These women

I want to write about women. Not the demographic of women native to the countries I’ve visited – although an expose of their endless sufferings would make a worthy tome in itself, and in time I’ll get around to putting together my many notes on that. But I want to write about the particular women I’ve met on this trip so far. ‘Girls’, I'm told, can be a pejorative term, even for females in their early twenties; we don’t call young men ‘boys’, after all. So, instead, I’ll just write a bit about These Women.

It’s rather lazy to import the wit of those much smarter than yourself, but a few quotes seem about right. “Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little”, the conceited but amusing Samuel Johnson once fatuously wrote, someone who’d doubtless be appalled to find that the law has given women much more in the centuries since, without redressing the imbalance by taking away Nature’s powerful gifts too.

Germaine Greer – a woman of almost vicious pulchritude when she was younger (before she supplicated herself to Celebrity Big Brother and the feline lasciviousness of the revolting George Galloway) – demanded to know, in The Female Eunuch, “Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”

From her writings, it’s still astonishing to me that Professor Greer isn’t a lesbian, but her point is irrefutable. Who can deny the daily pressure on women to attain unattainable levels of physical perfection? And who cannot see the relative ugliness of us men? I know of not one heterosexual female (or homosexual female, for that matter) who believes the males of our species to be more aesthetically pleasing than the women. As Elaine Benes once quipped, “The female body is a work of art…the male body is utilitarian. It’s like a jeep.” It’s nice for men and women to all agree on something for once, I suppose.

The unbearably smug and unjustly handsome anti-semite revisionist historian, Mel Gibson, remarks in the film What Women Want (on that very subject), “After about 20 years of marriage, I'm finally starting to scratch the surface of that one. And I think the answer lies somewhere between conversation and chocolate”. I quote that one because, although as I get older I find myself more and more confused about what it is which drives and inspires women, chocolate and conversation do seem to be two recurring themes – as generalisations go. It's like saying men want sex and respect or power. It’s pretty well on the money, but not particularly insightful and even less helpful.

And one final quote – my favourite – because it summarises rather well the point I want to make. It’s from Billy Joel – who married a supermodel, the bastard, but who came to regret it – “I've reached the age where competence is a turn-on”.

Indeed.

I grew up in Australia, and attended an all-boys’ school (and a particularly sausagey one at that) all the way through until starting university. Finding myself in lecture theatres like aviaries, replete with shrieking young women (girls, at that point, I suppose), I remember being struck by how a single-sex education can undermine your understanding of the other gender. I was never particularly gormless, I don’t think – I was, and have always been, able to talk to girls with a modicum of composure – but I saw around me those other young men condemned to school life without girls around, shivering in the muddy trenches of post-adolescence, and vowed never to foist the same fate upon my own sons. I’d had girlfriends during the school years – extra-curricular activities such as music, drama and debating were a saving grace in that regard – but I’d seldom had girls around me, doing the same things I was doing. I’d never spent time with them on a daily basis. I’d had taken from me the chance to see the way girls are, the way they mingle and gossip, and fight and flirt. The way they go to the bathroom in pairs, the way there’s so often a subtext to any question. The way their insecurities are so nuanced and their power so unexploited. The way they’re so conscious of what people are thinking, except on the dancefloor. I saw it at university, and bemoaned the lost years – all the while feeling real sympathy for some school acquaintances whose clumsiness with these new and mysterious strangers was going to be a cross they would bear for years to come.

My undergraduate years came and went, and for the most part I felt I got to understand women a bit. I learnt what makes them laugh and what makes them cry. I learnt to overcome the unspoken boys’-school prejudice that girls are so different from us that they could be a different species altogether. And I learnt that women are every bit the sexual creatures men are, just far more complex, and that whereas every girl (whether she grew up around boys or not) understands broadly what drives men and how she can use their predictability against them, the skill of understanding and unlocking women is a lifelong pursuit – and something a man usually only starts getting good at when it’s too late to really do anything useful about it. Because the man sees that the exceptional ones have been snapped up by the boys who used to kick sand in his face during recess, and the remainder are carrying the emotional baggage of having dated a handful of abusive and cruel Neanderthals and the ensuing mistrust leaves a minefield to be exhaustingly cleared.

But as the undergraduate years passed and so did postgraduate study, I found myself on the downward slope of a sine curve. Having felt I was starting to understand them and was learning from previous mistakes, I was in fact making the same errors over and over. Invariably, this comprised a regression to the “trophyism” of women; the misogynistic thinking that, because you can get your laughs and fun and conversations and real memories from men – without the complications which go along with relationships with women – the pursuit of women can, if desired, be simplified to the acquisition of more and more beautiful ones, until your twenties is but a scrapbook of vacuous dimwits with unblemished skin of silk and a scent that stops your blood’s circulation in its tracks. Coveting and chasing – the acquisition of beauty – becomes more than a past-time if you’re not careful. It becomes the backbone of your existence and can turn you into someone you don’t wish to be.

This is all by way of saying that there were many reasons why I dropped everything to do this trip. One was a career gamble, one a calculated assessment of opportunity, one a general ennui which was becoming worryingly incurable. But one reason was the desire, not to find the girl who ticks every box – that’ll come in time if it hasn’t already – but to reassure myself that they exist. That the sense of always compromising, of compartmentalising the fairer sex one way or another, is a demon who resides in the depths of context, and one who can be eventually vanquished for good.

I’m writing this sitting on the terrace of a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, with some girl’s (apologies, woman’s) perfume cutting through the heat and the stagnant water below and doing what it always does to me – making me giddy and stupid, dribbling like a lobotomised Aussie Rules footballer. And gazing furtively over at her (she, too, is writing. Something incredible and intelligent no doubt. I should go talk to her….Aargh it never ends!) it seems the right time to recount some things about the wonderful women I’ve met so far on this trip.

Just in the past couple of weeks, for example, there was Zohar, an Israeli who’s recently finished law school. Somehow she managed to excel at law while working at the same time as a stewardess for El Al – flying to New York a handful of times a month – and waitressing to pay the rest of the bills. All the while completing a second degree in Business. She is – as most Israelis – a sergeant in the IDF (something I find predictably alluring), and can carry a heavier backpack than mine for a longer distance. She’s deferred her clerkship at a firm in Tel Aviv for six months, and took herself off to Nepal to trek through the Himalayas seeking clarity and solitude. She has some real things to think about after a very rough couple of years, and I wont betray her valued confidences here. Suffice to say, though, a more fascinating, strong, determined, independent yet at the same time completely feminine woman you could never meet. We ran into each other in the airport in Bangkok, and after spending a couple of days exploring the city, travelled to the islands in the south and passed a happy few days on the beaches. My sadness, when I had to say goodbye, was profound. But I shall see her, if not in Australia, then perhaps in Israel next summer.

In Istanbul, there was Lauren, a Melbournian student of aeronautical engineering who’s taken a year off to live in Bremen and work for a company there, and who now is working the ski fields in Whistler, British Columbia. Curiously awkward and confident in equal measure, she has passion and ambition and guts and sass. Equipped with possibly the greatest thing a man can find in a woman – a splendidly ironic and filthy sense of humour – every moment with her was a delight. She wants to be an astronaut one day, and I cannot tell you how much I hope she succeeds in this.

In the last few days I’ve been travelling with a couple of French girls, Laura and Marie, who’ve served as a reminder that – as high-maintenance as French women can be, as any man who’s dated a few will know – there’s a reason they’re so desired and admired everywhere they go. They're chic and stunning and politically thoughtful and fun. They’ve been in Sydney for the past year, and we hit it off immediately, in part because of our shared ambivalence towards Australia and Australians. I’ve been pleasantly smitten for days, and exploring the astonishing, ancient Temples of Angkor with them while learning to sing smutty French songs about toilet-related misfortunes has been a lovely thing to do.

And there's Josie, from Malmö in Sweden, (half-Serbian too, a mix I would recommend to any young girl seeking a second half) whose self-assuredness and composure is breathtaking for someone not yet 22. I was a fraction of the man I am now when I was that age, something which reflects not only my then-immaturity, but her precocity now. I wish I were a mere tenth as cool as her, I wish I had her fabulous style and polyglot speech and unpretentious tattoos, but not everyone is cut from the same cloth. Our passing was a brief one, but the Age of Facebook means it will hopefully not be our last.

There was Libby – in Istanbul, too – a quite obviously brilliant gender studies major at Berkeley, but who’s living in Greece right now. Resisting every opportunity to be baited by me with provocative beliefs I don’t even really hold, she debated gender differences, and affirmative action, and women’s issues in the third world with a ferocious intelligence, personal experience and an open mind. I wish we had had more time to talk. 21 too, and with a genuine social conscience, she’ll do incredible things in her life, of that I’m sure.

There was Martha, a Canadian teacher living in Bahrain, and whom I’m meeting in Vietnam for Christmas. With an infectious laugh and enormous love for other people, she met me and my old friend Sarah in Istanbul, and they bonded almost telepathically. Although they met for only a week, and don’t know when they’ll see one another again, their friendship is more real than most which have lasted a hundred times as long. Martha is an enticing mix of young girl and real woman, extroverted and confident but with the frailty of someone who is unsure of what her world will bring. It will be truly lovely to see her again.

And Sarah, my dear Sarah. I’ve never met anyone of such unconditional generosity and compassion. Sardonic and smutty, she works with plants in a nursery back home, and grew up in the New Forest, running about in wellies and splashing in puddles. For every time since we met that I’ve felt lost, angry, nervous or just plain sad, she’s been there and I will never forget it. She’s the girl I needed in my life growing up. I wish I could be with her right now, to help her through her own current sadness.

There are also the other women I knew before departing who I’ve caught up with on these travels. There’s Sabine, an Austrian with whom I lived during my Master’s degree. She has quite the weirdest sense of humour of anyone I know, and is about as physically beautiful as a human being can ever be, like Wilma Flintstone with a better accent but, alas, without the fur skirt. I love her affectations and idiosyncrasies (a sudden and periodic inhalation which sounds like a 100 decibel hiccup is especially amusing in public, as is a vocabulary of words in English with which, I must confess, I am not yet fully au fait) and I love that way that when you tell her your aspirations and dreams, she looks you straight in the eye with a genuine and giddying enthusiasm as if these dreams were her own. I love how sexual and sensual she is, I love how she looks better in the morning with a splitting hangover than I did suited up on my graduation day. I miss her self-deprecation, unusual in a woman who knows very well her physical beauty but who never flaunts or uses it for unfair leverage. I love the way she dances with no self-consciousness at all, and if it’s at all possible, with even less grace.

And there’s Kat, with whom I stayed in Germany soon after leaving the UK. Confused and a little lost as all 19 year olds are, and with a grasp of reality which is sometimes tenuous at best, she’s infectiously witty, beguilingly complicated, unashamedly dorky and one of the smartest people I know. Not a day passes when I don’t miss being silly with her, and feeling like a teenager again, as difficult as it was the first time around.

There are others, too. Sara from Korcula, about whom I wrote some months back and who mesmerised me, transfixed me with her terrible sorrow and her overwhelming strength. Ani from Sofia, who took me around the city and explained Bulgaria with insight and imagination in a way that nobody else had. Sagen (named after Carl the writer but curiously with a different spelling) who is the most good-natured and bubbly person you could meet in five straight lifetimes. Violaine, Eva and Sarah in Belgrade, the first of whom stroked my neck and insisted on cutting my hair. So electric and tender was her touch and so seductive her entreaties that I put aside my concern that she’d never cut hair before. When beholding the unmitigated disaster which resulted after she hacked indiscriminately away with blunt kitchen scissors, I forgave her in a New York minute, because she's just so utterly stylish and irresistibly cool. Which is ironic, considering the abject mess she made of my hair.

I’ve mentioned these women not to please them that they made an impression – although I guess many will be reading this – nor to boast that I’ve met such women at all. I’ve mentioned them because it makes an important personal point. That one of the reasons for the enormous gamble I’ve undertaken – a voyage which has necessitated putting my career on hold, friendships on hold, and incurring significant financial debt – has already paid off. These women I’ve met – some of whom have been just wonderful new friends; some of whom have been more – have exorcised one of the demons from my adolescence. The frustration I felt for years that dealing with women is a constant exercise in compromise – putting up with this to get that, or looking beyond that in order to appreciate this – is gone, never to re-emerge. I am cured. I am, in the best way, a lover of women once more. I implore you never to send your sons (or daughters, for that matter, but I know less about that) to single-sex schools, because whatever slight academic advantage may possibly be achieved through a lack of distraction is more than offset by the burden they may carry from seeing the “other sex” as too much “other” and too much “sex”. I know facebook has allowed many to regain contact with their old school friends and acquaintances. For me, getting back in touch with these people and seeing how they’ve turned out has confirmed an underlying suspicion that a single-sex education can (not always, but it definitely can) dangerously defer really coming to understand and admire the opposite sex. After countless poor choices in girlfriends over the years (with one exception, someone I will love always), and a growing disenchantment with women in general brought about by these poor choices, I have purged, at last, the misogynistic remnants of a myopic past, and am entranced, moved, betwixt and ensorcelled by the fortitude and sass and fabulousness of these women.