I am pretty f*cking amazing - and so are you.

Why bragging is a feminist act

Oh hello, have I told you lately just how amazing I am? What, I haven’t? What? I’ve been going on about being sick, broke and stupid? How silly of me, I apologise.

I forgot to tell you the main stuff: I am actually pretty f*cking amazing. Quite a big deal, actually. Allow me to brag a bit? No? Not OK with that? Tough sh8t, baby I’m doing it. Buckle up. Prepare to be very uncomfortable as you witness an English/Irish woman go against every code in the book.

Here goes.

I brag that last month I sold out a 100 ticket event in Hackney talking about a book I wrote. I brag that I was in conversation with Anouchka Grose, a woman I hugely admire, a woman who to me represents what is possible in life and love. I brag that this woman told me that she admires me and thinks the book I wrote is deeply political and feminist. Moi.

I brag that I sat in front of that audience and said things out loud that women are not meant to say about sex, about our bodies, about men. I brag that I made the audience laugh and that there was a line of people buying my book afterwards, from twenty-somethings to sixty-somethings. I brag that twenty-somethings talked to me about their lives and their relationships. I brag that they felt inspired and safe enough to do that.

I brag that even though I came home and felt ashamed of the penis Tourette’s I seem to get when talking in public, I cut my usual vulnerability hangover down from a week to about 15 hours! Woohoo!

I brag that right now my neighbour is asleep on the sofa. I brag that I send men to sleep! No, Marianne, don’t do that. Don’t make a joke, say it another way: I brag that I am someone people can relax with.

I brag that through the intense struggle of the last few years, I kept going. I brag that I am stronger than I think I am. I brag that I did what I set out to do which is to be a woman that overcame her issues around sex, men and Catholic shame.

I brag that that is very cool, or as one interviewer said to me, ‘Oprah level stuff’.

I could have told a very different version of the event. A version where I said silly things, and my trousers were too short and swung around the middle of my legs. The version where I was too nervous to read from my book because my hands shake when I read out loud…

A version where I saw people leave early… A version where my talk was meandering and actually, quite embarrassing. A version where I talk about being awake half the night going over some of the things I said and wished I hadn’t said them.

For too many years I would have told you that version of the story.

But the first version is actually the more accurate.

It is also the version that is not only better for me but for the whole world.

Let me explain.

One of the books I write about in Love Me! is called Pussy A Reclamation by Regena Thomashauer. Reg (aka Mama Gena) runs massive Tony Robbins style events for women, where staff wear pink feather boas and t-shirts saying ‘8,000 nerve endings at your service’ (a reference to the power of pleasure and the clitoris).

Reg calls herself a fourth-wave feminist, her activism based not on anger but on joy. She believes that the early feminist movement was sourced by anger, but that now is the time for a feminism fuelled by happiness and celebration of being a woman. Part of this involves doing ridiculous things like gazing at your genitals in the mirror and declaring undying love to them. The first time I did this I accidentally looked the magnification side of the mirror and it was a LOT.

A fully dressed course of action is BRAGGING.

Mama G explains that women spend a lot of time bonding over their woes. In a patriarchal world women have been conditioned to see each other as competition, so we are keen to show that we are not a threat by making jokes about how crap we are, how this top might be nice but we literally got it from a bin on the street (something I actually said recently) and how we spent the morning plucking out chin hairs.

We might think this is charming and polite, or we might simply think it’s just true, but according to Reg this kind of conversation is hurting us.

It is bonding us to our weakness, not our power.

One of the things she recommends is a process called The Holy Trinity, which you do with another person.

1. Brag about something you’ve done well.

2. Share something you’re grateful for.

3. Describe something you desire.

At first this is very awkward. To brag goes so against how most of us were raised, where to be ‘full of yourself’ was the very worst thing a woman could be. Most of us were raised in worlds where for women humility was considered a virtue. It was also a way of keeping us safe. If you don’t raise your head above the parapet nobody can attack you. Stay low, stay small and you stay safe.

I’ve spent my life putting myself down. Made a career out of it, even. I wanted to get the criticisms in before anyone else did. I think I had also absorbed the message that the only way to be a woman in the public eye (which I have been through writing) is to make a joke about your crazy hair or crap love life. I thought this was all harmless but it wasn’t. I had started living down to the shambolic version of myself that I was presenting to the world. Call yourself a mess often enough and you start to believe it.

But not only was it affecting me, it was also playing into the culture that says that if a woman is visible or successful she’d better be humble. Fuck that. I don’t want younger women to follow those rules. I don’t want them to waste all their precious life energy putting themselves down. When I think of how much precious energy I spent hating myself - well, it’s heartbreaking. Truly.

Bragging is the antidote to this. You can start small. Really small. I brag that I got out of bed without pressing snooze. I brag that I cooked a healthy dinner last night. I brag that I turned off Netflix and opened a book. But keep building the muscle of looking at the wins, not the losses. Catch yourself when you say the automatic self-deprecating put down. Just catch it.

All of us have done things to brag about. ALL OF US. We have progressed, we have helped others, we have taken risks, we have worked hard, we have overcome difficulties, loss, illness, heartbreak.

So next: Gratitudes. They come easily to most of us (hashtag grateful and all that). But it can be quite easy to knock out the gratitudes without really feeling them, or even to use them to make you feel worse. I have all these things to be grateful for - so why do I still feel like shit? The aim is to really feel how unbelievably blessed you are right now, say in this coffee shop, in the warmth and safety, where no bombs are flying and where I have technology and a laptop to communicate with thousands of people around the world… and enough money to buy an overpriced coffee and the kind of freedom what allows me to work in this place… wow, I actually do feel that.

Finally desires. Urgh. I hate the word desire. It’s like ‘moist’. One of those words that makes me cringe. It sounds like a word used to sell perfume. ‘Desire… the new parfum by Calvin Klein. Want More. Want It All . . .’

Like bragging, voicing desires feels weird at first. Scary and wrong even. Admitting wants is not something many of us are encouraged to do. ‘I want doesn’t get’ was literally a phrase from my childhood, when wanting things made you a greedy brat.

A lot of us were praised when we didn’t ask for much, when we were quiet and easy.

Admitting a desire feels exposing. Thoughts like Who do you think you are? come thick and fast. What was the point in wanting things that would never happen?

But here goes…

I WANT.

I want to be rich. I want to be free. I want to be healthy. I want a wardrobe of gorgeous clothes (trouser suits are my current obsession). I want the health and money to get on a plane whenever I want. I want a lovely home. I want money in the bank and financial security. I want great sex. I want huge amounts of free time. I want lovely perfumes in my bathroom. I want to be worshipped and adored!! I want to always have enough money to help friends. I want spare rooms so that my house is always a place people can be. I want to run a successful business. I want to inspire other women. I want to have energy every day to do all the things I want to do.

Woohoo! I do want all those things. It feels thrilling to say them.

I have done this Holy Trinity exercise with friends and family, and it’s amazing the change that happens when we do it. It might feel awkward and clunky at first but at the end people are smiling. What we want can be very different and whenever I hear people’s desires I feel like I know them better. I hear what they want and think, ‘yeah that totally makes sense for you. Your desires aren’t stupid or outlandish, they are exactly what you should be doing’. Our wants are our path forward.

So go on brag and boast and allow yourself to dream. Not only will it make for a better chat than the usual chin hair stuff - but it might actually (no big deal) raise up women everywhere.

Liz Gilbert, Hannah Gadsby and Glennon Doyle have all written about the toxic effect of putting ourselves down. Gadsby, in her show Nanette, said: ‘Do you understand what self-deprecation means when it comes from someone who is already in the margins? It’s not humility. It’s humiliation.”

Liz Gilbert wrote: ‘I can’t attack myself anymore. I can’t respond to a compliment by offering up a list of my flaws. It feels like such a violation of the sacred... To witness a woman denying that she is beautiful is like watching someone set fire to an art museum.’

When I first read Gilbert’s thoughts on this, a few years ago, I thought, steady on love, that’s a bit dramatic. Now I feel the same way.

In Untamed Glennon Doyle writes: ‘We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves.’

As Maya Angelou puts it: “Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.”

So go on, brag a bit, it’s activism - and then you can brag, I’m changing the world, actually.

xx

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ps thank you so much to Pages of Hackney for a gorgeous night. Thank you, Anouchka for the beautiful conversation. xx