My-Bloody-sogyny (I tried for ages to think up a punny title and this is the best I could manage)

I was flicking through festival websites and I came across this advert for 'Nightmare before Xmas' , an All Tommorrow's Parties event curated by My Bloody Valentine. 

For anybody not cool enough to know what is so special about ATP, it's a festival where bands get to pick the line up and it's at Butlins. It's more indie than a comic book version of Juno printed on a T shirt. Your £300 ticket gets you chalet accommodation and the knowledge you are gonna be at the frickin coolest festival in all of coolsville. It's in the name- not only are you cool enough to go to all the parties, you go to the parties of the future. 

I've never been, I'm sure it's very good.

Anyway I thought I would put this ad up here to express my annoyance and invite comment at their use of a corpse like woman surrounded by twee indie creatures. 

A woman floating who is looking away with her legs spread apart? WTF ATP?

Twee owls do not negate the horrendous 'rape- like images as dark and edgy' bullshit that is going on here; infact to me it seems even more horrible. Yes, let's have a smiling blob playing with a rocket over a woman who looks like she has been murdered or sexually assualted (or both). Good work.

Sinister trivialisation/objectification inherent in the image aside, the ad itself could not seem any more contrived. It's as if someone swallowed a mashed up copy of Vice magazine and a box of crayons. 

'Well, let's call it nightmare before christmas - Tim Burton, he's cool and dark and all the hipsters love him, and cartoony twee things, that's very indie, got to be indie - and a woman looking as if she might have been raped, well that's really very dark and edgy. Can't have enough edge now can we. No it's not sexist, look there's a cute monster and a bird holding a wilted tulip'

Pathetic. 

Hipster, 'ironic' indie sexism - still sexism. 

http://www.atpfestival.com/Feedback.php if you want to complain. 

Leaving your house: the fatal mistake that will cost you YOUR LIFE !!

It's a good job I picked up the metro yesterday when I was on the bus, so that I could read about the conviction of the murderer and rapist who killed Moira Jones, a woman in Glasgow. 

Apparrently she had an argument with her boyfriend, and went out for the night; which turned out to be the fatal mistake which cost her her life. 

Yes this is how yesterdays Metro actually covered the story. Moira Jones made the mistake of going out after a row with her BF. How dare she? Don't women know if they go out at night they are likely to bump into rapists and murderers?

It is good of the Metro to warn us women to stay in with our menfolk. Good of them to shift at least some of the responsiblity on to this murdered woman.  After-all, if women will get in the way of violent men what are they to expect?

I hope to see this approach used more often in other fatalaties, ie - 

Boy 16, decides to cross over the street - the fatal mistake that cost him his life!

132 passengers go on holiday to greek island on a plane, the fatal mistake that cost them their lives.  Sue bloggs just needed to get away from work for a little while, little did she know this would be a fatal mistake as the plane she boarded plummetted to the ground. 

Well done the Metro for having the balls to tell it like it is.When bad things happen to people then they have to take responsibility. 

WTF?!!

A fellow feminist flagged up this advert for Wilkinson Razors.

The website it was on suggested in an aggravatingly playful tone that the racist stereotypes might 'ruffle a few feathers'. Consider this bird's feather's ruffled in a Hitchcock's The Birds, kind of way. 

Of course it's racist sexist bullshit, that much should be obvious to anyone with eyes that are connected to a brain. Apart from that, who the hell shaves their Bikini line to cheer themselves up? I mean seriously? Surely not even the world's femmiest women think, ooh I 'm bored I'll get rid of some body hair.  That will be fun, I will shave and it will be all bumpy and red, and then my bath will be full of pubes which I will have to then clean. Yes, really, great fun. 

Even if you stick with the stupid stupid garden analogy - would you rather, spend ages gardening, or sod the gardening, invite a some people over, get drunk and have a garden party.

When you are having a garden party, do the guests really care if the garden is overgrown? 

Supposing they do care, one has to ask oneself  'are these the sort of people I want to invite into my garden?'.

Do these guests ever do any gardening themselves?  If they do,  have you ever considered the fact that they might be boring wankers ?

Wouldn't it just be better if we just left our gardens with lots of grass and concentrated on having better parties? Interesting fun parties, where people can let themselves be who they want and relax, rather than feeling arkward and constricted by all the tidiness. 

On a positive note, snaps to South Park for this episode.

Jade Goody - Why the hell do I care?

On the whole I would say following celebs is at best a meaningless distraction from everyday life. A symptom of our rampantly individualistic society where a few people are lauded for often dubious achievements. A fundamental part of a media system, whereby that which is important and relevant to our existence as human beings is relegated beneath the irrational worship of individuals. 

But.

For some reason I find myself utterly captivated by Jade Goody's living death. Every other day I trawl the internet for more details of her suffering, I want to hear her last words and teary goodbyes. I have even been on The Sun's website. I knew I shouldn't but for some reason, I cared. 

Jade showed us death. A fact of life we are completely dominated by and spend most of our waking life ignoring. We may spend our more indulgent moments thinking about the moving speeches that will be given at our funeral, but we don't talk about death. Following  Goody's death  has forced us to face our own mortality; our obsession with her is an obsession with ourselves. It was also indicative of wider feelings of limitation and loss that we in the west are facing up to in the current economic climate. Jade Goody's whole life was one of bust boom and then bust. Perhaps it is stretching it to suggest that Jade Goody's death represents the inevitable collapse and unsustainability of freemarket economics. Then again, perhaps not. 

Jade Goody also taught us that Great Britain will not be seen to tolerate racism. I do not condone Jade's actions on Big Brother;however her consequent villification served only to place the guilt of the nation onto the head of one uncouth working class woman. We had to evict Jade Goody from the Big Brother house so we can be seen to care about racism, a convenient mask for reality. 

Our outrage at her outbursts demonstrated the great myth of multiculturalism; that racism is an abberrition, and exception to norms of behaivour that ought to be tackled in a brisk corrective manner. 

 'Some individuals are racist, this is because they are ignorant, we need to educate them to be not racist, like everyone else'. 

The reality is that some racism comes from a place of hatred rather than ignorance, and that Great Britain is inherently  unequal and racist. What Jade said on Big Brother was inevitable. Jade was not punished for her racism; she was punished for being too ignorant to succesfully hide her racist attitudes.Jade Goody provided an easy sacrificial lamb for the racism of a nation. The fact that she is working class and female made her demonization all the easier. 

Ultimately, Jade's easy rehabilitation by the media showed how shallow the public commitment to challenging racism really was.

Some people may have found her living death morbid or strange, but in many ways her openness made perfect sense.  Millions of us open up to the public online, Jade's living death was a logical extreme of the behaivour of millions. This morning her death felt like a relief, the one woman Truman Show has now finally ended. Jade's mediated omnipresence makes her death seem somehow unreal;dying in the public eye allowed Jade to clutch at the last remaining straws of immortality. 

I guess time will tell whether or not it worked.

Easily the most noble use of the internet

http://www.beedogs.com

Yes I am up at 1am looking at bee dogs. Why aren't you?

Have you seen the bearded lady?

In order to raise money and awareness about Reclaim the night I will be wearing a fake beard for a week between the 23rd and 28th of February.

You can sponsor me to do this, and read about my adventures in arkwardness at :

http://ladybeardchallenge.blogspot.com

If you are in Edinburgh then you can also come along to the Bowery on the 18th and sponsor me in person.

All money goes to reclaim the night and women's charities in Edinburgh.

Womenarebetterthanmen.com

If you type this into your browser it automatically redirects to menarebetterthanwomen.com. A predictabley mysoginistic wank fest for insecure whiney scuzzbuckets. I mean really mysoginistic, like ' why the fuck did that moron get a book deal and I can't believe amazon are selling it' kind of mysoginy. Probably conceived by the satanic hate child of Richard Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips and Jeremy Clarkson.

At first the re-direction irritated me, but then I realised that the existence of this vomitous website (with no female equivalent) does offer convincing evidence that women are indeed better.

Not conclusive, but convincing.

Comedy Speed Dating

So I was flicking through the listings for the Glasgow Comedy Festival and came across this event 'comedy speed dating'. That's funny, but not ha ha funny.



The idea of spending an evening watching a bunch of medicore tits on a stage, and then having to sit there listening to dozens more trying to crack a funny within a specific time frame is enough to make me want to end my days single. Tommorrow.



Their wording is, of course, totally sexist 'We all know that the best way to a woman's heart is to make her laugh'. Yup, obviously the only people actively seeking dates are hetero men (or lesbian women but I DOUBT, to a CAPS LOCK extent that the writer had lesbians in his mind when he wrote that. At least, not in a non-sexist way)

Women, you better just sit there and smile while the hilarious men do the 'hard work' and make you laugh. Maybe that's why it costs £19.95 for women and a mere £9.95 for men.


The assumption that men are the funny ones is of course, intensley aggravating. The only justification they can have for men paying less is that fewer men speed date. Why is that? Could it be that it's much easier to get a date, as a man, than the media or popular culture suggest?


Why they think that women are prepared to pay a tenner more, in an attempt to bag a 'funny' man is beyond me...








Yup - this could be you...