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Entering Protective Hag Era
On moving into a different stage of womanhood that combines no f***s and wrestling
I hope you’re enjoying As I Was Saying with Poorna Bell. If you’ve liked the writing, it is worth knowing it’s entirely a reader-supported and funded publication. If you’d like it to support it, and have access to all posts and regular community chats, the best way to support is through a paid subscription. And you’d have my undying gratitude!
Recently, I realised that I was exiting the maiden phase of womanhood, but was not yet near the hallowed land of crone-dom. Why all these defining markers you might ask? Shouldn’t we do away with labels and just ‘be’? Perhaps, but I’m going through a thing, and I need a name to call it, and if there’s anything writers know how to do well, it’s to cathart and emote until it’s just you yelling at clouds.
The word that seems appropriate here is ‘hag’. While the etymology of the word is Middle English meaning demon, witch, old woman, my version of it is that it is a state of mind, not an aesthetic. To caveat, at the age of 43, I also know I am only at the start and have a lot to learn about the way of the hag.
A lot of amazing things have happened in the last three years as a consequence of entering my forties such as feeling entitled and empowered to say no, not automatically moving out of the way on the street, refusing to go to certain events that I find tedious, giving an increasing number of less shits about the gaze of men, increasing intolerance of small talk and a rage that burns endlessly on behalf of all women. But, I have always felt like part of the mainstream female experience.
To me, hag era is when you realise you’re outside of it, that you’ve graduated to a new tier, and that it’s a blessed relief.
Although I’d been trundling towards this for a while, there was a definitive shift a couple of months ago, on a beautiful summer’s day in London, when I had just arrived at a lunch celebrating the book launch of an author I like very much. After I dabbed my sweaty forehead in the bathroom, we all stood in circles politely making conversation holding cold drinks infused with what looked like a garden. At first, I didn’t notice anything out of the extraordinary. I had arrived alone, without a plus one. Nervous small talk was par for the course.
A few people here and there knew each other, I saw a couple of familiar faces and gradually conversation pooled together like mercury. As time went on, I realised it was actually two pools. Either I was being asked for advice around certain things and the dynamic was older person advising younger person, or I was listening to the conversation taking place between the women around me, realising how familiar it all felt.
It was the whole gamut: situationships, cheating, alcoholism, stingy partners, relationships that had dragged on far too long, wanting kids with people who didn’t want kids, frenemies, spending a small fortune on hen dos/baby showers/weddings, work toxicity, losing friends to kids, falling out over splitting the bill on holiday. It isn’t that these things don’t happen to you when you’re older, but it’s the way in which these things were being discussed.
Although the tone was adult and all-knowing, most were mystified as to why they had gotten into the situations they’d found themselves in, while others spoke about the commitments they’d made to their friends as if they were marital contracts. I realised why this felt so strange – as if they were on one side of the fence and I was on the other peering over but thankful I was past this kind of mess: I was the oldest person there.
It was so clear to me what their problems were, why they were in the situation they were in, and what the solution was. And I don’t mean that in a ‘it’s easy to advise people when it’s not your own life’. I mean in the way that me and my friends have experienced all of it, multiple times over and are able to quickly spot red flags and patterns.
Part of being a hag means knowing when to conserve your energy, and recognising the difference between when people are asking for advice as opposed to needing you to listen. Another part of being a hag also means you don’t have to listen, and you can take yourself off to the toilet, lie about receiving a phone call or change the subject to how expensive print cartridges are.
I kept my yap shut, apart from when I told someone they will forever regret spending £1,000 on someone else’s hen do. And then I left early because I wanted to, and I didn’t give a reason why. When you’re a hag, you cultivate a general air of mystery of being busy with important things to do, and whose fault is it if people assume those are deadlines or business meetings, instead of wanting to change into pyjamas and catch up on the latest episode of Love Is Blind?
I hope you’re enjoying As I Was Saying with Poorna Bell. If you’ve liked the writing, it is worth knowing it’s entirely a reader-supported and funded publication. If you’d like it to support it, and have access to all posts and regular community chats, the best way to support is through a paid subscription. And you’d have my undying gratitude!
Apart from The Knowledge – which is what I call the ball of learnings I didn’t have in my 20s and 30s - there is a sense of protectiveness I feel towards other women, particularly younger women, and particularly women whose body language is defensive and small. (With regards to the latter, this isn’t about physicality but about vibe). I call this the protective hag.
This is mostly in effect when I’m on public transport and I can see other women being made to shrink, or perhaps there is a creep on the train, or an arsehole-in-waiting who is biding their time for the opportunity to say something.
This protectiveness is made mostly of rage and love. The rage is something I first read about in Sam Baker’s writing, around the fury women who are 40+ feel. At the time I was in my 30s and didn’t quite get it because I thought – surely you mellow more with age? After entering the decade, I understood two things can be true. You can be mellow around certain things – whether that’s learning to let go of the need to be right or letting someone overtake you (because you know they’ll get stuck one car ahead at a traffic light and it is HILARIOUS) – and you can be filled with rage.
Rage that in your lifetime, women can’t run at night, can’t be walking down the same street as a male stranger without automatically assuming he won’t harm her, that you can be called a bitch on a Tuesday afternoon because you didn’t indulge a stranger in conversation, that you will get paid less than a man until you die, that the endless stream of violence against women seems to be a tap that won’t turn off, that we will always choose the bear, that we can try and protect our girls as much as we can but it feels like watching baby turtles try and race for the sea, and if they manage to make it without being made to feel weird about their bodies, or that they have to contort themselves into shapes of likeability, then it will be nothing short of a miracle.
Although there is a rage I feel on my own behalf as a woman, the act of decentring men has helped me to reclaim some of my inner peace around this. When someone is not behaving well, my overall goal is to expend the least amount of life force on them. I’d recommend it as a rage reducer.
Alongside this, I’ve also taken up a few things that have impacted how I feel around men, and more importantly, the refusal to indulge them taking up my time or another woman’s time. It can be done politely and firmly, but the arrogance that someone feels entitled to your time simply because they’ve come over to talk to you, has no space in my life.
“I’m just being friendly,” is a foil for making you feel guilty if you choose not to engage, implying that you aren’t friendly. And that’s fine. If not wanting to talk to randoms on public transport/the street/supermarket means I’m not friendly, I can live with that. I saw this happening to a friend of mine who was too polite to tell the other person to go away, so I did on her behalf – and they went away.
The other day, I saw a woman walking down a tunnel in the London Underground, and there was something about her body language that made me want to make sure she was okay, and that no one messed with her. I found myself straightening out my shoulders and walking behind her – and then I worried that I was in some sort of weirdo inception. By trying to ward off weirdos around her, was I the weirdo? But I kept going, and felt part of that vast, invisible network of women who do these silent acts of love for other women, our watchfulness, our wordless handing of a tissue, a tampon, the way we arrange ourselves in empty carriages on a train - near each other, aware, walking alongside.
Some of this alertness on the behalf of other women has come as a result of a massive reduction in feeling intimidated around men. I’ve been learning how to wrestle over the past few months, and that combined with weightlifting and Brazilian jiu jitsu has led to an increase in confidence around men. It doesn’t mean I’m swaggering around like Conor McGregor looking for a fight, or that I could walk down a street at night and not assume the solitary man walking behind me doesn’t have ill intentions, but it means that my default state is not being scared.
I’m very aware that some awful, horrible thing might happen which would snatch away this sense of confidence in a matter of seconds. But I am also aware that to a certain extent, I possess something that allows me to protect myself. It’s something that I wordlessly offer to other women, because I have seen women older than me do the same. I wonder if society will know how lucky it is to have us – but then again I suppose the beauty of being a hag is that we don’t need the validation, we already know.
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Social commentary and essays from career to mental wellbeing, capturing the general WTF of life and topical news, by award-winning author, former HuffPost Exec editor and lifter of heavy weights, Poorna Bell.
Loved this piece, particularly the thoughtful move away from cognitive dissonance to posture how two things can be true at the same time, like mellowing towards certain things and breathing righteous rage over everything else.
Just wait until you cross the threshold of 45 and experience the brilliant expansion of your inner hag. PHE and BHE (Big Hag Energy) are legit states of consciousness.🔥
I’m really glad I stopped to read this Poorna. It’s a wonderful piece of writing that I relate to, I’m 52. I love to see myself in someone’s eloquent writing what I don’t have words for myself but know. Thank you. ☺️ there is a great book called Hagitude by Sharon Blackje I’d like to recommend.