Reflections on Coming of Age in the 90s Meat Market

Or how I tried to leave feminism behind for the sake of my sanity

Delicious girls.

“Okay, so who has the prettiest eyes?”

I looked around the room at my friends, letting them see how pretty my eyes were. I batted my eyelashes and attempted to look demure.

Nobody noticed. This was a category I didn’t score well in. Like ‘best legs’ and ‘best smile’. And most of the categories, actually. Still, it never occurred to me to resist the game. To question why the prettiest girls kept requesting that we play it.

We ranked each other’s looks, and that was that.

There were probably four of us, ‘playing’ and at around 14 we were uniformly pretty gorgeous - smooth-skinned, bright-eyed and glossy-haired (Jesus, what were we, horses?) But we were glorious in a way we couldn’t comprehend yet. A way that meant nothing in our reality, in which we were voraciously and viciously compared to each other. Measured against a clear set of standards upheld in TV shows, magazines, shop windows.

Rating each other was a new game, and I didn’t much like it, but that didn’t seem to matter. By fourteen I had learned to suppress much of my own personal preference.

“Katy has the prettiest eyes. Katy has the best legs. Sarah has the nicest smile.”

Thus, the awards were announced, and I came third or fourth (out of four) in everything apart from ‘best personality’. Thus cementing many of my longstanding hang-ups about my face and body.

Did it sting more when I was found to be physically lacking by my female friends or by the boys? I’m not sure. Being objectified was so very normal that what I remember most were the times when I was successful.

That one time when it was my legs that were deemed ‘the best’. Or that one time I showed up first on Mike Vgotsky’s list.

I don’t remember when it started, us ranking each other, but looking back it was a natural progression to the vibe of the time.

It wasn’t meant to be cruel - just another game we played. Not that we played any games. Unless you count watching the boys play football, which, God, I hope you don’t.

Looking back, it was deeply messed up. But that was the nineties! Thank god we also had amazing music, or none of us would have made it.

At least when we ranked each other, we just used a numerical scoring system. The boys system was based on meat. Literally. I’m not even making this up.

1. Fillet steak.

2. Beefburger.

3. Mincemeat.

4. I can’t remember, but maybe nut roast?

I may have the exact wording wrong, but this was the gist of it. In response, we made up our own revenge ranking system. In my memory, I led this. A slightly pathetic but also kinda admirable gesture towards resistance.

1. Red hot chili pepper.

2. Nice ‘n’ spicy.

3. Fuck knows.

4. Plain yoghurt.

Did it hurt them in the same way? Nope. They weren’t so easily reduced to parts and palatability the way we were. They knew as well as we did what value women held. Femininity was measured, ranked, deconstructed, and assigned a value across the whole culture. The FHM 50 most beautiful. Teenage girls semi-naked on Page 3 each day. We knew how we were to be measured long before we had the critical faculties to have a say on the matter.

I didn’t even feel like a girl, but I quickly worked out that I was treated better the more I appeared like one. If gender had been deconstructed the way it is now, I might have come out as non-binary back then, maybe even trans. And yes, perhaps that would have been as an attempt to get away from the chronic misogyny that abounded, but can you blame me?

Instead, I dressed up as a girl and bought a Wonderbra and tried to pass unnoticed. And honestly, when I found out I’d been rated a 1 - fillet steak - you’d better believe I was delighted.

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I still remember what it was like to grow up without feminism, or at least without the language for it. The unchecked, unexamined misogyny raging inside me, inside all of us. I was not a good ally to other girls. I got off with one of my dearest friends’ serious boyfriend. And another dear friend and I actually came up with a mantra for dealing with conflict around boys: every woman for themselves.

Looking back, I suspect I didn’t coin the phrase, second fiddle as I generally was in the kissing games. But it didn’t matter. Female loyalty was rare, and when I came upon it, I often let it go for things I deemed more valuable.

It wasn’t until art college that my feminist consciousness began to emerge. I’d grown up absorbing the vague sense that women just weren’t as good at certain things—art, music, literature—but in those years, I learned why. Why there were no female artists in the history books. Why their work was dismissed as craft, as minor, as decorative. Why women’s bodies were seen as spectacle, while men’s were seen as creators.

By the time I graduated a few years later, I was a fully signed-up feminist, determined to write a book that would help men understand women’s oppression. Something accessible that got to the crux of the matter. A vast research project that proved all of the points that I had learned from Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin, Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, that made feminism relevant for a new generation.

I told a male friend my idea one time, a throwaway chat after we’d been surfing. He laughed and said I had unrealistic expectations, and looking back I think he meant about my prospects as a graduate, generally, about any graduates’ prospects at that time - it was 2004/5 and we were approaching the credit crunch and a long financial crisis. But I felt embarrassed at my naivete. Ironically, I listened to him, holding him in too high regard, automatically, like he knew what he was talking about. Gradually, I let go of the idea that such a thing was ever going to happen. What did I know?

Over time, I let go of more and more of my feminism. Mostly because it was exhausting, arguing all the time. I remember drunkenly debating whether not paying a sex worker after sex should count as rape. Two of my best male friends insisted it shouldn’t, and I got so incensed I had to go home. There have been hours of my life misspent in this way.

And then Everyday Sexism took off. And No More Page 3 started making noise, and that glorious third wave of feminism flooded in, and I was so relieved. I wasn’t a part of it, and it was a little late for my adolescent/twenty-something self, but it was wonderful to behold. To see more women resisting the mainstream’s hatred/interpretation of them, refusing to be ranked, refusing to be made palatable, refusing to play the game we’d inherited.

We had been told change was impossible. Things were better than they had ever been! And women should be grateful. I had largely given up hoping for more, my passion quashed and misdirected. I had settled for arguing with men in pubs, instead of doing anything practical or academic with my beliefs. Had gotten stuck trying to prove sexism existed when most people around me preferred to believe it didn’t. I joked that I was changing the world, by educating one sexist man at a time, but still I felt so frustrated.

But feminism rose again. A new generation that wasn’t going to sit around, allowing themselves to be ranked. They weren’t even asking who was writing the menu, they were insisting that such menus be burnt.

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For a while, it felt like we were winning. But now we have teenage boys quoting Andrew Tate, and women still being told feminism has gone ‘too far.’ Abortion laws taking back the autonomy women fought for. Trad wives.

I don’t argue with men in pubs anymore. But that’s probably mostly because I don’t go to pubs. Did I stop fighting, or did I just stop believing the fight could be won?

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Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE. She is currently working on a book about the connection between undiagnosed neurodiversity and addiction + her first domestic noir.