The Beauty of a One-Hit Wonder

... is that you don't have to stick around for the second song!

A Big MStake

"There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill ...

Now, clearly, what is needed is a more comprehensive term which does homage to the sex without expressing any views as to their domestic situation, and what could be simpler or more logical than the retention of what the two doubtful terms have in common. The abbreviation "Ms" is simple, it is easy to write, and the person concerned can translate it properly according to circumstances. For oral use it might be rendered as "Mizz," which would be a close parallel to the practice long universal in many bucolic regions, where a slurred Mis' does duty for Miss and Mrs alike."

THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 1901. Nineteen-oh-fucking-ONE, people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am so furious that Ms has not replaced the Virgin/Housewife dichotomy. Did you know that in its original seventeenth century usage, "Mistress" -the equivalent of "Mister"- bore no reference to marital status?

I think this might be my calling, people. An anti-Mrs Campaign. Let's eradicate this menace in our lifetime! Who's on board?

Sack Theresa May!

Unfuckingbelievable.

A minister for equality who doesn't believe in equality ...

Please click here to register your utter disgust.

The Revolution Will Be Blogged About!!!

!!!Exclamation points in title down to woman's irrational hysteria ... NOT!!!

So here it is, in a nutshell (not nut as in testicle, you phallocentric phuck!) ...

I am sick of feminism being marginalised.

I am sick of the fact that feminism, when [mis]represented looks like shrill, hairy, hormonal UNFOUNDED dreck.

I am sick of the fact that women still make 73p to every male £1 FOR THE SAME JOB!!!! Imagine if any other group were earning a percentage of the mainstream wage! Imagine the (rightful) outcry!

I AM FUCKING SICK TO DEATH OF THE FACT THAT WE ARE ROUTINELY GROUPED ALONGSIDE "MINORITIES" WHEN NUMERICALLY WE OUTNUMBER MEN!!!!

The Revolution Starts Here!

If you are with me, add your thoughts below. We need action now.

And before you ask, maybe I am getting my period. Lick it up, haters!

I Feel Like Adrian Mole

Yes, I was a devotee of Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl and Are You Being Served?, Bless This House, The Good Life, On The Buses, Love Thy Neighbour (forgive me, my peeps, I was too young to know better), etcetera -------- but it was Sue Townsend's comic creation that turned me on to the Thatcher-hate.

There is a poem he writes, asking her if she cries into her "Marks & Spencer pillow", that I have not only never forgotten, but I think of nearly every time I pop into M&S for my superfood salad or fairtrade columbian ground-for-cafetiere coffee.

I feel sad. For the country, and also for the activist/hustler/politician/radical/agitator that I never became, but feel was my calling.

***********************************************************************

ps. Mr P has been saying for ages that he hopes the Tories inherit this current politicosocioecenomic shitstorm because whoever gets in is ultimately ferkakt, and that way we are ensured a Prime Minister Milliband sometime soon ... either one will do! And it's not just because they're both cute and English and Jewish and slightly geeky and ... somewhat familiar. But it helps.

See?! The personal: she is very political after all!!!

************************************************************************

Also: I used to be a MASSIVE comma girl. I was like, ",,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,," all over the place. But then I met a cool person once who turned me off 'em. 'Nother post. 'Nother time.

Pity Party!

So never heard the term until Jen Aniston's midlastdecade's Vanity Fair cover story, but I'm throwing meself one right now!

See, NO-ONE comments on my bog anymore. NO-ONE!!! NO-ONE!!!!!

(Except for the Mr, and that's only after x amounta days nagging (Misogynist Views of Wifey: ACTIVATE!)

So.

Feeling a tad neglected.

So now you have an opportunity to fill my comment sections, rejuvenate my self-disteem, and improve your own chances for a sainthood following a single click below.

Come on.

You know you want to.

"The Big Chill" at The Big Chill

Have you seen the '80s film "The Big Chill" (Kevin Kline, Phoebe Cates, Jeff Goldblum)? It centres on a group of friends going through all this heavy psychoshit over a weekend? Well Team Chill - members of the April and Oscar Send Off posse - had many, many memorable moments but instead of angst and drama, we had crazy giggles, messy debauchery and the bloodiest best. time. evah!!!! In fact, from now on, I shall refer to it as Bestival - 'cos it's the best (fest)ival I've ever been to!

The following videos are a bit dumb. Should I remove them? Vote "yes" or "no" in the comment section.

Doctor Plog Is Fast Losing Faith In Humanity

(How's *that* for a Status Report?)

1. Click here to see why.

2. Post comment to EXPLAIN why, if you could venture to guess. I mean, really?! Give me an oy! OY! Give me a vey! VEY! ...

Fuel

They were digging a new foundation in Manhattan
And they discovered a slave cemetery there
May their souls rest easy now that lynching is frowned upon
And we've moved on to the electric chair
And I wonder who's gonna be president
Tweedle Dumb or Tweedle Dumber?
And who's gonna have the big
Blockbuster box office
This summer
How 'bout we put up a wall
Between the houses and the highway
And then you can go your way
And I can go my way
Except all the radios agree with all the TVs
And all the magazines agree with all the radios
And I keep hearing that same damn song
Everywhere I go
Maybe I should put a bucket over my head
And a marshmallow in each ear
And stumble around for another dumb numb week
For another hum drum hit song to appear
People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people
Playing music in a room
Now everything is cross-marketing
It's about sunglasses and shoes
Or guns or drugs
You choose
We got it rehashed
We got it half-assed
We're digging up all the graves
And we're spitting on the past
And we can choose between the colors
Of the lipstick on the whores
Cuz we know the difference
Between the font of twenty percent more
And the font of teriyaki
You tell me
How does that make you feel?
You tell me what's real
They say that alcoholics are always alcoholics
Even when they're dry as my lips for years
Even when they're stranded on a small desert island
With no place in two thousand miles to buy beer
And I wonder is he different
Is he different
Has he changed
What he's about
Or is he just a liar
With nothing to lie about
Am I headed for the same brick wall
Is there anything I can do
About anything at all
Except go back to that corner in Manhattan
And dig deeper
Dig deeper this time
Down beneath the impossible pain of our history
Beneath unknown bones
Beneath the bedrock of the mystery
Beneath the sewage system and the path train
Beneath the cobblestones and the water main
Beneath the traffic of friendships and street deals
Beneath the screeching of kamikaze cab wheels
Beneath everything I can think of to think about
Beneath it all
Beneath all get out
Beneath the good and the kind and the stupid and the cruel
Ther'es a fire that's just waiting for fuel

-- ANI DIFRANCO

Revisionist Hair Stories

Sarah Haskins = Smart

Hair Commercials = Dumb

............................

Would Sarah Haskins front a show like Jon Stewart's if she had a peenie?

Discuss.

"Cher Is On The Airwaves Talking To The DJ"

To Larry King, actually. About Michael's sweetness as a young man.

About Bob Mackie and beaded socks and Val Kilmer and stuff.

So surreal.

And I'm a tad inder the unfluence. And thinking about Chas, the daughter formerly known as Chastity. Who calls a child Chastity? The least sexy of all of the virtues, majorly trumped by Faith, see Paloma.

I'm a bit names-obsessed. The mister chastises me about it daily.

Cheers!

BREAKING NEWS! Michael Jackson Dies

As reported by my second cousin, once removed, Wolf B, on CNN.

Fuck.

Thriller was the first cassette I bought.

How I want to remember him above.

An American Tragedy, RIP.

I didn't cry until I watched this. (Thanks D from J on fb for the link)

Angel Ascending

She was always secretly my favourite, despite the fact that my innate feminist instincts instructed me to always say that Kate Jackson, bookish brunette, precursor to Mirandadyke trope, was the Angel for me.

RIP Farrah. Your name* is Persian (Iranian) for "beauty". How accurate (yours brought you fame) and timely (genuine beauty of humanity currently under attack in Iran). Thankfully you are released from the pain of cancer and the indignity afforded you by modern menaces ("the tabloids", "TMfuckingZ"-grade reportage, a sick, sad, avoid-reality public), especially the series of you suffering that was officially "In Production".

People are sick fucking bastards.

*One of my hypothetical daughter's names was Farrah but I knew I'd have to partner it with a name like "Sage", meaning wisdom, as a middle name. Beauty is SOOOOOOOOOOoverrated in this world while intellect/insight/sensitivity/ordinariness/reality as opposed to "reality" are given the old STFU.

It is so past my bedtime.
Time to board the express to Bedfordshire before backpedalling to Black ...

Cowardly Lions Vs Roaring Jezebels: The Bish Plz Edition

It is mind-boggling to me that on the same day that I am mourning the loss of one who still had so much to contribute, I feel compelled to write about those that offer gurnischt. Hell, make that a whole plate of gurnischt mit gurnischt with a side order of extra-gurnischt. It's what the kids these days called Haterade.

Or what a blog I know and love once defined as a Mean Girl Syndrome, not at all loosely based on a Lindsay Lohan vehicle of the same name.

To those of you who don't spend too much of your life trawling the interwebz, you may still be aware of an undercurrent in our culture that is directly linked to snark - the desire to rip to shred mainly female targets, but anyone'll do! There are hate sites devoted to all manner of people and things. Who the feck are these losers that bitch and spew bile behind the safety of their screens?

Well, we know one ...

I'm not a big believer in corporal punishment but Perez Hilton? Draw enough crudely imagined cocks and stick them in the mouths of babes, slut-shame women, pay lipservice to anti-homophobic politics but then vilify lesbians (SaMANtha R, anyone?) -- dude, you're lucky you don't have to abide my my natural justice - waterboarding would be too soft on you. STFU Perez Hilton.

But please don't tell the Jezebels to STFU (whoever is behind STFU Jezebel, not Perez). What an idiotic target for all your vitriol? Why not Ahmadinejad? Even Speidi, if you're so loserishly inclined you need to "hate" on anyone? Why don't you just log off and go outside? Plant a tree? Volunteer somewhere? You are clearly not unintelligent, why invest yourself in such an ultimately futile and kinda very pathetic venture? Seriously. Seriously!

It's not what you're saying that is all that off-the-mark. It's just why the need to say it? You say you were on Jezebel from the outset so you're clearly simpatico and saw how much misogynist crap they called out so you ... decided to add to it? And by calling out individuals you claim not to know BY NAME? I'm not being glib, but you may want to consider therapy. CBT is good but you probably need to go with something more psychoanalytic; perhaps go back to the womb for the source of your idiocy?

Unless the problem is that you're not long out of the womb (ie, twelve). Which would explain so much. So turn off your TUMBLR, young lady! And take care. Really. I'm not being bitch for bitch's sake but because your site has actually unnerved me.

Dr. P

Untying The Knot: The Wedding Porn Edition

Fun Fact! The Wedding Industrial Complex turns over 17 billion dollars annually in the US alone. There are a fuckload of people whose livelihoods depend on the fact that every womanTM wants to be a big white pavlova princess! With photographers and flowers and bands, oh my! I am doing research into porn at the moment and it's amazing how wedding ephemera are fetishised and framed in a similar way to the boobs and bush(less)es on the screen. And I'm actually having trouble working out which is more degrading to women but leaning heavily to the Bride's Side of the Aisle (There is an actually a generic hybrid - link NSFW= Not Safe For Work, ie. dirty images ensue!- unsurprisingly. What is too niche for porn? Absolutely nothing! But that's another post.)

So for years I've had my very own dream wedding in mind. A non-wedding: the dream not to have one, just to be this cool iconolclastic goddess teetering on the edge of respectability, laughing in the face of the bourgeoisie, just me and Susan Sarandon and our Gauloises and arthouse fillums and young toyboys and air of general disdain ... Sorry, where was I? Yes. Not getting married. I'd studied the origins of the institution at university and am not a fan. In fact one of my all-time favourite quotes is Groucho Marx's "Marriage is a wonderful institution but who wants to live in an institution?".

Unfortunately this bloody man comes along and we bloody well have to fall in love and bloody want to make it legal for a variety of reasons so Ms. BigMouth now looks like a hegemony-happy, heteronormative hypocrite of the highest order. And it's bittersweet because I am in love but ultimately shackling myself to something that represents so much of what I viscreally, venally despise. But why can't I reframe the experience on my terms? I like big parties and the accompanying food and booze (a little too much sometimes, to which my not-ready-for-summer-bikini-bodTM attests) and we are doing it in Australia!!! It will be our one and only opportunity to gather our various family and friends from opposite sides of the world in one room, integrating so far disparate fragments of our lives and I can't bloody WAIT! We are lucky to have many people making the LONG trip over. If I'd just said "Party in Oz!" it wouldn't happen, no matter how enticing the invitation. But the biggest bonus for me is the official blending of our families - we only have small ones (mine is just my mum, brother, sister-in-law and me) so now he will have my relatives and I will have his, and life feels more supported, in a way. That's what I'm in this for. And, seriously, to hell with all that excess, misogynist (women = monolithic; Which SATC character are you?! I'm a Carrie!!!) WICrapola!

But what is freaking people the fuck out is that I'm not treating the wedding as the be-all and end-all of my existence and I'm not thinking of myself as some new person getting! married! at all: I'm just me, as me, doing a thing that doesn't define me any more than the fact that I have worn glasses for over two straight months (bloody iritis!) and am nursing some killer cramps today. (Missy P FTW!)

When we got engag[g]ed, I changed my facebook status to:"Doctor Plog is taking on the Wedding Industrial Complex". My old friend N wrote:"Good luck with the Wedding Industrial Complex! You will need all your super powers to ward off their insanity". I'm learning that these super powers include: the ability to block out white noise (venues, blah blah, rabbis, blah, blah) and to resist the temptation to punch anyone who refers to you as a bride/ the bride -- hang on, the wedding isn't for a few months. And lasts for how many hours? THAT'S where I'll be playing the role of "the bride", then and then only. But it's an inane title foisted upon you from proposal until the wedding where you become known as the equally preposterous thing called "wife"! I would have thought you were just the bride at the wedding but I guess for marketing purposes, the second you become engaged you become repackaged as a new consumer - one that is expected not to bat an eyelid at spending ridiculous amounts of money on idiotic things. Capitalism relies on the erasure of individual desire in order to effectively perpetuate the mass-market, so our very own wants come to us genetically modified and prepackaged, via spam email or billboard or word-of-mouth or the cultural osmosis that has kept the world going and institutions standing. Isn't it unlikely that EVERY Western woman getting married (age 17 - 70) just happens to have always "dreamed" of having exactly the same thing, irrespective of variabilities in age, experience and subjectivity?

And look at "The Package" itself, Hegemony-Style (£10,000+)! Big white dress, big white teeth, golden tan, slimmer bod in order that the photos be perfect, ripe for self-fetishisation, post-children, in the mournful knowledge that one will never look like that again. Lucky for me, I don't look like that now! In fact, perversely, post-proposal, I have started rapidly gaining weight. Even my body is rejecting this nuptial nonsense! It wants to become a plus-size bride and at this stage I'm letting it. (Come November I'll more than likely freak out and stop eating though. Disordered Eating Runs Deep.)

So here's a wee anecdote to illustrate the idiocy: My lovely mum was in town for a few weeks. Last Friday, we accidentally caught the the tube to Angel so looked at a few shops and saw a nice dress. Then we caught the tube to Selfridges, looked around for an hour, bought aforementioned Angel-sourced dress (gotta love high street chains and their multitudinous replications!) and a pair of shoes dispayed next to dress. Wedding costume shopping: done! Feelin' gooooood!

Then my lovely, proud mum made the fatal (ego-wise) error of sharing our pleasure with the Bitch Sales Assistant. The following scene ensued:

Mum: (to Bitch Sales Assistant) It's for her wedding!
Bitch: (to me, disbelievingly) For your wedding?
Me: (sheepishly) Uh ... yeah.
Bitch: (bitchily) How come you're not wearing a wedding dress?
Me: (having felt pretty and happy only minutes earlier, now wanting the ground to swallow me whole) Um ... didn't really want the big white dress thing ... (apologetically) It's not really me (attempting humour weakly) And ... um ... not everyone looks good in white...
Bitch: Yeah that's what I thought when I was getting married but then you just get swept up in it. (unconvincingly) Oh well, I guess you just want something you feel nice in.
Me: (gratefully) Yes, exactly.

Silly fucking bitch. She's probably still paying off her multi-thousand pound confection. But mostly silly fucking me for letting myself be intimidated by a silly twat who's probably a decade younger than I am. It gets worse though: I am a fatherless daughter and so many of the rituals are enshrined around that relationship, albeit (a word my dad once pronounced al-bait, as if to rhyme with the 'arbeit' from 'makht frei' - he'd only ever seen it written - how cute is that?) shitty rituals based on the chattel (woman) being traded between older man and younger man. So I may have pissed off my dad with my militancy were he around, but then again, if all this crapola weren't so deeply ingrained in our collective unconscious, I wouldn't have the issue in the first place. So it's also making me really sad too and missing him all the time and it's affecting my sleeping. Boo To The WIC! Causing insomnia as well as Keeping The Woman Down (forcing us to want all this poo and then condemning those who do buy into it with the monstrous Bridezilla trope).

I am not a knee-jerk, pounce-on-every-perceived-cliche feminist -- it's a lot more complex, and beautiful, than that -- but I believe that there are valuable lessons us sad straights desperately need to learn from our gay sisters and brothers in their (necessary) use of gender nonspecific language. Our appropriation of that seems to render the marital roles more fluid, less prescribed. The words "husband" and "wife" are anachronistic to me, aged, outdated and a bit passe, as they carry with them centuries of baggage -- much of which has no place in my home, thank you very much. At their heart they imply a relationship of non-equals, a predetermined power differential. We are partners, equals. We walk down the aisle together, I won't be "given" to him. We wear matching wedding bands, he doesn't get to "bags" me with a diamond (the male-to-female equivalent of throwing a jacket on a chair) which only became a symbol of enduring love in the 1940s when Frances Gerety, a copywriter, came up with slogan "A Diamond Is Forever". If Mr P and I want to live according to the sub/dom paradigm (not an interest to date, as far as I know) then let choice determine who gets to play which role rather than anatomy.

Also, ixnay on the name changing menace. I'm a grown woman and that name is me: I've always been called it! (To those who reply "But that's just your father's name!" - duh! Have I just been renting it these past three-and-a-half decades?) But beyond discussions of patriarchy, it just feels like a weird, flee-from-self type of thing to do. There are only two legitimate reasons a person ought to change their name and I am neither in Witness Protection nor appearing in a porno. (Although re: the latter, who knows what the future holds? I am, after all, getting married, which is the feminist equivalent of lying back, shutting your eyes tightly, and getting well and truly schtupped by the patriarchy. It may as well be available on DVD. Sorry, Sisterhood.)

I hate you, WIC.

But, even more, I love you, Mr P. I especially love the fact that you don't mind living in a state that is perpetually subject to deconstruction and reconfiguration. We're so meta! And it proves your gender identity is far more secure than your friends -- I'm looking at you, D and M! Hello boys and Welcome To The Blogosphere! -- would have us believe.

xxx

Desecration Upon Desecration

It has just been reported that a gunman attempted a shooting spree at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC.

I feel sick.

I don't want to see this incident in light of the success of the BNP and other fascist, Holocaust-denying parties in the European Parliament. Nor along side the shooting of Dr. Tiller, in terms of killing sprees taking a nasty political bent. That would just be too depressing.

Never Again.

No more shootings. No more death camps. No more fucking fascists. Boo to the baddies!

I keep harping on this, I know, but: blogging has made me feel more connected, more part of a community than I have in a long time, and in feeling less disenfranchised and less politically impotent, I feel like we could mobilise all us goodies (not Tim, Graeme and Bill) and do something! Or am I just as immature and idealistic as my rejection of wedding registries would have my future MIL believe?

BNPiss Off!

I have not really been sure how to respond to the news that the British National Party - a fascist, racist, anti-semitic has just won two seats in the European Parliament. My first reaction is RACISTS RAUS! (No offence to any German speakers for using your language but it's potent for me). My second is polemical, fearful: Is Europe being won back by the fascists? The deepest fear of a lot of Jews is that another Holocaust could happen (often used to justify the bloodiest, most unjust right-wing Zionism, but that's another story). Fact is, my grandfather was in Auschwitz and that wasn't so long ago, historically speaking. But my training as an historian instantly combats those initial emotional responses: no, it's not the 1930s all over again, recession or no recession.

But this is still shitty news. Surely, though, there are more of us than there are of them? More thinking, feeling, truly civilised humans than that human detrius of morons, saddos, loons and locos. Nick Griffin (isn't he the father from Family Guy?) just got some feedback from a less than adoring public but it's not enough. What the hell can we do to undermine their support? (Non-violent measures preferred, but all will be taken under advisement ...)

A Very P-ed Off Dr P.

PS. David Cameron, some advice: Maybe stop fraternising with the Polish meshugenneh voytek kholera yasneh brothers, otherwise it won't just be fringe Left-loonies calling you a fascist colloborator. Cheers, mate. x

I Am Dr Tiller

This tribute to the abortion doctor murdered last week - as he sat in church* -is so moving and so vital, and perhaps the only response I can posit at the moment given the absolute lunacy involved.

Thank you, Hortense, Jezebel's wonderful weekend warrior, for the link.

And Land Of Meg for the lesson in embedding. Seems you can teach an old doc new tricks.

x

*They say the difference between Islamic terrorists and anti-abortion activists is that the terrorists would have the decency to wait until the target had left the mosque...

Hazel, Hazel, Hazel!

Dear Hazel Blears,

While I definitely err on the side of the latter in the work/life balance debacle, can I just say that, short of having your loved ones gunned down in cold blood, no "family reasons" are compelling enough to justify ones resignation the day before an election? Especially one as crucial as the European Parliament where the BNP are likely to gain a foothold. (Nazi skinheads FTW?!)

Also, Hazel? Your excuse may have been more believable were you not about to get into trouble for that wee expenses snafu. I know it sucks that there is extra pressure on women in politics, given there are so few of you, but, damn, girl! This is not the kind of representation we were hoping for ...

Please unresign. You can always reresign at a later date, maybe one that won't have such a destabilising effect on the party - and more importantly, the constituents - you promised to faithfully serve.

Kthnxbai,

Dr. Plog xo

Faux-storian

So the other day I wrote about how I'm a bit of a lady-who-lunches in feminist clothing, a femifraud, if you will be so indulgent. And now I just realised I am also a Fauxstorian, that is, someone who writes "Historian" on forms (landing cards, etc) when she really makes most of her (minimum) wage in retail. Just because I have a degree in History doesn't make me a Historian -- it's not like just because I wank, I'm automatically a ...

Actually, yes. Yes, I am one. (A fact doubly confirmed by the fact that I write "Historian" when I'm not one.)

Why do we tell ourselves little lies? Does it matter? Is a bit of that Egyptian River what we need in order to survive this crazy world?

Could I be* any more Tryhard Carrie Bradshaw?



*Or indeed, Chandler Bing?