Girls are like boys are like girls are like boys
I’m older now. I’m somewhat wiser. I’m definitely much more rounded, considerate, fair minded, some might say ‘woke’ as an insult and I wouldn’t take it that way, all that stuff, than I once was. They say you get more Conservative as you get older, I find the opposite. I’m raging against the world and the inequality, and the shit we put…I’d say ‘anyone slightly different’ through, but it’s not that. It’s the shit we put anyone who isn’t basically a well off white man through. But this isn’t about that, not really, that’s just me distancing myself from the story I’m about to tell. This is about the day I realized that everything I’d been taught about men and women was bullshit. That everything I’d been indoctrinated to believe was a lie. It was the day I had my eyes opened to the fact that, at the end of the day, biology aside, there’s no difference between men and women. Little boys are made of slugs and snails and puppy dog tails. So are little girls. Men are gross, and, in short, so are women.
It was 1st October, 1995. There were three of us, me, my old friend from university, Stu, and our mutual friend, Andy, and a couple of weeks earlier we had looked round a new flat we were considering renting together, it was occupied by three girls of similar ages to us. Two of them were present when we were shown round, and they were lovely. Our early twenties hormones were kicking in and we were acting up. They laughed, they flirted, they loved us. No. Wait. They did nothing of the sort, they tolerated us, is what they did. We were dicks and they knew it. But the flat was lovely, a 10th floor, views across to the city, South London flat, just made for three young, free and single people to live the high life. We said yes, at once. And today we had picked up the keys.
We were…oh I hate this word…as an older man, I hate it…it’s…ugh…there’s no other word to use to describe us…bantering away in the lift, insulting each other, pushing and shoving, again, being dicks. Excited and excitable at our new start but very definitely, dicks. Then we unlocked the door and it hit us…the state of the place. Of course it *should* have been cleaned. It *should* have been. But our landlord clearly had our money and didn’t care. It. Was. A. State. Filthy, untidy, it looked burgled and abandoned. It was, as previously mentioned, gross.
These delightful, fun, young women lived…well…exactly, as we’d discover over the coming year, like us three, delightful (ha!), fun (ha!), young (h…actually, that one’s true) men would. In filth.
It took three days to clean up. We had bin liners of dirty knickers. Literally, bin liners full of dirty knickers, and the occasional bra. I was confused why there were so many knickers and so few bras. In my mind, they were like pants and socks, you changed them all every day (well, you should, at least). I know, I know, the naivety! What can I say? I was a good few years from living with a woman, now I’m old, and married, and I understand. I didn’t then.
We found tampons and sanitary pads strewn under the beds, around the bathroom, behind the wardrobes, under, down the side, and behind the sofa. (I never again rented furnished). Across all the rooms were stacks of magazines, some fashion, some gossip, some high brow, a surprising amount of them straight up porn. We may or may not have kept some of that. And yes, I did say surprising. Again, I was a few years away from living with a women, I didn’t know…. There was half a tube of thrush cream in a drawer in the kitchen. The kitchen!
I thank those women. Truly, I do. I thank them for the rotting food in the fridge, I thank them for the stained sheets left in the washing machine, I thank them for the hair in the plug hole and the stains in the toilet bowl. I thank them because it was a long journey for me from misguided, badly influenced teen with false ideas of how men and women did and should behave and live, to the person I am and try to be today. I thank them because moving into that house after those women had moved out took me on one big step along the way. Youthful men ARE gross. I know that, I was one. But that day I learned, so are youthful women, and I know that because I moved into a house after some.
There’s a post script to this. A couple of weeks later, I was at work when my phone rang. It was my flatmate. He was home that day and he’d been in the bathroom and noticed the side panel of the bath was loose, so he took a closer look and realized the whole thing would just come off. And behind it he found a plastic bag, so he pulled it out and, in his shellshocked words, found himself face to face with ‘a fucking footlong rubber cock’. It was on the dining room table when I got home. ‘Why?’, I asked. ‘I thought they might come back for it’, he replied. They didn’t.
If you live with two other men in their early 20s, and one of them finds a foot long rubber cock in the bathroom, over the coming weeks you will learn a valuable lesson. Open all cupboards carefully. Check your bag before you leave for work, and, above all else, for the love of God, look in your bed before you get into it.
