the internet is for porn

Ah, feminism and porn. Let the battle begin. I'm throwing some thoughts out there, rather than connecting them to the single Daily Fail article. This piece was actually started by a number of things, including spending time with the other femis at our Fascinator Funday (there are pictures on facebook. It was awesome.), the post about Filament magazine on The F-Word last week, which also linked to Erotica Cover Watch, and me taking on a role as Office Bitch at the gloriously wonderful Coffee, Cake and Kink.

I like porn. There we go. I don't expect you to, although bonus if you do. Everybody has something that turns them on, whether it's naked men, naked ladies, or men dressed up as raptors flapping their "wings" while a cave-lady blows them (I draw the line at the people with a fetish for dragons fucking cars. Dude. seriously. what. the. fuck?).

However, I have noticed this, and you'd be an idiot not to. A lot more men will admit to liking - and watching - porn than women. And the vast majority of porn is made for, and consumed by men. Even the images of naked men are produced, in the vast majority, for gay men. If you go to fleshbot, there is a "gay" filter if you want to look at naked men, and "straight" for naked women (you don't have to choose a filter, though). Why? Both options assume I'm male - despite fleshbot coming from the same group as Jezebel. ECW talk about this issue here. Redtube at least allows me to choose my gender and interest - but all the adverts are aimed at straight males. Pornotube does the same as Fleshbot - gay, straight, all. But once again, the adverts (the facebook of sex! github for lesbians!) are for men. And they're skeezy.

Anyway. There is a point. Feminism, at least for me is - partly at least - about the right for women to control their own bodies. If women make the choice to sell their bodies for money, then I think they should be entitled to - although I also think that women in porn and prostitution need a great deal of support. No woman should ever have to sell her body - but if she wants to, with both eyes open, then ok*. Same goes for porn - if a woman wants to make porn, then sure, why shouldn't she? And if she wants to watch it, hurrah! If, for any person, watching porn is a part of embracing or experimenting with their sexuality, then why the fuck should they be made to feel bad for doing so?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to wrestle my flowery chick-lit "girl porn" romance off my boyfriend.

*And mandatory health checks and no pimps.

Love Music, Hate Sexism

Apologies first of all, fair readers, that this post is not directly linked to the Fail. Oh, I know it's a great read, but my head was turned by baser reading material this week; yes, that's right, I almost bought a magazine about a genuinely interesting topic, instead of which skin cream will bag me a bachelor but give me cancer if I don't cook for him.

Almost, but not quite. You see, I do like bands. But I also like being a girl.

I remember quite vividly the first time it occurred to me that these two things could be incompatible. I was fourteen, we'd just got the internet, and a whole new world of fandom was opening before me. And then there it was; a scan of Kerrang magazine, Davey Havok and Dexter Holland sharing the cover with the headline, "ROCK IN THE DOCK: is rock music sexist?" I never did track down the article, but I even neverer forgot its title.

Those words have come back to me a lot over the years, most times I've read about Courtney Love or Brody Dalle, and every time I've flicked past yet another male-targeted advert in a music magazine. (Yes, I sometimes read the NME; no, that does not mean I aspire to style my manly hair into so improbable a quiff that women will dance on tables in its honour thus allowing me to look up their skirts, Shockwaves haircare). But this week really took the balls-up biscuit. Shipped out to Marylebone because Euston thought it might perhaps possibly be on fire and with a four-hour train journey ahead of me, I trudged into WHSmiths for something to read. Oh look, a new Q! But oh wait, it's shrink-wrapped to FHM.

Er, what the fuck? I stared at it for a moment, processed the fact that one of my favourite magazines had just turned to shit before my very eyes, and walked out of the shop.

I don't care how much it comes down to publishers' alliances, I don't care what snivelling little marketing strategy is behind it, I don't care if some girl whose face has started popping up in the London Lite has taken her "hippy chic" clothes off, but I am fucking livid that a magazine I really respected precisely because it was so much more interesting, well-written, and generally grown-up than its peers has done that for which every successful band risks crucifixion in the music media; sold out.

Well, I'm not buying it. I'm not sure what I'll buy instead (the NME's too flimsy, no-one at Artrocker can spell... maybe Clash will fill the gap) but Q can stick it; I'm sure FHM can tell them where.

Popstars: The Rivals *

You know how Cheryl Cole and Danni Minogue hate each other? Oh, they're always at it like cats and dogs, never have a nice word to say about each other. Danni's jealous you see, because Cheryl is younger than her, and because younger automatically means more beautiful, of course. The rivalry between them has got so bad that all at war has erupted on the set of the X Factor - a style war. Every day they try to outdo each other in that uniquely feminine way, with their outfits. so far Danni's trouncing Cheryl (apart from an embarrassing incident yesterday when they turned up both wearing the same shoes - NIGHTMARE!) and boy, isn't she smug about it.

Dear reader, you may have noticed that the previous paragraph is pure, unparallelled bollocks. I don't know Danni Minogue or Cheryl Cole, they're pop singers and judges on a tv talent show; I live in Essex and have savings totalling 47p, our worlds have yet to collide. They've never publicly said a bad word about each other, no "sources close to (either) star" have been quoted dishing the dirt on their "feud" and there's no evidence whatsoever that any more thought has gone into their outfits every day of last week beyond recognising the need to not leave the house naked.

Yet the Fail has presented every one of the ideas stated in the first paragraph as fact. Daily. I don't like the X Factor (though I'll admit to watching the auditions - yes, I'm a horrible person), Cheryl Cole (the "tv personality" I suppose, as I don't know her as a person) irritates the hell out of me and I have no strong feelings towards Danni Minogue, but Cod, I know every detail of their "feud", thanks to saturation coverage in the Fail.

It started when Cheryl joined the show on the last series. The Fail reported on the day of her appointment that Danni would "obviously feel envious and threated by her younger, thinner rival". She "could not compete" looks-wise, simply because Cheryl was a decade younger. Before filming even started they reported that Danni "would hate" Cheryl. All pure speculation, of course, and ignoring key points like the fact that beauty is subjective and thus not ruled by age and dress size.

And so it went on, and goes on, the last week being dominated by reports of how the judges were "trying to outdo each other" with their choice of clothes, with daily updates suggesting that one was "smug" and the other "furious at being outdone" without ever providing any evidence other than a photo of each of them smiling gaily, and quotes regarding "rumours" that they started, and have not been reported anywhere else.

If you're wondering what my point is, it is this. This "feud" is as manufactured as Girls Aloud theselves. It exists only within Fail writers own minds. Yet they slavishly report on it every day, along with innumerate other "catfights" between female celebrities for which no evidence exists. Why? Because they get to perpetuate their own ridiculous views on female beauty, by both implicitly and explicitly implying that Cheryl is 'more beautiful' because she is younger, and that more beautiful is 'better'. This in turn encourages women to judge each other on these terms and society in general to dismiss women as petty, insignificant creatures obsessed with make-up and clothes. Female solidarity is replaced by in-fighting; the Patriarchy rumbles on undisturbed.

The idea behind this blog was to bring our own brand of Facebook activism into the wider world, where we might one day help to inspire change. With that in mind, while there's no petition to sign and no ombudsman to complain to, we can all do something to help fight this characterisation of women as shallow bimbos in constant competition with one another - don't believe everything you read. At least if you read it in the Fail.

* With apologies to those quite rightly uninterested in fake tv talent contests.

Horny Hernu vs. The Front Page Campaign

What is it with the name “Piers”? The first that springs to mind is of course Mr. Morgan, but lately it’s been his equally slimy, paunched namesake getting (he wishes) on my tits; Piers Hernu, sometime Daily Mail contributor and, as I have had to hear twice on the radio this week, former editor of Front magazine and contributor to FHM. Journalism is of course the world’s second oldest profession – but no more so than in Mr. Hernu’s case does one suspect it was only an excuse to sidle a little closer to the oldest.

The reason for the BBC’s infliction of his dulcet tones is the Front Page Campaign, which, having recently won lottery funding, is now also receiving some media attention, leading to on-air debate between its founder (Amy King) and Piers Hernu. The campaign’s stated aim is “to protect children from offensive media and restore choice for adults”, particularly regarding “sexually explicit photographs and language”. In practical terms, this is a demand that such material be age-restricted and placed on the top shelf, out of sight and reach of children, but still perfectly accessible to adults. So what’s all the fuss about? Horny Hernu’s ego, apparently.

The first broadcast took place on 5live on Monday. I wondered at first if he's got real live friends to go out with at the weekends, because Hernu still sounded drunk; judging from his second performance on Radio Ulster on Wednesday, he’s either an inept alcoholic or has mugged one for their baseless bravado. When he wasn’t busy sniggering or talking over Ms. King (a tactic most of us leave behind with ill-judged haircuts and notes home from the teacher) Hernu repeated a couple of MENSAesque points over both interviews.

Firstly, lads’ mags are “clearly not sexually explicit” because “um, you know, I think that there’s a, a big, ermmm” – *wheezy silence* – “problem here with, with, with mistaking, erm, toplessness with pornography”. Well, quite. After all, the term definitely wasn’t “sexually explicit” rather than “pornography”, and anyway tits and ass have absolutely nothing to do with male heterosexual arousal – it’s really all just an NHS-sponsored biology campaign. Everybody else can tell that lads' mags are sexually explicit – why doesn't one of their own contributors have the Nuts to admit it?

Then, on Wednesday, he squawked that “if you were to suggest this to any other country in the whole of Europe, they would laugh you out, you know, th- they would just laugh at you, because the rest of Europe has a much more enlightened attitude towards nudity and sexuality”.

Question: has Hernu ever been to the rest of Europe? I know it’s a funny foreign place all the way across the channel, but had he ever lumbered aboard a Eurostar, he might conceivably be aware that, actually, the rest of Europe wouldn’t need to “laugh… out, you know, laugh at” anyone for starting a Front Page Campaign, because they simply don’t have a comparable lads’ mag “culture” to protest in the first place. Their “enlightened attitude towards nudity and sexuality” would balk as much at Zoo as it does every summer at its escapees’ yearly migration to Eye-beef-fah. (And if we really had a problem with “sexually repressed morality”, we might have less of a problem with teenage pregnancy which – oh look! – is the highest in Europe).

So far, so dense. But he wouldn’t be a proper little sexist without a good bit of cliché thrown in, would he? Never fear, he’s on the case; “it’s usually some embittered old harridan who’s got- who gets on her high horse about this, and, and, you know, nobody actually listens, ’cause this has come up time and time again, you know, various women have fronted these kind of campaigns and, as usual, it, er, it turns out that there aren’t lots of people up in arms about this, there aren’t lots of children traumatised by this, it’s just, it’s just not the case that people are bothered about it”. Well yes, of course; “women” – the word spat out like curdled milk – taking issue with it is entirely different from proper “people” doing so, isn’t it?

Ms. King’s citation of surveys indicating that 98% of the general public agree with the campaign was met with further bluster, and burblings about young men being “slowly broken in, as it were, to the harsh realities” – *snort*– “of the sexual world”. But whose sexual world? Lads’ mags have nothing to do with the delicate flowering of male sexuality and everything to do with the entrenchment of male sexism. An airbrushed, submissive, surgically-enhanced, Aryan model flaunting her knickers and knockers isn’t sex; it’s wank-fodder. Wank-fodder, no less, for the spotty teenager who can’t get a real girl because he doesn’t know how to - and Nuts and Zoo sure as hell aren’t going to teach him.

Well, maybe if he's really lucky he'll grow up to be as “embittered” about “various women” as poor old Piers Hernu himself. Sexual enlightenment, my arse.

"The views expressed... are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline."

In this litigious age, guest publications about toothpaste tubes on Have I Got News For You probably feature many a disclaimer, but the Daily Mail must need them more than most. After all, even a police force that is itself still enormously sexist and racist might have to hold them to account if they printed their readers' comments without such equivocation. Of course, anywhere that invites public comment will draw its share of fuckwittery (just look at dear old CiF) but just how much responsibility should the Mail bear for the user-generated bile throughout their website?

Their Terms and Conditions make interesting reading. In amongst all the usual legalese about "waiv[ing] all your moral rights" by submitting content (that must really stick in their self-righteous readership's craw!) they also prohibit anything "threatening, defamatory, offensive, abusive, liable to incite racial hatred, discriminatory or" - of course - "blasphemous". This might seem reasonable enough, but for two things; firstly, the fact that they select what to publish, and secondly, that they deviate from their own guidelines.

Accurate journalism (forgive my inclusion of this phrase in a blog about the Daily Mail) depends upon reporting all angles of a given story, including those you don't like. This would excuse the decision to publish the gamut of submitted comments were there not such a clear, discriminatory bias; even with a wealth of objective and printable comments to choose from, the Mail consistently chooses to publish the most bigoted, even if this means repetiton of the unintelligible. Perhaps most tellingly of all, they would rather publish none at all than any that undermine the party li(n)e; the tale of Hans Blomberg's live televised sexual harassment of his co-host, for instance, remains conspicuously comment-free despite a number of cogent submissions made by various groups and individuals. Thus, although the Daily Mail cannot be held responsible for the content submitted, they are distinctly accountable for its editorial use.

On then to their supposed distaste for the offensive, abusive and discriminatory (I omit the small matter of "racial hatred" only for reasons of time, space and theme - feel free to submit your own treatises on this issue!) Prohibiting something in one's Terms and Conditions would seem to imply its unsuitability for publication, certainly on so controlled a basis as the one upon which Daily Mail commenting operates.

Behold, then, a few pearls of wisdom from merely the previous week that the Daily Mail considers neither offensive, abusive nor discriminatory*:

"She's quite hot, and just the right amount of stupid."

"Looks so much younger and really soft and pretty, just as women ought to be. Take note, girls..."

"people are losing their homes and havent got jobs and this silly women are having cash thrown at them... get some kids, a dog and a tubby hubby"

"Women should realise that men prefer long hair on women. Those who say they prefer short masculine styles are lying (to their wives/girlfriends with horrible short masculine hair)."

"As a red blooded male, I think [Cheryl Cole] looks fantastic, so get to the back of the queue all of you fatties."

"Single British women... are not comparable, most are overweight, bossy and lazy and oh, CAN'T cook"

"only a blind man would prefer UK women to what is the 'average' girl in Eastern Europe"

"There are Not many single women over 25 in the UK that are worth the effort 4 a relationship 2day. Wane be men/Power trippers/ drunks/pretentious, and all the problems they get into."

"Come on English women - start being feminine again!"

"British women...are too forward and not sophisticated."

"You only have to look at what British woman have become to realise why men are now looking elsewhere."

"Woman want their cake and eat it. Sorry ladies, you can do everything we do, but we can't have the kids so make a choice for crying out loud. is this why we have spoilt middle class kids running amok, spoilt little brats the lot of them. is this why marriages are falling apart. JOB OR KIDS not both."


And the award for Most Prejudice In One Post goes to:

"Although it may be easy for people to mock these guys i know exactly where they are coming from.
I am a guy in my early thirties not too ugly and doing fairly well for myself.
However, finding a woman in Britain who doesn't swear constantly, is fairly intelligent, keeps fit and healty and is not engrossed with chav celebrity pap is almost an impossibility !!!! and add to that pretty, single and can cook, no chance.

Its only a matter of time before they cotton on to this sort of business in Africa where i'm sure the women may actually be greatful."


*All comments quoted sic, much as it pains my linguistic sensibilities.

"Bad Mother" Bad Science from the illustrious author of "A Playdate with Death"

The wittily-named Femail (geddit? geddit? just in case we hadn’t twigged that the rest of the paper is a tad male-dominated) is always a fine emetic read, but they really hit the jackshit jackpot recently with a guest spot from author Ayelet Waldman. Her article – here comes the train, little baby, because it’s really quite a mouthful – “Why it can be good to be a bad mother in a world where modern parenting has become hideously competitive”, unleashed on 28/05/09, boasts like all the best literary works an impressive twist in its tale, achieved chiefly by beginning quite reasonably.

The byline is deceptively encouraging as "Ayelet... argues that no woman is a perfect mother, and the sooner someone stands up for Bad Mothers the better". Was infiltration complete, I wondered on a first reading - had common sense, like MRSA and pig flu before it, finally destroyed the moronic inferno from within? Alas not; the Daily Mail is simply as incapable of balanced reporting of its own content as of the outside world. “Stand[ing] up” for anyone is by no stretch of any imagination (and lord knows their readership’s is a fevered one) what the charming Ms. Waldman proceeds to do.

I must confess, I have yet to delve too deeply into Waldman’s back catalogue, though there have been some passable reviews for her most recent works, such as Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, if not for her earlier Mommy-track Mysteries series (distinguished, if that’s quite the word, by distinctly Goosebumpesque dust jackets and worse titles than you can shake a B-movie at). But from reading articles such as this and the scintillating “Truly, Madly, Guiltily”, I really don’t envy her editor.

The plain and plaguing fact is, she just doesn’t know what she’s on about, as like the proverbial Blackadderian pencil she bounces pointlessly from one self-contradiction to another, without any apparent sense of, well, contradiction. It’s hard not to feel her next franchise should be a Mommy-track pantomime when mummy-bashing is at once “utterly unfair – because… no one hurls criticism like this at fathers” (OH YES, IT IS!) and yet sound grounds for a newspaper article because “so-called Good Mothers can be downright bad for their children” (OH NO, THEY’RE NOT!) until she remembers that it’s really “time we all accepted ourselves for… mothers who do our best” (OH YES… etc). This is no logical pre-empting of a counter-argument to reassert one’s original point; she just can’t make up her muddled mind.

Indeed, the more I eviscerate this article and research its author, the more inclined I am to agree with the reviewer on www.librarything.com who describes her debut novel, Nursery Crimes, as “Waldman's forum for rather nakedly communicating her own opinions and preferences [in a] self-indulgent, amateurish” manner. So far, so livejournal, and it wouldn’t really matter but for one thing; her petulant insistence on dragging feminism down with her.

Waldman is clearly dissatisfied with various things. Maybe it’s her kids, maybe it’s her mother (both get a good raking over in the article) or maybe she just likes a good moan – but none of these is justification for this cack-handed and irresponsible attack on the movement that gave her the voice to deride it in the first place. Like a Pantomime Dame approaching a banana skin, Waldman repeatedly misses her own points; oh yes, it is awful that parenting pressures are centred so one-sidedly on women, that the workplace has not yet caught up with gender equality, but oh no, it’s not her mother –sorry, feminism’s– fault.

The feminists of Waldman Senior’s generation did indeed “[sacrifice] much to give [women today] the opportunities they never had”, such as the right and expectation to work. So far, so fair – until she erroneously blames them for the fact “the workplace isn’t conducive to being a working mother”. If earlier feminists “were convinced they had sorted everything out for their daughters” they have been proven wrong; but they are not culpable for the work they started not yet having been completed. Neither the fact that Waldman’s own feminist ideals were shattered by “punishingly long” hours and missing her firstborn, nor the truth that some women probably do feel they had “better jolly well be Good Mothers” to justify the sacrifice of giving up their careers, are any indictment of feminism, but rather of the very forces it challenges. In attacking the effects of patriarchy and blaming them on feminism, Waldman pulls off a truly extraordinary non-sequitur.

But why? To spout such nonsense generally requires either acute stupidity or spite. In a Harvard graduate it is hard not to suspect the latter, particularly given her repeated reprobation of a mother depicted as the kind of Crazy Feminist™ Pat Robertson so feared. But actually, I don’t care why – and nor should anyone give a shit about Sophie on the swings or anything else Ayelet Waldman says or does or writes so long as she uses personal neuroses to legitimise sexism. You’d think such a self-trumpeting Former Classmate Of Obama’s might know better.