THIS IS WAR! Someone must speak out, on behalf of bitter little girls everywhere. We are traduced again, by the latest publishing sensation, The Dangerous Book for Boys. This is a pleasingly reckless manual on how to make bows and arrows, climb trees, camp, tie knots and admire Douglas Bader. Dads by the thousand are buying it to convert their square-eyed geeky little computer boys into Just William.
Well, fine. But girls? Mere aliens. Boys are advised to “respect” us (pah! we know what that means — veiled contempt). They are told that they should offer to help a girl to lift a heavy object — and if they can’t, “sit on it and engage her in conversation”. But not, please note, in a game. Girls are fit only to footle with dollies.
Bitter, bitter aftertaste of the 1950s! Look, I was a girl, and I made damn good bows and arrows with my trusty bark-stripping knife. My catapult technique was advanced. I never stirred without a miniature compass, torch and magnifying glass for deciphering enemy codes and then setting fire to them. I knew my knots and invisible inks, oh yes.
I read Scouting for Boys from cover to cover, and learnt to make an emergency toothbrush from a twig. I had a secret society called the Lone Wolves with a carefully designed badge, three pages of rules in a red notebook and one member (me). I idolised Douglas Bader, and sent off for a patent Seebackroscope in order to keep felons and spies under surveillance.
Yet we were not Lone Wolves by choice, we tomboy girls. With adored exceptions, boys soon stopped wanting us in the gang. There is a whole tragic feminist analysis to be written on the subject of Violet Elizabeth Bott and her threat to make Just William comply — “I’ll thcream and thcream and thcream until I’m thick.” Typical, see: the woman’s weapon is to turn against herself, make herself a sick weakling to be conciliated out of mere pity. Or nowadays — in the Britney generation — to don premature thongs and Wonderbras, and beat the boys that way.
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While all the time, what we really really want is to be Batman, not Britney; a pirate, not a Posh. If the publishers don’t get a girls’ own version out PDQ, we shall be round there with our bows and arrows and water-bomb catapults. And we are deadlier than the male.