By Heather Mallick (1998)

Heaven loves ya.
The clouds part for ya.
Nothing stands in your way when you're a boy!
Life is a pop of the cherry when you're a boy!

- Boys Keep Swinging, by David Bowie and Brian Eno

I don't know when I first realized that fate had dealt me a bad hand when it decreed that I would be born a girl. I now feel very strongly that I would have been better off being born male.

That doesn't mean I want to switch at this late date, and that doesn't mean I approve of having come to this conclusion. The conclusion is shameful and disgraceful. But it's not my shame and not my disgrace.

I have wanted to write about this for years. But I work in an industry that, unlike television, is run almost entirely by men and it's hardly wise to insult them. On the other hand, they may take it as a compliment.

Guys, if this is a compliment, trust me, it's the most backhanded one you'll ever receive.

Take a look at this picture in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, a magazine I bought for the first time in my life because I was so struck by the Francesco Scavullo portrait of hockey player Wayne Gretzky and his wife, Janet Jones. I have never thought much of Scavullo-the best you can say of his work is that it's "smooth"-and the other portraits of athletes and their wives are not of particular interest. Neither is the magazine, which is more cheesy than I would ever have imagined.

But the picture of Gretzky and Jones shocked me. They are part of a series of photos of athletes and their wives. Jones is the only wifey-my name for wives-who  has retained her last name. She is the only wifey who gets her own picture as well, decked out in a bizarre combination of underwear and hockey gear. And she is the only wifey who gets an interview in which she says, clearly and calmly, that she is an actress, a good one, and she lost her career when she married a famous athlete.

The male interviewer - almost every staff member of Sports Illustrated is male - points out that Jones, who is 37, is still "quite youthful," a comment that I find extraordinary.

Yes, she looks youthful and beautiful in the portrait but she is wearing a swimsuit and her husband is bulkily clothed from head to toe and looks ... nervous? embarrassed? intimidated? guilty?

Who knows what Scavullo is showing us in this portrait? We may be seeing female strength vs. male geekiness (male sportswriters tell me that Gretzky is pretty scrawny unclothed). We may be seeing the power of sexuality which displays itself differently according to the rules determined by men: Women display sexuality by showing flesh, men exude power by covering up their bodies. It may well be that this portrait celebrates the power intrinsic in Janet Jones' beauty. Her sexual power is tremendous here.

But that's what shocks and angers me. I don't object to female sexual power nor to women using it. What I object to is that that is the only power Janet Jones has, and by male standards, her power is dissipating every year.

That is not fair. That is not right. But I can live with that, because if there is one thing women learn as they grow older, it is to bend with the blows, to adapt to humiliation, to turn their anger inward.

It reminds me of my favorite novel, North Dallas Forty, and the scene when the evil and cold-eyed football coach explains to the football player Phil Elliott why his ambition is a waste of time: "Phil, I know you don't like the bench. I wouldn't want a man that did. But a man has to learn to adjust. Why, look at Larry Costello. He didn't want to sit on the bench when I first put him there. Just like you. But when I explained to him what was best for the team, he adjusted. Why, I'd even say he likes to sit on the bench now, if that's possible."

Women are permanently benched. In most workplaces, or indeed in all public places, we are always slightly on the sidelines, observing, not quite part of the gang. I have had hundreds of men complain to me about having to sit through some "dumb-ass four-hour Dilbert meeting," but I have never once heard them add disgustedly, "And it was so weird; it was all guys." Whereas I would find an all-female meeting very odd and somewhat reprehensible.

What I'm saying is that you guys may have a stupid gang, but as far as I can see from 11 years of full-time work, we've never been given the option of joining it, or perhaps improving it. The threat of improvement-maybe that's the risk.

The smartest journalist I know told me that I couldn't write this piece without explaining something crucial. What is it like to be a woman? And by that, she didn't mean blathering on about gender roles, she meant, What is it actually like?

I can only tell you what I have found it to be like.

Being a woman means being permanently on the margins of almost any group of people. It means being at all times dissatisfied with your physical appearance, but perhaps privately loving it-as long as no one else is looking. It means sex, with the man you truly desire, is transcendent, and at every other time, is so totally not worth the trouble.

It means an emotional rawness is your constant companion, being prey to feelings that sneak up on you unawares and must constantly be kept under rigid control in public, feelings that a man would never admit to even in private, even if he had them and recognized them.

It means resigning yourself to a decorative role, and the shaky status of the secondary wage earner, no matter what your genuine achievements.

Most interestingly, it means smiling through all of the above even as you puzzle at the completely unjustified self-confidence of the young, not very talented men who will best you by just being themselves.

I might add here that some of the references above were suggested to me by older male friends, many of whom have watched all this in their lifetimes with sorrow and some pity.

What are the advantages of being female? At its purest, it offers the intense pleasure of intuitiveness and giving love without stint. The joys of being female are always private joys.

At its worst, being a woman is nothing more than "not being a man." No one writes about what it's like being a man because they don't have to. Why bother analyzing it? Being a man is the gold standard. Being a woman is the deviation.

Women adjust to sitting on the bench. We aim to please. In newspapers, we win admiration when we write with that most coveted thing, a cool ironic tone.

But what I sense when talking to smart women is suppressed rage, or as the British commentator Lesley White describes it, "an amorphous, unspecific rage which is toted from office to home beneath a calm exterior and coping facade." Ironically, she says, this rage is a by-product of progress. "With each step forward we see more clearly the grotty place we left behind, how mad we were to accept it, and how much compensating we still do for male inadequacy. It makes us so mad we could kill."

Or at least hit. I don't approve of men hitting each other - I think it's idiotic - but sometimes I envy them their ability to take out their anger on other people instead of themselves. I have always been fascinated by the strange female phenomenon of self-mutilation. Women starve themselves, scar themselves. Princess Diana threw herself down the stairs when she was four months pregnant, she attacked herself with a serrated knife, she forced herself to vomit to the point of emaciation. At no time did it ever occur to her to give that morally perverted Prince Charles a roundhouse punch (she wouldn't know the technique anyway) or do something upper-class but definitive, like stab him with a hatpin, or spike his gin and tonic with an emetic.

These sorts of problems have remained modern and current. And that's what frightens me. I have to resign myself to this but I can't live with my stepdaughters and nieces growing up to face the same thing. As much as we tell ourselves that the world is becoming a better place for women, I can tell you that I have learned the hard way that it is not so much better.

I found it hideous that a Canadian newspaper should recently have run a front-page story about "girl power" taking over in Britain, which I read as-to use Spice Girl terminology-a sassy, sexy, tit-and-bum kind of power. It is sexual power. Got that already, thanks.

What about the power that comes from large salaries and corner offices and people who say yes when you give orders instead of "Who does she think she is?"

Anyway, "girl power" is not taking over in Britain, a country where, the Sunday Times of London reports, the major banks have the grace to be embarrassed that they have almost no female executives, so when they hold parties for clients, they hire women-not to work for the bank, but to attend the parties.

It's a country where, a recent survey showed, most married women would not marry their husbands all over again. Most married men would remarry the same woman. When it comes to feminism, Canada's bad enough, but Britain's a pathetic joke.

A very close Italian friend of mine tells me quietly she is deeply grateful that she gave birth to two boys. "It's not that I wouldn't love girls," she says. "It's just that I know that they would have such hard lives."

When I suggest writing this piece, my editor points out, reasonably enough, "You know, men have problems too."

I am not saying for a moment that men don't have problems. I sympathize with their problems, because I have the same ones. They are the problems of being human. But women have extra burdens that do not appear to be getting lighter, no matter how often silly people proclaim the death of feminism.

How did "sexual harassment" become a joke, a phrase used to denote women complaining about nothing? Men can be slighted at work for their competence, just as women can. But they are not attacked for their sexuality-or thought to be available because of it-which is at the core of a woman's being. And they're not attacked for being ugly-face it, most men and most women are not raving beauties-or being beautiful, as women are.

As Canadian talk show host Mike Bullard, whom I adore, says truthfully, "If there's one thing men and women agree on, it's that we all hate women." Women cannot win, no matter what they do, and yes, I do agree that women will conspire against each other, in the same way the hyenas fight for scraps after the lions have finishing tearing at the carcass.

Some years ago, I asked a man for a promotion or a raise, feeling that I had shown that I was more than capable of doing my current job and wanted more. "What does your husband think?" he asked.

I was distressed, to say the least. Two weeks later, he called me into his office for a friendly chat. I suggested that it was not done to ask a woman employee what her husband thought. He apologized for the question, and I apologized for having ever raised the fact in conversation that I had a husband. Fine.

I then told him that I was so unhappy in my current job that I was considering quitting without another job to go to. He leaned forward with curiosity and not a trace of irony. "What does your husband think about that?"

I hate the word "husband" as much as I loathe the word "wife." Love and marriage are very different things. In my life, they're concurrent, not consecutive, as a judge would put it, but that's more luck than good management. I'm married to a man so nice that at one point in my fulminations about my sorry career, he agreed that it was okay for me to introduce him at parties as my "boyfriend," so much do I hate the H-word, although he pointed out that it would be puzzling for people who know us.

And here comes the real joke.

My boyfriend/husband is 16 years my senior and works in Canadian journalism. He has worked successfully in Britain, Australia and Canada, and though he has seen "son-of-a-bitches" as well as good times and riches (to quote Jimmy Buffett), he has enjoyed himself immensely. He hires and promotes women with ease and always has, although the fact that he has daughters has no doubt influenced him greatly.

When I started out in newspapers 10 years ago, I worked for all the people he knew, plausible guys all of them, great to drink with, fine to work with, good for a laugh. My career has been a funhouse mirror of his, a hideously distorted version of the well-paid and sociable time he had. A lot of those men turned out to be not so nice after all when they were dealing with women.

Some of his acquaintances and former male co-workers have made passes at me, threatened me, shut me out of all-male meetings, stalked me with computer messages, told me to show cleavage and a black lace slip for photographs intended for publication and ridiculed me when I warned them of a sexual harassment scandal that has now erupted and left one newspaper with another sex offender on staff.

Yeah, but that's just work, you'll say. But I care about Canadian newspapers very much, whether I get to work in them or not. The fact that most of them have retreated to "feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food" (as Canadian author Douglas Coupland said about marketing), gives me pain, not giggles.

Women are always being accused of "wanting it all." I don't want it all, I want what men have, and men can have it all. Men can have families and jobs simultaneously without going mad from stress. Men can ask for promotions without being queried about what their wives think. Women, meanwhile, are mired in what I call "girlie jobs" or "jobettes," which means adequate jobs without managerial power.

As Janet Jones has discovered, we have sexual power (not a hell of a lot of use), we have power by association (through marriage), we have emotional power (mainly through love of family). But we don't have any real power, at least not the kind you can put a dollar figure on.

Do you think Jones, who has no agent and can't get an acting job, doesn't feel terrible that she doesn't contribute to the family finances? Men often feel this when their wives earn more than they do. But women feel this way too. Feminism has a reputation that has far outstripped the reality of women's accomplishments.