Having it all: being a ‘second class’ human but doing it anyway
Writing our lives as underdogs in a species where the males came out on top — and other observations about science, sex and evolution
In 2015, when the Lionesses came home from finishing third in the Women’s World Cup, the Football Association greeted them with this astonishingly sexist tweet:
@England Our #Lionesses go back to being mothers, partners and daughters today, but they have taken on another title — heroes.
Whatever we do, however much we achieve, women are still secondary in our species and seen as adjunct to males.
Seen that headline ‘The first woman to…’ recently? Yes you have, because even in 2021 we break new ground that should have been our natural territory for millennia.
Out of the endless insults to our personhood both macro and micro, generations of women have spun words in the form of memoir, autofiction and poetry. I turned to life writing while studying for a Master’s in Creative Writing at Brunel. The critic Amanda Craig described my poetry memoir My Love Life & Other Disasters (June 2021) as, ‘Witty, poignant, allusive and movingly heartfelt’. The poems concern temptation, lingerie, lust and longing as well as domesticity…
