We’re a small and uniquely dull country and it’s not too often the international press find us worthy of scrutiny. However, the announcement by one of our junior female Ministers that she was doing her bit to save men and women from negative body image gained global attention.

Personally, I’m pretty crapped off by the tokenism of it all so I thought the matter deserved a little discussion in the online realm. Let me tell you about Kate Ellis and her plan to save us from self-loathing.

Ms Kate Ellis is the Minister for Youth. After her party’s win in 2007, she became the youngest person in our nation’s history to hold a ministerial portfolio.

She also has a killer rack.

Oh, no you di’int.

I did. And I do have grounds.

As Ellis, presumably, hopes to declare in her newest “action on body image“, the itch to assess the merits of a woman based on her appearance is one we shouldn’t scratch.

However, context allows for exception.

The response would not be without motive, for example, in judging a beauty pageant. These contestants have agreed to be judged on appearances alone. It’s also defensible if we find a minister bound in skin-tight leather, Gucci stilettos and the fancy of stylists from a hateful magazine. She has agreed to be judged on appearances alone.

Last April, Ellis posed for the pages of Grazia. If you’re unfamiliar with the Bible of female self-loathing, here’s a crib: drop 10 dress sizes by Tuesday; spend all the money you don’t earn on a Marc Jacobs purse and cram this full of a yawning need for approval.

Ellis, who can now add “The Only Parliamentarian Who Looks Good In Python-Tight Hide” to her range of unique achievements, agreed to pose for the magazine’s “body” issue. And, it must be said, she looked steaming hot poured into her bondage frock. The Karen Millen dress wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Mapplethorpe shoot. The Minister wouldn’t have looked out of place as an extra from Sex and the City.

Apparently, Ellis enjoyed her makeover. “I didn’t think it would be so much fun – I didn’t want it to stop!” she told the dungeon-masters at Grazia.

Well. What girl doesn’t relish the chance to don high-end duds, professional make-up and the endorsement of a picky fashion editor? Once, I wore Armani Privé and a La Perla bustier for Vogue and forced everyone I know to use me as a screensaver for months. When your hair has been blow-dried by a genius called Tyrone, it’s wonderful to be judged on appearances alone.

Like Ellis, I adored all the grooming and “I didn’t want it to stop”. Unlike Ellis, I did not suppose that I was smashing the devious mirror of a sexist visual culture.

“I can help fashion magazines to promote a healthy body image,” the Minister said of her decision to pose in snug couture. This claim might have had more weight if Ellis had, well, more weight. Or, at least, a walking stick, untended facial hair or any damn thing that distinguished her from the print media parade of beautiful, young, able-bodied white women.

When all was said, done and air-brushed, Ellis had served no purpose higher than that of vanity. Or political ambition; which is pretty much the same thing. And exactly the same could be said of her newly announced “action” on “body image”. Except, in this case, her vanity will cost us half a million bucks.

This week, several of these dollars were disbursed on launching the Voluntary Industry Code of Conduct on Body Image and its attendant Body Image Friendly Awards. In short, businesses and publications that demonstrate diversity in their understanding and depiction of bodies will get a “tick” a la the Heart Foundation.

Apparently, I’m the nation’s only Op Ed writer who has previously declared Ellis’s National Body Image Advisory Council a crock.

Given that just about every other taxpayer seems content to fund You Go Girl (TM) afternoons of finger clicking, back slapping and disingenuous squawking, I thought it prudent to call it all a crock again.

This scheme, cheery as it seems, has a shaky foundation. It finds one of its bases in the idea that mass media produces body dysmorphic disorders like anorexia. Such illnesses and the compulsion to control one’s weight precede our era of mass communications.

The “fasting girl” was a fact of Victorian life; the practice we’d now call bulimia was almost mandatory for the Roman elite. Scholars have written about the holy anorexia of Joan of Arc and other female saints whose obsession with fat loss was informed not by Grazia magazine but by the desire to escape the perceived prison of the body.

When Mia Freedman, the chair of Ellis’ Advisory Council, recently wrote about the “Shame, panic, fear, self-loathing, despair…” she felt after gaining 11 kilograms, she attributes this, presumably, to our contemporary visual culture. Actually, we Westerners, and women in particular, have had revulsion for our bodies for some time.

While I concede that fat, as the adage goes, is a feminist issue and certainly an important one, I find myself frustrated that policy makers, and the journalists who inform them, overrate the impact of media and underrate the weight of Western thought which starts, more or less, with Plato and roughly proceeds, with all apologies to students of philosophy, “Body bad, mind good. Woman has more body, less mind. Therefore, woman bad.”

The body, as it is socially marked, is a complicated thing. We can’t hope to alter our relationship to it with a government-endorsed logo.

But, I guess we can airbrush it with a handful of tame initiatives from a snap-happy minister. In the past few days, Ellis has received worldwide recognition for her code.

She looks good. I’m sure she doesn’t want it to end.

Her name is Julia Gillard.

On Thursday morning, I watched this event unfold on television. A meringue-lite breakfast broadcaster called Lisa Wilkinson was charged with the task of delivering the news. I watched as Wilkinson entered her seventh hour of broadcast. Given this endurance and the fact that her remit rarely extends to a matter more taxing than diets, I guess she could be permitted a moment of folly

Or several. She made three references to our new Prime Minister’s idle womb. The second of which realised the difficult task of making one of her guests wince. The third of which doused most of my feminist fire. “Are we going to reference the Prime Minister’s reproductive organs all day?”, I asked the electronic media.

Apparently. This is the Oprah-fied reflex that greets nearly all public female achievement.

Giddy either from lack of sleep or the imagined promise of a feminist tomorrow, the internet and the television is still squealing, “You Go, Girl™.”

Awash with a uniquely Hallmark conceit, journalist Caroline Overington implored us gals to call our mothers and, “Say thank you”.

Fresh from a stint at the marathon Today show where she had been speaking for the female blogosphere, Mia Freedman gently pressed Gillard into the service of the sisterhood. On social media site, a rash of girl-positive comments flared like dermatitis on Boadicea’s chest.

“This is a proud day,” wrote one young woman.

And, of course, it was. I could not help but feel a little gynaecological bloat as Her Majesty’s female representative swore in the female representative of the people. The exchange was, as Wilkinson reminded me throughout the morning, “historic”. And momentarily gratifying in a nation where female labour continues to be undervalued; where women’s participation in public life is often treated with all the esteem of a pajama party.

Scholar and feminist Shakira Hussein beat me in unleashing that “inner party-pooper” seeking to underplay Gillard’s gender. Although both feminist and Australian, neither of us were wearing our pajamas.

Actually, the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, beat both of us when reminded, perhaps a little needlessly, by local press that she was the nation’s first female PM. “Maybe first redhead,” she joked.

That redhead, she said, was never pointed toward the detonation of any glass ceilings.

She set out, she said, to “keep my feet on the floor”. And there her feet remained throughout the 90s as she was knocked back as a representative for her party three timess. That they have now elevated her to the country’s top job is, of course, testament not only to her tenacity but to feminism’s gains. But, this doesn’t give us ladies license to bang on like the epilogue to Sex and the City

First, it’s just unseemly. Second, as any sensible woman should know, it’s perilous to declare one’s self satisfied. As my friend Hussein writes , Gillard’s ascension may be easily seen as evidence that women have, “no further reason to complain”.

I plan to whine for several decades yet. And I plan to assess my new leader’s feminism in the terms of her policy; not of her reproductive parts. Her ascent to the top is not the end of the feminist paragraph. The struggle will continue to be punctuated by the fight for equal pay and equal representation; the battle against domestic violence and the strange prison we have made of women’s bodies.

I’m terribly wary of celebrating appointments like this as “victories” for women and feminism. First, this diminishes the real victory which, in my view, is of a civic-minded politician over her incompetent forebear.. Second, and more generally, it reduces the aims of feminism to that of amassing trophies.

You can name all the CEOs, presidents and Prime Ministers you want. You can even revel in these appointments momentarily. It does us ladies good to remember, though: feminism is in the details; it cannot be located solely in the executive.

Australia is a colony founded in masculinity. Like the US, it can still feel like the land that feminism forgot. On this “historic” day, perhaps Overington, Wilkinson and co can be excused their greeting card gush.

Just as long as they stem the flow by the weekend.

I do not make this claim, by the way, without recourse to science. Each booz has been verified as medically young.

A year or two ago, just about everyone I knew seemed to be diagnosed with illness. It was a confusing case of me-too-ism that took my tits to the radiology department of a hospital. I was convinced my tits had cancer.

Anyhow. They didn’t. Not only did the man with the sonograph pronounce me cancer-free; he looked at his monitor and told me I had, “very young looking breast tissue.” That was a good day.

My breasts are not only youthful. They are if you don’t mind me saying, pretty fucking shapely. They are not, by any means, enormous; each cup hovers modestly, and symmetrically, between a B and a C. But, damn if this isn’t an arresting pair of cans.

A boy I once went out with used to describe them as, “fat”. He’d say, “You’ve got fat tits, Helen”and seemed to love nothing more than performing Jackson Pollock art upon their surface.

Expressionist filth aside, the “fat” descriptor works well to describe these spherical tar-tars which are yet to sag and each have a cheery looking nipple at their center; these the approximate color of the good bits of raspberry trifle.

Plainly, I could go on and interminably on about my tits. As I age and the day that they will sink like over-sifted sponge-cake approaches, I tend to talk about them a lot. I’m going to miss them when they shrivel and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about showing them to people.

Why do I want to show you my tits?

Back when I was very young, I showed my norks to no one. I was morally opposed to cleavage. Then, I used words like, “phallocracy” in everyday speech and, for a brief spell in London, I joined a “collective” called Women Against Violence Against Women. At WAVAW, we sought to rid the world of smutty books and films. We also drank dandelion tea.

We did Important Work. On Saturdays, I would go to a WH Smith in Hackney and take a dozen or so lads’ mags to the counter. When the clerk had totaled my purchase, I’d say, “I will not pay for the systematic oppression of my sisters” or something similar from the feminist book of Common Prayer.

Every now and then, I would sneak a peek at the knockers of the ladies on the magazines and reflexively think, “cor!”. Drenched in the sort of guilt only a Catholic education and a feminist adolescence could upchuck, I told Janice, a progressive school teacher from Islington and the WAVAW mother-duck, that I sometimes looked twice at the funbags. She explained to me that this was, “internalized misogyny” and was exactly the sort of self-loathing that she, being one eighth Jewish, could easily understand.

It was not much later that I read works by the writer Andrea Dworkin and came to the unanticipated conclusion that I really liked porn. And I did so not because I hated my gender but because I liked to masturbate.

Let it be said: I will not crap on the memory of radical feminism. Dworkin offered some useful rage. But the book Pornography which is the sine qua non of joyless folk like WAVAW or those Stop Porn gals in Boston, is totally full of shit.

According to Dworkin, any depiction of sticking things in ladies is bad. Further, no lady really wants things stuck in her. Having something stuck in you and enjoying it is, in fact, “internalized misogyny” at its most extreme. Anyhoo. Back to me and my porn: Dworkin offers us her reading of literary works in which ladies have things stuck in them. This includes the work of Georges Bataille.

So, here I was with my (fabulous) tits hidden underneath a coverall reading about this “oppressive” literature and trying not to rub one out. God. I was supposed to be nauseated. Instead, I was deeply aroused.

I have since read The Story of the Eye and found it interesting but not really reliable as a tool for tossing. If you haven’t ever seen it, you can download a copy here. (Do take note: the act of reading this 1928 text may constitute a criminal act as the great literary figure Bataille describes sexual acts conducted by a sixteen-year-old person.) Anyhoo. Young Marcelle and the strange things she does with eggs aside, I was led to porn.

Even though I enjoyed the consumption of porn, I continued to be troubled, like a good Marxist-Feminist, by its production. This is to say, I worried for the working conditions of the women within it. Actually, sometimes, I still do. No. Let’s amend that. I worry that anyone involved in the production of porn might confront industrial accident, unfair dismissal or unflattering camera angles.

It didn’t occur to me for many years that some women might have elected to do this sort of work; it certainly never occurred to me that some of them might even enjoy it.

And then, at about 37, I began to want to show everyone my tits and understood for the first time that it was possible that these women might have some volition.

Of course, there’s a gulf that separates the idle desire to flash your whamdanglers and signing on to star in The DaVinci Load. (Yes. It’s real.) As an acquaintance of mine likes to say, “There’s a big difference between scratching your butt and tearing your ass to shreds.”

And, of course, I don’t buy the crap that public sexuality is necessarily wonderful. Bugger me: I lived through the nineties. I remember all that shit. When Madonna grabbed her crotch and declared that she was “expressing” herself, nearly everyone believed her. When a celebrity declared that she found the experience of appearing in Playboy “empowering”, no one questioned her motives. And maybe we should have. The You Go Girl!™ din that greeted any muff-baring became, in short, really fucking annoying.

I don’t by any means wish to suggest that exhibitionism is liberating or therapeutic. I just mean that I have begun to understand why it might be fun.

And I mean to suggest, I suppose, that I, although a porn consumer, remain a little ambivalent about the entire va-va-voom thing. The WAVAW Spinsters and their pro-porn descendants each have a point. Yes, in one reading, porn is revolting. In a cultural economy driven by images, it hardly seems reasonable that there are so many pictures of bored-looking chicks lounging about in nothing but an airbrush. Then again, why do the elder defenders of the gender have to go about in dungarees equating representations of sex with threat and ugliness?

And I mean to suggest that my palookas are fucking excellent. At least, for the next five minutes. Why didn’t I get them out long ago?

Mismatch? “Too right,” I yell at a television that will not stop emitting the sound of injured wasps. There has never been a greater mismatch in television history than that of my ears and the frigging vuvuzela; that blasted South African horn FIFA has not yet seen fit to consign to the waste-basket of unwanted noise.

Have you heard the arse-hatted thing? It is said to evoke the gentle hum of African bees. When in fact, it sounds like a gassy march-fly after a night of spicy food and cheap brandy. It sounds like sleep apnea strained through a filter of Miley Cyrus outtakes. It’s worse than the music they play at my Body Combat class. FOR GOD’S SAKE FIFA: this is the noise a rat makes during labor.

For inscrutable reasons, FIFA is content to give birth to further baby ear-rats. This is despite the fact that the wretched trumpets of evil have been identified as a threat to the auditory health of all attending matches. And it is despite the fact that this crappy little ear-splitter has an occasional history that DOES NOT EXCEED A DECADE.

That’s right. The vuvuzela is as new and disposable as the plastic from which it is rendered. Borrowed from the football stadia of Mexico, the tainted little toy did not travel to South Africa until the 1990s. Its name is faux-exotic. Its “history” is an invention and has nothing whatsoever to do with African bees. So, you can drop your multi-culti guilt about Zulu rhythm right this instant. Don’t blame the Zulu for this acoustic flatulence. Blame the hearing-impaired administrators of FIFA.

Despite medical evidence, complaints from eminent players and full knowledge that the vuvuzela “tradition” is every bit as long and as august as the career of Katy Perry, FIFA will not budge. They described the din as an “integral part of South Africa’s football-watching culture.” Which is (a) bollocks, and (b) about as logical as upholding the grand English tradition of beating your opponents to a bloody pulp with an iron bar in the car park after the match.

No one likes this blare. In fact, clever geeks have identified its hateful frequency to help us eliminate it from broadcast.

What the frig is wrong with FIFA? Is the organisation actively working toward making me hate the World Cup. For the sake of Maradona and all that is good: I finally learned the off-side rule in preparation for 2010. And now, there’s a hornet in my ears that makes me long for the soothing sounds of Norwegian death metal.

There is nothing, save for the fact that it took my mind briefly off Australia’s wan performance, to redeem this bugle of hate.
republished from original post at citysearch

At least John Gailey of Aurora, CO wasn’t advertising his usefulness as a warehouse for spoodge.

This ain’t the most troubling shirt I’ve ever seen.

It was seven or eight years ago that I first saw the sort of shirt that continues to trouble me more. This was around the same time the Mesdames Hilton strutted into view. It was then “sexy” slogans began to foul our ambit. Paris wore shirts that said “I got lucky in Kentucky” And this sentiment filtered down to the lumpenmass and became “I will eat your jizz.”

I remember that day at the mall.

“I swallow,”said her t-shirt in the lowercase arial that was popular at the time. That’s peculiar, I thought, lulled by the same sans serif used to sell high-end kitchen goods. You swallow. Most people swallow. My digestive tract is working. This seemed an unusual boast.

There must be better functions to honor than those of the alimentary canal? Why not a more unusual process? Maybe the hypothalamus. “I release thyroid-stimulating hormone from my anterior pituitary” t-shirt is a bit more interesting.

Oh. That kind of swallowing. God. It was everywhere. And, at my local mall, it persists.

I didn’t want these girls arrested. I just didn’t like their shirts. And I wasn’t having a moral fit; I was just confused.

I wasn’t the only one asking questions. There has been study into this subspecies of dress. Some Londoner, apparently, investigated the trend and found that it was a legitimate and robust expression of young, potent female sexuality blah blah blah.

Whatever, to use the blank language of Paris. I just think it’s yucky. And, my own gag reflex aside, I imagine it does little for the receding members of young males.

Wouldn’t it be much nicer to surprise a lad with a swallow than to offer him a menu before the digestif? I’ve never been very good at having sex with men. Nonetheless, I believe I might perform better than the girl in the swallow tee. I might swallow. But I wouldn’t tell him until I’d actually, you know, MET HIM.

From there, I noticed a related rash of Sexually Liberated shirts. To wit:”They’re real” (N.B. not an necessary endorsement for the B Cups wearing the shirt. More just an affirmation of what we suspected) or “I may not be perfect but parts of me are fucking excellent.” Like dermatitis incubated in the hot changeroom of Ke$ha, this illness ravaged the chests of young women. And, it’s still going on.

I’m not so much offended as actually itchy. And troubled for the sexual future of the young. Again: if you’re giving people a comprehensive preview of all your bed tricks, what remains? How can you hope to charge a partner into the overdrive necessary to a good shag? Poor lambs, and their t-shirt sex. Are they ever to enjoy a truly good rogering?

Oh. Like I care about their sexual leisure.

There’s something else troubling me. And it’s this: these shirts are not offensive or outrageous. At best, they’ve become quite normal. At worst, they’re the twisted expression of what passes now for female “liberation”.

Blank, ironic sex is everywhere. Even, and especially, in shopping malls. So it is hardly, despite the claims of theorists, liberating or plucky for little tarts to strut about in their naughty shirts. It is, in fact, rather conservative. “I swallow”. Yes. Viva la revolucion.

I have done my time in offensive-wear. As I am now 40, I have abandoned t-shirts in favor of mid-level cleavage baring tops. As my décolleté is yet to turn to parchment, I figure this look is more inviting than a shirt that says, “I will suck your dong.”

Actually, I never wore things like that. I have worn shirts that said “I Hate People”, “Homosexuals are Gay” and “Christianity is Stupid”. I regard this kind of offense as mildly constructive.

Like a provocative tweet, this sort of thing can be okay. Not a bad thing to do at all, ensnared as we are in an era of text-message speak.

Now I wouldn’t wear the garb of this blaspheming kid. In Australia, his t-shirt prompted an arrest. It read “Jesus is a Cunt”.

Yes. Icky. But I don’t see why guy bloke was chucked in jail. And I don’t see why John Gailey of Colorado was considered an affront to families.

Of course, if young women wish to advertise their end-to-end fellatio services, that’s fine.. I just don’t want it dressed up as “liberation” and “legitimate expression” and I don’t want another standard set aside for people making political or religious statements.

Now. If anyone wants me, I’ll be producing an exclusive range of “I ♥ Sodomy” shirts. Order in time for you next family dinner.

In 1990, things hadn’t yet warmed up for academic pest Camille Paglia. Late that year, the Yale alum took the temperature of the culture and published her results in The New York Times.

When she declared Madonna the degree zero of pop, Paglia herself became white hot.

”Madonna is the true feminist,” wrote Paglia in 1990. The professor hailed the music video for Justify My Love as ”an eerie, sultry tableau of jaded androgynous creatures” and, in short, the future of a liberated art.

At the time, I agreed. As I was that sort of girl.

Here at last in Madonna’s reworking of Cavani’s The Night Porter was a positive and empowering vision of female sexuality. That’s what we said at the time. And, because back in 1990 being a feminist was about as much fun as being a bank clerk, it was an enormous relief to claim Madonna as our own. When Paglia introduced the metrics of sex, we immediately added it to our ledger.

Together, Paglia and Madonna launched a thousand term papers. Hungry for a bit of smut, feminist art critics wrote essays praising Madonna with titles that sounded like Justify My Ideology.

God. I think I turned something in to my professor about the song Borderline and how its lyric uttered ”Madonna’s transgressive sexuality”. I’m pretty sure I got an A.

Whenever a woman artist took her clothes off and demonstrated that femininity was a performance, you could be sure an undergraduate would write an essay about it.

For the next little while in the worlds of pop, the avant-garde and academia, things proceeded in this vein. From the Queer performance of Holly Hughes, whose work was praised by The Times for scraping ”away decades of encrusted decorum”, to the girl power of the Spice Girls, the new camp feminism could be felt. This was fun. It seemed that we’d all finally caught up with the prophesies of Susan Sontag, who said, ”Camp sees everything in quotation marks”. It is never a woman but a ”woman”.

The woman on stage, or ”woman”, could not lose with her new weapon of irony. However, like Madonna, this ironic ”woman” business began to get a little old.

Anyone who has ever sat through a shitty burlesque routine on the Lower East Side, or seen the movie Spice World, may have seen the cracks. Literally as well as figuratively. At a certain point, an audience begins to wonder: am I seeing tits or ”tits”? And, really, is there a difference?

Often, there is no difference. Often, burlesque or striptease can be so blankly ironic that it has about as much theatricality and power as you might enjoy at Scores.

But, every now and then, Paglia’s promise of ”woman” might be properly observed.

Gaga dialed up the promise presaged by Paglia and co. More than quotation marks, we see, amid a cast of trans-gendered, hyper camp enchantment, entire bound volumes shrieking ”woman”. Within the first 30 seconds of the video Telephone which I still LOVE these months later, Gaga evokes the rumor that she has a penis.

From the first, I knew that GaGa was special.

One day, I was at the gym on the elliptical trainer coaxing my body into a shape more suitable for 1990. Before me on the television screen was the promotional video for Poker Face. As I am very short-sighted with non-correctible vision, I might not have bothered moving up to the rowing machine for a second look at GaGa had it not been for her brickbat rip-off of Peaches, the rudest woman I’ve ever met.

In short, here was the most beautifully constructed bit of vision I’d seen since I Don’t Know When. I was particularly tickled to hear the phrase, “I’m Bluffin’ With My Muffin” and I was returned immediately to a youth where I passionately wrote horrible papers about Madonna, performance and feminism. Or, “performativity” as we Judith Butler fans of the early 1990s liked to say.

For the first time in forever, I wished I was young again. I knew that if I was 20, I’d devote myself utterly to reading the “text” of Lady GaGa. How could a young feminist academic even begin to resist analysis of “bluffin’ with my muffin”? Here was a burlesque refugee using the (broadly disputed) “fact” of her genitals to bluff. GaGa’s clear lack of knowledge about the rules of poker aside, if I was 18 again, my head would have been reeling with the promise of cultural studies funding.

What the fuck, I asked myself, was not to love about Lady GaGa? She was transgressive, post-ironic and irrefutably, wonderfully Queer.
I searched to find what Paglia had to say about the ”woman” who actually wears real masks in public. There wasn’t much.

In Salon.com, Paglia advised Gaga: ”Give it a rest, and focus on the music.”

In the meantime, I’m turning my old volumes of Paglia into a dress to wear next time GaGa comes to play in my town.

PETA describes itself a “Sexy Celeb Supporter“. That this mission statement might be applied equally to push-up bras makes sense. Frilly and precious, PETA is far too tied up with its appearance to, say, take any practical steps toward animal welfare in the Gulf of Mexico.

You’d think an organization like PETA might want to roll its sleeves up and help manage this habitat calamity. No. But they did release this intriguing press statement. PETA says that if we want to help injured Gulf animals, what we really should do is stop eating meat.

According to PETA, the devastation of marine animal populations is the result of the pot-roast you ate last Thursday. It has nothing to do with BP.

No. I don’t understand it either.

As oiled seabirds die a slow, painful death, PETA turns its attention back to core business: titties.

Big titties.

PETA’s newest Rad and Refreshing billboard takes a slice of British cheesecake to make the claim that a high-fat diet ends in a low-fat penis. The model, by-the-by, is called Chantelle and she started her climb to vegetarian stardom on the greasy poles of motorcycle trade shows. Then, she won a Reality TV contest. Now, she’s here to school you boys about the health of your omnivorous dongs.

Chantelle might be very nice and I’m glad she’s turned her charms into cash. God knows, I’d hold a flaccid wiener for money if I had the décolleté for it. It certainly looks easier than writing. Far be it from me to go on and interminably on about the objectification of flesh; processed into a sausage skin or otherwise. It’s not Chantelle I find repugnant. It is the sex reflex of her current employers.

WTF is it with PETA? Who among their number holds a sub-standard MBA and the shop-worn conviction that “sex sells”? Sure, sex sells some stuff. Sales of cars, footwear and quality linen can all be improved with sex. But, sex doesn’t sell everything. There’s a range of goods and services that cannot be convincingly promoted with sex. These include, but are by no means limited to, bank loans, floor coverings and responsible eating.

It’s easy to change into a pink pair of frilly panties. It is far more difficult to change what’s inside the pantries of the world. When it comes to what we put in our mouths, we tend to resist good advice. Sometimes, though, we might hear something so rational that we begin to think before we shop.

Personally, I could not resist the plain talk and neat thought of Michael Pollan. It was Pollan who drove me to buy only ethically grown meats. In small portions. And it was Pollan who alerted me, and many vegetarians, to the shocking practices of agribusiness. In short, we learned that the production of plant foods can be just as unethical, unsustainable and crap as the raising of meat.

But. The ethical flaws of a vegetarian world-view aside: Pollan got inside my gut. And he did so with reason, research and argument. And I have no wish to know what color panties he wore when he wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

This is how you change consumption for the greater good. You just can’t achieve it with a pair of tits and the threat of a floppy wang. And, you can’t achieve it by being racist tools.

Did you see this PETA dump on first nation people from back in February? The same “consciousness raising” vegans that used several of the world’s most expensive titties to save a few contaminated rabbits were making fun of the Inuit. Seriously. Who gives a flying frankfurter if the Inuit club a few seals? They don’t have nationhood, dental care or iPhones. Who in their right mind would begrudge these people a few dozen marine mammals?

For years now, this organization has colluded with famous idiots. Using the vacant mechanism of celebrity, it has attempted to jam the machine of animal slaughter. It has asked Naomi Campbell (still an unapologetic fur-wearer) to pose nude for its anti-fur campaign. It has lured vegan Playboy models into its employ and draped them publicly in lettuce leaves. Yes, girls, it’s apparently fine to inject poison into your tits and show your asshole to Hef and the world for money. But eating little lambs is Just Not Cool.

I hope Gaia is sick on them all.

But, aside from leaving all those animals to die in the Gulf, PETA’s saddest fail is its stupid beauty pageant.

Every year, it unstraps the bong from its smug vegetarian face and names Sexy Vegetarians. None of whom, as it happens, this guilty omnivore wants to eat. (OK. Except for Alyssa Milano.)

This is the problem with using one-size-fits-all sex. When mass culture spews out its sausage feed of lust, it can look as appetizing as head-cheese.

PETA, I am a principled eater and my omnvorism is certainly up for sale. But you simply will not buy it with your sexy, celeb-supporting processed meat.

First. You need to be told. Your movie is an abomination.

No. That just won’t do.

Let’s try again: Your movie is a cheerless, broken sham.

Not getting any closer.

One more time: Your movie has lain itself on the rock of female self-loathing, asked late-capitalism to gang-bang it, please, and then drown it in a bukkake-tsunami of product placement.

This is not a movie but an advertising medium strangely complicit in its own rape and murder.

I am witness to a brutal death. And I have your gift-bag to prove it.

On Friday, I attended the cinema for a “celebrity studded” premier of your terrible film.

This, of course, is Melbourne, Australia where “celebrity studded” has come to mean any woman working in the PR industry who has ever blown a footballer. So, I didn’t see any genuine celebrity. Then again, I was blinded by the desert nation that is your terrible movie.

Sarah. Sarah. Why did you do it?

After five bajillion years, and 146 minutes, I was gasping. Gasping like a woman of the Melbourne PR industry might as she sucks on a strapping midfielder. Thank goodness, then, a Proud Corporate Sponsor had thought to place branded water in my gift bag. Otherwise, my ovaries and hope would have shrivelled to resemble the tiny middle portion of you, Sarah Jessica Parker. You have never looked so much like a dead desert tree.

Your movie is set in Abu Dhabi where many of the trees are dead. A Gulf State? This is both (a) a shit idea for a franchise in which NYC has always figured as your ageless Fifth Lady (c) a gift to critics. They’ve all driven straight to Metaphor City. How could they resist the lure of comparing your parched old ladies to parched old landscapes? They couldn’t. Perhaps, they shouldn’t.

Normally, I loathe critique steeped in misogyny and I know you feel the same. On this occasion, I say to these critics: be my guest. Go to Menopause Town, Messrs. Anything you can do to stop the sisters from diving headfirst into this reeking pile of Shit by Ferragamo™ is fine by me. Girlfriend doesn’t need to see a snuff film with feminism as its object.

In fact, if Girlfriend is looking for a gender-affirming Night at the Movies she would be better to see Rocky. Or Rambo. Anything with Sly in it. He paints a more “empowering” portrait of What it Means to Be a Modern Woman in Her Forties than you do. And, while we’re at it, so does any Muslim cleric.

And, I’d like to tell you, Sarah, that if your movie wasn’t so crap, one of these clerics would be well within his rights to issue a Swarovski studded SJP fatwa. How dare you use your terrible movie to suggest that Islamic dress is oppressive and restrictive. On seven inch Diors you totter as you look at the Niqabi and say, “Poor women. Their dress is so uncomfortable. How do they even eat?” An odd question, Sarah, as clearly, in preparation for this movie, you haven’t eaten at all.

I could chastise you for your Islamophobia, Sarah, but I fear you’ve lost you patience.. For now, let’s examine the other and manifold ways in which you blow.

How much do you blow? You blow so hard that Us Magazine, one of your movie’s product placement principals, conducted a poll asking not “Do you LOVE it?” but “Is it Terrible?”. In an effort to nourish the desert in which it has taken root, the magazine boasts, “62 percent voted that the movie isn’t terrible!” Great. There’s some qualitative research for you, SJP. 62 percent also voted that they’d prefer to view this movie again than die after sucking off one of the camels featured in your desolate tract of talent.

You blow so hard, I’m afraid, that your girls are extinguished and will not themselves live to blow another New York City man again. And to those of us soothed by your chic, funny and often smart exegesis of bed-hopping As Seen on TV, this is nothing short of a disaster. I will miss my Four Winds.

Sarah, I pay tribute to them now.

Vale Miranda. Good-bye to the flinty, ambitious Harvard alum whose pointy head was always aimed toward the glass ceiling. After Friday night, she is dead. What have you made her do? Rather than man up against a partner whose impatience with her work is presumed to be sexist, Hobbes stops fighting and quits her gig to raise her irritating son and please her needy husband. What is it we say as we snap our fingers to praise female achievement? Oh. Yes. You Go Girl™.

Vale Charlotte. Good-bye to the prim, sweetly drawn New England eccentric whose beautifully kept Louboutins were always aimed toward great matrimonial sex. After Friday night, she is dead. What have you made her do? Rather than trust in her troth with Harry, she is now consumed with doubt and the vision of her nanny’s unrestrained bosom. I always loved Mrs Goldenblatt; I loved that she was besotted by Harry’s masculinity; I loved that she was so loving. But, you got her to cut off Harry’s balls and put them in a Kelly Bag . You’ve transformed her from a prize-winning Rules Girl into a sad and nervous loser.

Vale Samantha. Good-bye to the confident cougar whose impeccably waxed vagina was always pointed toward quality cock. After Friday night, she is dead. What have you made her do, Sarah? Rather than do, as she’s always done, what-comes-naturally, she decides to take a pill. Now, she’s doing what comes pharmaceutically. I loved the way Miss Jones chose to always satisfy herself. Now, she’s satisfying someone else. To wit: you; a woman-hating producer who’s hell-bent on drawing shrewish caricatures; not the fun female archetypes we loved.

What happened to you, Sarah? And what, moreover, happened to our beautiful Carrie.

Finally. Vale Carrie. Good-bye to the writer whose big, messy heart was always pointed toward real love. The woman who observed, Season One, Episode One, that, “cupid has flown the co-op” has taken a hatchet to her own longing. Cupid has visited the co-op and, for reasons only known to you and the Barbie Doll collector who wrote this pile of crap, she’s chopped off all his limbs and spat into his wounds screaming, “Why don’t we go out to dinner anymore, Big?”

“Am I just a bitch wife who nags?” your Carrie asks Big. The answer is: yes. You, just like your friends, have become a terminally insatiable, under-employed husk who can only be appeased as wads of money and praise are stuffed with force into all of your needy holes.

This is one of the central problems with your terrible movie. Every time one of your ladies is denied the instant rogering she craves, she blames it on “sexism”. To wit: your Carrie Bradshaw-Preston, always portrayed as a delightfully, happily low-brow writer is reviewed in the New Yorker. Which is odd for a writer who DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO USE AN APOSTROPHE. (Sarah. You never use an apostrophe for a plural. Ever.) Anyhow, Carrie doesn’t get a rave. Samantha blames it on “sexism” and all the girls agree, yes Carrie. You were not reviewed poorly because you leave your modifiers dangling, have nothing left to say and overuse the phrase “I couldn’t help but wonder”. You were reviewed poorly because, “Men just can’t handle women with a strong voice.”

Having been crushed by the oppressive, phallocentric world of literary magazines, Carrie then does what any newly oppressed maiden might. She does not hopefully send a review copy to Granta but puts on two pounds of eyeliner, a sparkly skirt with a split to her mons pubis and snogs her old boyfriend. You Go Girl™.

Bleugh.

I am sad to tell you, Sarah, most of the PR ladies in Melbourne ate up your bulimic purge with a spoon.

Hurt about Having No Voice as a Woman, your Carrie gives Aidan a glimpse of thigh and a yard of tongue. She’s married. He’s married. Clearly, she’s seeking the unhealthiest reprieve possible from her terrible review. But, all the Melbourne footy molls applauded. As you probably knew they would.

What are you telling us, Sarah? Are you saying when we’re beaten down by sexism, we should dress in couture and have sex with a man who sells high-end furniture? Are you saying liberation inheres in accessories, seven star restaurants and cock that appears at the moment we want it? I’m not saying these things aren’t enormous fun, Sarah. I’d love a Kate Spade purse crammed full with amuse bouche and penis to-go. Who wouldn’t?

But, in the end, these are not the rewards of liberation, Sarah. I want to be sick in your handbag of hate just to show you that designer hard goods and the hard goods of those poor men who barely exist in your brittle universe are NOT the site of insurgency. They are just a way to fill your needy, needy holes, Sarah.

Sarah. What have you done?

This morning I saw you on the television. We’re back to season one and you are in a cab with the girls you would, twelve years later, dress in hideous drag. It’s a transcendent TV moment. You have gathered, like a coven who specialises in advice to the newly sodomized, to talk to Charlotte about anal sex. My partner and I couldn’t believe that women were talking about such things on the telly. It was frothy, wonderful and the way I would thereafter secretly spent my every Monday night.

Charlotte says that she’d quite like to try it, but what if she was thereafter known as the Up The Butt girl. You and your cohorts tell her that what anyone thinks doesn’t matter; that virtue, being a dangerous myth, couldn’t be taken from her or her butt.

What happened, Sarah. After last Friday night, I can only think of you as the Up The Butt Girl who confused freedom and pleasure for capital and greed. My boxed set is on eBay. My hope was left, with my gift bag, in a cinema seat. I walked out when Samantha was throwing condoms all over an Arab state, and I Couldn’t Help But Wonder if, in Sex and the City 3, Carrie will not be played by you but an enormous tube of product placement lubricant dressed in Alexander McQueeen.

Yours,

Miss Helen Razer

No. Don’t worry. As far as I’m aware, David Marr is still alive, well and blaming John Howard for everything from the dwindling of the arts to the quality of bread.

It’s something even more precious than an aesthete they’re mourning. To wit: a possible blow to their income.

In the case you hadn’t heard and might give one eighth of a fuck, local progressive opinion site New Matilda is shutting up shop. And, lordy, is it being lamented.

Go here, here or here for the sort of story that never fails to elicit real media interest. What, after all, is of greater importance to a journalist than the death of a potential future client?

Reporting consensus squares with the sentiment of editor, Marni Cordell. In short: it’s so very, very sad that an unfeeling landscape can no longer nourish a sensitive progressive.

I am not certain who this fellow is but I certainly admire his balls. He uses both of them to point to the bleeding obvious. Viz. the failure of the forum had less to do with an aggressive market and more to do with being shit at math.

He has some insight. How on earth they remunerated anyone for anything is a mystery. For a little while, I worked for the publication and was agreeably shocked when my paycheck showed up. Things always felt a little doomed.

I had a dim feeling that few people actually visited the site. I had a dim feeling that the management team weren’t particularly troubled by the “elite” nature of their readership. I had a fairly clear feeling that the only acceptable reflex for contributors was to the orthodox Left. And, for the most part, that’s exactly what I provided.

This is not to say that I custom-fit my views to the organisation. I just selected from my views those that would suit the organisation. Which means I was shit boring. Once or twice, I didn’t fit and my stuff was returned to me. This is one of the offcuts. A piece on media treatment of hot girl-on-girl action following Lindsay Lohan’s “outing”. Not my finest comic moment, sure. But I think the use of the phrases “vagatarian”, “kettle of fist” and “box luncheon” were sufficient to warrant publication of the piece in full.

The point is, even though that’s a silly piece of writing, the Matildas rarely waltzed free-form. A piece, for example, about hotted-up homophobia in the mainstream press was outside their remit. With few exceptions, most provided by my talented associates Ben Pobjie and Shakira Hussein, the range of expression on the site was terribly narrow. If it wasn’t cookie-cutter progressivism, it wasn’t getting published.

Of course, the team was perfectly entitled to publish what they would. But, a Leninist approach to both copy and contractor relations ensured I wasn’t the only one who pissed off. I think readers did, too.

The talk today is about how difficult it is to find a place in such an odd market. And, certainly, it is difficult. The economic futurists of the past didn’t get it completely right. Certainly, after years of over-investment, it turns out that portions of the New Economy has more negative equity than Detroit. There ain’t much money to be made providing written content online. But, there is a little.

I think it might be more useful to look not at how the market failed an organisation like New Matilda but how an organisation like New Matilda failed the left. And, goodness knows, we need some new, engaging voices in Australia. We need to be provoked and challenged out of our malaise.

Perhaps the end of New Matilda cannot be attributed to bad bookkeeping, lazy SEO or challenging economic conditions. But its end wasn’t written in the stars either; it was written in the articles.

Lindsay Lohan is a talented young performer. More significantly, she is a busty top-drawer hottie who has recently Gone Lez. In thrilling news it seems that the young woman stuffed with theatric promise is also stuffed with a slender girl DJ named Sam.

Well. I haven’t been so elated since discovering that Mean Girls was available in limited edition format with director’s commentary and gratis pink barrette.

I’ve admired Lohan, but not in that way, since her comic twelve –year-old’s turn in The Parent Trap. Impeccable timing and precocious swagger recalled an adolescent Jodie Foster. Her People quickly identified this likeness and chose to make it plain. Freaky Friday was remade with Lohan cast in the Foster role.

Perhaps it was Lohan’s attachment to The Method that led her to duplicate some of Jode’s less broadcast habits. Or, perhaps it was the pure love of snatch. Who knows and, indeed, who cares? I’d just love to be among the first to welcome Miss Lohan to the company of tribades. Bienvenue.

Of course, many Sapphic bouquets arrived before I could call intervulva. I’d missed my chance. Somehow, this news had almost soured by the time it reached my screen. It was, in fact, an Australian news source that alerted me to the star’s penchant for vag. Appended with a charming pictorial entitled “Stars Who Turn” the article did not report but took as granted broad knowledge of Lohan’s box luncheon.

The piece, in fact, was chiefly concerned with the Lez japery of another and far less talented young performer. It seems that Miss Jessica Origliasso, one half of Australia’s most ghastly musical act, is also going the girl growl.

One hopes, for the sake of her young friend, that the noises she makes during congress are more endurable than The Veronicas’ oeuvre.

Like Lohan, Origliasso has chosen a mate whose celebrity and physical beauty will not eclipse her own. Unlike Lohan, Origliasso is rather dull.

Why did I have to learn the saucy truth about Lindsay in such a regrettable way?

My joy was assuaged. Much as it was when I discovered that Oprah liked The Corrections as fervently as I did. Much as it was when people started reciting W H Auden verse in naff films. Much as it was when I learned that Ronald and Nancy Reagan fancied Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. Although a Cat Lady, I’ve always got along tremendously well with this wilful breed. Whereas I regard the late Reagan, his terrifying spouse and their perverse legacy as neither sane nor cuddly.

JUST SAY NO, I urged Jessica the novice vagatarian.

The plea, of course, is futile. As a Muff Diva of some years standing, I understand the lure of lady love. As a vulgar acquaintance of mine is wont to say, Once You’ve Had Crack, You’ll Never Go Back.

And so, Origliasso and I now have two things in common. We are both carbon based and both enamoured of tattooed brunettes. Beyond this, our kinship is limited and I will have nothing further to say to or about her.

Lohan, however, is a different kettle of fist. I believe she is deserving of my immediate counsel. Lindsay, do accept my heartfelt advice.
Please don’t think me impolite. Naturally, I first tried to offer such via more direct and less open means. But I was rebuffed by your unfeeling corporation who failed to grasp my Big Sister instincts.

“Lindsay needs my advice,” I told them. “I’ve been slaking the lady bacon on and off for years. She’d probably appreciate it.”

As some mandarin of the Creative Artists Agency tangles with the intricacies of an international restraining order, I continue to worry. So I offer public advice to you; the beginner butch.

Lindsay: Having sex with a woman can be very difficult. The actual sex part, as I’m certain you’ve discovered, is actually quite straightforward and nearly always good. The rejoinders of others, however, might prove impossible to take.

I know I don’t need to tell you about garden variety homophobia, Lindsay. You live in America and, no doubt, have already experienced the odium of odious Christians. I’m not talking death threats and hell fire. I wanted to tell you about another peculiar ill.

I know, Lindsay, you are used by now to scrutiny. But I wanted to prepare you for study of a more brutal order. Of course, it’s possible that the folks at CAA engineered your sexual infraction. But, even so, you are now irredeemably tainted.

From now until the cessation of your womanhood, you will be trained with the most pornographic lens.

Of course, some women already know this and turn it to their fleeting benefit. Viz. that awful song currently on the radio about a girl pashing a girl; possibly The Veronicas; those sexhibitionist youngsters who can be found on any Friday night after a Bacardi Breezer or ten fingering their best mate on the dance floor in pursuit of male consideration.

Whenever anyone thinks of you, they will only be thinking: sex, sex, sex.

While it might seem tolerable now, this eventually becomes exhausting. Certainly, you might be flattered on the initial fifty occasions you are told by a gentleman, “I find what you two do very erotic.” You may even ask him to watch. On the fifty first, however, it might start sounding a little tired. Particularly if you and that young DJ are simply trying to buy a new Prius or similar.

“Can you explain the hybrid model to me?”
“I find what you two do very erotic.”

It’s inconvenient.

The enticing possibility of three ways aside, this whole thing gets very tiresome. I’m not half as hot as you and I’m twice as old. Yet, I’ve been dealing with it for years. A great many people will look at you. And all they are thinking is: vagina.

You will always be seen through the grubby lattice of girl-on-girl action. For this is how nearly everyone thinks of even tolerably attractive tribades: continually tangled in each others’ muffs.