If she’s known for one thing, it’s telling it like it is. Here she shares her candid insights into ‘managing’ the opposite sex whether it’s within your love life or the workplace.
I adore and value the company of men – God knows I have lived with a whole range of them nearly all my adult life from the age of 18, been married four times and had three relationships that have lasted over four years each. I’d call myself a serial monogamist. Or you could say what kind of weird person would want to live with a self-centred workaholic like me, who has a close circle of friends who are pretty similar, who spends a large part of her time in the company of gay men, and who is definitely not interested in family life of any description?
One thing’s for sure – there is no chance of me discovering latent lesbian tendencies in later life. I’m 100% heterosexual, although I know that I’m an easy character to spoof at drag balls! In spite of what’s been written about me, I am not at war with men. I do not see the point in routinely trashing the male sex. Men have helped me as close friends, as lovers and in the workplace. But I do think it takes a lot of thinking to get the best out of them. If only it were just as simple as lining up a great shag!
I have spent all my working life surrounded by men, as I have hacked my way through the media jungle. In my chosen fields, men have been the majority of my managers, although that is changing. When I started out as a journalist in the ’60s, I had to learn how to understand how to work with the opposite sex. I wasn’t much better at managing this than I was at sorting out my love life, but I have made progress over the years. The following is an attempt to try to pass on what I’ve found out about coexisting with men as lovers, friends and fellow workers: I invite you to share some of my successes and my disasters – make of them what you will.
Chemistry
The first thing to remember is that no matter how self-critical you may be, how loathsome you may find your body, someone out there will always fancy you!
A friend once said I was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. There is an element of truth in that: I certainly don’t think or generally act in a particularly feminine way – or what is traditionally regarded as female. Perhaps this ‘male’ way of thinking started when my father decided to treat me as the son he’d never had, and take me to football matches and speedway racing. One Christmas I was thrilled to unwrap a big box containing a complicated Meccano set and Dad and I set about building a giant crane. Soon afterwards he announced that I had the makings of an engineer. He was delighted when I decided to study architecture, and appalled when I chucked it all in after two years to become a journalist.
At architectural college there were just five or six girls in my year, and nearly 100 boys. In this male environment I capitalised on my looks by wearing very short skirts. I was a weird mixture of brash self-confidence and extreme insecurity – still true today.
I realised straight away that the majority of heterosexual men never communicate their feelings in any straightforward way, and that many of my fellow male students had left home for the first time and couldn’t even boil an egg or make toast, but they could provide me with correct answers for my college tests in plumbing and structural mechanics.
Most men I’ve spent my life with certainly never reveal any emotions, unless it is about sports or cars. I could never understand the nature of my sexual relationships – and I certainly forced myself on a lot of men, inviting myself to live with them, deciding I would like to get married or engaged, and easing them into my plans for our relationship, rather than the other way around. I admit that I, too, am reluctant about revealing the true nature of my feelings – because the more you give away, the weaker your position in any ensuing arguments. Life’s too short to dissect the nitty-gritty of your love life. Just accept the raw material you’ve got – you won’t be able to change your partner very much at all, and not at all if they’re over 30.
Home truths
And let’s not even get wound up about the touchy subject of buying food! Men take your shopping list out the front door, nonchalantly stuffing it in the back pocket of their jeans, and then lose it between home and the supermarket, returning triumphantly several hours later with 10 carrier bags crammed full of stuff they, not you, thought was needed. You find the list, like a discarded piece of origami, lying on the front seat of the car, unread. It’s enough to make you weep – but what’s the answer?
Life’s too short to constantly whinge about all the myriad ways men fail at these tasks we want them to do. Don’t even try to reshape, train or alter their conduct.
It has been scientifically proven that when women enter supermarkets they shop more quickly and more accurately and have better spatial memories of where required items are in the store. Don’t take over all these tasks yourself in the name of efficiency – are you mad? If you make loads of extra work for yourself, you’ll be shattered. Order as much as you can via the internet. Only take your own clothes to the dry-cleaners. Only iron what you need for yourself and the kids. Find (or suggest) a cleaner – he can pay for his stuff to be ironed. Or barter – if he does some stuff then you’ll do something in return.
Take cooking – some men are good at whipping up a few comfort foods, like cooking spaghetti bolognese or putting together steak, salad and chips. Okay, it’s not Jamie Oliver, but surely it’s better than doing it yourself.
Don’t sneer – build on this small beginning. Let him choose what you are eating one day a week, and then he can buy it and cook it. It’s not your problem, and it will hardly f*** up your healthy eating regime once in seven days.
There have been too many times in my life – and, I suspect, yours – when I’ve just got on with cooking the supper because no one else was going to do it. Now I eat what I want, buy what I want, cook when I want. It’s fit in or f*** off time.
When men come up with that classic phrase, ‘Stop nagging me, I’m going to get around to doing this in my own time’, we all know what the three magic words ‘my own time’ really mean: this year, next year, sometime, generally never. It’s one of the few simple and 100%-guaranteed ways men exercise power and control over women. My best advice in this situation: just feel inwardly superior – because you are!
Men at work
It’s the same at work – it’s almost impossible to change the mentality of men you work with. Better to work around them, recognise their weaknesses, but don’t draw attention to their shortcomings. Accept that you are going to have to work 50% harder to get where you want if men are your managers. More women may be getting into middle management, but the pay gap is actually getting wider, not smaller, in some professions. Don’t get irritated, as I regularly do, when the men at work think that some blonde airhead who’s just arrived in the office is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Once you’re over 40, you can be witty, intelligent, powerful and hard-working, but you will not be the person the middle-aged bloke at the top is interested in. You will not be the person he wants to have lunch with or pop down to the pub with after work to share office gossip. There are some females writing in newspapers I’ve worked for who routinely churn out mind-numbing f***ing drivel about their latest hairstyle, the length of their fringe, who they shagged last night or their eco-friendly toilet paper. And they get top billing. They just happen to be attractive, smiley and under 35. I could be bitter, but what’s the point? I earn more anyway. The editor thinks they’re gorgeous and slaps their picture all over the front page in the pathetic belief that they’ll sell more newspapers. No point in giving it a second thought.
At work, men never tell you the truth about what they are really thinking and what their strategies are. They love congregating in groups, jangling keys in their pockets, discussing the minutiae of a sporting event or the intricacies of a particular car journey. Luckily, normal women are not blessed with the need to indulge in any of this, which frees up at least 30 minutes a day for stuff we’d rather be doing, such as shopping on the internet or reading magazines. I know this may sound sexist, but everywhere I have worked, men just do this stuff – twittering away to each other like chickens in a coop. It is a mistake to attempt to show any interest or join in – pretending you’re one of the chaps will get you nowhere socially (other women at work will loathe you), and certainly won’t improve your career.
Men and time
Obviously men do not operate on the same clock as women, just as they do not speak the same language. When men say the word ‘soon’ it can mean all sorts of things. ‘Soon’ home from work is quite different to doing the dishes ‘soon’. Basically ‘soon’ is whatever they want it to mean – a long time if they’re enjoying themselves doing something else, or it could be quite shortly, if they’ve nothing more interesting on the horizon. ‘Soon’ is one of the words women are right to treat with utter contempt. Coming from a bloke it is meaningless.
Women and time
Over the years, a subtle form of brainwashing has gone on, which reinforces the stereotype that women like gossiping and shopping and are always late. Nonsensical bilge designed to ensure we don’t rise above our station. I am only late by other people’s agenda, not my own. I don’t want to walk into a pub or cafe or restaurant and sit by myself, so I always arrive a little bit late, maybe five minutes – what’s the crime in that? Hardly a flogging offence – my reasoning seems perfectly sensible!
Memory gaps
Most men have selective memories. Whether it is at home or in the office, when asked to do something, they often claim that you ‘didn’t tell them’. Bollocks. The male brain is hard-wired so their mental circuitry will never accept some requests. It might be changing a toilet roll – something men find almost impossible to do. It might be loading the dishwasher and switching it on. It might be separating the washing, putting it into the machine and starting the appropriate programme. Men who run big businesses, who handle complex issues at work and manage millions of pounds all generally find any of the above as incomprehensible as you or I would find building a space shuttle to Mars. Men will never bother to learn to operate the timer on your oven, or learn how the central heating control box works. Don’t even attempt to argue, just accept the reality that women do this stuff better. Get even in other ways.
Telling the truth is overrated
Never look for veracity in every aspect of a relationship – we all lie about everything all the time. Life’s too short to conduct a Midsomer Murders-style investigation every day about what your partner has been getting up to.
Men lie about where they’ve been and whom they’ve been with – but what’s the point of getting annoyed about it? Be honest, do you really want to have to tell the truth about what you spend your money on, what your new coat or shoes cost? And I am the first to admit that when it comes to putting out my partial version of the truth, I am an expert – how else could I remain friends with so many of my exes? Take sex – what’s the f***ing point in offering an honest evaluation of the f*** you’ve just had? Why not just let out a satisfied sigh, and masturbate later? I’ve had great sex, boring sex, drunken sex, dreary sex and inconsequential sex. I’m not a relationship counsellor, but I do know that over the years sex with the same person goes off the boil and other things have to replace it. You can only improve sex marginally, not fundamentally, if your partner is uninterested or lacklustre. Far more important in the long term is a shared sense of humour, kindness and considerate behaviour. In short, men are not our enemies, but a great resource. But it’s harnessing all that, so that our lives are not disrupted to an unacceptable extent by trying to accommodate and cater for them, that’s the difficult part. Dealing with men successfully can be draining, infuriating and wearing. But it’s worth it!
Extracted from Life’s Too F***ing Short by Janet Street-Porter (Quadrille, £14.99). The author is as renowned for her razor-sharp tongue and outspoken views as she is for her successful career as a journalist and broadcaster. She was a columnist for the Daily Mail at 21, has written for the Evening Standard, The Observer, Vogue and Marie Claire, and edited the Independent on Sunday. She is now editor-at-large for The Independent.
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