Tag Archives: feminism

No ghost

I finally know what it feels like to be a man. Specifically, I know what it feels like to be a man watching superhero movies, or Bond, or Star Trek, or pretty much any fucking movie ever. I’ve seen the new Ghostbusters, and I swaggered out of that cinema feeling like I could punch a lion in the throat.

Is this it? Is this how it feels to watch representations of yourself kick several shades of ass on the big screen? And if so: how has it taken this long? Do you know how cheated I feel that I had to wait until I was thirty-bastard-eight years old before this happened? And how many levels of angry I am with all the whiny manbabies who hate the concept of a female Ghostbusters? I mean, I was angry with them before. But now I’ve seen it, and now I know how great it made me feel, I’m beyond furious.

Continue reading No ghost

Private property

I, along with many other people, recently became aware of a waste of oxygen going by the name of Roosh V. Roosh V is a “pick up artist” – in other words, he uses pressure and tricks to get his dick wet and then tells other men how to do the same. Because sex is a right, you guys. And those bitches don’t want to give us our rights, so let’s take it anyway.

Truly, in the words of Germaine Greer, women have very little idea how much men hate them.

One of the more appalling ideas Roosh V has suggested is that rape should be legal if done on private property. Of course, now this has got mass media publicity, he’s pulled out the favourite last-resort of all douchebags, which is ‘lighten up would you, it was a joke’.

If you actually read this piece of crap, you’ll see it appears to be telling women not to drink and “follow a strange man into a bedroom”; thereby taking the onus off men not to rape women, or get women drunk and then rape women, or find a woman incapable of making rational decisions and prey on her in order to rape women, but on women to protect our bodies like the delicate, precious flowers that we are. And let’s not even get started on the fact that most women are raped by people they know, not strangers.

But here’s the thing, Roosh V. Your ‘satirical’ blog post doesn’t even work as satire. You’ve not thought through your premise carefully enough for it to be funny. I’m sorry that it’s taken a lady to point this out, but here we go.

All private property, Roosh V? All of it? So if I go to a male friend’s house for dinner, have I consented to sex with him? What about with his flatmates? If he rents, have I now given the landlord consent to have sex with me? Or just the tenants? Or not even the tenants? After all, it’s not their property. If you’re proposing a new form of droit du seigneur then I expect buy to let sales to go through the roof, and that’s the last thing London needs right now.

You, Roosh V, say I should never be unchaperoned with a man I don’t want to sleep with. How about if I go to a female friend’s house and they go to the loo, or nip out to Sainsbury’s for some more pitta bread? Is it OK for the other, male, guest to rape me while they’re out?

What about at work, Roosh V? Offices are private property. Can Bob from accounts pin me to the wall by the throat in the stationery cupboard and have his way with me without fear of reprisal from HR?

And how about private public spaces, Roosh V? More London, that area around City Hall in the big bad British capital, is technically private property. If I’m admiring the view of Tower Bridge, can any passer-by unzip himself and grapple beneath my skirt as the whim arises? Or is that pleasure reserved for the security guards who tell people to stop taking photos of City Hall?

There’s just too much ambiguity in your ‘satire’, Roosh V. You would never make it as a stand-up. You probably think women don’t have a sense of humour, don’t you Roosh V? Sadly, you’re just not funny. Even though you’re a joke.

Disney meets Stephen King

Ever since I was 7, I’ve been wondering if there was something wrong with me. I woke up every morning for almost 20 years with the question floating through my mind, between thoughts of food and coffee. The inside of my head sounded something like “I’m hungry, what should I have for breakfast? I wonder if there’s something wrong with me. I know: coffee.” The answer is always coffee.

Now I know for sure. There is definitely something wrong with me, because it’s Saturday evening and I’m going to my friend’s house to babysit for her. As I pass hoards of party people, some of them already in a joyful state of inebriation, the certainty that something is wrong with me grows stronger. I try to focus on the music that’s now blaring in my headphones. At some point, I swear I can hear Strummer screaming “There’s something wrong with you” between the lyrics of Cheapskates. Surely, missing out on the parties I was supposed to attend in order to spend the night with the spoiled brats my friend birthed is a sign of something being completely messed up in my head.

Maybe my brain’s been bleeding somewhere in the frontal lobe, thus changing my personality. This may sound extreme, but my friend has three girls, which is reason enough to say no to babysitting. They always look like they came out of a Disney book and that creeps me out. What’s up with those Elsa dresses they keep wearing? This Frozen shit is like crystal meth for little girls.

I look around at girls aged 2 to 7 and all I can see is a future generation of Taylor Swift-loving idiots waiting for some dumbass Prince Charming to kiss their loneliness away. Yesterday I saw a toddler wearing a pink onesie that said “future trophy wife” in capital dark pink letters. Her mum was pushing the buggy around with a smug look on her face, as if already envisioning the life of her offspring in the shadow of some poor fucker who’d have to work 80 hours a week to support the fifties cliche he chose as a wife.

Isn’t society supposed to evolve? Why the fuck are we heading back to the last century? What’s with all these gender stereotypes? Women get pregnant and they can’t wait to find out the sex of the baby, just to know if they should decorate the nursery in tones of pink or blue, although I imagine it won’t be long until some nutjob will have their house covered in shades of grey – about fifty of them. Poor foetuses haven’t even developed fingerprints at the time their fate is decided and colour-coded.

“Oh, baby, Mummy loves you so much. Now, because you have a vagina, you will have to wear headache-inducing colours, play with dolls and survive on lettuce for the vast majority of your life. Please don’t step out of this tiny pink glittery box or you’ll have a very hard time. Other than that, welcome to the world, it’s lovely having someone I can dump all my unaccomplished hopes and dreams on.” Does that sound messed up to you? That’s because it is.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s much the same with boys. The only reason I’m focusing on girls is the fact that I’m surrounded by them and it’s obnoxious seeing this happening every single day. My friend is a nice woman, but she’s making the same mistake as most mothers nowadays. I stopped visiting her by the time her second daughter turned 2. The last time I went to see them, her lounge was something out of a horror story. A pink, glittery horror story. It was Disney meets Stephen King. Carrie at the prom covered in glittery blood. I don’t know if ‘glitter allergy’ is a thing, but it should be and I should try and get it. It would be the perfect excuse to stay away from the three future housewives with sticky hands and weird white wigs that she’s raising.

We think we’re the lucky ones, the ones free and educate their children in that spirit of freedom and accomplishment. Yet there’s a girl across the world who faced bullets in order to protect her right to go to school, at an age when girls in Western countries post pouting selfies on Instagram because they don’t have a boyfriend to validate their worth. We think they’re savage because they force their daughters into marriage, yet we’re so quick to judge a woman who gets to a certain age and is still single and childless.

We jump on our high horses and descend onto ‘poor, uneducated’ peoples to serve them a nice warm slice of our wisdom, not realizing it smells oddly like shit. You’ll read a magazine article praising some Hollywood star’s feminist campaign, then turn the page and find ‘beauty tips’ and ‘diet advice’, because surely, as a woman, you can’t be interested in much else.

And all this shit starts with the Disney movies that seem so perfectly innocent. We take our little girls and spoon feed them all the stereotypes you can think of: girls always have teeny tiny waists, princes are handsome and if you see someone physically ugly in the movie you can bet they’re the bad guy. That’s why they grow up to quickly help that young man in an expensive suit who suddenly got sick in the middle of the street, while ignoring the homeless who’s probably dying under their eyes. And if they somehow grow up without having the perfect princess body, that’s fine, they have the women magazines to teach them all about lemon detox and how to hide their pimples.

People often ask me why I hate children. They assume I do, because I quit teaching for no apparent reason and I say I don’t want to have children of my own. I don’t hate children, though. I hate their parents and their ignorance. I hate how I saw a woman say ‘no’ when her daughter wanted a green tee with a dinosaur on it and buy a pink one instead; when people say to me “you’re too smart for your own good”, but never say it to my brother or my male friends; when they assume a woman is single because she can’t “keep a man around” and not because she actually chooses to be single; when a boy is “gay” because he likes to knit rather than watch football; when “real men have muscles” and “real women have curves” because if you’re too skinny you’re less of a man or a woman.

It’s a two-edged sword, though, because the victims of the issue are also the enforcers of it. Growing up with this bullshit makes children see the world in a very twisted way. They’re not only the ones trying hard to fit in, but also the ones who judge others for not succeeding.

And yes, I still stand by my opinion – it all starts with the fuckin’ Disney movies. I’d like to see Disney make a movie about an average sized girl who likes chocolate a bit too much, binge-watches Netflix at weekends and works a shitty job to pay her way through her neuroscience degree, all the while being single and far from frustrated by it. Or maybe a musical about a princess falling in love with another princess and flipping those who stand against it. But god forbid we teach our children something about real life, right?

Glorifying grubby slavery

I don’t hate porn because I’m some upstanding moral guardian. Those kinds of people secretly love the stuff and only pretend to disapprove of it. I hate porn because, despite having the lowest production values, the least talented crew and the worst acting of any entertainment medium, it somehow sees fit to take itself so fucking seriously.

“Oh baby, yeah! Yeah! You’re so good! How do you get to be this good? You’re so big, baby! Much bigger than anybody watching this shit! I can’t believe you’re doing things to me that no self-respecting girl would ever, ever, allow to happen to her body in a million fucking years! Oh yes! Give me those unrealistic expectations! Harder! Harder!”

Sex is not meant to be taken seriously. If you take sex seriously it’s either because you’re not getting any, because you feel inadequate in some way or another, or because your relationship is in trouble. The best sex any of us will ever have is the jolly, farcical fucking that puts one in mind of trying to adjust a television aerial in a bad 1970’s sketch show. “There! Right there! Hold it! Hold it!”

Sex is where you lose your inhibitions. You don’t care what you look like or how you’re doing it. Sex is fun and cheerful. Sex is a laugh. Sex should not scare or intimidate you and if it does there’s obviously something seriously wrong.

And yet the sex in Fifty Shades of Grey, both book and film trailer, looks pretty damned intimidating and scary to me. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t because it’s BDSM. I had a friend who was into BDSM once and they told me the key to the scene is that those who submit do so willingly and without fear. Let me emphasise again: without fear.

And yet from what I can gather the entire book and film is dominated with serious issues regarding depression, insecurity, vulnerability and a load of physiological crap that posits to be an in-depth study of the human mind, when in reality it’s just another grubby little soft-core porno made even worse by delusions of grandeur and a highly suspicious borderline sex offender as the main character. And who in the hell goes to watch a porno to find out why the main characters want to fuck?

It is true to say most feminists are not a particularly sympathetic bunch. Recently the male-hating militancy has become more and more virulent as individuals attempt to blame their ageless, sexless failings on their being of the supposed gentler sex, and I cannot help but think this has driven most reasonable women away from the movement. Nonetheless I find it very hard to believe that a single badly written book and inevitably worse film has suddenly had most of the female population yearning to be transformed into simpering, beaten slaves controlled by a sloany little yuppy who seems, to all intents and purposes, to be the lovechild of Patrick Bateman and Margaret Thatcher.

Perhaps Fifty Shades is a rebellion of sorts against the modern feminist movement that seems more interested in dictating to women than empowering them. Perhaps it is a woman’s way of telling these people that they have the right to choose to submit to a man just as they have the right to raise their children themselves or stay at home whilst their husband works. Perhaps it is all about choice.

But Fifty Shades of Grey is a lousy book that completely misunderstands the very concept of mental illness and ends up glorifying total, willing slavery, something no novel has attempted to do for over a hundred years. A sure sign, if ever one was needed, that we should be careful what we wish for.

Equalicism

Let me lay my cards on the table. Despite some assuming I am a Daily Mail-reading, Tory-loving capitalist, let me prick that bubble: I am as far to the left as you can be without being insane. I lack any religious conviction, I’ve worked for government and charities, and I love baby kittens.

That doesn’t make me a lesbian either. I’ve even taken drugs and inhaled (for any police reading it was in a licensed café in Amsterdam, honest). I also have a degree. So before you rage at what comes next, just remember – I am not what you think.

‘Feminist’ is becoming a disgusting, negative term I do not wish to be associated with. It’s heading right up there with ‘racist’.

I fully appreciate the roots of the movement, to seek equality and freedom from oppression. The Rights of Women was an eye opener to me at University, and I understood the historical background it grew out of. What I can no longer stand is women bitching and whining for equality, and then spouting judgmental lectures on what that should mean without any consideration for the root of the movement.

Equality and freedom means any woman can be whomever she wants. Right? Wrong. Don’t demean yourself, don’t be a trophy wife, don’t change your body, blah blah blah. Feminism is now just an excuse to bitch about those different from yourself, and female jealousy is frequently masked in articles by an allusion to feminist rhetoric.

The prevarication of supposed feminist writers is fast becoming a joke we are now all tainted with. Pick on an easy target, say something right-on with no balance, make every woman with a brain look like an idiot.

Let me give you an example. Last year the Guardian published an article about how the coverage at Wimbledon was “anti-feminist”. All those camera shots of the players’ girlfriends; the comments on the Ladies Singles winner. This went into a rant about how these women were merely trophy wives, waiting to trap a man, as well as calling for the BBC to remove commentators who make sexist comments.

Now hold on a sec. Let me consider my experience of the competition. Let’s see, there were a lot of men in shorts, a huge amount of risqué photos of Nadal and Murray in the mags, Andy Murray’s unpolished mother in every other shot, and masses of camera shots of Bradley Cooper and Gerard Butler. I bet if you look at Twitter, a lot of women were tweeting about that.

Well how dare you, women of the world. All this equality has brought you suggestive pictures of athletes and lingering shots of Hollywood hunks. You all disgust me.

Well no, actually you don’t. You see equality is about everyone getting the same options – free will means you choose what you do with them. Did you cover your eyes as a player changed his shirt? No? Well the rules said you should so no moral high ground for you.

So women want to do Page 3, or porn, or beauty pageants. Let them. As long as it’s their choice, so what? No one questions a man becoming a stripper, or going into porn, and heaven forbid you question a gay man entering Mr Gay UK. Some girls want to marry a footballer; good luck to them. Some want a career – brilliant, just don’t bitch and demand positive discrimination. Like women trying to change an alcoholic or falling in love with a serial killer, there are some things that will just never work. No matter what gender or persuasion, some people are just cunts.

My plea is for women everywhere to stop throwing the word ‘feminism’ at anything that winds them up, without thinking whether it really is a balanced point of view. You’ve pretty much destroyed the meaning of the movement; to me and many women it is now a negative word. I’m an ‘equalicist’. Same rights for everyone. Talk about persecution, rape in war, genital mutilation, anywhere where equality really is needed. Whether Kate Middleton should dye her grey hair, or keep true to feminism by keeping it real? No comparison really, is there?