I t has been a strange time to be a “woman of a certain age”, as Gregg Wallace so charmingly labelled us . Many of us were consumed by every detail of the Russell Brand trial and the David Walliams exposé . We were pleasantly surprised, albeit dazed – stunned even – by there being consequences for their behaviour, because that’s not how it usually goes, in our experience.
A few days ago, while spending time with a group of fellow certain-agers, among whom this was the main topic of discussion, as it has been pretty much everywhere I’ve been, I confessed to something of which I’m ashamed. If I had been the woman Brand was found guilty of raping – in an attack that was difficult even to read about – I worry that I would have felt powerless to complain about what had happened. I would have thought consent would be taken as a blanket statement that covered whatever followed, however horrifying and unwanted; that I’d made my bed, so was obliged to lie in it, come what may. My friends, it should be noted, felt the same. Thank God the heroic woman forced to endure Brand’s attack knew better.
After this week, much in my rear-view mirror looks different. For example, the brief relationship – although the word relationship is doing a lot of heavy lifting – I had with a 36-year-old man when I was 17. He was the DJ at the local high street nightclub that I was able to frequent, thanks to a terrible fake ID that was never closely inspected and a tangled web of lies to my parents about sleepovers at a friend’s. A group of us, all the same age, went to the nightclub as regularly as we could sneak out, as did a group of the DJ’s mates, all about 20 years our senior. We paired off and no one batted an eyelid. Boys of 17 were so childish: it was common knowledge that they matured more slowly than we did. It made sense that we were with older men.
Like most teenage girls, I was desperate to be treated as an adult, and the DJ obviously did that, with bells on. My association with him made me feel unbelievably cool, special and grownup, fully the sophisticated, worldly wise woman I had become, rather than the little girl my parents still saw me as. He had his own flat and a car, and he could come and go as he pleased. It seemed impossibly glamorous. I never for one second questioned what this man approaching 40 wanted with a kid, which is, much as I would have furiously denied it, what I was. Nor did I ever wonder why he wasn’t going out with women his own age, or what they sensed about him that I was blind to. I didn’t worry that what I was doing was dangerous, or ask myself if I was being exploited. Genuinely, until last week, it was just another tale in the folder marked idiotic teenage exploits. My friends were doing it too, it wasn’t unusual and no laws were being broken. It would have been illegal for the DJ to buy me an alcoholic drink in the club where we met, but there was no issue with him taking me home to spend the night with him after he played his last record.
Now, decades later, beyond belatedly, the person I’m most angry with is myself. Why didn’t I know better? It’s the same as when I heard from the Brand trial what women who were simply trying to get on with their jobs were subjected to, and it took me back to my time as a waitress. The male bosses would come up behind us waitresses when we had a stack of plates in each arm, and run their hands all over our bodies. None of the other teenage staff made a fuss about it, so I didn’t either. That was just what happened there. Oh, and to some degree, almost everywhere I’ve ever worked. I got used to dodging a grope, laughing off a suggestive remark, pretending not to understand advances from men with wives and kids at home, so as not to be seen as a troublemaker, difficult, someone uptight, who can’t take a bit of banter. Throughout all this, rather than doubt the men’s behaviour, the only actions I doubted were my own – what I’d worn, whether I’d given the wrong signals, or been too friendly. The misogyny is coming from inside the house.
I feel as if I’ve been blundering through life with my eyes closed. In light of the testimonies I’ve heard, the information I’ve taken in, so many intimate encounters are now reframed, blurry, uncertain. Blokes from my past who I thought were fine are rebranded – no pun intended – as dodgy and problematic. There were times when I felt bad or confused afterwards, thought that something wasn’t right, but I told myself I was being silly, oversensitive, weird. There were occasions when I ignored my intuition and my emotions and abandoned myself in favour of some man whose surname I probably no longer remember. It isn’t a case of not being brave enough to speak up: it’s much worse than that. It’s not even being aware there was anything to speak up about. I wish I could go back to the young woman I was then and apologise, for not taking better care of her, for letting her down so badly.
One way to reconcile how so many women’s histories have been altered in the wake of Brand and Walliams is to focus on hope, the positives. On what can change, now that some women, who are far more courageous than I am, have taught all of us how to know better.
