Ew, Hair.

And so to the minor feminist issues, the ones which don't - or shouldn't - really matter, but hell, we know what kind of world we're living in and we have to deal with them.

Body hair, specifically women's body hair, is gross and weird and wrong and should never ever have to be viewed by the human eye. This is what we learn from a pretty young age. We see the world shocked and outraged by Julia Roberts displaying armpit hair in public, and we all know that the shock and outrage goes beyond the shameless display of said hair in public and extends to a misogynistic disgust at the existence of body hair at all.

It's bizarre, when you think about it. A woman raises an arm to wave at a friend, or her adoring public, and the whole world goes, "Ewwww! Hair!" And the world can say whatever shit it likes about reasons of hygiene, but if that had any real weight then men would be expected to do it too. Suggest that to any given man (well, except Len Goodman) and watch him try to comprehend what on earth might possess him to do such a thing. It's really a nonsensical thing to do. But I do it, just like most women do it. My mother is a professional waxer and does my armpits every few weeks. I'm a bit more lax with my legs. I have less hair there, and I'm English. My legs never see daylight. My bikini line is off-limits. I've tried it, it hurts, it's bloody stupid. My mother is also a practitioner of electrolysis, and if you think pouring hot wax on your crotch is stupid, try having an electrical current zapped through it. I only let her do that once.

This is one of those subjects where we all have an opinion and none of us have an answer. I mean, we could all rise up as one and chuck out our wax and razors and blow a giant raspberry at men and tabloids alike, but some women like being hairless. It's also one of those subjects where we all have to make some sort of compromise between the ideal and real life, and I've made mine: I will remove public hair, not pubic hair. I will remove societally-condemned hair that will be exposed to the world in general, but societally-condemned hair that remains a secret between me and my underwear will stay where it is. I'm quite alright with it being there. I don't feel unclean, it doesn't make me uncomfortable, and removing it is a real pain in the arse (or somewhere thereabouts). Any man that has a problem with this doesn't get to go down there. It's as simple as that. I've been fortunate enough never to be with a man who demanded or even slyly encouraged me to get rid of it, but now that I have been thrust back into the world of singledom with a new and fundamental distrust that I will ever meet a nice man who will accept me, I anticipate such an event with a sort of gloomy resignation. And when it does happen, I will tell him to go first. Oh, and get his back waxed. And keep it waxed.

As I've said before, I hate this stupid idea of feminine mystery, and any man I ever go out with is going to know what a time-consuming, expensive, painful and ultimately pointless process I and most other women go through in order to look the way we're supposed to. If no sex is preferable to sex plus hair, I will not go there. I will wax if I'm going to be out in public in a vest top, but I cannot and will not sleep with a man who expects to see shiny hairless me every single time we have sex. Sometimes I have hairy armpits. I'm a person. Deal with it.

Nice Girls Don't Do That

I've always shied away from writing about sex, but what the hell. New horizons and all that.


My partner is what we might call a feminist novice. He comes from one of the least feminist backgrounds possible, and whilst he is willing and eager to learn, I'm often surprised at the things he's surprised at. I cannot and will not marry a man who doesn't call himself a feminist, so light lectures often ensue, which so far he's been taking rather well. We had one such discussion in the car the other day, after I told him about a dream I'd had the previous night. In the dream, I was on a TV panel show (I've been watching nothing else lately), talking about the time I did a talk on female masturbation for the BBC, who then cut everything masturbation-related from the broadcast. Everything I said on this imaginary panel show was then cut for being "potentially offensive".

Masturbation jokes are all over the TV at the moment (as it were), and every single one of them is made by a bloke about a bloke. I ranted gently about the fact that masturbation is considered normal for men but some sort of bizarre deviant practice for women (see also oral sex).

Adam: Well, we don't think you do it.
Jen: Why not?
Adam: Because you don't talk about it.
Jen: We don't tend to talk about having a shit either.
Adam: Some men think you don't do that.

Which explains a lot really - the number of times I've come back from the loo in a pub and a man has said, "What do you girls DO in there?!" I probably should have twigged earlier. We don't shit. We just sit on the bathroom counter wielding oversized powder brushes. I always knew that the Nuts crowd consider women's toilets to be arcane and mysterious places, and now I know why - they don't think there are actually loos in there.

The above conversation came as no surprise to me. Adam's biology teacher sent the boys out of the room when the time came to discuss menstruation, and he has long been surrounded by the sort of well-intentioned men who will respond to a fact about rape or sexual harassment with "Really? Are you sure?". We know it's not "feminine" to be sexual, or to talk about shitting, or to eat an entire pizza followed by a huge pudding and a belch. We've learned to accommodate this - we say "down there" and "powder room" and "do you want to split this?" because we're meant to be better than that. Men have these "base desires" and "can't help themselves", and we are supposed be "refined" and "elegant" and "ladylike". All of which translates into: Women aren't supposed to be human.

Since I was very little, I've hated the sort of misogynistic arsehole who refuses to be with his partner when she's giving birth because it "ruins the mystery". He wants to walk in afterwards, when the baby has been cleaned up and the woman is smiling happily and he can pretend that the whole stork thing really is true. If you're having a child together, you're having a child together. She's got the worst of it by far, and putting up with a bit of blood and screaming is the least he can do, really. Referring to the wonder of a woman's "mystery" is one of my top ten warning signs that a man is a git. He wants to believe that you don't fart, or get drunk, or bleed. He doesn't want to know that you shave off or rip out your body hair - you're a woman, so you have to do it, but he wants to think of you as naturally hairless, smooth and perfect. I'll be the first to admit that I don't have the courage to let my armpits go au naturel, but I'm not going to pretend I don't cover them in wax and rip all the hairs off. I'm not going to pretend I'm not hungry. I'm not going to pretend that I don't even notice my period (seriously, fucking ARGH. Whose idea was it to make it so bloody painful?). And I don't see why we have to pretend that we don't masturbate. Blokes sit around and boast about it. Why, exactly, are we supposed to be above it? Why are we supposed to be "nice girls"? And what the hell is a "nice girl", anyway?

Some people think I'm a nice girl. I don't sleep with men outside long-term relationships (partly because I have severe trust issues with strangers, and partly because nobody has ever made me feel inclined to do so), I've never smoked, have no interest in drugs and barely even drink anymore. My friend's boyfriend consciously tries not to swear around me. On the other hand, some people look at me and see a bitch. And, y'know, I'll be a bitch. I don't think I'll ever feel comfortable enough to reclaim "cunt" as a feminist word, but I can deal with bitch. Because "bitch" means "not a nice girl" and if there's one thing I dislike about my drugless, monogamous lifestyle, it's the idea that I will be mistaken for one of these "nice girls" who don't shit and laugh dutifully at bigoted jokes. So I have to make do with being bitchy, because if I talk about masturbation and a man hears me, that's a desperate come-on. Nice girls don't talk about that sort of thing, so since I've said it, I'm not nice - or, in modern parlance, a slut. And we all know that sluts are there to be used, and have no business being discerning. I saw "slut" defined, brilliantly, on Shakesville as "woman who is getting more sex than I think she should", which apparently applies even if that sex is with yourself.

I used to read a lot of really terrible chick-lit (it was my secret guilty pleasure for years), including a series of books in which the nasty bitch was always marked out by a masturbation scene. This told us she was a bitch because a) she was always fantasising about money, or private planes, or something equally ridiculous, and b) she couldn't get a man. In a) we see that even a masturbating woman is not allowed to actually have a sexual fantasy, and in b) we see that women only masturbate if they are single and desperate. Where the hell did this come from? Why can't we be in control of our own bloody orgasms? How come we're only allowed to masturbate if there's a man watching? Why is it never about us? GAH. Sick of having my desires regulated by some sort of bizarre governing body. OFWANK, or something. We're told who we're supposed to find attractive, and it's usually David Beckham, even though he's as dumb as a box of hair. I once tried to write an essay on the rules of attraction, but getting people to admit to unauthorised crushes was damn near impossible. I remember Adam listing several unspeakably gorgeous women and then saying, vaguely, "That's embarrassing for men. Trust me." I have a bit of a thing for John Malkovich, but you try admitting that to people in the pub.

I have no solutions, I confess. I don't know how we go about breaking down this wall that divides us into nice girls and dirty little sluts when none of us are either. The only thing I can do is refuse to be labelled by the people I care about. I can only promise myself never to get involved with anyone who puts me on any kind of pedestal, who calls me perfect and acts aggrieved when my looks or behaviour are not. I can only refuse to be shamed for being both human and a woman, for liking cake and sex and being picky as hell over both. I can only hope that I have the guts to tell the man who likes mystery to go to hell. I can only believe that I will never put up as being treated as less than human, even if he thinks he's treating me as more than human, and that I will choose to be alone over being someone else's nice girl.

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.

Sex and the City and Me

First of all, what happened to the font? It changed. I didn't ask it to. Stupid Blogger.

In small news, there will be spoilers. I warned ya. I went to see Sex and the City despite not watching the TV series ever. Because I'm such a gore-and-violence wimp, I have to jump on pretty much anything else if I want to go to the cinema. I quite liked it, but at the same time it kind of depressed me.

OK, the likes. I liked seeing a film about women. I like seeing a film about women who look like actual people (if very attractive actual people) as opposed to the sort of waxy idols you usually find yourself watching. I liked all the insane clothes. I really liked them all piled on the bed listening to Walk This Way while Carrie tried on a load of her old clothes. I liked the little dig at the iPhone, which looks daft to me. I liked Samantha's story arc. I loved that she bought the dog because it humped things.

The dislikes. Small ones first. The bag Carrie bought for her assistant was beyond gross. I'm sorry, but if she's an extremely poor label fanatic, get her a classic bag. Don't get her a nasty pink/purple/gold piece of ick. I know she loved it, but ew. I didn't like either of Carrie's wedding dresses. Even I, with my extremely limited knowledge of the show, know about her normal taste in clothes. Nicely put, it's 'eclectic', otherwise, it's 'bonkers'. All the Vogue wedding dresses were nasty, but the one she chose was big and white and boring. Yes, she wore a bird in her hair, so what? And when she actually did get married, it was worse. It was boring, it was matronly, it was a bad length on her, and considering how big a deal they make out of Carrie being a label queen, it seemed wrong to me that she got a 'no-name' dress. Even with a pair of blue shoes, it was boring.

I didn't like Big at all. His acting was wooden, his character was stilted and unsympathetic, and were his eyebrows always that pointy? It was really distracting. He looked kind of evil all the way through.

More seriously, I didn't like that the only couple not to break up at some point were barely ever seen together, and I really didn't like that Miranda and Carrie both forgave their errant men. One sleeps with another woman (which everyone else in the film makes out to be not much of a problem), and one pisses off and abandons her at the altar, and they get forgiven because love is all great and stuff. Oh, and it was kind of the woman's fault too, y'know, for not having sex enough and for wanting a big wedding.

I mean, I get that if your partner goes off sex it must be frustrating. But the film was striving to inform me that Miranda had to take some of the responsibility for Steve's cheating. Why? Why did we have to hear "you didn't give me much of a choice" so many times? I have zero tolerance for cheating at the best of times, but if my partner cheated on me and then tried to blame it, in whole or in part, on what I was or wasn't doing, I would kill him. If my friends tried to tell me it was no big deal and I should stop being such a drama queen, they would be in huge amounts of trouble. I get that they have a long history, and a child, but I just do not understand the mindset that adultery is less bad or less significant if you've been together a long time. I really don't understand.

And really, forgiving a man for fucking off on the wedding day? No way. Forgiving a man for fucking off apparently because she had a veil over her face and didn't turn around when he would have liked her to? Really? And then blaming that on the big wedding? I just don't get it. If you're going to say that a wedding is 'girls' stuff' and not get involved, don't fucking complain when it's not exactly what you want. He could have said what he wanted (just the two of them at whatever the American equivalent of a registry office is), but he didn't. He left it all up to her then got snotty when she didn't plan what he wanted. He got all weird because she didn't answer her phone on the morning of the wedding, then left because she didn't turn around. How much effort would it have taken to call to her out of the car window? And she actually took some of the responsibility for it. I saw the film with two friends, and when Carrie and Big made up, one of them started clapping in her seat. I was just disgusted (as was Friend Two, who I suspect would chain me up in a cellar and throw wet sponges at me before she'd let me go back to a man who'd done that to me, and that's far more comforting then you'd think).

I left the cinema thinking Is that love? It's OK if he cheats, it's OK if he leaves you at the altar because he's a freak, as long as you love him? I got the impression this was meant to be a liberated viewpoint, as in it's a huge mistake to leave your husband if he fucks up once and marriage can overcome infidelity in these modern times, and look how happy they were once they dispensed with the traditional marriage, but it came across to me like Doormat Central. If a man can get you to love him, he can do what he likes. If a man ever betrays you, it's at least 50% your fault, for not wanting what he wants, or wanting something he professes not to care about but actually has a very specific plan which you must extract from his mind via telepathy. If men aren't happy, they won't tell you. And if you don't use your telepathy and sort it out, they will act out and shake you to your very core and it'll be your fault for not understanding them. I felt lonely, and kind of insecure and scared. I don't believe any of this stuff, but if such a message catches you off-guard when you're in a vulnerable place, when you've gone in prepared to invest a little bit of yourself in the characters' personal relationships, it can worm its way in and throw you off-balance, and it has, somewhat. I don't believe my partner is a cheater, or a leave-you-at-the-altar scumbag maggot, but apparently if he was, this new liberated world would think it was my fault. My wedding dress is too big, my sex drive is too small, I'm too fat, I'm too busy, I'm not busy enough. My fault.

I obviously have the wrong values for this particular film (which, yes, I am taking too seriously. I do that), but is it just these writers, or is it a trend? Am I going to come across more people who think cheating is not a big deal and/or the fault of the cheated-on? Does the world think I have a responsibility to plan the wedding my partner wants without his involvement? Is it me that's wrong? Should I be thinking, "Yeah, sex once, no problem, doesn't have to get in the way"? I don't know.

I'm glad the film was made, and I'm glad it's doing so well, because hopefully it will start to wedge open some doors for more films based around women's friendships, and proper relationships as opposed to Disney for humans, and also because on a superficial level, I did enjoy it quite a lot. But it's shaken me a little, and I wonder if maybe there's some questioning I need to do.

This post has been brought to you by the Maudlin Society. Sarcastic ranting will resume in a few days. Thank you.