In The Name of National Security, Please Can I Touch Your Wobbly Bits

My purse is constantly weighted down with change. I list slightly to the right at all times because of the excessive strain my handbag puts on my shoulder. This is because I cannot handle holding up queues at the Tesco self-service machine by counting out the correct change. The tutting, foot stamping and impatient shifting-of-items-in-arms-to-signify-you-are-getting-tired-of-holding-them cause me to get flustered, embarrassed, and invariably leave at least two items of shopping behind in my haste to be gone from unfairly accusing glares. Thus, I faithfully feed £10 notes into the bowels of the machine for a 67p purchase, and spend the rest of the day waiting for my arm to pop out of its socket.

In a similar vain, it was with polite efficiency that I bagged my 25ml tube of Colgate and 50ml mascara wand for inspection at Stansted airport, removed my jacket and scarf and placed all electronic items securely in my hand-luggage, all in readiness for a speedy transition through to Departures. I comfortably joined in the ranks of silent admonition as people held up the lengthy queue by failing to have done any of the above despite seventeen-thousand written notices and tannoy announcements in every European language. I answered the security questions concisely, and with the demure, 'I Am Not A Terrorist' look everyone adopts at airport security, walked briskly through the metal detector toward WH Smith and half-price chocolate.

It was a rather sinking feeling that then accompanied the angry bleeping of the machine which roughly translates as 'Stop her! STOP HEEEERRRR!' I looked sheepishly at the friendly young pair manning the machine. The girl smiled and asked if I was wearing a bracelet. I dutifully removed all my jewellery, and turned to go back through the machine. 'Sorry Miss, I'm just going to have to give you a quick search first'. Are there any more embarrassing words to hear from a very pretty girl in front of fifty impatient travellers who just want to prove their deodorant isn't an incendiary device, goddammit? I grimaced. I raise my arms. I parted my legs ever so slightly. And instead of thinking, 'What if they think I'm actually a terrorist? What if she finds that little nugget of C4 I forgot I'd tucked into the waistline of my underwear this morning? WHAT IF THEY TAKE ME INTO A PRIVATE ROOM WHERE SOMEONE IS ALREADY WEARING LATEX GLOVES?', I thought, 'God, this girl is going to think I'm so fat'. When she reached the tights-waistband double-stomach area, the burden we British women must bear to sport a Nice Dress in the winter, I really wished I hadn't just eaten bread. As if by abstaining from a small amount of carbohydrates within the last hour would have naturally made me as lithe as this smiley lady. And whilst she was probably my age, I stopped being twenty-one and became instead the fifteen-year-old with a puppy-fat face and an inability to look pretty ladies in the eyes in case they, I don't know, faint in horror.  I silently cursed the copy of 'How To Be A Woman' at the top of my handluggage, the emo-trainers and the man's plaid shirt I had thrown on with my Nice Dress for travel-pragmatism. She no doubt expected to find a small travel-surgery kit for performing emergency castrations with the message 'If Found, Please Return To The Nearest Militant Feminist'. But she did not, and sent me back through the machine with an almost-disappointed 'I can't believe that little bracelet made all that noise - I really thought I was going to find something else!'

And so, metal-free and released from my humiliation (the foot-tapping from the queue now so rhythmically in sync I expected a West Side Story style dance-off between travellers and security staff), I skipped back through the machine. BLEEPBLEEPBLEEPBLEEPBLEEP.

You have got to be kidding.

When the male announced that I would have to be searched again, I almost ran for the vague direction of London to live out a life as a poor street-performer named Arabella rather than be frisked in front of by-now around eighty people by a young man. 'Don't worry, the first time was for a reason, it's just a random search now' the smiley lady said. Oh, good. Now I just LOOK like a terrorist. Yet again, her slender little hands zipped around my mid-riff, and the voice of reason in my head which I normally like to keep quiet because she's a bit boring said 'Isn't it ridiculous that you're worried this woman thinks you could do with going to the gym, when she must frisk hundreds of women a day and does not care in the slightest where you carry your weight, as long as it's not also where you carry a detonator?' And the much louder voice which likes to make a drama out of everything said 'OH MY GOD? Do you know what? You are SO right, Miss Reasonable. This is NOT about body-shape, this is about aviation'.

A lesson I think we should all apply to every aspect of our lives. Regardless of whether or not wings are involved. I bet that lovely girl would have been horrified to know I'd been expecting her to have uncharitable thoughts about my waistline. And I bet she would have been delighted if I'd offered her some of the 'share bar' of Galaxy I did purchase in WH Smith. But I ate it.

MY Lovely Lady Lumps, OK?

            It has often been the recourse of COSMOPOLITAN and its associates to counter ‘Beach Body Now! Step 1: Stop Eating’ type features with articles on how much men love ‘real women’ (also, sorry, what is the antithesis? Are there life-sized female Morphs wandering around out there?). Big thighs? Men love them! Spare tyres? Men love them! Feeling invalidated? GET A MAN. Now, where my initial objection lies with the suggestion that if you are seriously refusing to go on a diet then you better hurry the hell up and get a boyfriend because you sure don’t deserve to love yourself, I will save that argument for another day. Allowing your self-worth to be dependent on some else’s opinion of you is deeply unhealthy; but so is this pervasive idea that men should be allowed to judge us, for better or worse. Basically, men might love ‘real women’, but kindly stop loving me if I haven’t invited you to.

I don’t know how naturally thin girls feel about this, having only been skinny pre-puberty and thus blissfully unaware, and I went to Uni where every man was either gay or posh. But in the Real World I have increasingly come to notice that men sparsely furnished in the cranial department assume that a woman possessed of breasts/ass/hips/thighs is naturally inviting stares/comments/gropes, the coy tart. Men: the bits sticking out are not invading your personal space, though you are most certainly invading mine when you ‘accidentally’ brush past. This degrading presumption that ‘if I can see it, I can touch it’ was quite abruptly presented to me a few weeks ago in a club. Whilst waiting at the bar, someone grabbed my ass. Unused to this sort of behaviour, I couldn’t actually believe anyone would be a) that much of a pig, or b) delusional enough to think it was a winning seduction technique. And yet, next time I made my way to the bar, he appeared again, hand at the ready for some alluring pinching action. Even more gallingly, he took my ‘Don’t do that, it’s not cute and I don’t appreciate it’ as a challenge, and just left his hand on my backside. As if it had squatters’ rights. The pint over the head, slap in the face and decidedly less diplomatic ‘F*** OFF’ eventually encouraged him to slope off and wash Tennants out of his hair. Hooray, it only took mild assault to decisively explain an ass is not for grabbing just because it’s there.  HOWEVER. Next day he had tracked me down on facebook and sent me a message explaining that he wouldn’t apologise for the ‘gratuitous ass-grabbing’ because it was a ‘fine derriere’. Now, I was feeling tender from the previous night, and I’m sure you won’t mind me telling you that message overcame my strenuous attempts to not throw up.

I am still astounded. He felt no compulsion to apologise for being a disgusting chauvinist pig, because any girl with the temerity to have curvy bits is asking for a groping. In what world is this ok? I’m pretty sure tall-drink-of-water girls don’t get this treatment. Statuesque beauties are given a wide berth by the walking results of contraceptive failure. I reckon it’s because those Neanderthal men who see breasts and immediately salivate think curvy girls are homely – we look evolutionarily sound, childbirth won’t kill us, and our mammary glands…sorry, I lost my train of thought, something about breasts? I like to think of myself as a great proponent of women’s rights. But as a male friend said to me recently ‘If you want to be treated the same as men, don’t expect me to give up my seat for you’. Well, I don’t want to be treated the same as men, I just don’t want to be treated like I’m inferior because I’m not one. So don’t grope me; don’t leer down my shirt; and most certainly don’t make comments about me. Not being skinny doesn’t make me fair game; it just means there’s a lot more weight behind my right hook.