*shudder*

This scares the everloving shit out of me.

It's all horrible, every bit of it, but what really disturbs me is that the most so-say acceptable reason for hitting a woman is the wearing of revealing clothes in public. What the FUCK? Twenty per cent of people think it's at least sometimes acceptable to hit your girlfriend because... why? Because she's making other men look at her? What is it? I genuinely don't understand.

Also, I notice, it seems to be more acceptable to hit a woman for flirting than for cheating. I can't really think of anything to say about that, except yargh argh grrrrr argh bah scream arrrgggghhh. The more I see of the world, the more I am made to realise that female sexuality is bad and wrong and weird and scary and must be contained by any means necessary.

One of my ex's favourite lines to justify his possessiveness and dislike of my male friends was "Of course I trust you. I just don't trust them." The whole time we were together, this made no sense to me. How could he trust me if he didn't trust them, unless he thought they were rapists? I asked him a couple of times if that's what he thought, and he responded in complete shock that of course he didn't, how could I get that from what he said? So I remained confused.

I get it now. If I'm around a man who could conceivably find me attractive, said man might think about me. And that, right there, is the violation. There are versions of me running around in other people's heads, versions that no stern looks of his or monogamous nature of mine could regulate or control. It's got nothing to do with how I feel, and it's really not got much to do with whether or not said man would ever act on his hypothetical fantasies. The point is (or was) that they're out there. That somebody created a world where I did not belong to my ex. That in the recesses of somebody's imagination, I was being unfaithful. And (and this is the key point) I should not have been encouraging it. I think this is the logic: You know what men are like. You know what men's brains are like. You should know that being around them, wearing make-up and laughing at their jokes and dancing and everything else you do with your friends, will only make it worse. And unless you want them to be having those thoughts, why would you encourage it? And right there is where it becomes Your Fault.

I'm in no way saying that all men are like this. Indeed, I think my ex is an extreme case. But I look at survey results like that, and I have to acknowledge that no, it's not all that strange. He's not the only man who thinks this way, and I have a one in five chance of coming across another one.

It's stuff like this that makes feel justified in snapping at men in pubs who say shit like this then pretend, innocent faces firmly plastered on, that "it was only a joke". It's NOT only a joke. And I refuse to apologise for being a cranky, sexy, difficult feminist bitch. So there.

I was going to end there, but then I realised that I only put the last paragraph there to avoid ending another entry with "I'm really scared". Defiance is an easier stance to take at the moment, and one that won't result in me hiding in a cupboard for the next thirty years. What can you do with fear, except turn it into anger?

(Women + Money) = (Divorce + Damaged Children)

The BBC informs me that we must think of the children. Why, oh why, won’t we think of the children? Whose fault is it, you ask. Well, if you can possibly blame the working mothers, you do, don’t you? We all know the “mothers should be at home with the children” rhetoric, and if that’s what the article said I’d probably have ignored it. But it doesn’t say that.

"Most women now work and their new economic independence contributes to levels of family break-up which are higher in the UK than in any other Western European country."

Yeah, it’s not that we should be at home with the kids. It’s that women having money is causing divorce. If we really want to help the children, we will stop allowing women to have their own money. See, if women are reliant entirely on their husband’s income, then they will have no choice but to remain in unhappy, unhealthy relationships! Then the children will be alright!

I don’t know who comprised this “panel of independent experts”, but the Archbishop of Canterbury is listed as a contributor. Hmmm. These are, perhaps, not experts without an agenda. The thing is, I can understand people who believe that it’s detrimental to a child to have both parents working (usually phrased as “Mums should stay at home”, of course). I would like to stay at home with my hypothetical kids for a bit. I would also like my hypothetical partner to stay at home with the hypothetical kids for a bit. I totally, completely understand the thinking here. I learnt a lot from my parents in my early years (though probably not stuff that Rowan Williams would approve of – I asked my mother why I hadn’t been christened and she said: “that will be your decision to make when you’re older, Jennifer.”). If this panel has been stuffed with bishops and such, I can understand why they’re making such a big deal out of divorce, though I think people at the BBC would do well to bear in mind that correlation does not imply causation. But to say that women’s economic independence is causing divorce and hence harming the children? Can I get a “bullshit”?

The headline worried me, too. Selfish adults damage children. Clearly, they don’t mean selfish adults – they mean selfish mothers. And what does a mother have to do to be selfish? Not a lot. Want a career? Selfish. Part-time job? Selfish. Evening course? Back to school? Selfish, selfish. And god forbid you go out with friends. This is what we’re told. We’re given the impression that our child is so precious that he or she must be given all of our time. All of it. And then, when the child becomes a teenager and starts demanding independence, we are expected to adjust to that in a snap. If we get upset, or panic, we are yet again selfish. What this all comes down to is: women wish to be human. This wish is selfish. Men (of this type, at least) wish us to be quiet, perfect porcelain dolls with no needs of our own and an unlimited supply of unconditional love and nurturing, for which we demand nothing in return. This wish, we learn, is not selfish.

I am confused. I have gone right off the idea of having kids.

Punching Women Is Funny

Since my ex and I split up, I've been processing the past five and a half years and wondering what lessons I can take from this, because I haven't quite managed to shake off my self-help book past. There's a lot of processing to do, because my memory is annoyingly good. And about twenty minutes ago, I remembered this:

We wander into a local pub. We go to the bar to get drinks, as one tends to do in a pub. Standing at the bar with a pint is a cheerful-looking elderly chap. He smiles affably as we approach, and watches us order our drinks. He makes a little small talk. He mentions something his wife said him the other week. Then he says: "I told her if she ever said that to me again I'd smack her."

I do my bug-eyed "Excuse me?!" face. He turns to my ex with a friendly face and a male-bonding laugh. "Eh?" he says. My ex says nothing. Loud, loud silence from him. "Oh," says cheeky chappie, "can't say anything while she's here, I get it!" He still looks genuinely friendly, laughing good-naturedly as though the three of us are enjoying a joke, even though my "Excuse me?!" face has turned into my "I am seriously appalled and must leave NOW" face. My ex lets out a weak laugh and we turn to go and sit outside.

I'm not sure why this little scene should suddenly have popped back into my head, but I remember several like it. Horrible domestic violence jokes or insults about me as a stand-in for all women, usually coming from a source that genuinely seemed to think they were good-naturedly joking around. And (duh) it upset me. Hugely. I would say this to my ex, and every time he would tell me that he knew the jokes were horrible, but he wasn't going to say anything, and I had a choice: either I could back off and let him say nothing, or he would get into a physical fight with the joker. Those were my two choices. Shut up and take it, or tell him to get punching. He said there was no other way to go, because were he to say anything, the other guy would take it badly and want to start a fight. Some of these men were our friends. One was (is, indeed) my friend's partner, and I could well believe that he thought these jokes were welcoming. Were you to respond, I would say, to a joking comment that you are totally screwed now that we're engaged with a smile and "Actually, I'm really lucky", that would provoke nothing more than a grumpily affectionate "Sappy git." No, he insisted, it would start a fight. I know men.

No, you don't. Or at least I hope he doesn't. I don't think he does, but the one thing I've been left with post-break-up is a huge, steaming pile of uncertainty. I've heard a lot of men make those jokes. I believe that had their blithe assumptions that said jokes are funny to all been met with a cheerful yet firm refutation, they would have stopped. I don't think men say these things with the intent to force other men to into fist fights. I just think there are a lot of people who think that on a theoretical level, punching women is funny. And as all comedy fans know, if your joke falls flat, find a better topic and fast. If you make a joke, it's because you're trying to be funny, and only really terrible comedians punch people who don't laugh at their jokes.

Scary, though, to realise that so many people do think this is funny, and scarier to realise you spent five years with a man who thinks that whilst they're not funny, they're certainly reasonable. Misogynistic jokes are a reasonable part of modern life, but isn't it a pain when your girlfriend takes exception to them? Isn't it a pain when she expects you to be bothered too? Bloody women, wanting to go out without hearing how men would really like to punch their partners in the face/tie them up and shove them in the boot of their car? (We had this one too - my ex's response was a long silnce and then "She wouldn't fit.")

Punching women is funny, and moving on is really, really tough.

Scared, Not Stupid

I was reading this post at Feministing when I came across a comment that upset me. The article is about women being coerced into sex by their partners and having their reproductive choices denied to them, and in wades a commenter to tell us that this is off-topic but Very Important. What is it? Why, that women who allow themselves to become financially dependent on a man are "100% stupid/dumb". Then they complain when they get abused, silly women! Now, I have no idea whether this commenter is male or female, but why is everything in a relationship assumed to be a woman's fault or responsibility? To an article about the frighteningly high figures of rape and abuse in relationships, this person feels the need to add that these women are stupid? Oh, thanks.

I'm nervous about adding my own voice to this story, because my ex knows about this blog. But since he dismissed it as unimportant when we were together, I should be alright. So here goes: why on earth do these people assume that women walk into abusive or controlling relationships knowing exactly what they're getting into? Why do they assume there was a point when the woman willingly handed over all control of her finances to a man she knew was going to abuse her? Why is the default assumption not that this man is horrible, but that she's dumb? Why have we created a culture in which not only will a woman not be believed if she reports physical violence or rape committed against her by her husband, but emotional abuse is believed not to exist? Why have we decided that emotional abuse does not constitute an abusive relationship? Why does the phrase "I wish he would hit me, so I could leave" resonate with so many women?

I'll talk from the perspective of a woman who has left an abusive relationship. I had to stop myself qualifying that sentence with "emotionally abusive" just in case anyone mixed it up with "real" abuse, because that's what we're taught to believe. Everyone yells. If it scares you, that's your problem, not his. Everyone says things in the heat of the moment, you should learn to brush it off. Everyone gets road rage, and it's not like he's ever hit you, is it? Did he apologise? Well, that's alright, then. And then we get the guilt trip: how dare you call yourself abused? Think of those poor women who are getting beaten senseless by their husbands every night. How can you diminish their suffering by calling yourself abused? After all, it's only a bit of yelling, or a bit of jealousy, or one slap in the face. That's not abuse. Who do you think you are?

We don't quantify anything else this way. We don't tell people they weren't robbed because the burglars didn't smash anything, or because Mrs Johnson up the road had more stuff taken. We don't say the Iraq war isn't a war because World War II was bigger. By calling emotional abuse for what it is, we don't diminish or cheapen women who experience domestic violence. We aren't claiming to have it worse than them. We are simply admitting our own experiences of abuse, and using the awareness of what we went through to help us pick ourselves up and move on.

Women do not walk into abusive relationships knowing that the partner is an abuser. We walk into abusive relationships seeing a charming, sweet guy who adores us. We fall in love, as people do, and we continue to see a charming, sweet guy who adores us. Instead of seeing his jealousy as a form of control, we see it for what he tells us it is - a sign that he loves us, can't live without us, can't bear the thought of losing us. So we cut down on the going out, pull back from the friends who inspire these feelings, because we don't want to hurt him. We applaud him for being so willing to open up to us, for being so unafraid to be vulnerable. We don't see this as control. After all, it's not like he asked us not to see these friends. We did it willingly, because we saw it was hurting him. We chose this.

Women do not walk into abusive relationships intending to relinquish control of their finances because we are dumb and can't be bothered. Maybe it starts with something tiny. He's an old-fashioned gent, he likes to pay on dates. He wants to look after us, to provide for us. Perhaps he begins to tell us not to take money out with us. We don't need it, he pays, we know that. Perhaps we get sick, or lose our jobs. Perhaps he looks after us during that time, pays for us, supports us. We feel grateful for all he's done for us, and he says, no, not at all. I enjoy looking after you. Perhaps when we're ready to go back to work he says, no, stay. I like having you at home. Perhaps we say we want to go back to work and he says why? Don't you trust me to provide for you? Am I not enough for you? Perhaps by this point, we're already a little bit scared of him. Perhaps we've seen him as an aggressive drunk. Perhaps we've seen him scream at someone who didn't deserve it, or hit someone in a bar fight. Perhaps he's never done anything to us, and we think we're safe, but we know he has that unpredictable, violent edge to him. We know that, maybe, it's not so safe to disagree with him. He won't hurt us, but he might hurt someone else, or he might start punching the walls when we fight, the table during breakfast, the pillows when we're in bed. Does it make us "100% stupid/dumb" to just give up? Or does it make us shit-scared? Perhaps you don't think it's wrong to call frightened women "dumb". Perhaps you think we can "just leave". Perhaps you, from your lofty position on the hill, think we should have seen it coming, should have got out earlier or never got in, and because we didn't, it's just our too bad. We got ourselves into this, and we can get ourselves out. Perhaps you see no need for compassion here.

For a long time, I knew that if I got in the car with my ex, I was bound to hear an aggressive round-up of all my character flaws. If he took a wrong turn, it was my fault. If he was in the wrong lane, it was my fault. If I dared to start crying, he would scream. The first time this happened, I was shocked. I jumped out of the car at traffic lights and ran home. He left me message after message, crying and apologising and telling me he loved me. And I forgave him. After all, it was only once, and everyone has their off-days, right? This is why it's so hard to find the red line that says "GET OUT" - we can all forgive someone for fucking up once. When he did it for the second time, it was a year later. That, too, could be written off as an isolated incident. Once it happens for a third, fourth, fifth time and you're sure that this is a pattern and not just a couple of isolated incidents, the impact has gone. You're no longer outraged that he would treat you this way. You've got used to it. Not only that, but you're frightened. This stuff is scary. Being attacked, verbally or physically or emotionally, by someone you love is frightening. Being attacked by someone you know to be violent is frightening. You're confused. You thought you were safe, and he only acted that way to other people. You didn't have a plan for what you'd do if he attacked you. You don't trust him not to follow you if you leave. Your self-esteem is shot. You don't trust yourself. If someone you love can say such horrible things to you, he must mean them. You must really be that bad. He's a saint for putting up with you, really. None of this makes you "dumb". It makes you ABUSED. You don't believe you're abused, of course. You believe him when he says he's just being honest, or he's trying to help, or that he just gets this way sometimes and you just have to ignore him. If you do talk to someone else about it, they tell you you're overreacting. You lose all trust in your own judgement, and begin to rely on his. He's lovely to you in public, then screams at you behind closed doors. He tells you he only has the courage to be honest when he's mad. You trust that. You trust everything he's telling you, because he wouldn't make that up, would he?

We are not "dumb". We are not "stupid". We did not choose this. We did not ask for this. We do not want this. We may be stuck, we may be scared, we may have given up, but we are not stupid. We know that people won't believe us, or will blame us. We will be hysterical women, overreacting to a stupid fight, or we will deserve everything we get. I am proud of myself for getting out. I am proud that I am not that woman anymore. I am not stupid, and it was horribly upsetting and jarring to come across that sort of victim-blaming. So many women have not done what I did. So many women are scared, and stuck. So many women have given up. I pray that one day they will be able to get out. What they do not need is to have sanctimonious tossers calling them "dumb". If you must throw blame around, there is one very logical place to throw it, and that place is the abuser, NOT the abused.

EDIT: The original commenter has informed us that we are far too sensitive and should get some professional counselling if we cannot deal with "opinions" such as "abused women are dumb". This post is not for that commenter. This post is for those who want to understand.

In Case You Didn't Know...

Jeremy Paxman is a pillock.

Oh, no! The poor middle-class white men! They've got no chance of getting into TV, have they? He knows of five women - five! - in powerful positions, and so obviously this is evidence that women have taken over the world, because they shouldn't be in those positions at all! How dare they? Why aren't they making the tea?

What is wrong with these men? If there are a hundred people in a room, ninety-four men and six women, women are clearly underrepresented. But the ninety-four men are all panicking because there were only two women last time. It's a conspiracy! There can't possibly be six women who are good at their jobs. Bloody political correctness, grouch grouch grouch.

Jeremy Paxman makes insane amounts of money. He sees an awful lot of middle-class white men on his job. I would wager he sees very few women or people of colour on a day-to-day basis, unless they're fetching his sandwiches for him, so presumably it must come as a shock to have anyone who isn't a middle-class white man speak to him like an equal. Perhaps that's the problem here.

I decided to do a little experiment, using the guest hosts of HIGNFY. In the eleven series of the show since Angus Deayton was fired, we have had:

13 white women
1 woman of colour
3 men of colour
30 white men

Ooh, Jeremy's right! Look at that, nearly half as many women as men! Wow, we really must be taking over. Seriously, though, I really enjoy HIGNFY, but only one black woman (newsreader Moira Stuart, who'd just been fired for apparently being too old. Lotsa jokes there)? I must say I'm disappointed. Mock the Week has had exactly one black man and one black woman, and in every show five out of six of the panellists are white men. I decided to look up the panellists on QI, too - in the first series we have Meera Syal and Peter Serafinowicz, and then no POC at all for the next four series. Wikipedia promises me Lebanon-born Dom Joly next series, but then it also promises an appearance from creepy molesting bastard Johnny Vegas, and I'm afraid that if appearances by Vegas outnumber appearances by all POC put together, I am going to have to go and scream at Stephen Fry.

So, yeah, nice one, Paxman. White men are totally screwed over by British TV.

Why Isn't She Dead Yet?

I've been meaning to write about this for a while, and was reminded to do so this morning when the BBC reported on Margaret Thatcher's funeral plans. Is she dead? No. Has her health worsened? No. Have any decisions been made as to whether or not she will get a state funeral? Again, no. So, perhaps, this is not technically news. But the BBC has learnt that people love to read about Thatcher's impending death. At the time of writing it's the most-read story on the website. And for a long time, probably since her stroke or maybe before, there has been an unmistakeable whiff of "Why isn't she dead yet?"

I was born during Thatcher's government, and I quite like that I got to come into the world during the reign of the first female Prime Minister (when I was seven or so, I did a quiz which asked "Who was the first female Prime Minister?". Thatcher was the only one I'd heard of, but I was convinced that couldn't be right as there must have been female PMs back in the 18th century, mustn't there?). I was still very young when she was kicked out, so I don't remember much about the way the country was under her, but I was always keenly conscious of the fact that everybody hated her. It was so acceptable to hate her that newspapers could call her a damnable bitch with no fear of complaint - except from a few reactionary Conservatives, but who cares about them, right? - and praying for her death on stage would earn you a huge round of applause. But this was the way the world was, so I didn't think about it much.

This all came back into my head during one of my frequent bouts of insomnia, when I decided to hell with the sleeping and I would watch comedy videos on Youtube. My first port of call was Room 101, with guest Mark Steel. I am quite the Mark Steel fan; he's the sort of comedian who will be invited onto Question Time to make serious points. He makes politics funny, he makes history funny, and he never has to resort to slurs based on gender, race, sexuality or physical appearance, unlike the legions of comedians who think they're being terribly clever and edgy in doing so. Anyway, Steel talked about Bono and Ben Elton and bad teachers, and I nodded and laughed merrily. He then said he would have chosen Thatcher, but that it was "too obvious". He told a story about how he was sitting at home watching the news on the day Thatcher had her stroke - the Very Serious Music played, the newsreader had his Very Serious Face on, and a picture of Mrs Thatcher flashed up: "I must have been one of about a million people who leapt out of their seats and shouted 'Dead?!'" He went on to talk about the disappointment of it being "only a stroke".

In a similar vein, Jeremy Hardy on QI (whom I am not a fan of the way I am of Steel, but he's usually funny and I consider both of them part of Linda Smith's lot, which gets them quite a lot of points automatically) remarked, "Thatcher's grave is going to be a permanent urinal to all decent people, isn't it?" Let's look at that. First of all, Thatcher wasn't the topic of conversation - this was the first thing that came into his head when someone mentioned graves. Her grave is going to be a permanent urinal - she will never, ever, ever be forgiven. And to all decent people - she is so horrible that pissing on a grave becomes not a sign of horrendous, deliberate and malicious disrespect, but a badge of honour, and if you don't fancy pissing on the woman's grave, you're not a decent person. Neither Steel nor Hardy are proponents of the "haha, I can swear and toss out tired old stereotypes" style of what is apparently terribly sophisticated comedy, so I can only conclude that yes, they do bear that kind of ill-will towards Thatcher, and they do genuinely believe that she was such a force of evil that she ruined the country. They genuinely see her death as being 'justice'.

Why? She's an old lady. She has had no power of any kind for more than fifteen years. She is ill and frail, and looks it. Will it be 'justice' to see an old lady die nearly two decades after she last did anything? Tony Blair took us into war under false pretences, but nobody was praying for his death - they just wanted him to leave power. Now that he has, we don't care what happens to him. When he does die, there will undoubtedly be people who say "I'm not sorry he died, he caused thousands of others to die" but nobody will be hanging around his deathbed screaming for him to piss off and die already, we're tired of waiting, you soldier-killing bastard, you Iraqi-massacring bastard, why won't you die? Even from parents of the dead, this would be unacceptable and, well, pretty damn weird. Politicians make bad decisions and we hate them for it, but they're rarely criminals (well, of the non-profiteering type, anyway). Mrs Thatcher was not a serial killer, she was not a rapist, she was not an abductor of children. And I have no truck whatsoever with people who say things like "well, she raped the miners" or "she abducted our children's future" (both of which I have heard recently), because using language intended for violent crimes to describe a political decision you disagreed with is frankly vile.

Is death 'justice'? I don't think so. I can see, however, how some might think that Ian Huntley's death would be justice, or Josef Fritzl's (when they're not pissing themselves laughing about it, of course), or any other real criminals who directly inflict real abuse on others, but this does not describe Margaret Thatcher. It just doesn't. Her policies may have caused great difficulties for great numbers of people, sure, but to compare her to a violent criminal is grossly offensive. "Thatcher did worse things to the miners" is a LIE. And to anticipate her death with the eagerness of Christmas Day, to look upon it as a gift, the shiny toy in the shop that will finally, finally make you happy, finally make you truly believe that Father Christmas exists, is just ghoulish. And yes, whether you like it or not, misogynistic. The same show that laughs at Josef Fritzl's actions talks with unconcealed disgust about Thatcher and the desperate wait for her death. There are few figures in the world, criminals or not, who inspire such gleeful reflections about their eventual death, and it is hard not to conclude that Mrs Thatcher, an uppity woman who dared to believe in power for herself, is in her old age a victim of men who wish they could have cut her down to size when she was powerful and are now taking the opportunity to do so in her weakness.

I believe that there are a lot of lovely men in the world. I also believe there are a lot of down-and-dirty misogynist assholes, who know they are misogynist assholes and enjoy it. The majority of men, I think, believe that they are good guys who love women, but have never dealt with their internal misogyny because they simply don't see it. Most Thatcher-hating men believe themselves to be totally open to a woman running the country, and they hate her that much because she is Just That Awful (Hillary Clinton has seen a similar thing in the last few months: "I've got no problem with a female President, but why does it have to be that bitch? I'm not sexist, I just hate her. Jesus, you fucking hysterical feminists, what's wrong with you?"). But she's not Just That Awful. A man in her position would not be subjected to this. He might have been disliked at the time, sure, but once he got out of power nobody would care. There would be no close watch on his health, looking for signs of the Reaper. There would be no comedy routines predicated on the blissful day when he finally passed on. There would be no large-scale defacings of his image. In fact, his death would be treated the same way as that of any other Prime Minister - we would look in the papers and say: "Oh, is he dead? He was the guy with the miners, wasn't he? That was a bit crap. Oh well." Then we would look at some cartoons.

All this fuss about a state funeral, too - who cares, really? I'm not sure anybody does. People are just frightened that she'll have a funeral in public and nice things will be said. People don't want good things said about her, and crucially, they don't want her to be remembered as anything other than a useless evil bitch. A state funeral is an endorsement. An endorsement of the first female Prime Minister who managed to get elected three times, despite her apparent useless evil bitchery. The Auditor, currently, is a fair picture of "useless" - wasn't elected in, and will probably be elected straight back out again. And if she was an evil bitch, so fucking what? What choice did she have? You can't be a woman in charge and be a moderate, or be "nice", especially if you're in the Tory party, where women are there to make the tea, thank you, sweetheart. You have to fight them all the damn way. You have to take them to war, you have to tell them to toe the fucking line or you'll fire them, no excuses, no nothing. And to the watching public, that's not what women do. The papers tell us that women are embracing their destiny as nurturers, and want to stay at home with the babies. If this is what you're being told constantly, and then along comes a Mrs Thatcher who is going to do what she's decided to do, you can't use human interest stories to appeal to her feminine side, because she doesn't care. She will not have it. She is busy. People perhaps start to think, maybe she doesn't have a feminine side. Maybe she's some sort of mutant. She's weird.

And now the evil bitch is old and sick, withering away. Just getting out of power wasn't enough to satisfy the misogyny that dare not speak. She ran the country, and she ran it like a man. She must be destroyed, utterly and completely. After all this time, the scars run deep. How dare she? I hope I live to see her die, and all decent people will piss on her grave. Well, fuck that. No decent person pisses on anyone's grave. I don't care whose grave it is. And no decent, self-aware person waits with delight for the death of someone they never met. Hate her policies, hate her actions, whatever. But if you're desperate to see her die, you're just a creep.

Out-of-Touch Old Gits: Women are Mush-Brains

To continue with Feminist Issue Week, I'm going to yell at some people.

In this article, which I strongly recommend, we learn that Theo Paphitis of Dragons' Den fame is an arsehole.

"All this feminist stuff," he said, "are we seriously saying that 50% of all jobs should go to women?" Paphitis went on to note that women "get themselves bloody pregnant and ... they always argue that they'll be working until the day before, have the baby, go down to the river, wash it off, give it to the nanny and be back at work the following day, but sure enough, their brains turn to mush, and then after the birth the maternal instincts kick in, they take three months off, get it out of their system and are back to normal". On the subject of paternity leave he suggested that he thinks "it's a bit soppy".

Yes, this "feminist stuff". It's shit, isn't it? No, of course 50% of jobs shouldn't go to women, it's not as though they're half the population or, y'know, people. Also, women somehow get themselves pregnant (how does that work?). Also notice that he seems to believe it's totally reasonable for a woman to have a baby, jump straight out of the hospital bed and goback to work, as though they haven't actually undergone an enormously painful, body-altering experience and pushed a bloody person out themselves. Note that taking three months off is considered insane and the result of "brains turning to mush".

On top of that, the contempt with which he mentions nannies suggests that even if we could jump out of the hospital bed and go straight back to work, it wouldn't do anything to push up his respect for us as a gender. My partner and I quite like Dragons' Den and I distinctly remember watching an episode in which a woman pitching them made a snarky remark about the nanny doing the work. Paphitis, who has five kids, immediately stopped her and said, "There's no nanny. There's just Mrs P." Two of the other dragons (five kids and six kids respectively) immediately fell over themselves to make clear that they had never, ever hired child-rearing help. For five fucking kids. And Paphitis thinks paternity leave is "soppy" so God knows he's not helping out. His poor wife. Can't get any help from anyone. Looking after the kids is the mother's job and only the mother's job, goddammit. He's big and important and has businesses to run. Including, amusingly, multiple lingerie companies. You'd think it wouldn't be in his best interests, especially taking into account his personal celebrity, to make disparaging remarks about his entire target market. And lingerie shops have to have, well, bra-fitters. The entire staff has to be female, really, and he's so unconcerned with them that he's quite willing to go out and call them mush-brains to the entire world. Guess where I won't be buying my lingerie anymore. I'd write and tell him, but he'd probably assume I was just a pregnant mush-head. Screw it, I'm going to do it anyway. La Senza, Contessa, you will be hearing from me.

Alan Sugar, apparently, thinks it's disgraceful that he's not allowed to hire based on whether or not a woman wants a family (and presumably, if she says no and then gets pregnant, he can fire her), and that to cut all the crap out, he just doesn't hire women. Just in case they get pregnant. I think that might be kind of illegal, but nobody will tell him off because he's on the telly. He doesn't think it should be illegal, because successful businesses can collapse under the strain of having to phone a temp agency and ask for someone who wants six months' work. How useless is he? We all know Alan Sugar is out of touch (email phone, anyone? All the convenience of email with none of that computer/internet stuff! You wouldn't think he made his money in bloody computers), but Jesus Christ. Has the man ever left 1972?

Edited to remove incorrect information.

My Vulva Is Not Your Work of Art

So, to start Feminist Issue Week, let's go with this one, the empowering vaginoplasty. I was confronted with this over breakfast on Sunday. What we have here is a doctor, apparently known to some as "Dr Sex" (I'm sorry, but he gave that name to himself, I don't care what he says), who wants to help women by cutting up their privates and reshaping them to eighteen-year-old porn star standards. This is so great for women, and he's totally doing it because he cares.

"He wants to talk about his work, which is proudly displayed in a series of ring binders. It is not my usual choice of pre-breakfast viewing. “Look at that — excess tissue along the clitoris. Now, see how clean and sleek that is. The minora: nice and neat.”"

First of all, ew. Second of all, clean and sleek and nice and neat? I'm not a bloody designer vase. But he's very proud of these cloned vulvas. What does it involve, doctor?

“I have procedures that I pioneered, trademarked and have developed over the past 12 years. Laser vaginal rejuvenation, for the enhancement of sexual gratification. Designer laser vaginoplasty, for the aesthetic enhancement of the vulva structures. I also do liposculpting.”

Again, ew. It really, really freaks me out when anyone uses the word "designer" to refer to reproductive parts. And it's always women's reproductive parts, too - men get their share of the surgical enhancement crap, but I've never come across "designer penis" ads. Anyway, this guy is a multimillionaire and charges tens of thousands of pounds to reshape and revitalise.

"A self-styled, can-do crusader for women, he sees his role as one of liberating women from the tyranny of sexual inadequacy and disappointment. By arming us with the tools for total physical dominion over our private parts, he is, to his mind, setting us free."

ARGH. Argh, argh, argh, ARGH. A crusader for women? How are you a crusader for women if you earn your living from telling them the most intimate parts of their body are weird and gross and need fixing? Also, he's not arming us with the tools for total physical dominion over our private parts. By doing this, HE is the one with total physical dominion over our private parts. He's the one with the tools, and he's cutting us up with them, to make us look like his previous works. A ring binder full of identical vaginas. It's like a really twisted version of Argos.

“My customers say, ‘You know what, I don’t like the length of my labia minora. I don’t want the small lips projecting outside the outer lips.’ We can take that excess skin away. They say, ‘I don’t want my labia majora. They’re too flat, I want them full.’ We can inject fat there. Or, ‘I’ve got too much fat in my mons pubis. It looks like I have a penis.’ And we can do that. Or, ‘I’ve had children, I’m too relaxed, I want intense sexual gratification’, so we tighten the muscle. Or, simply, ‘I just look too old.’ Because it's all about youth, youth, youth.”

Oh, for fuck's sake. I wouldn't mind betting that nobody has ever come into his office and said "You know what, I've got too much fat in my mons pubis". Nobody says "mons pubis". The idea that women are actually sitting around with little hand mirrors between their legs, poking their labia and panicking about lack of plumpness, panicking to the extent that they have to call a doctor and pay thousands of pounds to have them fattened up frightens me more than I can say. Whether it's just come from watching porn, or from horrible partners, or from the nagging insecurity that they're wrong, the magazines have told them that so few women have great vaginas, that they have to go and ask a man who knows. A feminist crusader, no less. Am I wrong? Yes, you are. You have flat labia, you ugly bitch, says the feminist crusader.

"He does hymen repair, but doesn’t talk about it since receiving death threats from religious groups."

I'm not sure what the worst part of this sentence is. I can't stand the stupid virginity cult, and since some women legitimately fear for their lives if they don't bleed like hell on the wedding night and give the man something to show for it, this is the one part of the surgery I could, under these circumstances, understand (it's still vile, though). But for a feminist crusader, this seems cowardly in the extreme. Stand up for your damn patients. No points for anybody here.

He also does a rather bizarre procedure called the G-Shot, which involves sticking collagen into the G-spot, or what is assumed to be the G-spot. I don't know much about the existence or lack thereof of a G-spot, because I am lazy and do not research. He reckons this collagen idea is brilliant and 87% of people report more sexual pleasure. The journalist amusingly points out that this figure comes from a study of 20 people. 87% of 20 people? I don't get science.

Some say there is no G-spot, or that it only exists in a certain number of women.

“I would say that every woman does have one. Reports like that . . . it’s as if men want to take pleasure away from women.”

Go Feminist Crusader! We all have G-spots that are insufficiently pleasurable naturally and must have plumping agent stuffed in there! It's totally about our pleasure and not about his profits at all! Hooray!

The journalist asks, helpfully, if this is maybe not about us and more about piling the paranoia on in a world that's already full of the stuff.

“Look, demand for these treatments comes from women,” he says. “I didn’t create it, the market was there, and I discovered it because I listened to women. Every single one of the procedures has been developed because it has been requested. And it’s going international. There is demand.”

You know, I find this remarkably hard to believe. I know that some women are hugely insecure about the way their privates look, and would give anything to have something done about it, but not only is correcting these apparent faults not a helpful or feminist action, but also this man is operating a business. Businesses must have customers. Without vulvas to inject, he's fucked. He needs us, and he must convince us that we need him too. That's what success is all about. He has an enormous vested interest in instilling paranoia, nurturing it and making sure it doesn't die. There is no way in hell he could be a multi-millionaire in a world where women aren't made to feel insecure about this and no alternative route is publicised. He knows damn well what he's doing here.

Apparently he has a couple of UK customers a month, but we have no stats about vaginoplasty over here because it doesn't really happen. He thinks (and this is fucking brilliant) that this isn't because we don't need it, it's because we're weird. He blames our healthcare system. No, he does. And this man is from the stupidly rich nation where people die because they can't afford medical care. I mean, I rag on the NHS as much as anyone, but thank God we're not in America. He, however, thinks we should envy Americans because they can spend all their money on a designer vagina - I hate that phrase with a rhyming passion - and then die of whatever when their money and insurance runs out.

"Also, the mentality of the doctors — they work so hard, they have no life. Doctors here are entrepreneurial, in the first place."

Yeah, our doctors are fucking weird. Wanting to save lives and shit. Who cares if people die, so long as they die with diamond-encrusted genitals? Seriously, this is disgusting. Who the hell thinks like this?

"It isn’t just the fault of the doctors. Some of the blame must also be laid at the feet of British women. Matlock is frustrated by the modesty of his British patients when it comes to that part of their anatomy. “My UK patients are so shy. They say, ‘Women in the UK would never talk about this.’ The attitude is, ‘That’s how it is. You were born like that, so leave it alone.’ That’s why they come here. Here, the culture is 100% different.”"

Well, thank fuck for that. How dare we be modest about it? It's not like we keep it covered up and hidden from view all the time, and only the people we really trust are allowed to see it or anything. Oh, wait. I cannot believe "you were born like that, so leave it alone" is a bad thing in this context.

He goes on about the whole tighter vagina = better sex thing, which the journalist points out is crap. We read a testimonial from a happy customer. She wanted to be like a nineteen-year-old, which makes me sad for her self-esteem.

"Back in Matlock’s office, we’re poring over pictures of a Playboy model displaying what he calls “a beautiful structure”. Matlock's hands-down bestseller is laser vaginal labioplasty, and it’s this kind of image, he claims, that inspires women. “Women bring in this pornographic information — I have drawers of it — and they say, ‘That is what I wanna see.’ That’s what women want to see after rejuvenation.”"

I don't know about you, but I feel sick. Women watch porn, feel inadequate, and come to him. He confirms their fears and takes a huge chunk of money. Women want to look like porn stars. WHY?

"Dr Toby Mayer is a plastic surgeon working in Beverly Hills. “If someone has a functional problem with their vagina, then they should have reconstructive surgery,” he says. “But who can say what a vagina should look like? I am 66 years old. I have never, in all my life, ever heard a man say,‘I saw this woman, she had an ugly vagina.’ Never. To tell someone otherwise is to promote body dysmorphia. What is the mentality of this person? It’s not progressive, it’s entrepreneurial. It’s about money. And doctors should never be about the money.”"

Read that again. And again, and again. Thank God for him. I have not lost faith in all doctors. And, thankfully, even "Dr Sex" himself has to admit that no, men do not care if your vagina looks like that of a teenage porn star. He's quite sad about it, though. We end on some horrible motivational-speaker thing about perfection, and then some even more horrible stuff about French women having toned pelvic floors.

I really hate this wave of people who say and do horrifically anti-feminist things, and then try and pretend they're trying to help us. We've had people who think women shouldn't be working, and tell us that they're on our side, because we don't really want to be working. This "I correct women because they want to be corrected" stuff has been all over the place forever, trying to sell us an image of the person we could be if only we bought this, or went there, or did that. We are supposed to accept without question that breast implants can be empowering if a woman really, truly wants them (and I'm not about to psychoanalyse any of these women, but empowering? No. Confidence-boosting, perhaps) and I am pretty worried that one day soon I will be expected to accept without question that if a woman really, truly wants this man to re-mould her vagina in his signature style, then more power to her. It's inevitable that vaginoplasty will migrate over here, but I wish I could keep it out. Whatever this guy says, we clearly don't need it here, otherwise there would be actual demand for it. We seem to run enough plastic surgery clinics, and if enough of their patients, unsubjected to the hard sell, had asked for this sort of thing, they would have found someone to do it. It's all about profit.

What it is emphatically NOT about is empowering us. It's also not about what we want. This man knows what he thinks a good vagina looks like. It's not like a haircut, or even a nose job - one size will damn well fit all here. There is one image of symmetrical, youthful perfection. What if you like your flat labia? You think he'll encourage you in that, or will he break out his ring binder and say, in wheedling tones, "Oh, but darling, see how much better you could look"? The only reason this is being marketed as personal empowerment is because, by his own admission, men couldn't care less if there's fat in your mons pubis (I don't even understand this one, frankly) - if they did care, the good doctor would be working that angle for all he's worth. We all know that what other people think is far more important than what we think, at least when it comes to our own appearance, and if there was a viable "don't you want to give him this gift?" or "well, you can leave it alone if you want, but it's the kind of thing guys whisper about in pubs" selling point, the empowerment spiel would be out the window. He doesn't care about us, he wants money. Of course he wants money. That's understandable. But for the love of God, admit you're in it for the money. Don't pretend you're in it for us, because you know you're not. You know this is nothing but a breeding ground for insecurity and panic and self-loathing and looking at as much porn as possible trying to work out what the 'perfect' vagina looks like. And then we come to you and you say "Let me help you, I want to help you." And we believe that we're wrong, and funny-looking, and can never have sex ever again because what will he say? And you smile, and you fix us, and you take £40,000. And you get to tell the whole world that you're on our side.

I am not here to be shaped and moulded into someone else's idea of perfect. Not a stranger's, not a doctor's, not my partner's. And whatever the good doctor may say about the woman's decisions, it's not. He gets to reshape and remould every woman to have the "structure" and the "lines" that he thinks a woman should have. I am a person, and I am not your work of art. In fact, I'm one of those Englishwomen you hate so much - I was fucking born like this, so leave me the fuck alone.

My Uterus Is Not On The Free Market

OK, last one today, I promise.

I'm confused by this. Not the article itself, which makes points that need to be made about an issue that makes me very cross. I'm confused by the comments. Why are so many people saying "Oh, but of course we must respect the free market"? The free market protects your right to open up yet another coffee shop, but this isn't bad coffee, this is medical health. You're not a shill, you're providing the medicine that your customers' doctors have decreed necessary for their health. You are not part of that equation and you do not have the right to tell someone that they cannot have the medication they need. I don't understand why anyone, much less a woman, much less a feminist woman, would defend the right to open up a pharmacy that will not give you your medication. This is not about people being able to choose which supermarket they go to or whether they give their money to Starbucks or Costa, this is HEALTHCARE.

Note this:

"We try to practice pharmacy in a way that we feel is best to help our community and promote healthy lifestyles," said Lloyd Duplantis, who owns Lloyd's Remedies in Gray, La., and is a deacon in his Catholic church. "After researching the science behind steroidal contraceptives, I decided they could hurt the woman and possibly hurt her unborn child. I decided to opt out."

He decided. So what if a doctor prescribed it? This guy looked it up on the internet and he decided not to allow women access to their meds! He thinks you can "opt out" of contraception. No, mate, you're a pharmacist. You don't get to do that.

When feminists, of all people, are arguing for this guy's right to "decide" whether or not women get their medication, for his right to throw misleading information around a field in which he is supposed to be expert and trustworthy, his right to try and conform any woman who walks in to his warped idea of morality, we've got trouble, my friends. Right here in River City. I don't think this kind of thing would fly here (the sheer arrogance of "I decided" is enough to put most of us off supporting him), but Americans are having trouble holding on to their legal abortions as it is. Bush has been eroding the abortion laws, McCain will surely do the same and I do not believe for a minute that Obama will be a pro-choice stalwart (I think he's wishy-washy, light on policy and could just as easily be a Republican if he thought that would work better for him - sorry), so I can't see that this erosion will do anything but continue. And with feminists who make noises about the "free market" when it comes to their own health - if a woman needs contraceptives for ovarian cancer, as is one Feministing commenter's experience, and a scary fake pharmacy steals her prescription and sends her away, the fake pharmacy is not just screwing with this woman's health, it's risking her life. A few people on the thread pointed out how rare pharmacies are in some parts of the US, and for some people "I'll just go to another one" is not feasible. And even if the Pill's only use was pregnancy prevention, so what? We're feminists. We should be defending our reproductive rights with every damn ounce of strength we have, not making stupid weak noises about the "free market". NO. STOP IT.

I think we reach a point where we have to stop saying "but I can see both sides of the argument" or "technically under the law it might be possible for them to argue this, and we should respect that". Anti-choicers are rabid. They will make no concessions to our side. They will just yell that we're bad, we're evil, we're baby-killers, we're corrupting society, we're causing all these wars and deaths and tornadoes and things. So why are we trying to see their side? Of course we want to debate more intelligently than they do, but why can we not tell them they're wrong, they're liars, they're hypocrites, they're doing enormous damage with their deliberate use of misinformation? Why do we have to "see their point" and bend over backwards to make cases of gross malpractice like this fit inside the law? Are we that desperate to be seen as reasonable?

I tell you what, I am so sick of this whole "reasonable" thing. The word is a stick with which to beat women. Call us "shrill" or "hysterical" when we disagree and you've won, because then everything we say is born out of irrational feminine emotion and is hence not relevant. We've internalised that we won't be taken seriously if we are seen to get angry at all over any issue, no matter how worthy of the anger that issue may be, and we try as hard as we can to seem reasonable. Mum and I had the TV on while doing the crossword this evening, and we caught part of a show called Mary Queen of Shops, based on the standard TV premise of sending an expert into a failing business and making it work again. The clothes shop under scrutiny was run by a husband and wife team (mainly the husband, with the beaten-down wife on grunt-work duty), and was doing terrifically badly because the man had no idea about clothes. He also wouldn't listen to a damn word anyone else said, and rejected all the expert's plans out of hand. Repeatedly. She, of course, got frustrated. So he, in the voice of a true git, said, "Now, just calm down. Calm down, relax. I'm trying to explain." Any female blogger knows those words. They're "shut up, you silly little woman, and let the big man explain it to you" words. I've seen most episodes of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, and even though he goes ballistic in most episodes, nobody has ever told him to calm down, or relax. Certainly nobody would dare to invite Ramsay into a failing business and say, in impossibly patronising tones, "I'm explaining it to you, so you'll understand." I've seen people who think they know how to run their own business better than Ramsay would, but I've never seen anyone who thinks they can teach Ramsay a thing or two about cooking. Eventually the git gave in, the expert did her thing and of course made it eight million times better, but I got the sense that the git would have almost preferred to go bankrupt, just so as not to be bested by a woman.

This is what we're up against. We can't be "reasonable" because we are not in a world full of allies. We are in a world full of men who would happily throw our rights away, and powerful but stupid women who would happily help because they don't seem to understand that no exception would be written in for them (I don't get these women. Help would be appreciated). We have to fight loud and hard, and it's not even for progress. It's for the privilege of staying where we are. We're not making hard-won advancements, we're struggling with hard-won stagnation. In the interests of managing, if not reducing, sexism, feminists have to come out in defence of women they despise. I have found myself defending both Ann Widdecombe and Ruth Kelly, both of whose views conflict on almost every level with mine (Ann Widdecombe bothers me on a personal level as well, whereas Ruth Kelly's track record on issues of equality and reproductive rights just make me nervous), and several American feminists talk about the sad necessity of defending someone called Ann Coulter, who is by all accounts rather mad and one of the powerful but stupid women I mentioned earlier. We not only have to defend these women, we have to watch out for opportunities to defend them, because we know how pervasive and insidious sexism is. We also know that we can't be weak about it. We have to make people listen to us, we have to stand up for our cause at every opportunity, we have to fight like hell. We all know this. So why are we so concerned with seeming "reasonable" to the point of defending medical malpractice that runs totally contrary to our belief system? Why are we allowing some man to "decide" which healthcare we are and are not permitted to have, with no medical training at all? Why are we amused by them, calling them "stupid and wrong" in the same dismissive way that we talk about people who used to bully us at school, instead of using more serious words like "dangerous" and "malpractice"? I learnt a harsh lesson when the leaders of the Catholic and Anglican churches over here noticed the power that their counterparts in the US had and started digging in their heels for a little piece of that here (letters to the Times from various reverends state that all this talk by the bishops of Christian-hating and marginalising from the government and the public is rubbish and they haven't noticed anything of the sort). If it happens anywhere in the Western world, it can happen everywhere in the Western world. And when it's happening in your own damn country, you cannot afford to sit back and say "free market". My uterus is not to be negotiated by the church, the government, my family or even my partner, and it sure as hell is not on the free market. Read that guy's speech again. He's denying women their medication because he decided to. The decision isn't his to make, but we're letting him make it anyway. He decided, and we let him.

An Epic Rant: Tad Safran is Tosspot McGee

Tad Safran just wanted to remind me that he is a useless tosspot.

I don't know why he bothered, since my memory of this is still pretty strong in my mind (Safran argues that British women just don't spend enough money making themselves look like eighteen-year-olds, is horrified about being set up with a woman he deems insufficiently attractive and is more horrified still that this ugly beast might still need to be sold on the good qualities he insists that he has - I think I may segue on to this piece, because it reads like a self-parody), but just in case, he informs me here that equal pay for men and women is "inherently unfair". The piece, if you're link-phobic, is written as a conversation of sorts between Tosspot McGee and a "reader". On the one hand, yes, get a woman in to argue with him, but on the other, get a journalist. And if she is a journalist, why isn't she credited as such? Lord knows. It seems to be a series, too, as another link on the side says "Tad and Molly: Why Women Are Sluts and Men Are Studs." I didn't have the stomach to click on it.

So anyway, let's humour him for a minute. Why, Tad, is it unfair to pay women the same as men? Why is it unfair to men, corporations and the economy in general? Do tell.

"Well, in most industries, there is a period of training, which is at considerable expense to a company. With male employees, the expense will be amortised over the next four or so decades because men will work until they die or retire. The majority of women will choose to stop working after a decade or so and the money spent on their training will be thrown out with the dirty nappies."

No, seriously. That's what he says. We should pay women less because some of them have babies and it's a waste of training. He makes no further points in the rest of the article, except to claim that men still "pay for" women (hence, they need more money) and then as his final line, says "I'm starting to think you get paid by the word." Oh God, yes, won't these women just shut up? And isn't he witty! I so want to shag you now, Tad.

I could make several arguments against what he's saying. So let's do that.
1. Tad is living in the 1950s. Men don't stay in the same job (and certainly not in the same company) for forty years anymore. Everyone chops and changes, quits for a better offer, decides it's not for them after all and trains to become a tennis coach instead.

2. Perhaps Tad intends to lock his imaginary wife up in the house with the dirty nappies, but most women actually, y'know, go back to work again. If we go with Tad's theory that the majority of women leave work after a decade, most of them don't stay at home with a thirty-year-old child wondering why they're still changing nappies. We go back, so as not to waste the corporations' precious time and money.

3. What, I wonder, would Tad's reaction be if women agreed to give up having kids in exchange for equal pay? If Tad wants a baby, he can grow one in a damn test tube. I sincerely hope Tad doesn't want a baby, because how fucked-up will that poor kid be?

4. Tad wants to know if it's fair that male and female docotrs are paid the same, since female doctors are more likely to go part-time. Tad, mate: Do you honestly want to be operated on by an underpaid surgeon? What if she is full-time and has been damned by your "all women are the same woman" theory? What if she is insufficiently attractive (use Tosspot McGee scale to determine) to catch herself a rich workaholic husband? What if she has to work eighty-hour weeks to keep herself afloat? Do you want to be cut open by that woman? I'm giving Tad the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he doesn't think women can't be surgeons, more for my sanity than anything else.

5. If a man opts to become a stay-at-home dad, can we ask for some of our money back? After all, he, by virtue of being male, cheated us into thinking he would work FOREVER, and now he's not.

6. Tad says men pay for women. Tad also says that the American women he knows spend about £850 a month all told on beauty and fitness, and remarks with disgust that the British women he knows don't even spend £700 a year on that stuff. Once again I am proud to be British, but Tad cites as an example the old "well, women don't pay in restaurants" schtick. If Tad is spending £850 on women's meals in a month, he's even more fucking pretentious than I thought. Also, if I went out to dinner with him, I wouldn't fucking pay either. He would a) have expected me to spend that much looking attractive enough for him to be seen with (his equivalent is "putting on a clean shirt") and b) have already cost me about half my IQ from having to listen to him all night. As we learn in the last line, Tad isn't keen on women getting chatty when he has some VITALLY IMPORTANT MAN-KNOWLEDGE to impart to the silly little women.

7. Tad is a whiny, entitled little ass who knows full well it makes no difference whatsoever to him if the woman he's arguing with in the article (whose responses I haven't copied out because she is mostly just telling him he's a useless fucker, which is fair enough) is getting paid the same amount he is. It makes no difference whatsoever to him or any of the rich idiots that he knows if everybody operates on the same scale of pay. He knows that, and he's not arguing from any objective position of fairness. He just likes having that superiority. He likes to know that he's earning more than his date, because it means his opinions are worth more and he doesn't have to listen to her. Entitled little brats like to remain entitled little brats, and he doesn't want any uppity woman coming along and reminding him that he's not that special.

As we move on to the earlier and most amusingly parodic of the two articles, I remind you that were Tad not earning more than the women he dates, were he not more so-say successful than them, he would have much less of an inbuilt 'right' to demand that women devote all their time, money and energy into being sexually attractive for him. Well, American women already do that, he notes with approval, but then they spoil it by being - gasp! - shallow. How on earth do you manage to spend £850 a month on your looks and not be shallow (or, at least, Tad's version of shallow)? Let's look at this, shall we?

We start off with: Bridget Jones is soooooo gross. And I bet all you women reckon that you're going to have Hugh Grant and Colin Firth fighting over you, right? Well, you won't, because you're all gross too. Ha! Take that!

Then we move on to: eighteen-year-olds are hot. Why don't you stay eighteen? That's what I'd like. Stupid bitches. I sense that none of this article was directed at me, because I never resembled the "sublime rose" he describes in tones that are, frankly, gross for a man twice the age of these girls. "They dressed as if there would be a prize at the end of the night for the girl wearing the least" says Tad, dreamily. Ooh, yum. Women are Tad's shiny, naked objects. Then he goes to America and comes back and horrors! The gorgeous women have been eaten by fat lager-swilling slobs! No, seriously, that's what he says.

We get into what Tad considers to be "standard beauty maintenance" and a "simple and sensible investment in [a woman's] future". Here's what he lists:
haircut, highlights, manicure, pedicure, waxing, tanning, make-up, facials, teeth whitening, military fitness, spinning sessions, vikram yoga, Pilates, deep-tissue sports massage, personal training, the occasional spa day, a week-long “bikini boot camp” in Mexico at the start of every summer and seasonal splurges on personal shoppers and clothing. Apparently all his female friends in America do all this. I think that's bullshit, largely because I find it hard to believe he has any female friends at all.

Then comes my favourite bit: Tad's disastrous date with a woman not groomed to his exacting standards. "Now, I'm not saying I'm the greatest prize out there..." says Tad modestly, sort of ruining it by making clear in the rest of the article that yes, that is exactly what he's saying. Remember the list of all the things women were supposed to spending money on as he says "...at least I'd put on a clean shirt, shaved and brushed my teeth." Brushed your teeth, Tad? Brushed? Ooh, big spender. Anyway, apparently this girl (whose name he has kindly changed) used to be stunning, but now had the audacity to not be dressed like a slut, not be a gym bunny and not smell the way he would prefer. "I was hurt," says Tad, "that my friends thought I'd be remotely interested in Sophie." He was hurt! Guys, you hurt him! Setting him up with a nice woman like that! How could you! Then one of his friends attempts to show off Tad's successes to Sophie, in order, I assume, to demonstrate that they weren't just competing in a reality show called Who Can Set Up Their Friend With The Biggest Git. Tad, outraged: "I could not believe it. She was selling ME to HER!?" Yeah, I'm totally with him. I mean, obviously she was a moose (I know because Tad told me, in euphemistic language that was presumably meant to be funny), how dare she not grab on to ANY MAN who comes her way? How dare she have standards? I also think it's fairly clear that he was acting like the Biggest Git and the friends felt that some selling of this horrible tosser was needed. He informs us snottily that Americans don't touch carbs after 2pm, which is why everyone in the States is married and nobody in Britain is. It's also why the States is renowned for being the thinnest nation on earth and not at all characterised by the words "fat" and "stupid". He actually blames carbs for Sophie's single status, as opposed to the fact that her friends obviously hate her and keep setting her up with horrible people.

Tad, ever the egalitarian, does go on to blame the friends (well, the woman, as is only right)... for not "managing his expectations, whatever the fuck that means. He calls Sophie an "orc" which might be the least clever insult I've ever seen in print. He then compares Helena Bonham-Carter to Michelle Pfeiffer, calling them "equivalent". Erm, no, dear. There is no such thing as an "equivalent" to Helena Bonham-Carter. He quite hilariously implies that you never see American celebrity women looking rough. Tad lives in a very strange world.

It's all the fault of British parents, of course, for not shaming their little girls about their looks. Tad then talks about going for a manicure (HA! I'm sorry, men can get manicures if they want, etc, but HA!) and nobody wanting to talk to him. Of course they didn't, you asswipe. You were in fucking Britain and you were a creepy man trying to talk to strangers in a manicurists'. You claim to have lived here since you were three - have you learned nothing? We don't DO THAT. Who knows, they might have recognised you. "Oh, fuck, it's Tosspot McGee. Pretend you're Cantonese, quick."

It's also our friends' fault, because we're nice to each other. We don't tell our friends they look like shit, or need to lose weight, or are wearing clothes we don't like. First of all, I have very English friends who have done all three of these both to me and to other people. And no, I wasn't fucking grateful, and you know why, Tad? You know why? BECAUSE I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK. I don't care if you think I'm fat, or unattractive, or dressed badly. I just couldn't give a shit. I'm terribly sorry. When you go on to say that yes, we like shoes, but men don't care about shoes, WE DON'T CARE IF YOU CARE ABOUT SHOES. I have never in my life put on a pair of shoes and thought, "Hmmm, I wonder if these will make me more attractive to that git over there." I've never even thought, "Hmmm, I wonder if my partner will like these shoes." Hear that, Tad? I have never in my life bought shoes with a man in mind, and I don't know any woman that has, unless her man is a fetishist. We may think, "I wonder if he'll like this extremely hot piece of lingerie" (answer: yes. Every time, yes. Even though I've never been to a spinning class in my life), but a lot of us don't even care what you think of our clothes, and we certainly don't care what you think of our shoes. Shoes are for us, not for you, hence all the time and money we selfish Brits spend on them.

It's also just as off-putting if you're absolutely perfect except for one minor flaw. So, Tad, if that's just as off-putting, why should we bother at all? We obviously can't bring ourselves up to your level.

Tosspot McGee concludes by reassuring us British girls that we're miles ahead in the personality stakes, and devotes several misogynistic paragraphs to talking shit about the American women he was praising to the skies at the beginning of the article (remember that? All the way up there? I am pissed off today, I tell you). They're vapid, they have no social skills, they ask too many questions, they're annoying and confrontational and think sleeping with men makes the sexes equal (Tad sniggers a little, because of course nothing could make a woman equal to him), they're grasping, they're shallow, they've all got new faces from the plastic surgeon that they lie about. Ew.

He assures us that we're wonderful, we really are, "[b]ut when it comes to making the all-important first impression, do you really want it to be, “I’ll bet she was really hot ten years ago”? I couldn't give a fuck, Tad. I couldn't give a fuck if your first impression of me was "Ugh, fucking hell, that's a moose and a half." I'll say it one last time: WE AREN'T DOING IT FOR YOU, YOU ODIOUS PIECE OF CRAP. I don't wear make-up in the hope that some loser will think I'm hot. I am not going to starve myself so that some man who thinks he's entitled to a hot girl will think he's entitled to me. Also, your standards are YOUR fucking standards. Most men (I can generalise too) can't think of anything worse than a woman who spends a grand a month on her looks. No woman has to spend a grand a month on her looks to be thought of as hot. Poisonous people like you (and you are poisonous, Tad) try to convince us that we have to do it, no man will want us if we don't do it, but I've discovered the big secret: It's a huge fucking lie. My partner doesn't care if I've waxed or not. He doesn't notice if I put on a few pounds. He doesn't care how nicely-shaped my nails are. Unwaxed, period-bloat, straggly-haired, naked-faced me doesn't repulse him at all; he seems to quite like it. None of this stuff matters to most men. And frankly, if he did tell me to wax, I'd tell him to go first. It's taken a long time learning, and maybe I'm not quite there emotionally, but the logic stands, Tad, that I don't have to do squat to be attractive to men. Nor does this Sophie you were so scornful of. I can guarantee you that out there somewhere are several men who know her and think you're absolutely nuts. WE DON'T HAVE TO TRY. And when we do try, it ain't for you. We buy nice shoes because they make us feel good. We're more likely to put on a face full of make-up for other women than for you.

It upsets me that Tosspot McGee wrote all this, snark potential aside, because I remember being in a place where his words would have stung me, and perhaps he would have been successful in convincing me that I should "take better care of myself" and try to mould myself into his vision of attractiveness, and I am so grateful that I didn't see this then. It upsets me now because so many women still are. And he knows it, the nasty little tosspot. He knows he can convince women to change for him if he can get them to believe that he deserves to get what he wants. If he can pass himself off as someone so utterly wonderful that all women are throwing themselves at his feet - and thereby stand in for all men, who all expect this kind of care and attention to looking the way you're told to look - he can make us believe that he has all the power and we have none. Men like Tad look at the world as if there's only one bachelor left and all the hot women must compete for him. Women like me must stand atop Tad's roof and scream, "IT'S A LIE!"

And I have. My fingers are bloody exhausted.

Oh, Go and Put Up Some Shelves

In my time as an active feminist, many things have confused me about the way people respond to the concept of feminism. A lot of them boil down to: Is anything that diminishes feminism automatically supposed to be funny? I don't understand how a hundred men can think that saying "Go and make me a sandwich" or "You're really ugly" or "Oooh, I have a penis" over and over again is somehow really cool and clever and amusing. I also don't understand why "sammich" is suddenly a word.

A helpful troll explains that "it's fun to annoy you and you just don't understand that." No, troll. What I don't understand is exactly how you intend to annoy me with your endlessly repeated cliches and remarks about your genitalia. Is it simply their presence in what is meant to be a feminist space? Is it the repetition? Or is the content supposed to needle us? I'm genuinely unsure. I'm also curious, in a rhetorical sense, as to why these men feel the need to keep emphasising their dicks. I sort of think it's meant to be threatening, though it comes across more as "it's really small", but it's slightly odd. I also wonder how many of these men would say, if confronted, that they were just being funny and can't you take a joke and humourless feminist and what's next on the overused cliche list, and how many would claim that they were, in fact, making a valid point.

In Jessica's screenshot of youtube comments, I find the one that says: "[D]o you honestly think you are smarter than me? You better have an Iq [sic] above 125, stupid bitch" especially funny. Ooh, 125! That's, like, so huge! I'm not sure if that's the highest IQ he's ever come across or it was just the biggest number he could think of. Either way, the answer is yes, I do, stupid little boy, and the fact that you think 125 is so enormous is really rather adorable.

I have to console myself with the thought that all of these men are right to feel threatened by me. Should the troll brigade, through some strange quirk, actually find this trafficless blog, I will warn them beforehand that any comments like those in the screenshot will be made with either "Go mow my lawn, little boy" or "Hahaha, small penis!" Because the power of the internet does not extend to the education of anonymous morons, and I would prefer to amuse myself rather than waste my time.

In The Stocks: Self-Destructives and Uppity Bitches

The BBC posts an interesting article about the disproportionate hatred for celebrity women. In a poll, four out of the five most hated celebrities were female, and the man was Simon Cowell, who also appears on the "Most Loved" list, along with four other men. Just as an aside, Gary Lineker? Really?

The British, the poll concludes, love Paul McCartney and hate Heather Mills. We love David Beckham and hate Victoria Beckham. The article doesn't comment on this, but it seems a little weird to me. It's almost as though we pick our national treasures and then unleash hate on their wives. It never seems to happen the other way round - the only times we've come close, oddly enough, are with the other two women on the list. When Brian McFadden of awful Irish boyband Westlife left Kerry Katona of awful English girl band Atomic Kitten, we hated him. Boy, did we hate him, and his new girlfriend too. We hated him so much that he's buggered off out of the country. We were right to hate him, too, I think. I don't trust any man who compares having children with his ex to "having a dog we weren't ready for" (they'll read it, you asshole!), or who bashes the mother of his children to journalists and threatens in the national press to sue for custody then does jack shit about it. I think Brian McFadden is an odious piece of crap. But now that he's off in Australia or America or wherever and most people have forgotten about him, we've decided to hate her instead. We claim it's because she's behaving like an unfit mother, smoking and drinking, taking drugs (or so the delightful Mr McFadden informs us), and generally behaving like - hmmmm - someone who's not very well. Kerry Katona, back in the dark ages, was one of the most popular women in the country. She'd just split up from a man who slept with a lap dancer on his stag night, she'd just won an appalling but highly-rated reality show, and she was down-to-earth and Northern and smiley. We just loved her. She won Mother of the Year twice, and got the Iceland ads on the strength of her being a recognisable symbol for good parenting. My unofficial theory is that when she began to break down, we felt betrayed. How dare she not be the perfect mother? We gave her an award! We were proud of her for moving on from her nasty ex, and we expected to see a marked improvement in her future choice of partner. When she yet again opted for a loser - or someone represented to us by the press as a loser - we got impatient. When we heard that she was smoking while pregnant, we got mad. We're not having that, Kerry! We don't care what your problems are, you're a damn role model! Act like one!

Everything she does is now fair game for bile and ridicule. I can't imagine that she's still working with Iceland, but nevertheless she's still attacked for it. She is, or was, advertising insufficiently healthy food to the nation. How dare she? Whether you choose to attack her on a serious level or just make eight hundred jokes about lard, you're perfectly entitled to do so. I mean, it's her fault, isn't it? When she was subject to robbery at knifepoint in her own house, we took the piss. Relentlessly. Not a word of sympathy for her. And it's her fault, of course, because she let us down.

Amy Winehouse follows a similar pattern. When she really came to our attention with the release of her second album, we fell in love with her, bonkers beehive hair and all. So talented! Such a songwriter! Such a voice! Gather round, boys and girls, this is real music. We thought Simon Cowell had done away with actual musical talent. We were impressed. And then Amy, too, turned out not be perfect. A lot of pop stars like a drink, but Amy was old school and turned up drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks. I know people who went off her then, because her speaking voice was annoying and she was all uncouth and spat. Spat! On TV! Then she picked her unsuitable man, and all the drug-taking palaver unleashed itself upon us. And we blamed him. He was a useless smug little man who didn't appear to have a job of any description. Ditch him, Amy, we urged, but instead, she married him. And I think that's when the backlash started. Amy Winehouse's husband is currently awaiting trial for GBH or perverting the course of justice or both, depending on which reports you believe. Her parents blame him for getting her onto hard drugs. He has reportedly refused to go to rehab with her, saying instead, "You can go if you want to," which is classic manipulator's language if I ever heard it. Maybe it was never right to put all the blame on him, but no way in hell can it be right to put all the blame on her. She's self-destructing and needs help, which is NOT a hanging offence, but we blame her because she let us down too. She was our great white hope of British music and shouldn't expect to be allowed flaws and issues too. The day after Heath Ledger's death, I read five separate blogs (all male authors, incidentally) who screeched, "If someone was going to die, why not Amy Winehouse?" That, my friends, is not normal.

A commenter on that article claimed he could understand the hatred for all of them except Winehouse, who is talented. But we don't hate people for being untalented. As I said, we used to love Kerry Katona, and even when she had a singing career we all knew she wasn't any good. We used to love Posh too, and her singing ability hasn't deteriorated to any great extent. I've felt stung into becoming a Posh fan. She may look like Self-Tan Barbie but so fucking what? The reason people hate her and Heather Mills is because they married people the public have decided are too good for them. These women are up themselves. We can't have that. Amy and Kerry married below them and allowed themselves to get screwed up, we hate them for that. Victoria and Heather married above them and made a lot of money, and we hate them for that.

It's a terrible mistake to marry a Beatle. The press and public will hate you for it. They hate Heather now the way they hated Yoko then, and the way they've conveniently forgotten they treated Linda. Oh, she may be a veggie-burger-making saint now, but back then she was a damn outrage. How can she have the nerve, we asked. She must be a gold-digger. Only by being silent and supportive and staying at home and finally dying of breast cancer did she win our love, and turn into what might as well be a fictional character. Carole Malone in the Sunday Mirror wrote, in a short article that Google is currently refusing to turn up, that it's understandable that we hate Heather when we've been used to the wonderful Linda. She then went on to say (in what I was convinced would turn out to be a parody) that Linda stayed at home like a good wife and mother, supported Sir Paul and raised children. Bless her. Not like this bitch, with ambitions and other such shit that has no place in a woman's brain. This is a charming piece of revisionist history that beyond the appalling misogyny the woman is spewing, shows that we think we get to decide who is good enough for our heroes. If a man picks a woman we think is beneath him, we turn on that woman. If a woman picks a man who is beneath her, we wait five minutes then turn on the woman. Again.

Notice, if you will, that the McCartney divorce is perceived to be entirely, 100% Heather's fault. If Paul gets any flack, it's for being "a naive old man", caught by the surreptitious and scheming wiles of a predator. Notice, if you will, that when the story of Beckham's affair broke, he was the only one who got no flack at all. The mistress got a decent dose, and Posh got the rest. Ian Hislop, who is not normally my first point of reference on feminist issues, remarked on how weird it was: "God, her husband's cheated on her! What a cow! She's been humiliated publicly! Bitch!" If he cheated it was her damn fault and there's no use her crying about it now. The press waits breathlessly to this day for them to split up, even though they seem to have put it behind them and are moving on quite happily. Neither of these women get any points for being a mother, though there has been nothing to suggest that either are anything less than highly devoted and attentive parents, certainly more so than either jet-setting father. Heather Mills has made it acceptable to make horrendous jokes about artificial limbs ("no, it's OK, 'cause she's an evil bitch"), and gets villified daily for apparently being a compulsive liar. People don't take kindly to me when they make a nasty remark about that and I suggest that if that is the case, then she's ILL and shouldn't be subject to your judgement.

I think anyone would be surprised to see me defending these women. They're "offensive" and "talentless" and "selfish" after all. Some of the commenters on the article would be astonished to see a woman defending other women because they've decided we don't do that. One even manages to get in a "poor little white boy" whine, amusingly. Those people especially would tell me I'm wasting my time on these women. Why don't I defend someone who's worth it? It makes no odds that I like Beckham and Winehouse, or that I have no strong feelings either way on Katona and Mills. It would make no odds if I hated the lot of them. They are human beings. Human beings who have made choices that we think are inappropriate. They are women who happened to fall in love, or woman who happened to fall ill. They are women with problems that we'd rather pretend weren't real. They are women whose wretched humanity got in the way of our comfortable assumptions, and we're punishing them for it (some of those comments make me believe that we're punishing all women for it). We laugh at, or condemn them for, their misfortunes. We villify them for their mistakes, and for mistakes we asume or believe that they made. Basically, we're hating them for being women who behave in ways we consider "unfeminine". You married up? You must have chased him. You must be ambitious. Ambition is unfeminine, bitch. Drugs are unfeminine, bitch. Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch. We know how you should behave and YOU'RE NOT DOING IT. You deserve everything you get.

This has been a rant from a pissed-off woman. Thank you.

A Comedy-Goer's Perspective on Why Johnny Vegas is a Nasty Tosser

Johnny Vegas decides to sexually assault a woman onstage.

Full disclosure: Johnny Vegas ranks only slightly lower than Jim Davidson in my personal list of Shittiest Comedians Ever. I've never once found him funny. The episode of QI he did is not an exception - it's my least favourite episode. He is a slobby drunken loser with the world's most annoying voice and his routines are shambolic. He can get away with more than Jim Davidson because "Vegas is playing a character! He's being ironic!" Alright, but is he being funny? Well... no. What he's doing is getting audience members to carry a girl onto the stage and then assaulting her.

This story is disturbing enough in itself, but made all the worse by hundreds of commenters claiming that the girl can't have been sexually assualted because a) she didn't slap him in face, b) nobody tried to stop it and c) Vegas hasn't been arrested. I don't think any of these people are inveterate comedy fans. We who go to gigs (no, I did not see this gig - that makes none of my points about assault invalid) know that you don't get up and interfere with the act. You just don't. When a comedian drags you up on stage, you do as they tell you. I saw a woman reduced to tears when she was dragged up on stage at a Rex Boyd gig - she was humiliated, he wasn't funny, but she did as she was told. A shy person at a comedy gig does NOT want the audience turning on them, and chances are, if you screw up the routine, any half-decent comedian will immediately being making cruel jokes at your expense, and provided he's got laughs previously, that's enough to make the audience turn on you. We once saw a comedian we suspected was high on crack during his performance. We KNEW he was high on crack when my friend Jess and I started playing noughts and crosses, right at the front of the stage, and he didn't say anything. A lot of people like witty cruelty, and only a comedian high on crack wouldn't pick on us for blatantly disrespecting his act.

Also, the difference between a comedy club gig with four or five small-to-middling comedians and a show with a household name headline act is huge. Take my review of Sean Lock's abysmal gig on Saturday night. No way in hell would he have got away with that performance as an unknown perfoming third in a night's entertainment at Wolverhampton Jongleurs (I assume there's a Wolverhampton Jongleurs). He would have been heckled, booed, snarked at, people would have got up and gone out for a fag. What actually happened was that we sat there mostly in polite silence, forcing laughter at any joke we found even remotely funny. A few people made quiet, unobtrusive exits during the interval. No heckles. You don't heckle a big-name comedian, unless it's a Ross Noble type whose whole show thrives on heckles (and all those are very much pro-Ross heckles. I miss Ross. Come back to England and save me from all this shitty comedy!). It's an unwritten rule that you don't heckle someone whose audience has mostly come to see someone they recognise from the TV. They don't want heckles and it spoils their enjoyment, even if the heckle makes a good point. You do NOT get involved with an established comedian's act unless he invites you, and if he invites you, you do NOT attempt to swing his routine your own way. I like to think that if I'd accidentally ended up at this particular Vegas gig, I'd have least yelled, "Get the fuck off her, loser" or something to that effect. I know I'd have walked out and complained to the management. But despite what a couple of commenters on that Guardian article have said, established comedians have all the power in that room. They can choose not to prepare, to segue away from their planned material to complain about having to wait for a breakdown truck, to actually include the breakdown truck complaint in their written material (you suck, Lock), to insult the audience, to ignore the audience, whatever they choose to do, and the audience will say nothing. I wonder if these people arguing that Vegas has no power at all have ever disrupted a performance. I wonder if they'd be cross if they were in the cinema with two hundred other people, and someone came in and punched a hole through the screen because they thought it was disgusting. If you disrupt a show, the audience will turn on you. Everyone knows this. As one of the Guardian's commenters pointed out, comedians go to great lengths to imply that their brand of humour is edgy and fashionable and funny, and anyone who doesn't get it is a middle-class reactionary. If you don't get it, you're humourless, you're a prude, you're a member of the PC Brigade. You wouldn't know funny if it hit you in the face. I was certainly told this once when I complained about Bernard Manning (Bernard Manning! Edgy, fashionable and funny! Even he would have laughed at that). Why hasn't Vegas been arrested? Because if this girl was indeed assaulted as badly as Mary O'Hara claims, she's afraid of what people will say about her. She'll be the middle-class reactionary, the prude, the girl with no sense of humour. Johnny Vegas is a nationally-acclaimed comedian, so it must have been funny, and she doesn't want to look like a bad sport. And after all, she went up there. She did what he told her to do. She doesn't have a leg to stand on. And the truth is, she doesn't, even though she should. In her position I wouldn't file a complaint - I'd tell anyone who asked that it was 'no big deal', I'd beat myself up for a while then resolve to be much more careful in future, either stopping visiting comedy gigs altogether or only sitting right at the back where nobody could see me. We still don't consider coercion to be a real thing. We don't think everything described above is coercion, because coercion means "someone held a gun to her head". We say, "if you go to comedy gigs, what do you expect?" Even O'Hara, writing to condemn Vegas, says this.

Well, here's what I expect. I expect a comedy gig to BE FUNNY. Even if we assume that Vegas wasn't assaulting the girl, he was apparently using her to take the piss out of Shakespears Sister's "Stay" (I really hate the lack of apostrophe in that band name. Damn you, Siobhan Fahey). From nineteen-ninety-fucking-two. Jesus Christ, Johnny, try to move in the same century as the rest of us! To think we were scorning Sean Lock for doing a riff on Gail Porter's hair. The standard defence of Johnny Vegas as a "character" is crap, too. When his "character" gets involved with people who are not acting, everything that happens is his responsibility. Not his character's. It doesn't fly that it's alright to grope a stranger's breasts if you "don't really mean it". It's not alright to grope a stranger's breasts because "that's what the character would do" or because "he is trying to portray his character's self-loathing" or because "it indicates to the audience that his character is a loser". The last one is especially off, because if it were okay to grope strangers to show you were a loser, it doesn't really seem to have worked. People now think that Johnny Vegas is a criminal, Johnny Vegas didn't actually do it, or Johnny Vegas is allowed to do it because he's Johnny Vegas. It's not about his stupid fucking character.

In conclusion, Johnny Vegas is a nasty tosser. I'm cross and hate everybody. I will delete any of the following comments:
"But you weren't there!"
"Why didn't she stop him, if it was so bad?"
"Why haven't the police done anything, if it was really assault?"
"OMG you just don't get Johnny Vegas he's soooo funny" (I don't want this person on my blog ever again, thank you)
"How dare you condemn him before you've heard his side?"
"But you're forgetting that he's a truly brilliant actor - his performance in the BBC's Bleak House was exquisite." (This is not relevant and smacks of the 'he's an upstanding member of the community with a steady job' that people use to defend rapists.)
"But people saw her chatting to him afterwards! He said thank you!"
"The journalist hasn't gone to the police, which means she's lying."

Seen all of these, at least four times, and I just can't be arsed with them. Jennifer is not impressed. Jennifer SMASH.

Via Shakesville.

Edited to add: On Chortle, this is quoted:

"...[O]ne seemed to understand the point Vegas was trying to make by saying: ‘Not totally defending him but I'm sure that the point was that pathetic individuals/society are totally enthralled with celebrity and let them get away with murder. She, and others, could have told him to get lost but didn't probably for that reason.’"

The POINT he was trying to make? What the fuck? The POINT??? He wasn't making a point. If I killed someone in public and my defence was "I was trying to make a point", people would think I was a psychopath. You don't fuck with people on stage in order to make a point. Making a point, my arse. He wanted to grope a girl. Jesus. I'm interested to see if he'll make any comment on this at all. I always got the impression he'd like people to think that 'Johnny Vegas' was an idiot but that he himself was really a lovely guy. So, what do we think? Will he apologise, will he say nothing? Or will he claim he was making a fucking point? If he claims he was making a point, he will officially surpass Jim Davidson on my shit list. At least Davidson managed to apologise and admit he might have a problem with homophobia after all those 'shirtlifter' attacks. I never thought I'd see the day when a comedian could be worse than Jim Davidson. Christ.

Ashton Kutcher: Grrrr

Grrrr.

I really hate these articles. Oh, thank you, Ashton Kutcher, for telling me what you don't find attractive in a woman. It's wonderful "advice". No, really:

Tip One: He doesn't like too much perfume. He warns us not to be "that woman", the one who oversprays and chokes you with her scent. Call me crazy, but eight times out of ten, the oversprayer is a man and his Lynx. This is not a 'woman thing'.

Tip Two: Don't say mean things. It's sexy when a woman is nice and quiet and sweet. Bollocks. I don't trust anyone who never says a mean thing.

Tip Three. My absolute favourite - "Dress how you want to be treated. If you show respect for yourself, you will be respected." GAAAAAAHHHHHH. How fucking dare you? If I have a bit of midriff on show, you get to treat me like crap? GAH. Oh, but you still have to look sexy, you don't want to be Hillary Clinton, now, do you? So Tip Three is essentially "Dress exactly the way I want you to dress. Not doing so gives me the right to be a shithole to you."

Tip Four: Don't wear too much expensive jewellery, because it means you're a gold digger. Yeah, Ashton, women don't ever have any money. You tell Demi Moore not to wear expensive jewellery because everyone will think she's sponging off you? Do you? Seriously, what world is he living in? No woman has any money, and all men have loads.

Tip Five: Don't be selfish. "Don't worry about what you are getting; worry about what you're giving." HAH. So what he's saying is, he wants a nice doormat who won't complain if he treats her like crap. Honey, please. Stop worrying about what you're getting out of this relationship. Selfishness is so unattractive.

Tip Six: Don't drop brand names. "Have you ever heard someone say 'Do you like my new Prada sweater?'" Well, no, actually, Ashton. I don't know anyone who can afford Prada sweaters. Get out of Hollywood, man, your brain is melting. As a side note, I was particularly amused by his assertion that "most guys...couldn't pick a pair of Louboutin shoes out of a line-up" because a couple of weeks ago my father, apropos of absolutely nothing, dropped the name into conversation and proceeded to describe the distinguishing mark of a Louboutin shoe. So sucks to you, Ashton. My fifty-six-year-old brain-damaged father can do it.

Articles like this make me want to throw things. Actually, what I really want to do is get on a plane to La-La Land, find Ashton Kutcher (he's probably hanging out with a unicorn or something), go right up to him and scream, "IT'S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU, YOU KNOW! SOMETIMES, WOMEN DO THINGS BECAUSE THEY WANT TO, WITHOUT ANY REFERENCE TO WHETHER OR NOT A MAN WILL FIND THEM ATTRACTIVE! I'LL WEAR WHAT THE FUCK I LIKE, AND IF YOU CHOOSE TO DISRESPECT ME BECAUSE OF IT I'LL KNEE YOU IN THE SOLAR PLEXUS, YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLE!"

Ahem.

Tip Three is the most straight-up offensive, but Tip Five actually frightens me. It reminds me of Buffy, when Warren programmed his Aprilbot to believe that crying is blackmail and good girlfriends don't do it. Everyone has to be selfish. A man who tells his girlfriend, or women in general, not to worry about what they're getting is a misogynistic wanker. It's one of the things on my private 'abusive man' red flag list. And let me tell you, if that one wasn't there, I would be absolutely fucked now. I hate these articles, but just once I'd like to see one that says: "I like difficult women. I like honest, self-aware women who will call me on my bullshit and do whatever the hell they please with reference only to their own moral code. Not to society's, not to mine. I like women who own themselves." Half-formed wish, probably, but I'll continue to keep half an eye out, just in case.