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Fuck Politeness

“This is a revolution, not a public relations movement”

Tag Archives: women’s mags

October 23, 2008 The CLEO, the CLEO, the CLEO’s on fire…burn motherfucker…burn

I don’t know why I did it to myself, but I opened my sister’s issue of this month’s Cleo. Perhaps it’s because my youngest sister had been flicking through and rating ” She’s SOOooo hot” , and ‘She’s UGLY, she’s so gap-toothed’ etc.

It was the usual parade – a blur of fashion ads, ads for “Girls Night In” (a breast cancer awareness fundraiser, which CLEO suggests you spend sitting around in your underwear with your female friends…cos that’s what we do, us females, we enjoy hanging out in our undies together), and snaps of celebrities with fake tans, anorexia and cosmetic surgery – after a while you start to think you’ve found some account of some eternally youthful and nubile Aryan race with an ever changing wardrobe. (Top piece of hilarity? CLEO is cranky cos there are starving kids in the world and J-Lo dresses her kid in a new designer outfit each day..this coming from CLEO with it’s ” Shoes you MUST HAVE” ethos).

Anyway, same old dross. And then I get to a page on ways to tell if a guy loves you even though he doesn’t/won’t say it. OH DEAR!

So apparently men are all emotionally dysfunctional morons who couldn’t possibly genuinely display or communicate their own emotions (Cleo FACT!)

So: you know he loves you when he jerks it thinking about you and not other women – a/ how WOULD you ever know??? I mean really? Are you gonna stalk him, then wait for climax, pop out of a bush near the window and scream Are you thinking about ME??? Ask him? Bwahahaha! “Honey, when you wank, are you thinking of me?”, “Um…yeah…sure”. b/ Please. How about a little perspective? Masturbation and who/what you think about has FUCK ALL to do with your love for/devotion to your significant other, or really to do with anything at all. Do YOU always masturbate thinking about HIM? OH NOES!!! YOU DON”T LOVE HIM!!!!!

What is the DEAL with this shit!?? It just seems like more food for paranoia – Girls, you need to stress over this, and wonder, and fret, and maybe ask and make things really uncomfortable. Here’s an idea girls. Instead of lying awake wondering if he’s masturbating and if so who is he thinking about and what it means for your relationship? Stop wasting your time. Get to know your own body! How’s about you spend that time constructively: why don’t YOU masturbate instead of lying around working on developing crippling emotional issues. After all, you’re going to feel a whole lot better afterwards. (Yeah, I know, Cleo doesn’t actually admit that women wank! We’re dainty and a-sexual and have sex as a favour).

What were the others (I’ve left this post half finished a while). Oh yeah, you know your fella loves you when he holds your hand in public BECAUSE this lets people know he’s clean and getting laid regularly. So…not *really* about you and how much he loves you so much as the social acceptance holding your hand grants him? Well done Cleo! I know I’ll be subscribing to your magazine for answers to all life’s questions.

Oh another was ‘if he ‘jokes around’ a lot’. So right, if you ask him “How long will you love me” (cos Cleo encourages emotional codependancy and the asking of ludicrous and unanswerable questions the answers to which are to build our egos or crush our souls because women have no existence except that a man loves them) and he says “I dunno…how long does a blow job last for” you should bask in warm happy feelings of love, rather than roundly kick his balls, because THAT means he loves you. EXCUSE ME FUCKING WHAT????

Ok. Do NOT ask the damned question, you know it’s insanity, go home and have a fucking sleep, write in your diary, do what you need to to NOT ask the question. Second, if you DO actually ask…and he comes back with that I suggest you say “Not very long in your case dickwad”, dump his arse and get a new boyfriend. Men putting you down/reducing you to a sexual service centre/being self absorbed pricks/hurting you for their amusement is NOT AFFIRMATION OF LOVE.

Men are NOT emotionally *incapable* of expressing themselves maturely except that they choose to be/choose not to sort their shit out. So fucking expect better or don’t give him the time of day (let alone a blow job). Find a man where you know how he feels because he tells you/shows you, where he treats you with respect and holds your hand for the sake of affection rather than “See, I washed today people!”, where his jokes actually make you laugh rather than cry and for fuck’s sake…when you find him then DO NOT lay awake wondering who he thinks about when he’s masturbating. Get cracking on your own solo activities!

Oh and HEY, guess what? You can choose the GENDER of your partner too. I hate that in responding to CLEO/COSMO crap *my* posts end up being either heteronormative in the attempt to address all the propaganda about men being adorably fucked up, OR making lesbian relationships sound like the second/lesser option for “if you’re sick of men”. Fucking hell. Regardless of who you choose to love/sleep with you don’t HAVE to pine away the way CLEO insists you do, agonising over men, how mean and horrid they are, what their words and actions “mean”, and ways to cope when they make you miserable. Men are not “damaged” or “incapable”, they can fucking take responsibility when they want to and if they don’t, get the hell out. ALSO there’s this whole thing CLEO and Cosmo won’t tell you: You ARE allowed to try relationships with women! YES, even if you’ve never thought about that properly, even if you don’t identify as gay, even if you are not some crap-arsed teen-pop try hard pashing a ‘hot chick’ to give the boys something to toss over. YOU KNOW WHAT? You make your own rules and life is too fucking short to let people make you miserable. BURN YOUR FUCKING CLEOS GIRLS!

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November 5, 2007 How to have a successful mainstream newspaper blog

I hate, loathe, despise the blogs of Sam in the City and Sam de Brito of the Sydney Morning Herald. They both shit me to tears, to varying degrees, and for some of the same and some differing reasons. However I noticed that Sam de Brito’s has won, and Sam in the City’s has been nominated for a Weblog Award.

So, they are great at appealling to the lowest common denominator. Good for them! Just wondering if I can glean any lessons from them as to how to improve my chances of mass appeal.

Step 1/ It would seem that (and this appears to be a crucial step) I should take down the political message on my header and replace it with a personal picture of myself exuding a highly gendered sense of a stereotypically “hetero” “sex appeal” far greater than that which I actually possess. As a man, clearly this would come from being MA-CHO, as a woman, looking as non threatening, but simultaneously like the tired traditional version of “men’s ideal” as possible. Perhaps I could get one of those cheesy Westfield store ‘makeovers’ in which I come out looking like an oil painting of a porn star?

Step 2/ Change the title. Clearly, being a female I need to strip away all pretence of political engagement (and DEFINATELY that totally unladylike bad language) and instead go for some ride-on-the-coattails, done to death imitation of a succesful women’s novel, movie or tv show….Sex in the Suburbs? Desperate OfficeWorkers? The Bitch Wears Prada [actually, I kinda like that one].

I could (as done so many times, so very cringingly) try to write in the style of Bridget Jones without acknowledging my blatant theft of ideas and style…

Day One. Gosh! Got harrassed on train again. Whoopsy daisy! Meant to stop. Must try a little harder to avoid the unavoidable. Make sure I don’t raise it in polite conversation or bring politics into it. Must blame self. Dieting will help.

Day Two. Three fights over gender, two bottles of gin and a tragic singalong. Feeling FAT!

3/ The type of blog. Now whether a male or female writer, one simply must make all sorts of gender generalisations, mostly about de wimenz. If I was a male I might make them provocatively offensive, jutting my jaw in the air while I say things like rape is worse for a man than a woman (and decry any political agenda or misogyny the whole time), or bang ON and ON about how women are all the same and need to be lied to, need to be more polite in bars, don’t care about the emotions of men (HELLO???You ever READ a women’s mag de Brito? They do nothing else OTHER than try to decode and manage men’s emotions).

BUT…given I am in fact a WO-MAN, I must take a different approach to my gender stereotypes. Gigglingly, shyly, flipping my newly blond hair extensions with my hands given a makeover by horridly chunky gel nails, I must raise a couple of semi-questions “tee hee hee, are women, do you think into power instead of looks?”, ask two random passers by and draw my conclusion from their answers “golly gee, YES, women are ALL the SAME!!! They are into POWER, not sex! They will shag men to get along cos they HATES to have the sex! [Intriguingly the same load of CRAP de Brito writes about, though he charmingly concludes that women in dating are all prostituting themselves for the flowers, drinks and meals he seems to think we all want/demand/get/refuse to date/put out if we don’t get…but I degress]

“Women like MANLY men, not “Metros” [they CERTAINLY don’t like WOMEN…and UGH feminists? How UGLY and last season and totally irrelevant, cos you know, like despite rape and domestic violence stats and a general lack of bodily autonomy etc, we’re like EQUAL now!??] But you know, I asked two people, how could my generalisation be wrong? Tee hee”.

Funnily enough the conclusions of the two blogs, while claiming to have different aims, while getting there differently, whilst couching it in different language, propogate the same gender myths. THEREFORE, if I want to succeed in a mainstream newspaper blog, if I wish for my genius to be rewarded, I must (male or female) expound on the topic of WOMEN, what they *are*, *how* they feel, *who* they wanna boink, and most importantly I must not forget that they are ALL the SAME!!! Yes! It is true, I asked two people passing my office and they said, like, TOTALLY all women are the same!

4/ I must seek out a target audience who have insulting opinions on gender issues, and I must pander to them. I must put out a provocative sentiment, couching it carefully, then sit back and wait for the controversy and hate to ROLL in. In this way I avoid the work of having to say anything of intelligence or significance, avoid the responsibility for the vile and disgusting sentiments raised (see dredgirls earlier comment on this blog quoting a guy regarding punching his “Mrs”, see almost any days comments section on their blogs) and can rely on the joyful celebration of generalisations and misogyny to ensure that the numbers come rolling in.

 Ah, fuck it, I can’t be arsed with this bullshit anymore. I feel ill.

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November 2, 2007 Women’s Mags

Ok – ENOUGH!

The other day I went to a doctors surgery and I read through a copy of a “womens” magazine. You know the ones? The ones with the “raunchy” sex section? With suggestions like “When you’re going down on him [cos it’s always assumed it’s a him] try pouting and moaning like a porn star. HOT!”

So anyway, having waited forty minutes already I thought I’d check it out. Fuck me.

Under the banner of something like “Are you GOOD in bed? Do you wanna be GREAT in bed?” it had about eight suggestions. Two stuck in my mind as particularly outstanding – one for being so galling, the other just made me laugh out loud.

 So girls, when you are going to have sex and you are ashamed of your body because it doesn’t look like a taut skinned pre-pubescent boy’s body, what you should do to make the sex “hotter”, to be “great” in bed is to lie on your side facing away. Get him to lie behind you, lift your leg and let him enter you from behind. That way you don’t have to be worried about all the ‘bits’ of your body that you are ashamed of. That way he can get off without ever having to look at your hideous disgusting women’s body.

I am NOT making this up!

The second??? This being the one that made me laugh, cos the one above is so NOT funny…”Don’t be afraid to initiate sex”. ???…….????????????

Wow. Now I know that I am a feminist and I am over thirty so perhaps it is alzheimer’s kicking in, but was I ever afraid to initiate sex? Is it something women are afraid of? Or should be afraid of?? See the article said “I know this one sounds scary girls” then it went on to say you didn’t need to be so bold as to say it, to ask for it, or just to get on with setting it in motion…”anything you do that makes him think of sex” (like not killing him dead) is good to initiate sex while protecting your gigglish girlish innocent persona.

They are talking (as they always do) about sex in the context of a relationship…what sort of a relationship do you have where if you wanna have sex with your partner you have to wait til they initiate it??? What exactly is your boyfriend (cos only hetero relationships get a look-in in these mags) gonna do, what is he gonna think if you grab him, kiss him and push him up against a wall? Is he gonna freak that he’s dating Sharron Stone and your gonna go get the icepick? Are we still after all this time being forced to choose between playing damned whores and gods police? Sluts or timid little ladies who blush and only have sex because they are doing someone a favour?

So…given the above I thought maybe I should start up a regular column for women so we can know what our men want (stay away from other women girls, unless you’re pashing your female friend in the pub for ten bucks and the guy’s amusement) and can plan ahead to ensure that we are great in bed.

PART ONE OF HOW TO BE A SEXY, HOT HETERO GIRL:

 First I suggest taking a good look at your body. If you are female, chances are you have some flesh. That is wrong, out of place and disgustingly unsexy. You could of course choose to kind of grab it in chunks, tie it back with rubber bands and enter the room sideways like a crab so he is amazed by the tautness of your skin and can’t see all the wierd rubber bands.

This then requires that you choose certain positions in order that he doesn’t see your back. Also do NOT let him touch you. While the feel of hands running over your skin might be sexy, this is not about you. You are here to do a job and to fit in with current stereotypes of beauty. Straddle him carefully, facing him. Tie him up so his hands can’t wander. Then proceed to move carefully so as not to begin pinging rubber bands across the room.

The added advantage of tying his hands up is that he then can’t touch you “down there” – cos we all know how gross it is down there. That’s why labial cosmetic surgery is so popular. But that’s a topic for another day. 

 For today, consider the rubber bands. If this is too high maintenance, you could always try starving yourself til ‘acceptably’ thin, saving a fortune from your low paying, non-threatening job, and investing in surgery to cut away all that disgusting womanly flesh. This is the only true method to ensure that he can have sex with you from in front and behind so he will not get so bored with you. It’s a worthwhile investment in becoming a hot hetero girl.

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