Girls Up Close, January 2010, ink and pencil on paper, 190 x 40 mm

• FRANKI , 50. East coast American. Blonde, petite, cousin to Meryl Streep. Mother to Tom Ellis – Californian Democrat rep at the North American Youth Congress – avid campaigner against FRANKI + friends.

• PHYLLIDA, 50.  West Coast American.  Blonde, 5′6, mistress to Silvio Berlusconi (they’re not all young). Anglified.

The Thames Barrier. 30th August 09. Driving wind. 10 metres viewing range in the spray. Phyllida collects snaps for her photography assignment. Frankie struggles with a loose tie on her harem pants.

F   (Shouts)  It’s the best thing you’ve ever done Phyllida. Absolutely. I’m so glad I’m here.

P  I’m adjusting my aperture darling. one moment

F    (Shouts)  Will we be heading when the wind drops? No need to rush you in the slightest, lovely to get some cracking shots darling, fully, but can we substantiate the portfolio with some others Fricko, can we?

P   clicks away.

F grasps once again the harem tie. In dire straits.

Ten minutes later. A sodden walk back down the pier. PHYLLIDA finds droplets within the camera as well as out of it.  FRANKI’s had an accident with her Lilet pads. They hurry.

F  Phyllida I’m aging darling, I feel like a tortoise retreating. As I said to Meryl, there comes a point when it stops being quirky.

P oh shh Frankie

F And terrible things are happening. One’s doctors can’t reach.

P Fucking absorbant.  Ridiculous. Not your fault.  There’s nothing old about you Fricks you’re Giselle in the Annie Lebovitch shot.  Wendy in the bedroom.  Little girl.

F  Lets go out darling please. I’m parched and desperate and ancient. Let’s go out.

F   Of course darling. We’ll take the Audio.

Later that night. Frightfully aware of their own mortality, FRANKI and PHYLLIDA have taken a booth at Mahiki. PHYLLIDA’s camera has puddled-up the cloakroom and FRANKI’s harem pants are hanging of the blow dryer in the Ladies.

F   I’m back darling. Thank god. Back with the living.  I felt like Scott of the Antartic out there – marvellous though it was – you like David fucking Bailey ‘ ilimitable. But you know me and the outdoors, it’s fiddly. Like the jet ski. Terrible. Are we having a jug?

P   Darling, yes, darling. WILL!?!?!?

Prince William has entered the club, and unbeknown to the girls, turned down his security’s plea that he take the VIP lounge.  He doesn’t want to upset his idylls.

WILLIAM    They’re my friends! They’re mummy’s friends.  I couldn’t possibly. Come on Pete, Phil!, Jo let’s go to the bar

William has bought his army chums.

P     Will!! Come here.

W    Phylly! I saw you and thought not to bother.

P     Are you well? Is Kate well?

W    She’s ok. We’re on a bit of a break. (Gasps from PYLLIDA). She found out Harry’s been in Afganistan and her brains fell out! She lost the plot!

P    That hit the news in September last year Willy.

W    I blocked her Radio 2 podcast for fear!

P    Oh my love. Well are you free for a rum or two?

W    ooo! Pete, Phil, Jo!

Cut to 20 minutes later, FRANKI is cosy with JO, 20, from Lincoln.

F …. (under breath) tight.

LATER THAT NIGHT.

PHYLLIDA is wasted. Gufumped.

P    In William’s ear. Do you .. do you .. do you … do you …. do you fancy parking that helicopter somewhere near my … patio… garden do you soldier??

WILLIAM gets his coat.

4 .30 am.  The Thames barrier.  PHYLLIDA is being taken, quite passionately, by William against the railings. In the corner of her eye. 30 feet away, she sees FRANKI in exactly the same position with JO. She laughs. Drifting softly on the blackened waters are the harem pants, fallen in the heat of FRANKI’s endeavours.

PHYLLIDA grabs her camera and snaps.

P     Gotcha.

THREE WEEKS LATER

THe National Geographic.  Page 15, FLOOD SPECIAL. Bangladesh is in focus.

PHYLLIDA’s picture of the harem pants takes article key page. One week later, Annie Leibovitz recieves the first of many cheques for $15,0000 and forwards her picture PETER PAN to one FRANKI EMIRATES in response.  FRANKI and PHYLLIDA start their journey into Leibovitz.  Their aim – win the portfolio.

@ your peril.

Dorothy Feaver

Stella Scott

Looking everywhere.

Dorothy Feaver

Babe, really, how did we get our kicks?

Dorothy Feaver

Stella Scott

We’ll always have les vacances…

Dorothy Feaver

Stella Scott

Stella Scott

We dined with Joan Rivers then nearly died in a hot air balloon…

Dorothy Feaver

Stella Scott

Your rude vest.

Dorothy Feaver

The road through the woods (2003)…

Dorothy Feaver

‘My friend and me,

Looking through her red box of memories,

Faded I’m sure,

But love seems to stick in her veins you know.’

Stella Scott

Dorothy Feaver

And all became clear… so was that the end of girlhood?

Dorothy Feaver

I’m not sure i remember…

Stella Scott

Ways out…

Dorothy Feaver

X  marks the spot

Stella Scott

Bras, razors, and pantyliners, clear as day…

Stella Scott

Stella Scott

\

Stella Scott

Stella Scott

Stella Scott

Boys will never grasp the extent to which girls talk. Be warned – we talk down

to the finest detail, cigarettes, cider, all the cards on the table, a full analysis,

reassurance given, a bitch if needed and then make up on and out the door to

party our troubles away. We’re always ready to drop everything for her

(exceptions being when we’re captivated by a lover). That’s girl love.

Stella Scott

Girlhood for me was dumping boys before I’d even met them,

watching late night films and feeling a strong sensation between my

legs, spending time after school at various classmates’ houses,

playing endless games where the teddies were boys and we were the

hormonal ten year olds – “The bed’s a disco, that chair is where we

smoke and the floor is where we kiss boys”, finding it impossible

to meet a nice boy my age, having a crush on the most attainable,

least attractive idiotic boy living on the same estate as me, my mum

sending fake valentine cards from him, meeting losers at clubs,

feeling like I was at the dentist the first time I was kissed, meeting

my best friend from primary school at thirteen – she was covered

in make up and called herself ‘the local tart’, having a man called

Aloys text me quotes from Nick Cave songs:

‘When we’re in love we will know, won’t we? The stars will explode

in the sky, but they don’t, do they…Stars have their moments and

then they die.x’

Stella Scott

Stella Scott

Stella Scott

You too ♥

Dorothy Feaver

Female friendships are fraught with competition.  I met up with a girlfriend the other day, and she introduced me to a friend of hers with the following words:
“This is Jacinta.  She used to be cooler than me at school.  Would you believe it?”  Later on, as we posed for photos, she said: “The main thing is, that I look better than you.  As long as you look fatter than me, I’m happy!”

But that’s not all female friendships are about.  They’re fraught with competition, but, and I’m sorry for the Hallmark cliché here, the glue that holds them together is Love….

I was always friends with the poshest girl in the school, right. In Infant school it was Rosa Wyatt. Her mum was an art teacher and her dad was a deputy head. My mum used to pause a little and almost gasp before she said the word “deputy head-teacher.”  There was respect in her voice, but resentment, too, you know.
They had this sign on their fridge saying “When I give money to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are poor, they call me a Communist.”
I remember that sign. I remember asking Rosa Wyatt’s dad about that sign, and what a Communist was, and if he was a Communist. I remember him saying yes, probably. I remember him reading us Clever Polly and the Silly Wolf and Anne of Green Gables.

I remember Rosa Wyatt always got to choose whose game it was – if it was at hers, she got to choose because it was her house, and if it was at mine, she got to choose because she was a guest. We used to play strict teachers and French dancing Can-Can girls. Rosa Wyatt told me that the real ones, in France, didn’t wear any knickers, but I didn’t believe her. I remember thinking that they just called knickers something-else in France.

At Juniors it was Deborah de Berker, her mum was a social worker and her dad was a civil servant, and not being funny, her dad was a bit in love with me. He used to try and get me to read Homer and stuff, and he’d drink whiskey and bounce us up and down on his knee and ask us what did we think of Stig of the Dump. You should be reading Homer, he’d say.

Deborah had everything she ever wanted: china dolls, Barbies, dolls’ houses, silver spoons, her own bedroom, a wooden Wendy house in the back garden, Care Bears, My Little Ponys, everything. We used to sometimes play Nazis in her back garden. Well, she was the Nazi and I was the Jew and we would fall in love and escape to Switzerland over the climbing frame. But mostly it was starving orphans and strict teachers.

I got converted to Deborah’s Methodist Church when I was eight. What it was, was I went along with her to this Billy Graham concert and got so bored I started thinking about other stuff. Then I switched back to reality just in time to hear him say: “You can stay up there and got to Hell, or come down here and bask in eternity with Jesus and everything.” So I went for the second option. I only lasted six months as a Methodist, though. I felt so guilty coz of masturbating and plus I thought God knew I was only believing in him because I was scared of going to Hell and so it didn’t really count anyway.

And at High School it was Jacqui. Jacqui Short. She didn’t have any dad but she was still posh, she pronounced all her Ts and Hs and a few extra ones, too. She read Elle and the Independent. She used to say the word “extraneous” a lot. She used to say: “Don’t get all extraneous with me, Jacinta.”

She had perfect nails and perfect hair and her brother was a vegetarian who went to the Grammar School. I remember her brother almost as well as I remember her. He loved Björk and Teletext. He had a letter on Teletext correcting someone who had spelt till ’til. Well, they’d written in, correcting someone-else and that had angered him. I remember once he found a spelling mistake in the dictionary, he was very passionate about it. He was kind of into trick questions, too, and then you’d fuck up and he’d giggle away at you for being stupid. Jacqui used to get annoyed but I quite enjoyed it, I’d fight back. He had an unfair advantage, though, being two years older and plus at his school you actually got taught stuff. He was really good at French and once he did Jacqui’s homework for her and wrote that her mum was a prostitute and her town was shitty.

Jacqui loved Barbie, Spice Girls, Absolutely Fabulous… and Annie Lennox and Simply Red. She adored Richard and Judy and simply despised Liz Earle. Once we got caught shoplifting – we did quite a bit of thieving, as kids – and ran away to Leeds together. Where are you meant to run away to if you come from London? On the way we nearly got converted to the Socialist Worker’s Party. When I had been fished back from Leeds, I was grounded, for, like ever. And then the SWP came round and asked if I was coming to their meeting. I don’t think so, my mum said. This young lady here is not going anywhere for a very long time, and certainly not with the Socialist Workers.

My mum never admitted that she thought Jacqui was a bad influence on me. she always said that we were just a “bad combination.”

“That just means a bad influence,” Jacqui used to say.  She was quite perceptive like that.

One of Jacqui’s favourite quotes was how Annie Lennox used to say that she felt “not better but other” than her home-town. Jacqui used to say she felt the same.  About Chadwell Heath. But then she used to go: “But other does mean better, really.”

I loved her for that

I missed her so much when we fell out, I did.

Why do girls send themselves so crazy competing with one another?  It makes us so petty, it keeps us so small.  All the men are flying to the moon – we’re down here on Earth, bickering about T-shirts.  The worst thing is the reverse psychology one, where you say you are fat and the other girl is thin, forever and ever and ever and ever until your brain implodes:
“Does my bum look big in this?”
“No you look gorgeous – absolutely bloody gorgeous!”
“No, you know you’re the one who’s gorgeous, you know that.”
“Look how skinny and gorgeous you are!  Look at your skinny little waist!  Aaargh!  Look how skinny she is!  She’s such a skinny bitch!”
“No you’re skinny!”
“No you’re skinny!”
“No you’re skinny!”
No, darling, you are skinny!  If you look up the word Skinny Bitch in the dictionary – you get your face!”
“You’re the skinny bitch.”
“No – I’m grotesquely fat – and you’re divinely skinny.  That’s the difference between us.”

Why do we do it to ourselves?  Why don’t men do it to each other?  I suspect it’s to do with sex, and freedom.  Men don’t repress their homosexual side in the same way that we do.  They don’t snipe at each other – they just kind of wrestle.  Women, on the other hand, snipe and snipe and snipe – and compare.  And it’s fucking boooooowring.  Because, seeing as how the glue which holds together female friendships is love, and not competition, I vote to stop competing and start loving.  And the best way to find out who’s the skinniest is to simply get naked and start exploring each other’s beautiful, fertile bodies…….and shut the fuck up.

We know little of girlhood in ancient Mesopotamia, but this is hardly surprising when you consider how we came to know what we do know. When it was rediscovered, the entire civilisation had been lost and forgotten for two thousand years, buried beneath the dusty plains of Iraq. It is largely thanks to the discovery of thousands of clay tablets, and the efforts of scholars in working out how to read them, that we have been able to draw out scraps of information, piece them together, and achieve our current level of understanding. Gaps are inevitable, and one of the most gaping is the subject of women and
girls – a half of the population of which we are largely ignorant.

So what can we say of girlhood in ancient Iraq? Some children went to school, but very few, and especially not girls. Some women could read and write. We have the letters and accounts of many women of the temple or palace elite actively involved in business. And there is Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon, the first known poet in human
history. But these examples of the royal daughters and sequestered elite women who formed the female literati are exceptional. For most, girlhood did not mean education.

It probably meant work – most children began light labour in weaving centres when they were five or six years old. The lives of girls were directed to marriage and children, and they were trained from childhood in the traditional roles of wife, mother, and housekeeper. They would have learnt how to grind grain, cooking and beer making,
spinning and weaving cloth for clothing – all the skills they would need. They also played. Their toys – dolls and miniature furniture – reflected their future roles, but some toys were shared with the boys, like spinning tops and skipping ropes.

Girlhood was short. Secondary sexual characteristics marked the transition into adulthood, and girls were married off between the ages of fourteen and twenty. These marriages were usually planned when the couple were children, or even before they were born. The family of the husband-to-be chose a girl, and paid her family a compensatory
amount. When the girl became nubile, she was introduced into her husband’s household and became a member of his family. She would probably stay there until her death, entirely under her husband’s authority. Indeed, in Akkadian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia, the verb ‘to marry’ – ahâzu – also means ‘to seize’ or ‘to take possession of’.

This wasn’t unique to Mesopotamia. An Akkadian word used for the husband was bêlu – ‘lord and master’. The word ba’al is used in Hebrew, ba’l in Arabic – both close relations of bêlu. And there is more in writings from other parts of the Near East; in the Bible: ‘…yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you’ (Genesis 3.16), and in the Qur’an: ‘Men are superior to women, Allah having preferred them.’ (Surah 4.34). Even today, these views remain influential among some people.

Literature gives us a new viewpoint. The mythological character Ishtar was the goddess of love and war, but inspired many poems about youthful love, in which she is depicted as a young girl. In one, she waits impatiently in her parents’ house for her lover Dumuzi to arrive. In another she sneaks out of the house to meet him, and as they embrace under the stars she realises how late it is getting. ‘Let me go!’ she says. ‘I must go home! What am I going to tell my mother?’ Dumuzi suggests that she says her girl companions persuaded her to go with them to listen to music and dance. It all seems very familiar to a modern reader. But we must take care – this is literature from a civilization in which few could read. It may not have reflected views from far outside the elite levels of society that produced it.

We have been able to extract little more from the remains of Mesopotamian civilisation. What it meant to be a girl in this ancient land is largely lost to us. We search through the ruins and find what scraps of information we can, but the picture we have is incomplete and fragmentary like the texts from which it is drawn. There are so many things which we do not understand. So many things of which we have only the briefest glimpses or we have lost forever in the dust and can only guess at. But perhaps the dearth of information itself tells us a great deal.

As always we play and discuss some thematically germane music too. Are female vox in UK 2-step in any way functionally equivalent to duck calls? Will La Roux’s Elly Jackson ever forgive us for disregarding the chorus to ‘I’m Not Your Toy’ in order to fawn over and tattle about her?  All this and more, in an episode so referentially dense I seriously considered writing a bibliography for it.

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Spotify Playlist [link to spotify]

• Blonde Redhead – Misery Is a Butterfly
• Richard Hell & the Voidoids – The Plan
• Burial – Unite
• M83 – Graveyard Girl
• La Roux – I’m Not your Toy
• Kate Bush – L’Amour Looks Something Like You
• Belle & Sebastian – String Bean Jean
• The Magnetic Fields – A Pretty Girl Is Like

First off, and as an example of how girlhood can stand for exploration and transformation and that, I’d like to refer you to artist Tamas Waliczky’s video piece ‘The Garden,’ from an era when it took a million supercomputers a million hours to render digital scenery warping around a Polish artist’s toddling daughter (aka 1992). Waliczky links to girlhood with potentiality and flux. Philosophers Deleuze and Guattari agree, proposing (in their characteristic, headily cod-mystic brand of jargonese) that ‘becoming-girl’ might be a good way to start undoing ‘molar’ conceptions of the body, the self and being  – something that’s pretty high on their to-do list. Susan Hillier’s ‘Psi-Girls’ – a five-screen video work that features clips from movies like The Craft, Stalker, and Matilda – is all about our cultural habit of associating girlhood with a kind of mysterious, potentially malign power (you could, pace Halliwell, call it girl power).

Maybe it’s the fear of this arcane power that’s to account for girl-children hardly being allowed to play. Certainly I remember thinking, as a kid, that being a girl was a pretty raw deal playwise; while my games and toys were based around dragons, spider-men and lost civilsations, my little sister mostly played at scaled-down versions of domestic stuff: operating lightbulb-powered muffin ovens, grooming a bodiless Barbie head, wheeling dolls around in miniature pushchairs. This split has been carried over into interactive entertainment too. While a lot of girls and women now play videogames, figures suggest they play different games, in different ways. Because girls tend (at least in the West) to play fewer narrative-driven games, and because boys tend not to want to play as girls (though they’ll occasionaly condescend to play as buxom, cheesecakey heroines of course) there aren’t that many decent girl characters in games.*

That’s something M/F Belgian development house Tale of Tales are looking to change. They describe their works as ‘computer games without all the things that we don’t like [about commercial games] (competition, meaningless violence, strict rules, predefined goals, canned stories)’ and recently put out a fairly buzzed-about game called The Path. Based on Red Riding Hood, it sees players guiding six sisters along a resoundingly metaphorical path to their grandmother’s resoundingly metaphorical house.** If you keep to the path you don’t get anything out of the experience; only through straying do you make discoveries (this may be metaphorical). In many ways – and despite how offputting the unremitting visual emo-ness of the graphics is – The Path is trying to do some pretty admirable things. Tale of Tales wanted to make an accessible, thought-provoking game that addresses issues – girlhood, sexuality, cultural memory – which, with a few notable exceptions, are seldom addressed in a medium still pretty much stuck in the ‘kill the Nazis &/or save the princess’ backwaters of narrative.

The problem I have with the game, however, is that it’s not gamey enough. ‘Interactive Narrative’ is a difficult, all-but oxymoronic remit, and The Path, in the attempt to remove barriers to entry, stints sorely on the interactivity front. For all The Path’s rhetoric about straying, exploring and experimentation, there are countless ‘commercial’ games that are richer and stranger, more amenable both to improvisatory play and to free interpretation than The Path (wherein rhymed couplets appear onscreen to spell out the symbolic significance of everything you find). The lack of actions and objectives in the game might remove barriers to participation but it also limits the extent to which it can be played against the grain. Maybe this is to be expected; interviews with Tale of Tales suggest that being precious, condescending and prescriptive is kind of a forte of theirs…

Card-carrying Deleuzians Dean Lockwood and Tony Richards hold that it’s exactly this tension between interactivity and storytelling that makes videogames a great medium for staging the sorts of becomings and recombinations Deleuze associates with becoming-girl. More tied to notions of plot, character, place and identification than other interactive media but much looser than traditional modes of storytelling, games facilitate a ‘flickering’ between different positions and possibilities, meaning there’s potential to tell/play stories about girlhood that’ll prove even more compelling than a bulb-baked muffin.



* not that it’s stopped a terrifying subset of Japanese geeks giving up on real-life romance in favour of ‘dating’ dolls, figurines or life-size pilllowcases representing their favourite videogame and anime heroines instead (the trend’s known as ‘2-D love’ and there was a scandal when its main proponent confessed to occasionally watching non-cartoon porn).

**The Path’s demo/prologue is available for free download here, if you’re interested and have a computer you can run it on, which I certainly don’t.