends, and be the sort of person who feels more comfortable around men than women. Being comfortable around boys, socialising with them, making them laugh, having the same interests – that's what will make you a slut.

To be fair, Sinead and I aren't much of a representative sample. You shouldn't draw conclusions from us. And our own observations might be biased. I suggest people take us out, buy us lots of drinks and observe from a distance. And saying that kind of thing, that's a Slut Indicator too.

However, let's say a school was terribly genuinely worried about their female pupils mis-wearing the uniform, and suffering from being branded sluts. Instead of the sort of uniform that can only be tested by getting teenage girls to kneel in front of you, how about changing the uniform requirement for girls to trousers? Then a girl wouldn't magically become a slut by, say, growing taller during adolescence.

Slut is a word that, like nigger and queer, is being reclaimed by some of its victims, at least for ironic purposes. But just because we do, doesn't mean you can.

Here's a question: when was the last time you heard someone say something nice about penises? I mean actual genitalia; this isn't some coded reference to Paul Henry*.

Penises get really bad press. I can only imagine what it's like to be on the receiving end, because no woman is ever asked to be alienated from a part of her body to that extent. It won't do what it's told: it goes from betraying you by getting up when you don't want it to, to betraying you by not getting up when you do want it to, with a small golden age in between.

Penises are often talked about as being capable of independent thought, and acting as a sort of auxiliary control for the male body. Melissa Theuriau appears on the telly and suddenly it's all ditching the saucer section and flying from the nether regions down in engineering.

In combination, it's kind of like the penis is some kind of alien parasite, only attached to its bearer through an admittedly rather lovely symbiosis. It gains nutrition and transport in return for giving pleasure and occasionally making its host behave like, well, a cock. And that's another thing: all the colloquial words for it are insults.

On top of that, it's silly-looking. And ugly. And too small, if your junk mail filter is anything to go by. It's such a powerful symbol of sexist oppression and dominance that so is anything it lends its shape to: missiles, spears, the CN tower. It's completely stupid and utterly terrifying.

It doesn't seem fair, having quite aggressively reclaimed female sexuality for women, that we don't make something of the same effort for men. Where, after all, is the warm-hearted generous celebration of straight male sexuality? When was the last time you saw a man having fun having sex? (Um. I mean in sexualised media, not in real life. Funny how I can pose one of those questions in a quite detached analytical mood, and the other makes me blush and giggle.)

For me, this all started with a serendipitous visit to this site. (Please note: in no way is Naked Men Happy Women a site that is Safe For Work. There are cocks. In a good way.) And it was only when I read this that I realised how very seldom you hear anything like it: a positive view of the penis:

Women have a strong tactile sense. Soft materials make them feel all warm and cuddly. The skin of the penis feels soft like silk. This makes it a very desirable object for the female touch.

Women love to cuddle. The more, the better. It is something they have in commen(sic) with the penis.

The penis is not ashamed to show his lady friend he is happy to see her. He also pokes her, lets her know he is there for her. Women do appreciate these gestures.

One way to a woman's heart, is to give her presents. The penis is a giver by nature.

So let's settle a few things. Your penis does not look stupid. Consider it next to any other body part viewed in isolation: the knee, for instance, or the elbow. The ear. A cock looks nothing like as stupid as an ear. It's just that we're not conditioned to be ashamed of our ears. There's nothing inherently ridiculous about the shape of a penis: it's a column-shape. It's practically designed to be caressed. It might bounce about if unrestrained when you walk, but so do breasts, and nobody thinks breasts look stupid. Nobody.

Penises have also, I believe, been the inspiration behind some of our most useful inventions. Tent poles. The catapult. You can't tell me whoever invented the catapult hadn't played with a few erect penises. (Penises can also play Helicopter, but I'm assured that's coincidental not relational. I'm also told I shouldn't mention that because it's embarrassing.)

Your penis is also not the wrong size. It is, exactly and precisely, the size of your penis. I can understand the neurosis: after all, I can just look around on the street and compare my breasts with other women's. You're not allowed to look at other penises. Insecurity flourishes in the dark. However. I have never in my life had a conversation with a female friend in which we compared the sizes of various men's genitalia. You guys care way more than we do. When we were competitively objectifying Richard Kahui and John Barrowman, not once did their cocks even come up in conversation. So to speak.

And no, a penis is not necessary for sexual pleasure. Chocolate is not necessary to my diet. That doesn't mean it isn't fucking awesome.

Female bodies are gorgeous. Male bodies are also gorgeous. Just speaking for myself, one of the things I want

for and in men is for them to be comfortable with their own bodies, with their own desires. Own them. It's dead sexy. The next time you see your penis, try thinking of it as a cuddly natural giver. Nothing at all like Paul Henry.



*I wrote that sentence, and the beginning of this column, two weeks ago. Events have rather, etc.