Beyond Selidor

Oh people people people, I just have to link you to a FANTASTIC post by sophiamcdougall. In it, she reacts to an (admittedly old) quote by Doctor Who showrunner Stephen Moffat, which is as follows:

"There’s this issue you’re not allowed to discuss: that women are needy. Men can go for longer, more happily, without women. That’s the truth. We don’t, as little boys, play at being married - we try to avoid it for as long as possible. Meanwhile women are out there hunting for husbands. ... Well, the world is vastly counted in favour of men at every level - except if you live in a civilised country and you’re sort of educated and middle-class, because then you’re almost certainly junior in your relationship and in a state of permanent, crippled apology. Your preferences are routinely mocked. There’s a huge, unfortunate lack of respect for anything male."

If there's one thing you can rely on, it's McDougall calling out privilege in an eloquent and (for want of a better word) compassionate way. Thus:

First, it needs to be said, of course, that not all women played at weddings when they were little. I know plenty who didn’t. But I want to talk about the ones that did. Let’s assume I was one of them – I can’t completely remember whether I ever went as far as acting out a wedding, but I know I thought and talked to my friends about how I wanted my wedding dress to be. Long, swishy and dramatic, of course, but not white, because that’s boring! Why wouldn’t I want to wear my favourite colour? My wedding dress, I promised myself, would be blue – a deep, rich, bright blue.

But you know what I didn’t daydream about? You know what never entered my mind?

The groom.

Never, when I thought about My Wedding, did I promise myself that on this day of days, at last my innate female loneliness would be over. I never even imagined how handsome he’d be or how much he’d love me. Not even “He’ll be a kind, nice man.” The poor fellow never got a look-in. I knew he’d have to be there, vaguely, but that was a detail as negligible as the seating arrangements, and frankly, if I could have had the wedding without the husband that would have been just fine by me.

Yes, I am afraid, Steven, little girls’ wedding fantasies are not about you. You can relax; packs of little girls are not being reared from infancy to hunt you. It’s just the dress. That’s the fantasy. It’s about wearing an awesome outfit and getting to be the centre of attention.

I wish I had an applause gif right now, because her whole post just made me want to stand on my chair and clap.

Because I was one of those girls who played getting married (and indeed, if wedding ceremonies are legally binding if officiated by a seven-year-old girl from Canberra draped in sarongs and doubling as an organist, I'm currently married to the younger brother of my childhood best friend), but it wasn't all I played.

Because the game that my sister and I most consistently played was that we were some form of single-mother-headed family, with a mother (me), an absent (and never-mentioned) father, a resourceful oldest daughter (her) and a gaggle of younger children represented by our (exclusively female) dolls. No matter what the setting (and we had several different versions of the game, but the two most common iterations were: struggling single-parent family lives in the top floor of a block of flats, is oppressed by the cartoonish rich family in the neighbourhood, and single mother is wrongfully imprisoned but is able to slip in and out of the bars on her cell and goes and has adventures with her friend, who lives an Aladdin-like existence in the streets*, and all are oppressed by the cartoonish rich family who owns the prison) the game was always about overcoming adversity through trickery and just generally being awesome.

Because the characters from books I played at being were Naomi and Chava Bernstein from The Girls in the Velvet Frame (impoverished Jewish family in British Mandate Palestine, widowed mother, five sisters being awesome) and Sara Crewe from A Little Princess (impoverished formerly privileged girl uses the power of the imagination to triumph over her horrible circumstances).

Because when my cousin S and my sister and I played together we pretended to be Sadako Sasaki or characters from Heian-era Japan (to cut a long story short, every game involved my sister being a cheeky child with a menagerie of animals, my cousin dying from some terrible disease and me being forced to make a political marriage with someone horrible (and off-screen)).

Because when I played dinosaurs with my sister and whatever friends came around, we were always herbivorous dinosaurs in a dinosaur boarding school run by carnivores who maltreated us.

Because, when I think back on it, pretty much every imaginative game I played as a child involved combating some kind of injustice with deviousness and cleverness and resourcefulness or just sheer endurance and acceptance. Because those were the ways girls and women were heroic in the kinds of books I read. Because they made themselves the centre of their stories by slipping in sideways. They weren't the Chosen One, they were the ones scrambling around trying to live in the margins, on the boundaries of a world that would never have a Chosen One come and save it. And because no one ever told me that that wasn't heroic, that compromise and shiftiness and bargaining and moral ambiguity were what saved people, I grew up wanting to be like those girls, like those people.

Men were kind of absent and irrelevant to my childhood imagination. That's the truth of it. Sometimes, it's just not about the men. And usually, when it's little girls playing, it's not about wanting to force the poor oppressed middle-class men to the altar.

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* When I look back on the things I imagined and played, I cringe a little. I was middle-class, white and clueless. I had no direct experience of the kinds of oppression that I was playing at opposing, which I think is why they captured my imagination at the time.