This is going to hurt, but I must be straight with you. When a colleague came
into work yesterday wearing a new Alexander McQueen jacket, bought for a
total steal at a sample sale, my feelings were quite mixed. I told her that
I loved it (love didn’t begin to describe my feelings), that the cunning way
it was tailored made her waist look minute (it was as if McQueen had sat
down and cut the thing straight onto her body), but secretly, what I was
actually thinking was, I wanted to kill her.
This is the sort of sentiment that would make the sex researcher and cultural
historian Professor Shere Hite – the woman who helped to fuel the 1970s
sexual revolution by suggesting that women reach orgasm more reliably
through masturbation than sex – sigh knowingly. Her latest book, The Hite
Report on Women Loving Women, is a treatise on female friendship and why it
breaks down. Hite says that there is an underlying tension in relationships
between girls that makes us compete with each other rather than get along.
She thinks that if we could only overcome it, we would be all set for a new
kind of 21st-century female power, one that relies not on trying to be
sexier than one another, but on helping each other out.
On the face of it, she’s spot-on. We do give other girls an unnecessarily hard
time. These days, it isn’t considered chic to bitch, Dynasty-style – we
leave the crude viperishness to the Jordans, the Cheryls and the Poshes.
Competitiveness comes in a different guise: an awesomely sophisticated game
of one-upmanship. Do you have the latest Mulberry bag? Are you wearing this
season’s key shape in denim? Will you go back to work after having a baby –
and if so, how long after? Is your baby sleeping through the night? No? Oh,
you poor thing. Urgently trying to guess a woman’s age the moment you meet
her is not very sisterly. Nor is our morbid fascination with the collapsing
lives of Misses Winehouse and Spears.
And even when we are not getting one over on other women, we are probably
still forgetting to give them the respect they deserve. Yes, we tell each
other when a new haircut looks fab, but if we are honest, our girlfriends
are mostly there to play a supporting role in our lives with men. Married
women complain how hard it is to make and maintain new friendships. The only
permanent fallout I have ever had with a close girlfriend happened because
of a stupid misunderstanding over a man. The ITV series Mistresses was hit
girls’ television but, like Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives before
it, the implication was that the beautiful friendships at its centre
wouldn’t have had anything like the intensity without the fuel of romantic
crisis.
Only The L Word – the Living TV drama series about lesbians living in LA –
kept the focus on the women’s relationships with each other. It can’t be a
coincidence that the gay women I know tend to have the most robust platonic
friendships with other females. Straight girls will give hours, days and
weeks to the close study of the male mind – a simple organ possibly less
worthy of our considerable analytical skills than we like to admit – but how
much time, comparatively, do we dedicate to understanding our girlfriends’?
Hite thinks, not enough. She writes that cattiness and jealousy are tired old
clichés and that we love and need each other far more than we like to
acknowledge. Clearly a bit of a romantic as well as a scientist, she
describes some of our friendships – which can span long distances and many
decades, and in terms of emotional closeness, reach places men don’t – as
“great love stories”.
Now, I’m as sluttish about my friendships as the next girl. I never tire of
making NBFs, and after the first heat of passion has passed, some last, and
others fade away. Hite blames the way we drift apart on the lack of any
institution to consecrate friendship in the way that marriage consecrates
sexual love. “The life cycle of friendship can be like that of a love
affair,” she says. “It surges and then dies, because it doesn’t know where
to go. There’s no such thing as a ‘friendship party’, and that is a shame.
We need a word as beautiful as marriage.”
According to Hite, if we took our friendships as seriously as we do our
relationships with men, they could turn out to be everything that we need.
But what do we need?
Most people need a home, a family and emotional stability. “It’s a lot of fun
to be with a best friend,” she says, “but as adults, we are not permitted to
be with other women, unless we are gay. It doesn’t have to be like that. You
don’t have to be sexually attracted to someone to start a business together,
to buy a house together, to bring up kids together.”
What with the price of a four-bedroom house these days, and the dearth of
culturally engaged, emotionally ready, solvent men (not to mention the
attendant stigma of singlehood), shacking up with a girlfriend sounds like a
plan. The problem begins with “l.”
Uh-oh. The lezza question. Hite – who, in 1985, married a man 20 years her
junior – thinks we are all terrible prudes. She advocates a lot more
physical intimacy, and blames our unwillingness to follow our natural
inclinations and cuddle our best friends on the sofa, or even share baths,
for the “distance, suspicion and distrust between women”.
“Why does physical intimacy have to be all or nothing, either ‘real sex’ or
‘no touching’?” she asks in her book. “We are a culture starved of
affection. It should not be necessary to have sex to get it.”
As any BBC period drama illustrates, back in the days before sapphic love was
acknowledged, and when the consequences of a one-night stand was still
eternal ruination, ladies were much more inclined to roll around in the hay
together and call each other “dearest one” without worrying about people
getting the wrong idea.
It’s a shame that this has changed. One of my favourite evenings ever was a
hen do at the Chelsea hotel in New York a few years ago. After a boozing
session and a very badly behaved ride around Manhattan in a stretch limo
containing a male stripper, we ditched the car and the man, and locked
ourselves in a suite, where we took off our clothes and discoed the night
away with wild abandon. Nothing properly sexual happened – sorry, boys –
because that wasn’t what we were after. As girl-bonding sessions go, though,
it was tops. It was life-affirming and honest. It was the best laugh.
Would I bring up a family with those girls? Maybe not, but, I think our sex is
further ahead on the bonding curve than Hite gives us credit for, because I
already know that I would be nowhere without them. Women-only dinner parties
are held to discuss important matters, including (occasionally) world peace,
and, recently, it has become the thing to say “love you” at the end of every
phone conversation. But it’s because I love them so much that I wouldn’t
inflict myself on them 24/7 for, like, life.
It’s easier to live with boys, surely. We probably behave better around men.
Fellas are, after all, physiologically better disposed to absorb our daily
ups and downs. Or is it that we know we can only push it so far with them,
before they lose patience? (“Yes,” says Hite sagely. “The male still has a
power advantage. The woman defers to him in a way she does not to another
woman.”) Whatever the reason, somehow it seems less likely that the whole
set-up will dissolve in a puddle of jealousy, ganging up and stealing key
wardrobe items. For Hite, this is the problem: fundamentally, we don’t trust
each other enough to put our friends’ interests first. If we could only
learn to consider one another as kin, not competitors. If only we would
interpret a mate’s new leopardprint catsuit, or a casually undermining
comment in front of the boss, not as threats, but for what they really are:
a bid to impress each other.
“Women don’t need to be enemies,” she says. “Of course, not all women will
like all other women, and why should they? Jealousy will not disappear –
it’s normal. But it is a pity to have a psychological mind-set pretuned for
rivalry. Instead, if we meet a woman who impresses us, we should think, ‘She
will be a good addition to my life.’ If she’s pretty, try thinking, ‘She is
very attractive. I would like to have her for a friend. Or maybe I’d like to
hold her hand.’ ” She describes a new “calm power” in the workplace, where
women are adapting business to this status quo by setting up small companies
together, organising mentoring schemes and changing the social landscape
from one of competition to cooperation. Who knows, maybe we would even like
Hillary Clinton more.
It’s a big ask. Hite is expecting us to give up on the idea of being the best,
and that’s hard. However much we battle with it, the desire to be Ivanka
Trump in the boardroom, Nigella in the kitchen, Angelina in the nursery, and
all three in the bedroom, is pernicious. Are we really happy to take a step
back and let other women climb the ladder faster, for the sake of getting on
(even if, as Susan Pinker wrote in this newspaper two weeks ago, it turns
out that we are, after all, biologically programmed to stop competing at a
certain point anyway)? Are we big enough?
“It is shaky, frightening new ground,” says Hite. “But women will build
long-term futures around their happy, productive relationships, and this
will be enormously positive for society as a whole.”
There is just the one group who won’t be invited to this particular party.
“There’s nothing new in men claiming they feel emasculated,” says Hite. “And
women always get the blame.”
Which just leaves me to praise my colleague for her excellent taste that is so
like my own, be honest about my feelings of resentment and covetousness, and
then ask her to bring the jacket into the office sometimes, in the hope that
we can share the jacket, so that we may both look good in it. How hard can
that be?
Friendship never ends: Shere Hite’s tips for keeping a woman friend
DO
— Keep dates. (Emergencies happen only one in 10 times.)
— Compliment her – her clothes, her friendliness, her manner, her
appearance, her health. Often, and sincerely.
— Call regularly or develop a rhythm, so she has some idea when to
expect to hear from you or to plan to see you.
— A friend needs regular, quality conversation, once every three weeks
for two hours minimum. The rest of the time, things can be casual: going
grocery shopping together, running errands, talking about world events or
why the car needs a new battery.
— Develop mutuality: agree on things to do together in the future. Be
sure to actually do them, or explain why you had to change your plans.
— Ask her how she thinks the friendship is going and what she would like
to fix, if anything. How could you make her happier? Tell her how she could
make you happier, but only after asking her first and listening attentively
to what she has to say.
— Listen to her. Try to read between the lines and draw her out: “You
often say that you are tired from work. Do you like your work? Do you want
to change jobs? What’s going on?”
— During quality time, ask her if she is getting enough affection and
how things are going in her intimate life.
— Tell her what you are thinking and feeling about things, including her.
— Show her you care.
DON’T
— Speak only about your husband, boyfriend or children, and never call
her when they are around – unless you explain that this has to be the case
and she agrees with you.
— Say you are “too busy” whenever she calls you. If you are, tell her
you are happy to hear from her, and set a time and date when you will call
her back. And call her back then.
— Only go out to lunch, never dinner – and assume she’ll understand why.
— Assume she will know you like her, even though you don’t tell her.
(Tell her the things you like about her and about being with her.)
— Drop her the minute you a) fall in love; b) have a baby; c) have a
crisis at work.
Extracted from The Hite Report on Women Loving Women, by Shere Hite
(Arcadia £15.99)
