Picture this. You open the newspaper one grey morning, and there in a bright pixel smear on the third page is a full-length photograph of a young man. The young man is almost naked; a flesh-coloured thong clings tightly to his hairless cock and balls; he looks over his shoulder at you, his jaw a perfect masculine square, his dark eyes smouldering. Everywhere, this young man is hard, smooth, impenetrable and yet submissive, wanting you to consume him. You turn the page.

There are more young men on each of the pages that follow, naked or scantily clothed, poreless, flawless, with broad shoulders and rock-hard arses and muscles that bunch and gleam under oiled skin. You are used to the sight of these young men; these days, they hardly even arouse you. Their glassy eyes follow you on public transport, on the internet, on television, in the fashion spreads of magazines.

Picture this. Every one of the men and boys whose images you see repeated thousands of times a day is impossibly perfect, hewn from some arcane piece of rock on the platonic plane. Not one of them is over thirty-three. In the shadow of their hard, robotic masculinity, the possibility of paunches and puppy fat and male-pattern balding is unthinkable . They rarely speak, and when they do speak, they ventriloquise; they implore you to look at them, to understand their silent semiotics of commercial masculinity; they threaten and seduce you in a boring parade of billboards, adverts, music videos.

These men don’t seem to be doing very much. Usually, they are moronically thrusting and jerking around cereal boxes, insurance packages, bottles of shampoo and soap. They seem to beg to be penetrated, but it is they who have invaded your body and brain, as if the images were trying to force themselves out through your skin. Some of them are known to you by name or sobriquet, as singers or actors, or as the sons or lovers of powerful women. They grimace beautifully as they drape their impossible bodies over stages and sets, showing off watches and shoes and beautiful clothing that hangs from their perfect torsos in artful folds and flutters in artificial winds. Their images cluster in everywhere , unseeing, bored, as if they can’t quite decide whether to fuck you or punch you.

You know that it’s not real, of course. continue reading… »

Something terrible is happening to young women. Despite the dazzling gains made for bourgeois white women by reformist feminism, we’re….well, we’re turning into sluts. Look around you: the streets are littered with half-naked young hussies vomiting their A-levels into spillovers with their skirts hoiked round their waists. At the merest flash of a web-camera, young ladies from nice homes will flash their tits for Nuts magazine.

Conservatives and a small number of high-profile feminists are unanimous in their assertion that contemporary culture has made desperate sexual victims of all women under thirty. The reaction to the Home Office report into the ’sexualisation of children’ has been gleefully priggish, with Conservative leader David Cameron telling the BBC that: “We’ve all read stories about padded bras and Lolita beds…children are growing up too fast and missing out on childhood.” Oh David, with your nice hair and your nice wife and your house in Knightsbridge, only you can save Broken Britain from the march of the underage slags.
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Radical politics, like romance, inevitably disappoints. It has become a cliché that liberal infighting gets in the way of liberal action, but this week has been a flashpoint for the British left, struggling to organise itself in the face of an upcoming election which may well bring greater gains for its enemies on the right and the far-right than the country has seen for a generation.

Fifty core members of provocative far-left group The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) resigned their membership yesterday in a dramatic public walkout that has sent shockwaves through the British far-left.

The catalyst for the walkout was the resignation of party stalwart and recent Mayoral candidate Lindsey German after members attempted to block her appearance at a local Stop The War meeting, amid ferocious internal debates.
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I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time these days sitting in sessions about New Media and politics in which men tell women why women don’t blog. The New Media debate at the Progressive London conference this month was exciting, and uplifting, and full of cutting-edge ideas about How to Use the Internet to Re-energise the British Left, and at the end of his speech, Andy Newman made a little, throwaway comment which made me feel as if all the air had been kicked out of my chest in one go.

“Not many women are really involved in blogging, because the blogosphere is quite pugnacious.”
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I believe that the best response to the careening unexamined prejudice of the esteemed Mr Jenkins’ latest article on Comment Is Free is a line-by line takedown.

The pope is right and ­Harriet Harman is wrong. I might prefer the ­opposite to be the case but, on the matter in hand, Voltaire’s ­principle should apply. The ­Roman Catholic church may be a hotbed of religious prejudice, indoctrination and, somewhere in the United Kingdom, social division.

…and sexual discrimination, intolerance and ugly homophobic dogma.

But faced with Harriet Harman’s equality bill and her utopian campaign to straighten all the rough timber of mankind, the pope’s right to practise what he preaches needs defending.

Last I heard, it wasn’t Harman who was anxious to straighten out her constituents.

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Outside the Houses of Parliament last week I met two American tourists who were genuinely convinced that David Cameron was the prime minister of Britain. Try as I might, it was almost impossible persuade these people that Cameron hadn’t been in power for at least a year, swooping in to fill the power vacuum left by the universally beloved Tony Blair.

All of this would have been pleasantly diverting if the entirety of the British left didn’t seem to be labouring under the same delusion. On the eve of what’s supposed to be a huge symposium of liberal thought and policy, can we please – just for one weekend – stop behaving as if the Conservatives were already the party in power?
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I spent this evening watching a black labrador slurpily lapping the shoes of a major think-tank director whilst its owner thought up ways to lie to me about his party’s attitude to the poor and needy. In a speech given in conjunction with Progress, David Blunkett MP set out to demonstrate just why the Tories are so very, very different from New Labour.

The former Home Secretary quoted Aneurin Bevan, who described the Conservative party’s habit of using government policy to shore up the assets of the privileged as “sucking at the teats of the state”.

“That sums it up pretty well”, said Blunkett, who went on to describe how the evil, ghoulish Tories, are planning to reduce the size of the state by selling off central and local government functions to private companies in an effort to save money, because they, unlike Labour, care about money more than about people.

Mr Blunkett omitted to mention the small matter of the Welfare Reform Bill 2008, with its stated aim of saving cash by getting a million people off sickness benefits and back into work whether they are up to it or not.
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With politics, as with relationships, there are certain times when you wish they’d just lie to you a little harder.

This week, for instance, with the election months away and the Tory campaign bursting onto billboards across the country in all its terrible definitely-unairbrushed glory, it’d be nice if someone in government was making some sort of noise to persuade the people of Britain that they really do have a choice in their political leadership.

Amidst all the filibustering, the clumsy cloak-and-dagger backstairs plotting over a last-minute replacement for Gordon Brown, if it’s too much to ask that we actually be granted a degree of democratic self-determination, then it’d be nice if they were to at least pretend they have anything other than contempt for ordinary voters.
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Thinking of getting merry this Christmas? Think again, if you’re a girl. According to the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), women who don’t want to be raped have a responsibility not to get drunk.

A new campaign, launched on Monday, aims to deter “potential victims” from drinking too much – implying once again that women are to blame for rape. Dave Whatton, ACPO lead on rape, explained that “A large proportion of reported rape cases feature alcohol as a factor. Ultimately we want to prevent rape from occurring in the first place, by arming potential victims with key advice on how to keep themselves safe.”

The campaign, which also contains advice aimed at potential rapists, encourages women to “let your hair down, not your guard down”. News associations across the country, including Reuters, Associated Newspapers and the BBC, have predictably honed in on the message that women have a responsibility to protect themselves from rape by staying sober. This may be news to potential rapists, but most women do not need to be told how to protect themselves from rape.
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Attention shoppers, and ladies that means you: now that marriage, mortgage and maternity are the new must-have items in today’s post-credit-crunch-pre-Torygeddon social control bonanza, there’s a new lifestyle drug on the market. It won’t help you dance all night, shunt you through a red-eyed work deadline or – heaven forbid – encourage you to go to bed with random strangers; it won’t even make you lose weight. It’s called Filibanserin, and it’s here to help you please your man.

As any fool knows, in this all-the-sex all-the-time society the only functional couples are the ones who are going at it like crack-addled bunnies night after hard-shagging night, whatever their age or personal preference. Your duty as a woman is to provide your male partner with the sexual release he needs. Don’t fancy sex with hubby tonight? Let’s not be silly enough to question mandatory heteronormative monogamy or a culture that frames heterosexual intercourse as the ultimate panacaea: the problem, little lady, is with you. You have a disease called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, and Filibanserin can fix you.

According to Boehringer-Ingelheim, which just happens to make and sell Filibanserin, HSDD is “a form of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD)” affecting around 10% of women. It is “a medical condition characterised by a decrease in sexual desire…. the condition can negatively impact a woman`s life and her relationship with her partner.” continue reading… »

London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.

Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. On Thursday 19th November, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’.

University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status; white men may dominate the world of work, top-level management, politics, administration, the arts, culture, the military and the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36 percent of the student population. White males are also less likely to graduate with a first or upper second class degree and find immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS. continue reading… »

I’d like to shout out for an unsung hero of improper, joyful, self-actualising women everywhere: Knickers Girl.

When a Sun photographer snapped Knickers Girl – aka 20 year old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons -cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, she instantly became the face of female reprobation up and down the country. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhof knickers a mate had picked up in a bar.

Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and hence was actually stone-cold sober at the time: the new postergirl of binge-drinking ladettes everywhere has been suspended from her job pending a disciplinary inquiry, for the dubious crime of having fun in public. And they say sexism in the workplace is dead.
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I was struck by this article, in which American journalist Penelope Trunk defends her decision, despite an unanticipated global barrage of hate mail, to post the following to her Twitter feed:

“I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.”

That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read.
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The death of gay popstar Stephen Gately from pulmonary oedema this week was “unnatural”, not by virtue of foul play but because of his sexuality, according to frothing baghack Jan Moir of the Daily Mail .

More unnatural than the death of 38-year old Siobhan Kearney, whose former husband this week lost his appeal to be acquitted of her murder.

The judge confirmed that in 2006, Brian Kearney strangled Siobhan in her room then used a Dyson Vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature before trying to hoist her over the en-suite door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. He then left the house, leaving their three-year-old son alone downstairs whilst his mother’s body slowly cooled.

More unnatural than the death of Kate Ellerbeck, who rowed with her mutually unfaithful husband and asked for a divorce, attacking him in a rage when he refused.

HSBC investment banker Neil Ellerbeck, who was this week convicted of manslaughter, told police that restrained his wife “forcefully”, pinning her to the ground with his entire 15stone bulk until she stopped “wriggling and kicking”, and left her corpse in the hallway. He then texted his lover, bought a lottery ticket, and went to pick up the couple’s ten-year-old daughter from school, telling her “Mummy’s not here because she’s gone shopping”.
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[This entry comes with a trigger warning for mention of rape and abuse involving young girls. A longer version is online at Penny Red]

Thanks to a new book, ‘The Lolita Effect’, a kiddy-sized pole-dancing kit marketed to six year olds that got attention on both sides of the pond and, of course, Miley Cyrus, the ’sexualisation of young girls’ is in the press again. Cue a great deal of handwringing and think-of-the-children-isms in the same international press that, this same week, gave a good deal of coverage to child-rape apologists.

All of these stories are just begging, just laying back like the wanton little semiotic nymphets they are and begging to be illustrated with faux-naive photos of young girls in suggestive states of undress – or, more frequently and legally, parts of young girls. Merely, of course, to demonstrate how awful it all is.

Western society has a curious doublethink going on over young girls and sex.
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By now most of you will have picked up on Dr Kealey of Buckingham University’s disgusting piece in the Times Higher Education supplement this week, in which he advises university lecturers to treat their female students as ‘perks’, and enjoy watching the little hussies ‘flaunt their curves’. (KJB has a brilliant satire on the whole fiasco over at Get There Steppin’).

Addressing his article to the only members of the academic profession who really count – straight, male ones – Kealey advises his chums to have fun flirting, because everyone knows that ‘normal’ young women are more interested in men than in their education:

Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

“Enjoy her! She’s a perk.

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So. Rumour has it [well, Guido has it] that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is taking a course of mood-stabilising anti-depressants. Several blogs and broadsheet columnists of all stripes have gone public with the allegation that Gordon Brown is taking “heavy duty antidepressants known as MAOIs (Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors)”.

This rumour, along with what Guido reminds us are “the stories of rages, flying Nokias, smashed laser printers, tables kicked over and crying Downing Street secretaries subjected to foul-mouthed tirades”, have led many in the national press to suggest or imply that Brown’s leadership is inherently undermined by his alleged mental health difficulties, as well as by the medication he supposedly takes for those difficulties.

We have no way of substantiating this rumor, but let’s for a moment run with the assumption that Brown is taking anti-depressants.
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Shock, horror, disaster: the population is exploding! Yes, the recently-over-reported demographic expansion of 1%, incidentally mitigating the encroaching pensions crisis, has kicked off a chain of explosions – explosions of racial paranoia, class hatred and misogyny.

According to Amanda Platell of the Mail and Melanie McDonagh of The Telegraph, what this means is that middle class, “Anglo-Saxon” women now have a duty to have more babies in their twenties. I have a spare set of sewing scissors around if anyone cares to unpick the various strands of racism, misogyny and class prejudice going on in those assumptions – let’s just say that it’s all intersectionally fucked.

I’m going to work on the assumption that by “Anglo-Saxon…women”, McDonagh means to say is that ‘white women should be having more babies.’ And despite my Mediterranean-Slavic heritage, I’m fairly sure I’m one of the nice young lilywhite gels McDonagh wants to see breeding like paranoid supremacist bunnies.

To which my response is: fuck. Right. Off. I’m not going to be told when and how and with whom I may breed, by anyone, thanks.
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Shambling through the kitchen with my face in a massive plate of pasta last night, I heard the door crash open: my friend who shall henceforth be known as Activist Polly*, veteran of the summer of hate, had come back from Climate Camp.

‘Oh my GOD, Laurie, it was awful,’ she moaned. ‘Climate Camp was full of hippies!’

The fact that Polly might have expected something different is key to the essential weirdness of Climate Camp. The idea is – well, It’s a protest, you see, a four-day sit-in protest about…something. The environment. Capitalism, also. And associated…badnesses. And we swoop, you see, we all gather in various parts of the city and swoop, not walk, swoop, on text-command from our remote superiors towards a target which we don’t know what it is yet but we’ll definitely be told about on the day. Possibly we’ll go to the Bank of England, and everyone will see, because it’ll be in London. I’m certainly planning to take lots and lots of photographs. How about you?

Being a young cool lefty kind of person, I’m aware of many people who are at Climate Camp – and every single one of them has gone with the express or primary intention of taking photographs.
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