Scandi fish and potatoes
Today has been another decent day. Mum’s headache got worse in the early afternoon and she got a bit complain-y, but she perked up when Lady Friday got here and allowed me to sneak away to do some work on the cookbook.
Which leaves me space to write about something else entirely: the experience of being a woman. (Slightly heavy stuff again, I’m afraid: Friday’s obviously my day for thinking too much!)
I no longer identify as female, and only ever did because I’m clearly not male and didn’t know when I was younger that there were more than those two choices. (The old “you’re not an apple so you must be an orange, and never mind that you’re too yellow and too pointy to be an orange”1.)
But I’m afab2, and generally read female, so I’ve had plenty of experience of being a woman in a culture that isn’t particularly welcoming to women. It’s generally better on the Isle of Wight, where the main issue is a certain old-fashioned type of gentlemanly behaviour that presupposes that opening doors and carrying things are far too taxing for the delicate fragility of the female gender.
Which may sound harmless, even well-intentioned, and to be fair it generally is. The problem is that this sort of thing blends seamlessly into “women can’t do these things”, and from there into “women shouldn’t do these things”, and that’s how we end up with women feeling unwelcome at (and even being outright discouraged from going to) places like pubs and gyms.
One thing that I don’t have to put up with in my rural corner of a notoriously backwards county (sorry, Island, but you know it’s true) is harassment when out and about. While living in Portsmouth I was verbally harassed more times than I can remember: in some areas of the city, it was so common that even complaining about it to another woman generally evoked no more than a shrugged “well, what do you expect?”
Even being physically assaulted wasn’t considered a thing worth reporting if it was nothing more than a shove or two that just resulted in a few bruises.
If this sounds horrific to you, you’re probably either not a woman, or not a city dweller, or older than me (or some combination of all three). When this was raised as a topic at my last workplace, by a man who was generally a good ally to women, he was shocked when every female member of his team just nodded wearily that yes, been there, done that.
When I mentioned this to mum, in the days when her memory was still decent, she said that she didn’t know a single other woman her age who had experienced any kind of verbal or physical harassment. I don’t know any women of my age or younger who haven’t.
This is a long and wandering way of getting to my point, which is that mum gets far more irritated when women are being loud (in person or on tv) than when men do the exact same thing – for example when watching the curling. I can’t help but feel that this is a bit of gendered experience: in her world, women are meant to be quiet, and not shout to each other, and probably not be in this sort of sporting space to begin with.
I know this is almost certainly something she was brought up to believe, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating to me, when she starts snapping “oh do shut up, you stupid woman” at an innocent female curler on tv.
(FWIW, I find men shouting to be not just irritating, but outright alarming. That’s past trauma speaking, though. I would love to tell you more, but a non-disclosure agreement prevents that. I don’t know if the company involved would actually take action, 15 years later and after the offending parties have all moved on, but it’s not worth the risk just to have people confirm that what happened was very much Not OK.)
For dinner I made a Simply Cook recipe, for Scandinavian-style fish and potatoes. Mum and I agreed that it was fine, but nothing more than that. For afters we’ve got a random selection of sweet stuff from Graces Bakery, to which mum voiced her usual complaint of me buying too much food, before diving in with enthusiasm. (Including eating the custard Danish that I thought would safe as mum hates custard. Except in Danish pastry form, apparently. 😥)
And with that, goodnight. I’m off to see what I can eat before mum gets to it.
Is it pineapple sponge today? 