Deep Sea

Sunday 9th September ‘07

Continuing on my little rant on feminism, I was walking down a busy street the other day when I approached a group of three boys coming the other way. They must have been about 17ish and were clearly trouble. They swerved towards me as they drew closer, so much so that I was forced to dart out of their way and the middle one said loudly to his mates as we passed only inches away from each other, “Will you look at the tits on that thing!” Wow, just when you thought things were improving.

This habit of men of referring to women as inanimate objects is not a new one, but it is something I am noticing more and more these days. It seems as though the more powerful women get in society the more some weak men feel the need to objectify us by referring to all woman as “it” and “that”, even to our faces. I don’t even know what that habit is called grammatically. ‘It’ is defined as a third-person neutral pronoun in the English language, but no-where can I find what it means to refer to a human as an object or animal. If I am to be insulted I would at least like to know how it is done.
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Despite this year being the wettest summer on record I have yet again come up against my annual nemesis, sunglasses. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love sunglasses. If it didn’t make me look like a prat I’d wear them all year round. No, the trouble is finding the sunglasses in the first place. I seem to spend my life on an eternal mission to find the perfect pair, and my room is a graveyard of broken attempts.

I have often though it ironic actually when I look at Muslim women who are all covered up apart from their eyes, how they are actually displaying the most intimate and expressive part of their bodies. ‘The window to their souls.’ When I put on a pair of sunglasses I feel more anonymous and protected than if I’d shrouded my whole body in acres of billowing fabric. There is a definite reason celebrities wear them all the time. I love that no one can tell what I am thinking when I wear them, or even who I am really. I like way I can stare at people for hours with total impunity, and I love the instant aura or cool mystique they give you.

Despite the coolness, there is of course, a more practical reason as to why I love my sunglasses so much, namely that my eyes are extremely sensitive to light. My Mother is the same, so I can only conclude that it’s just one of those things. According to the optician, it’s apparently something to do with being blue-eyed. Even on a dull winter’s day I find myself squinting at the light. I worry about it actually; I’m probably going to end up with huge wrinkles through spending my life with my face unconsciously screwed up like I’m trying to see in a howling snowstorm all the time. Only I the dark can I ever truly relax my eyes. I can see well in the dark, really well if I do say so myself. I love the dark actually. When I was young I used to practice finding my way around my house with my eyes closed just so i could navigate better in the dark. And for the past two years I have had my bedroom on the ground floor. When I wake in the night (As I do frequently) I like the feeling of prowling around alone in the darkness, while all of my housemates are sleeping upstairs, mistress of my own private kingdom. I used to be afraid of the dark when I was little, but once you realise that fear of the dark is merely fear of the unknown, fear of the monsters that could be lurking in the dark, that soon goes. That’s one of the things I hate about this city, the lack of darkness. I can’t sleep in this damn half-daylight they’ve got going on here twenty-four hours a day. I do worry sometimes it might be turning me mad. My current bedroom is on the ground floor of the house and some inconsiderate bastard has planted a lamppost directly opposite. When I first arrived I had to sew blackout fabric on to the backs of the curtains because my room was lit up as clear as day all through the night. Because of the odd curve of the bay window though, and the miserly amount of material the landlord has used on the curtains, there are gaping holes in my impenetrable wall of darkness through which the light still pours. There is nothing I can do about the top and bottom of the window, but I have spent most of this week dreaming up ingenious methods of fastening the curtains to the walls on either side. The current method on trial is Velcro superglued to the wall and sewn to the tops of the curtains. It’s not working.

What would you be if you were an animal? What do you most resemble? I know what I would be. I would be one of those silent, amorphous creatures that lurk in the deepest, blackest corners of the ocean. And all alone down there, way down deep in the cold, inky darkness where no one could ever see, I would glow with a phosphorescent brilliance in all the colours of the rainbow.