The Vagenda

The Sisterhood of the Unravelling Pants

 
 
I’m trying to write this while my boyfriend lies next to me going “SEX!” “SEX!” I think he feels like he’s become a bit of a widower to twitter, poor lamb. It’s pretty difficult to type when someone is whingeing “I want to bone you,” in your ear, but hey, ho, I’ll endeavour to do my best, having told him to go off and do his shower or his gardening or something.
 
Don’t worry, this article isn’t about how my sex-starved lover can’t be arsed to dig the vegetable patch he’s been talking about for six months, because quite frankly I find this a pretty dull topic myself. LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS.
 
Yesterday, I was strolling down Fortess road towards the tube thinking about the vagina-shaped cake we are already planning on having at our as-yet fictitious book launch party (“there aren’t enough labia in the baking sphere, I feel”), when I was awakened from my reverie by the strained sounds of an RP “excuse me!” emanating from around the corner. It was only then that I realised that a lady in her sixties was sprinting after me down the street. “Excuse me!” she shouted again, before catching up with me and grabbing my arm.
 
(“I’m a bit horny,” interjects my boyfriend at this point, trying to pull down my tights. “I KNOW,” I am saying, while typing this. “Don’t type that,” he is saying now, “It makes you sound mean and you’re not mean.” I am still typing. My boyfriend is now gently humping my leg and kissing my shoulder. I wriggle free)
 
So the lady has me by the arm. What could it possibly be that she wants? I don’t have to wait long to find out. “I can see your knickers!” she hisses. “You need to pull your dress down!”
 
(“I wish I could bloody see your knickers,” my boyfriend is saying.)
 
That laboriously long-winded and frequently interrupted tale is the crux of the point I want to make. In a society where women are so often pitted against one another, and held to be constantly in competition or capable of undermining one another with various conniving acts of sabotage, this shit matters. Because if that were truly the case, why would hundreds, if not thousands, of women every day be flagging this stuff up to one another? Every time I have been walking around with my arse hanging out (more often than you’d imagine), or with a bit of toilet paper on my shoe, or a hardened lump of snot on my cheek or breakfast in my teeth, or a ladder in my tights or a small mammal in my hair, another woman has always kindly alerted me to the fact. Which sort of implies that most women aren’t twats to each other, and don’t want to be twats to one another, if they can help it. We’ve generally got each other’s backs(ides).
And that, my friends, is sisterhood. Something to think about.
 
The author of this article is presently engaged in a sexual act which, while being inconvenient in terms of her schedule, is completely and entirely consensual.

 

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