The Future Is Female

At the very least, I expected angry tee-shirts. You know – “Men smell funny. Especially if they’re on fire.” Or “Billions of Men. Why Test on Animals?” But the lesbians of Hebden Bridge aren’t angry. According to the latest census, there are more lesbians, per head, in the Yorkshire town than anywhere else in the UK – and there’s not a lot for them to be angry about. Which is nice. Especially when you consider that their female-dominated society may, in the future, be a model for the rest of us.

The ‘female’ X chromosome is getting stronger. While the ‘male’ Y chromosome is getting weaker. Which is one of the reasons why the infertility rate in men is 7% – and rising. But, before long, women won’t need fertile men anyway. Producing a child that is the genetic offspring of two females will soon become a real possibility. Scientists have already done it with mice, using cells from other females. It’s only a matter of time before the future is female. Completely.

Which isn’t great for the male ego. And it only gets worse. Academics think that if you take away men’s unique ability to father children (which is about to happen), and their higher earning potential (which has already happened), more women will choose to live with other women. Men will have to adjust to a very different world. A world where a partnership between two women makes sense on every level. A world like Hebden Bridge.

In many ways, Hebden Bridge is a traditional northern community. According to resident Mike Williams, “There are four or five surnames that have been in the town since the dawn of time.” But it’s not reactionary. “Day to day,” says Williams, “it is very accepting. Everyone rubs along with everyone else. Twenty years ago it was the Baptists rubbing along with the Methodists. Now it’s the lesbians rubbing along with the Pagans.”

The houseboats are tethered up along the Rochdale canal, where the locks are still operated by hand and, outside the Sit Thi Down café, the men still fish on the towpath. There are cobbled streets, wet with summer rain. And a clog factory. And a Picture House which, of a Thursday, lets you take tea and biscuits into the matinee. Only one bar – Nelson’s on Crown Street – flies the rainbow flag. It might be proud. But Hebden Bridge is a long way from loud.

There are a few lesbian shops. Like the jean shop. “Where it’s almost like there’s a line drawn across the door” says John Siddique, a Hebden Bridge poet, “to keep men out. And there’s a shop called Ruby Tuesday run by a nice lesbian couple. It’s odd to call it ‘a sensible shoe store’, but that’s exactly what it is. There are no high heels at all.” Apart from that, there’s not a lot to mark out this sweet little place as ‘a lesbian town’.

“How exactly would you define ‘a lesbian town’?” asks Clare Lupino, who runs the pretty boutique Lupino And Rose. “Have you been watching The Worm That Turned?” In this BBC skit, set sometime in the future, Britain is ruled over by a high-handed female dictator, and policed by female stormtroopers in thigh-boots and hot pants. The males do the housework – and wear the pinnies. “You wouldn’t get men in Hebden wearing pinnies” says Lupino.

John Holland is reconstructed. He wouldn’t mind wearing a pinnie. But since moving to Hebden Bridge from London he’s noticed a lot of what he calls ‘man hating’. “Just a crackle” he says. “Having a beard didn’t help. Nor did my leather coat. In London it didn’t mean anything, but here there was a reaction against my masculinity. And opening doors for women? The attitude here was almost resentment. I thought, ‘Hey, just because I’m a man doesn’t mean you can behave like that’.’”

Holland, who has now lived in Hebden for five years, has noticed the growing ‘feminisation’ of the men in the town. “Because there’s a high proportion of lesbians, with their own careers and businesses, the straight women in Hebden follow suit” says Holland. “So you see lots of house-husbands. They are well turned-out – the man bag is there and the hair is perfect – but it’s like ‘Woah! What are you?’ They have coffee mornings. From my point of view, they are rather transparent and watery.”

John Siddique, a poet who teaches creative writing, has lived in Hebden Bridge for nine years. And in that time he’s noticed the evolution of what he calls ‘the Hebden man’. “Just go and sit in Mooch [a chi chi little coffee place on Market Street] and watch the couples arrive. It’s like the Moslem idea of the woman walking three paces behind the man. Except that, in Hebden, it’s the man who walks behind the woman. It’s not what I call equality.”

Outside, in the street, children are screaming at the top of their voices. They keep screaming. And no-one tells them to stop. According to Siddique, it’s what happens when children are raised without a ‘masculine’ influence. “Hebden is the kind of place where no-one says no” he says. “I was in the Post Office, and this kid was kicking the hell out of the photo booth. I shouted ‘Stop it’, and the woman looked at me like I was a child murderer. Children need boundaries. They need men.”

Men in Hebden Bridge might be feeling emasculated but, if they do, argues Mike Williams, it’s their own fault. He’s a stone carver, but he was taught by a woman. And he’s happy with the Hebden way. “Men are emasculating themselves” he says. “Buying sports cars or quad bikes when they’re 40 because of some mid-life crisis? While they dump their first wives? They’re already emasculated. Don’t they know that being a man isn’t about the trappings? It’s about something deeper than that.”

The women of the Calder Valley have long been a breed apart. There are journals, dating from the 19th century, that document the female clog makers, tin plate workers and fustian finishers. Mrs Fanny Whitaker, for instance, was a plumber and glazier. Susan Robinson was a wheelwright. And they weren’t, according to the journals, an exception. But it all changed. In the later Victorian era, women were expected to stay at home, have children, and tend the house – not finish the fustian.

It was fustian that made Hebden Bridge its money. The town was the world centre for the manufacture of working men’s trousers. But when the men stopped working, they stopped needing their trousers. The manufacturers moved out, and the hippies moved in, turning Hebden Bridge into some sort of counter-culture paradise. Since then, the whole Upper Valley has seen wave after wave of idealistic incomers. The lesbians are just the latest in a long line.

The phenomenon could have remained undiscovered were it not for Dr Darren Smith. And, like a lot of scientific discoveries, it happened by accident. Dr Smith was doing door-to-door interviews for his PhD when he noticed the large number of single sex couples answering the door. “I was astonished” says Smith. “All received knowledge has it that lesbians gravitate towards large metropolitan spaces; this mass movement into the countryside was bucking every known trend.”

Hebden Bridge is the “real” world outside the “scene” of Brighton and Manchester. It feels like the kind of place where lesbians move to when they’re done with their more urban, hedonistic lifestyle. In Hebden Bridge, where the South Pennines reach out to the horizon, there are lesbian walking groups. There are picnics in the spring, and games of rounders in the summer. Hebden Bridge is all grown up – with a lot less to prove.

But Fern Bast arrived here by accident. “Literally, a pin in the map” she says. She walked into the town’s health food shop, and saw a postcard on the wall advertising for a house-sitter. That was 17 years ago. “I love the place. But sometimes it can be a bit funny. What’s the definition of confusion? Hebden Bridge of Father’s Day. On Mother’s Day, people here have to buy four cards. But there’s a really great spirit. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

That’s despite the Hebden Bridge Curse. Mike Williams moved to the town 16 years ago – with his girlfriend. Only to be told that, according to local lore, they wouldn’t be together for more than two years. “We were told we would either change our sexuality. Or move on to another partner. And if we didn’t have a cat when we arrived, we would be issued with one.” His girlfriend is now his wife. And they decided to get their own cat. But, the Curse usually takes vengeance in the end …

It took vengeance on Bast. She was bisexual when she arrived. And, after a flirtation with lesbianism, she’s bisexual again. “That’s quite a Hebden thing” says Clare Lupino. “There’s a fluidity. Women dipping in and out..” Clare isn’t a lesbian. She’s been married for 12 years, to the same man. “But I could quite easily be” she says. “If I was single, there are lots of available women in Hebden, and they’re not all that butch stereotype.”

It’s not, actually, just a ‘Hebden thing’. Scientists at America’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction argue that all women’s sexuality is more fluid. The result is that the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the number of adult women having lesbian sex had almost trebled, from 4% to 11.5%, in one decade. Surveys in Britain have produced similar findings. Men are becoming less and less attractive.

Lupino has been in Hebden for five years, and finds it a very accepting place. “It has a Mecca quality” says Clare. “People think ‘I’ll go there because I can be myself’.” Ironic really. Clare Lupino, like Fern Bast, isn’t her real name. “I am actually related to Ida Lupino, the 1940s film actress – and one of Hollywood’s first female directors. But there’s a real sense that in Hebden Bridge that you can be who you want to be. As well as who you are. Does that make sense?”

Jayne Lockwood-Allen, who moved to Hebden five years ago, likes being herself. And that’s something she never was in Oldham. Her partner, Rachel, escaped to Hebden Bridge from Leeds. But she was escaping more than twitching curtains. The couple, who met at their local transgender group, were born men. “And when my neighbours in Leeds found out that I was in transition,” says Rachel, “they nailed dead animals to my door.” She ended up having a nervous breakdown.

Jayne and Rachel didn’t actually realise that Hebden Bridge was the Sapphic capital of Great Britain – they just wanted somewhere to start again. Somewhere nearer Burnley. “But when we moved in,” says Jayne, “we had a lesbian couple on one side, and a Wickan on the other. Next to her was another lesbian couple, and the guy across the road was gay. Happy coincidence really.” So was the fact that the Fox and Goose – their Hebden Bridge local – was a member of Camra. They both drink real ale.

When Jayne went into hospital for her gender reassignment operation, the regulars had a whip round and sent her flowers by Interflora. “It was a lovely arrangement,” says Jayne. “And there was a card saying ‘Get well soon’.” Jayne and Rachel, who run a market stall on Wednesdays and Saturdays selling hair grips, decided to get married. “But our families didn’t want to come to the wedding. Never mind. The photos are full of the regulars from the Fox and Goose.”

A Mori poll commissioned by Stonewall suggests that when people from a variety of backgrounds start to live together in an area it creates more harmony, and less prejudice. But Alice, who is bisexual, has found that some prejudice still exists. And it comes from the lesbians. It’s like the days of political lesbianism – when women were encouraged to remain separate from men, and any attempt at ‘prettiness’ was seen as a sell-out– never went away.

Take the lesbian disco, held on the second Sunday of every month in Todmorden. “I said to my lesbian friend that I was thinking of going at New Year” says Alice. “And she asked ‘Why?’ I said ‘Well, why do you go? I want to go because I know everybody’. That’s an illustration of the cliquiness in this place. You’re not a lesbian. You’re bi. Even in Hebden I think there’s prejudice. The lesbian society can be very exclusive.”

As a model for a future society, Hebden Bridge is fabled – but flawed. Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University and author of the book Adam’s Curse, reckons that, at the current rate of decline, heterosexual reproduction could last 125,000 years. Which gives us all a bit of time to get used to the new order. “We’re just women living our lives” says Peg, from Nelson’s Wine Bar. Fair play. Maybe we should just get on with living ours.



		The Future Is Female At the very least, I expected angry tee-shirts. You know – “Men smell funny. Especially if they’re on fire.” Or “Billions of Men. Why Test on Animals?” But the lesbians of Hebden Bridge aren’t angry. According to the latest census, there are more lesbians, per head, in the Yorkshire town than anywhere else in the UK – and there’s not a lot for them to be angry about. Which is nice. Especially when you consider that their female-dominated society may, in the future, be a model for the rest of us. The ‘female’ X chromosome is getting stronger. While the ‘male’ Y chromosome is getting weaker. Which is one of the reasons why the infertility rate in men is 7% – and rising. But, before long, women won’t need fertile men anyway. Producing a child that is the genetic offspring of two females will soon become a real possibility. Scientists have already done it with mice, using cells from other females. It’s only a matter of time before the future is female. Completely. Which isn’t great for the male ego. And it only gets worse. Academics think that if you take away men’s unique ability to father children (which is about to happen), and their higher earning potential (which has already happened), more women will choose to live with other women. Men will have to adjust to a very different world. A world where a partnership between two women makes sense on every level. A world like Hebden Bridge. In many ways, Hebden Bridge is a traditional northern community. According to resident Mike Williams, “There are four or five surnames that have been in the town since the dawn of time.” But it’s not reactionary. “Day to day,” says Williams, “it is very accepting. Everyone rubs along with everyone else. Twenty years ago it was the Baptists rubbing along with the Methodists. Now it’s the lesbians rubbing along with the Pagans.” The houseboats are tethered up along the Rochdale canal, where the locks are still operated by hand and, outside the Sit Thi Down café, the men still fish on the towpath. There are cobbled streets, wet with summer rain. And a clog factory. And a Picture House which, of a Thursday, lets you take tea and biscuits into the matinee. Only one bar – Nelson’s on Crown Street – flies the rainbow flag. It might be proud. But Hebden Bridge is a long way from loud. There are a few lesbian shops. Like the jean shop. “Where it’s almost like there’s a line drawn across the door” says John Siddique, a Hebden Bridge poet, “to keep men out. And there’s a shop called Ruby Tuesday run by a nice lesbian couple. It’s odd to call it ‘a sensible shoe store’, but that’s exactly what it is. There are no high heels at all.” Apart from that, there’s not a lot to mark out this sweet little place as ‘a lesbian town’. “How exactly would you define ‘a lesbian town’?” asks Clare Lupino, who runs the pretty boutique Lupino And Rose. “Have you been watching The Worm That Turned?” In this BBC skit, set sometime in the future, Britain is ruled over by a high-handed female dictator, and policed by female stormtroopers in thigh-boots and hot pants. The males do the housework – and wear the pinnies. “You wouldn’t get men in Hebden wearing pinnies” says Lupino. John Holland is reconstructed. He wouldn’t mind wearing a pinnie. But since moving to Hebden Bridge from London he’s noticed a lot of what he calls ‘man hating’. “Just a crackle” he says. “Having a beard didn’t help. Nor did my leather coat. In London it didn’t mean anything, but here there was a reaction against my masculinity. And opening doors for women? The attitude here was almost resentment. I thought, ‘Hey, just because I’m a man doesn’t mean you can behave like that’.’” Holland, who has now lived in Hebden for five years, has noticed the growing ‘feminisation’ of the men in the town. “Because there’s a high proportion of lesbians, with their own careers and businesses, the straight women in Hebden follow suit” says Holland. “So you see lots of house-husbands. They are well turned-out – the man bag is there and the hair is perfect – but it’s like ‘Woah! What are you?’ They have coffee mornings. From my point of view, they are rather transparent and watery.” John Siddique, a poet who teaches creative writing, has lived in Hebden Bridge for nine years. And in that time he’s noticed the evolution of what he calls ‘the Hebden man’. “Just go and sit in Mooch [a chi chi little coffee place on Market Street] and watch the couples arrive. It’s like the Moslem idea of the woman walking three paces behind the man. Except that, in Hebden, it’s the man who walks behind the woman. It’s not what I call equality.” Outside, in the street, children are screaming at the top of their voices. They keep screaming. And no-one tells them to stop. According to Siddique, it’s what happens when children are raised without a ‘masculine’ influence. “Hebden is the kind of place where no-one says no” he says. “I was in the Post Office, and this kid was kicking the hell out of the photo booth. I shouted ‘Stop it’, and the woman looked at me like I was a child murderer. Children need boundaries. They need men.” Men in Hebden Bridge might be feeling emasculated but, if they do, argues Mike Williams, it’s their own fault. He’s a stone carver, but he was taught by a woman. And he’s happy with the Hebden way. “Men are emasculating themselves” he says. “Buying sports cars or quad bikes when they’re 40 because of some mid-life crisis? While they dump their first wives? They’re already emasculated. Don’t they know that being a man isn’t about the trappings? It’s about something deeper than that.” The women of the Calder Valley have long been a breed apart. There are journals, dating from the 19th century, that document the female clog makers, tin plate workers and fustian finishers. Mrs Fanny Whitaker, for instance, was a plumber and glazier. Susan Robinson was a wheelwright. And they weren’t, according to the journals, an exception. But it all changed. In the later Victorian era, women were expected to stay at home, have children, and tend the house – not finish the fustian. It was fustian that made Hebden Bridge its money. The town was the world centre for the manufacture of working men’s trousers. But when the men stopped working, they stopped needing their trousers. The manufacturers moved out, and the hippies moved in, turning Hebden Bridge into some sort of counter-culture paradise. Since then, the whole Upper Valley has seen wave after wave of idealistic incomers. The lesbians are just the latest in a long line. The phenomenon could have remained undiscovered were it not for Dr Darren Smith. And, like a lot of scientific discoveries, it happened by accident. Dr Smith was doing door-to-door interviews for his PhD when he noticed the large number of single sex couples answering the door. “I was astonished” says Smith. “All received knowledge has it that lesbians gravitate towards large metropolitan spaces; this mass movement into the countryside was bucking every known trend.” Hebden Bridge is the “real” world outside the “scene” of Brighton and Manchester. It feels like the kind of place where lesbians move to when they’re done with their more urban, hedonistic lifestyle. In Hebden Bridge, where the South Pennines reach out to the horizon, there are lesbian walking groups. There are picnics in the spring, and games of rounders in the summer. Hebden Bridge is all grown up – with a lot less to prove. But Fern Bast arrived here by accident. “Literally, a pin in the map” she says. She walked into the town’s health food shop, and saw a postcard on the wall advertising for a house-sitter. That was 17 years ago. “I love the place. But sometimes it can be a bit funny. What’s the definition of confusion? Hebden Bridge of Father’s Day. On Mother’s Day, people here have to buy four cards. But there’s a really great spirit. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.” That’s despite the Hebden Bridge Curse. Mike Williams moved to the town 16 years ago – with his girlfriend. Only to be told that, according to local lore, they wouldn’t be together for more than two years. “We were told we would either change our sexuality. Or move on to another partner. And if we didn’t have a cat when we arrived, we would be issued with one.” His girlfriend is now his wife. And they decided to get their own cat. But, the Curse usually takes vengeance in the end … It took vengeance on Bast. She was bisexual when she arrived. And, after a flirtation with lesbianism, she’s bisexual again. “That’s quite a Hebden thing” says Clare Lupino. “There’s a fluidity. Women dipping in and out..” Clare isn’t a lesbian. She’s been married for 12 years, to the same man. “But I could quite easily be” she says. “If I was single, there are lots of available women in Hebden, and they’re not all that butch stereotype.” It’s not, actually, just a ‘Hebden thing’. Scientists at America’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction argue that all women’s sexuality is more fluid. The result is that the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the number of adult women having lesbian sex had almost trebled, from 4% to 11.5%, in one decade. Surveys in Britain have produced similar findings. Men are becoming less and less attractive. Lupino has been in Hebden for five years, and finds it a very accepting place. “It has a Mecca quality” says Clare. “People think ‘I’ll go there because I can be myself’.” Ironic really. Clare Lupino, like Fern Bast, isn’t her real name. “I am actually related to Ida Lupino, the 1940s film actress – and one of Hollywood’s first female directors. But there’s a real sense that in Hebden Bridge that you can be who you want to be. As well as who you are. Does that make sense?” Jayne Lockwood-Allen, who moved to Hebden five years ago, likes being herself. And that’s something she never was in Oldham. Her partner, Rachel, escaped to Hebden Bridge from Leeds. But she was escaping more than twitching curtains. The couple, who met at their local transgender group, were born men. “And when my neighbours in Leeds found out that I was in transition,” says Rachel, “they nailed dead animals to my door.” She ended up having a nervous breakdown. Jayne and Rachel didn’t actually realise that Hebden Bridge was the Sapphic capital of Great Britain – they just wanted somewhere to start again. Somewhere nearer Burnley. “But when we moved in,” says Jayne, “we had a lesbian couple on one side, and a Wickan on the other. Next to her was another lesbian couple, and the guy across the road was gay. Happy coincidence really.” So was the fact that the Fox and Goose – their Hebden Bridge local – was a member of Camra. They both drink real ale. When Jayne went into hospital for her gender reassignment operation, the regulars had a whip round and sent her flowers by Interflora. “It was a lovely arrangement,” says Jayne. “And there was a card saying ‘Get well soon’.” Jayne and Rachel, who run a market stall on Wednesdays and Saturdays selling hair grips, decided to get married. “But our families didn’t want to come to the wedding. Never mind. The photos are full of the regulars from the Fox and Goose.” A Mori poll commissioned by Stonewall suggests that when people from a variety of backgrounds start to live together in an area it creates more harmony, and less prejudice. But Alice, who is bisexual, has found that some prejudice still exists. And it comes from the lesbians. It’s like the days of political lesbianism – when women were encouraged to remain separate from men, and any attempt at ‘prettiness’ was seen as a sell-out– never went away. Take the lesbian disco, held on the second Sunday of every month in Todmorden. “I said to my lesbian friend that I was thinking of going at New Year” says Alice. “And she asked ‘Why?’ I said ‘Well, why do you go? I want to go because I know everybody’. That’s an illustration of the cliquiness in this place. You’re not a lesbian. You’re bi. Even in Hebden I think there’s prejudice. The lesbian society can be very exclusive.” As a model for a future society, Hebden Bridge is fabled – but flawed. Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University and author of the book Adam’s Curse, reckons that, at the current rate of decline, heterosexual reproduction could last 125,000 years. Which gives us all a bit of time to get used to the new order. “We’re just women living our lives” says Peg, from Nelson’s Wine Bar. Fair play. Maybe we should just get on with living ours.

		© Richard Johnson 2000 -