It was this kind of bigotry that made me hate school from the very start. I remember boys trying to buddy up to me at nursery school with the baffling line "We don't like girls do we?" Well, actually, I did. My best friend was a girl. My sister was a girl. My mother was a girl. And I loved them all. So what's with all this 'we don't like girls' shit? My stance on this topic set me apart from the other boys instantly. At primary school and then secondary school it went from bad to worse. I was ashamed to associate with so much racist and sexist hatred and harassment. By the time I was 15 I'd disassociated myself from most of the boys, the vast majority of whom were by that time skin heads with a liking for gratuitous violence. It was 1970. I'd grown my hair long and I'd taken to wearing flared trousers and a black leather jacket, and I became the target of threats and ended up in some nasty 'situations'. Those I could just about cope with, but then I became the target of jeers from a bunch of girls a year younger. They'd snigger as I walked passed and call me "Poof". That was really depressing. I wasn't in the least insecure about my sexuality, so I didn't care too much if someone who didn't know me thought I was gay, but it made me wince just the same, as I could imagine what that scornful label could feel like to a boy who was gay. It showed those girls up to be nasty bigoted bullies and just made me feel a bit sick.
My older and younger sisters both went to a girl's grammar school. Years later I learned that they, particularly the younger, were badly bullied for being sexually knowledgeable (we had a lot of books in our house) and were called slag, whore, etc. by their peers. A little later when my elder sister was at art school she discovered feminisim and came home to try it out on the family at weekends, where she did her best to teach our mother and younger sister to turn on me and my dad. My mum wasn't about to start hating anyone, but big sister showed little sister how to go for the men's jugulars. Dad's, mostly behind his back, where she'd try to convince mum that he was a male chauvinist pig and suppressed her (which couldn't be further from the truth as he was selflessly supporting the family and enabling and encouraging her to explore her interests), and I was regularly stood up as an example of a sexist bastard on account of my having a dick, a sex drive, and a bunch of girly magazines under my bed. I was kind of caught red-handed and there was no defense. I could only absorb the emotional body blows and hope it wouldn't last too long. I am still wary of my sisters.
The work place proved to be no better than school, and I wasn't happy until I became self employed as a photographer, through which medium I explored sexuality and fetishism. I eventually ended up in publishing and book selling, specialising in titles that dealt with tattooing, body piercing, fetishism, gender issues, etc. That's all quite a long time ago now, and these days I'm working on music projects when I can.
The post feminist era has been interesting. It was good to see girls in boys shoes (I never have liked what stilettos do to women's feet). 'Girl Power' was a good slogan. We (men) had it coming to us. So the 90s was a time of healing. Teachers and employers were at last being encouraged not to tolerate bigotry. But men had had a kicking and I guess it was inevitable to see the backlash when rappers started singing about their bitches, who mince about in high heels and lap up the glamour. Was that post-feminist backlash, or just a newly released wave of sexism from a culture that had never really been affected by feminism? But it's rot and the attitudes have seeped into the mainstream. Both men and women (and some of them seemingly intelligent) seem to think they're so clever and 'street' these days when they use the term 'Ho' for a woman, or when they describe a car, or colour, or whatever, as being 'a bit gay'. Oh shit, me thinks, here we go again.
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