Unfuckable

Cara Ellison

Scotland is unfuckable.

Scotland cannot, will not, be fucked. It has always been, and to this day is, in a total and complete lack of having been fucked, fucked up, fucked over, fucked with.

I say this in defiance of a history of its misery and domination, poverty and neglect — though it has been bought and sold and barely any of its land is owned by anyone who really lives there. For certain, Scotland has been fucked on: Robert Burns and Edwin Morgan wrote down, in beautiful detail, the desiring of a woman's and man's body, respectively. But the way that the accepted canon of literary men talks about land, ownership, territory — Scotland is unfuckable because it is inhospitable.

I am become the land I stand on. I cannot remember exactly when the transformation took place. But I would like to tell you about where I realised it had, and the powerful ritual it gave me.

It is the grand masculine colonial tradition to talk about women as if they were a conquerable landscape — from Sir Walter Raleigh's naming of Virginia after a virgin queen, through the way that residents of the Kingdom of Fife adoringly call the Lomond Hills the 'paps of Fife', or the 'breasts of Fife'. In the pale teal mornings I would lie back on my grandmother's cold garden lawn and compare my growing chest bumps to the horizon.

But as I look closer at the history of Scotland, that very early history before and enduring the Ancient Romans, I learn that in the beginning, women were never the tilled, the claimed, the fertile land that the Romantic poets made them. They were wild: the crags, the bursting river; the unpredictable, the dangerous; those who may at any point take it all away. We might one day lash the world like a cat surprised, break the skin of natural order, and have the contents below burst into mess. It was that part of the land metaphor we occupied. We were not known as the passive but the prickly. The spiky. The terrifying. The vicious.

Scotland did not behave. Scotland will not behave.

As Sharon Blackie writes in her book If Women Rose Rooted, Celtic women had social standing that most other contemporaries in the West did not, and Christianity came to change that for the worse. In Ireland and Britain, women could be leaders and were important in political, social, and religious roles. Boudica and Cartimandua, for example, lead their people into battle, and Celtic women have been reported to have been judges, priestesses, lawyers, astronomers, artists, and doctors, often with rights to property, sexual freedom, and recourse to damages if they were physically or sexually assaulted. A Celtic woman was feared and respected. The Romans are on record saying you do not fuck with a Celtic woman.

The whole Celtic world was based on the ordaining of place, of the natural world. What we might now call the 'femme' was indivisible from the land on which people lived. This land was not something considered to belong to anyone.

I leaf through the Ulster Cycle of Irish literary tradition, a sort of Marvel Universe of the Dark Ages, the stories Celts constructed together as they cooked and drank and wove and washed and stole each other's sheep. One figure in particular stands out to me: Scáthach, a famous warrior woman and prophet who lived with her daughter on the Isle of Skye. Scáthach taught the Irish heroes how to snatch life from one another and vault ramparts like giants, like gods. There is little centred upon her alone, but she has an easy traversal through the background of stories written down about more famous Irish heroes. She stands, smiling, to the side of gilt Celtic knot lettering, behind the posturing of hundreds of words of male-ingratiated prose.

She gets up every morning to sharpen spears, kick the shins of young Irishmen, wash blood out of undershirts. Her daughter is on the wall watching her, sewing, and spotting selkies in the ocean waves.

There is supposed to be failure in a woman being alone. For years it bothered me that I was not 'possessed' by another or 'attached' in some way. What are you supposed to do with yourself when the ways in which society is structured make you safe or content only if you are tied, legally or socially, to another, more esteemed gender? It is not that you cannot have it: there are many men who would marry you or would at least treat you kindly. It is that happiness and a steady attention supply are not the same thing. Happiness and a steady attention supply are not the same thing. They are not even related. And the only reason that I thought they were was because very many of my role models were operating under the same delusion.

That you might think they are the same thing is because of magazines, social media, romantic movies, people's fickle approval, the way people talk about weddings and marriage, 'he'll make you happy': those are mythology. The only things needed for happiness are a fixed abode, safety, food, water, care, and stories. The care and stories can come from anyone, romantic or otherwise. You do not need daily attention to survive; you merely only need to experience daily care. The care, if it is not forthcoming, can be sought most of the time, but it must be face to face. In person. And the greatest purveyors of it, these days, tend not to be men.

Two years ago, I stopped being subject to the woodpecker opinions of the internet, stopped reassessing my worth by the comments column, deleted my popular Twitter account, and wandered into the constant dark wilderness of my home country, far away from the cities that require that you sell yourself to keep from suffocating. There, I began to write what I wanted at length in private and work at jobs that required my physical presence. I found people nearby who cared for me and I cared for. I found people who wanted to tell stories with me. This has brought me close to my motherland in a way that I have never been: I have become firm friends with the roiling dark and grey-blue frowns of the unpredictable. In fact, I revel in downpours and thunder and fierce, ripping...