'Bubble-Wrapping Women Isn't Helping -It's Oppressing Us'

Female-only hotels and train carriages? Bubble-wrapping women does us no favours in gaining equality, says Farrah Storr. We need to toughen up

- Farrah Storr

BETWEEN THE AGES of 13 and 16, I spent my days locked in a red-bricked tower filled with women. There were smart women. And hilarious women. And mischievous women who wore their hair long and their skirts short. We were a funny bunch, thrown together by our sex, our adolescent hormones and our shared unhappiness at spending our ‘essential’ years in an all-girls school, hidden away from the dark, forbidding world.

But sometimes, these young women wanted to test the world. Some would take the bus out of town at lunch time, just to see what was out there. Or, worse still, ‘hang out’ with boys from the school over the road, just to know what it felt like to be desired. And always, word would travel back to the tower. The girls were called out, admonishments delivered, and the eerie messaging that protection from the big wide world was for our own good was disseminated to all.

I grew up with the vague unsettling feeling that men were not to be trusted, the world was overwhelmingly scary, and that the best course of action one could hope for as a fragile woman was to let those in power protect me. And yet, when I hit 16, I had a decision to make. Stay and do my A-levels at the tower, or venture instead to the mixed college down the road and test how the ‘real’ world, filled with boys and temptation, would impact me. I chose to leave, and I wondered then if exposure to the very things we are scared of is what ultimately makes us stronger.

This is not what the modern strain of feminism has sadly come to represent. We now live in a world where women-only hotels, women-only carriages on public transport and even women-only islands (Finland’s SuperShe Island, for all those desperate to escape men) are now a thing.