FROM THE EDITOR

The other day I saw a Facebook post that caught my attention. It was left by a woman I had once gone to school with. “It’s finally happening…” the message read. “The school sixth forms are joining! Positive change?” She had tagged myself and around 30 other ex-students, all of whom had spent their formative years at the same single-sex girls’ school and who, like me, had spent much of that time staring longingly at the boys’ sixth-form college over the road. Ours was not an unhappy school, but the absence of boys made itself felt in deep and curious ways. (Not least by the fact most of us harboured erotic stirrings for almost all of our male teachers – and, believe me, these were not men you would want to base your seminal fantasies around.) And so, over the years, we drifted out into two distinct camps: the men-mad or the men-phobic. (I hung somewhere in the middle.) Over time, the opposite sex became these strange, unknowable creatures and the man void we found ourselves faced with, we filled with conjecture and irrational fear. Did boys have erections all the time? Did they think girls were utterly vacuous? If you looked at a boy did they take it as read that you wanted to ‘go with them’ (the rather lovely euphemism for fully clothed hooking up that pervaded playgrounds of the 1990s). As I approached my 17th birthday, the choice came for me to either stay on into the single-sex sixth-form college, along with my friends, or head to the local co-ed college. After months of deliberation I, along with a very small number of other girls, decided to leave the fold and head to the mixed college half a mile away down the road. I did this not because I especially wanted to meet boys (well, OK, maybe a little bit) but because I was pragmatic enough to know that the manless bubble in which I had spent the past 10 years of my life was not a real representation of the world. I raise this now because there is a troubling undercurrent of belief that we should be reinstating this bubble. There is talk of women-only railway carriages across Europe and gender-segregated events at UK universities. But progress is about bursting bubbles, not creating new ones. If we want men to treat us better at work and in the bedroom, then we need to work side by side with them from as early as possible. So… positive change? Absolutely. How could it not be?