Look. Don’t get me wrong. I have great respect for Sufism and if I were ever to make a Madonna-like grab for enlightenment, Islam’s mystical order would be my one-stop shop. Think about it. You’ve got the whirling, the outfits and all those lovely poets who give us beautiful comforts.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

This is from Rumi, the thirteenth century Sufi we know best. I think we can all agree he is much better than Coldplay.

The one fly in the salve of my conversion fantasy, though, is the knowledge that “This too shall pass” is, in fact, a Sufi proverb.

This too shall pass. Fuck I hate it when people say that. It reminds me that all passage is painful And/or that all things are fleeting. It sounds tedious and terrifying and brings to mind the overuse of laxatives. It is never soothing.

Well, almost never. Sometimes it is soothing and funny.

My mother said it to me once at a major Matisse exhibition while we were packed like beasts in the Fauvism section. I have always found my mother’s impatience with visual art every bit as funny as my rather more aspirational father finds it galling.

Luxe, Calme et Volupté ("Luxury, Calm and Pleasure") by Henri Matisse, 1904. Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

This too shall pass she said as we walked by the unremarkable Luxe, Calme et Volupté. She HATED these pictures. This too shall pass.

Mum was right.I laughed and we went to the bar while my father stroked his chin (not figuratively; my father actually strokes his chin at blockbuster art exhibitions) and used words like “painterly” looking at that lurid picture of a woman in a hat. This too shall pass. Fauvism did pass pretty quickly. I think it lasted only three years.

This is not very long; especially when you consider that I stayed in a dumbass relationship for fourteen years. AND it could have gone on longer, too, thanks to loyalty of a sort so unstinting and panting that even a Golden Retriever would refer me to his therapist. This fourteen-year art-movement only ended when the ex had a new subject lined up.

Now she is painting a pastoral work of a compliant heifer ready for emotional-milking in the pastures of deceit.

MOO. I hope you’re happy together in your tedious landscape.

So I’m a little angry about disbursing the last of my youth and my money in a loveless hate farm. But apparently THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

Like fuck it will. When? WHEN WILL IT PASS? I am so, so angry with the waste of my time. I want this rage to pass.

I’m going to be, perhaps, a little too frank and tell you I thought that it had passed. Just one week after being left for a heifer. Almost as soon as my first date in the Helen One Hundred showed up. We shall call him “J”.

After my partner had left to pursue new dimensions in art and vagina, something strong and strange began to happen to me. I was overcome by old appetites with a force for which there is no marker.

I am not talking about sex alone, here. My appetites for reading returned and for debate and for running, too. But my libidinal drive in particular began to combust beyond the limits of convention.

And so. It was my id that signed up to an internet dating system and my id that agreed to meet a chap after a little more than two hours of affectedly idle online chat.

It was my heart that stopped when I saw him.

Freud would say that it was not a failure of the heart but of the super-ego that caused me to gasp on a pavement in south-east Melbourne on the sort of summer night so hot I, a creature effective within a very moderate temperature range, would otherwise shun. And, you know, Freud is more often right than I am.

Freud would say that I was willing myself to erotic disaster. I had been reading Freud again after my partner had left me and I knew even as I stood there watching this tall man approach that I would repeat the mistakes of eros I had been rehearsing since I was a child

But Freud doesn’t have much to say about big brown eyes, does he? And Freud has little to offer on the question of walking in twilight with a body that smells of butterscotch and tobacco. And Freud is silent on the topic of posture.

The way J held himself was, um, id-shaking. From an orthopedic standpoint, it was terrible. From mine, though, there can be no human bearing that will ever move me quite so much. His big and perfect body said, “I’m sorry”.

Actually, for much of the night, J said “sorry”; about everything. Sorry for not looking exactly like my photograph. (He looked better.) Sorry for not being more interesting. (He knew all of the books I had been reading and was able to discuss them with ardour and grace and gently direct my reading further; he was smarter than me.) Sorry for not bringing anything. (You brought yourself, you fuckhead.)

Sorry. He looked sorry. Even – and especially – from a distance, his carriage said I’m Sorry.

Over six feet, he’d grown fast enough at some point to become apologetic for it. I thought about how he must have tried to hold that body for so long and instead of a man my age I saw a young, reluctant full-forward kicking goals to please the coach. Then, of course, I was gone. Or, rather, my super-ego failed.

We walked around the suburb and returned a lost Tonkinese to its owner. We derided ourselves for having, apparently, stumbled into an indie rom-com starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt with an unforgivable meet-cute involving a pedigree cat. We spoke about the difficulty of speaking for the first time outside the rhythms of online chat and it became an easy decision to invite someone who liked cats and critical theory and smelled of butterscotch into my home.

What do we say about what came next? Contingent on my mood, I will tell you that this evening – which became a month or two of evenings – proceeded very well or very poorly. What else can I tell you? I don’t think the subject of my story would mind if I told you that the sex became very good and immersive and frequent.

He made me come the hardest and I felt it even in my knees for days. I cannot think for too long about the sex because I will not think of anything else. I submitted completely and I cannot trust myself not to submit again. Even with Freud screaming in my ear

We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love, never so forlornly unhappy as when we have lost our love object or its love.

For a week or two or perhaps for a month, I was fairly sure that my heart had begun to beat again. But, it seems that the sound of the pulse was just an echo; a pre-recorded message from a time when one was, if not happy, then just actually content.

Freud reminds us we are doomed to repeat our romantic disasters.

This knowledge will not stop me for a moment in replaying those mistakes at least ninety-nine times in my life. (Apply within!)

This knowledge will not claim the memory I have of staying up all night with J who , as it turned out, was a Twitcher and could name the birds calling outside the window at dawn. Nor will it make me regret the sleeplessness I endured from the sound of my prerecorded heart bouncing around the bed he had vacated.

When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.
Praise God for those two insomnias!
And the difference between them.

This shall not pass. I won’t allow the memory of this lovely man to pass. Although he is already gone.

99 Dates To Go. Wanna Date? Enclicken?

It is hot, my life remains in the lavatory and I have no icecream. More to the point, my #Helen100 date scheduled for tonight cancelled and so I am left alone on a Friday.  With my empty muff and head.

Frankly, I’d rather write more about the former but its neglect cracks open the latter; and she is bordering upon madness at this hour, the close of International Women’s Day.

Don’t. Even. Talk. To. Me.

Seriously, don’t.

Anyone who knows me even a little makes sure to avoid the topic of gender in my company.  Actually, one of the #Helen100 tried it in a pub in Coburg last week but we’ll get to that story – which ended with me raging “I couldn’t possibly fuck a biological essentialist; not even one with an EH Sedan”– in the fullness of time.

That guy didn’t know me.  If he did, he’d know my ideas about gender come more from Judith Butler than they do  from, say, Growing Pains.  He’d know that an express route to my trousers is to talk about the seams that join Freud to Marx. He’d know my relationship with feminism is long, ardent and difficult.

Feminism.  It keeps me awake at night.   Yeah, I got problems.  But not so many, I’d venture, as an Australian feminism that produces twaddle like this.   For International Women’s Day, here is a piece that considers the special qualities women might bring as leaders of professional media.

WHAT?  What? WHAT?

Are women better media leaders?

Rebekah Brooks is the answer.   Marissa Mayer is the answer.  Gina Rinehart is the answer. Fucking NO is the answer.

That professed feminists can think – just as the man in the Coburg pub did – that women have “special” qualities that they might bring to enterprise is fucking beyond me.  Women are not nicer.  Women are not a civilising influence.  Women are just as capable of avarice and stupidity as anyone.

This “If Only Women Ruled the World” shit has no place outside the Hallmark Corporation. Ascribing a Marian grace to my gender might work in the Catholic Church but it really shouldn’t have any function for those who do not worship the Blessed Virgin.

Women are not gifted, either socially or biologically, of anything special.  If we believe that they are, then we must also accept the possibility that the gender could be marked with unpleasant characteristics.  If we believe that women are “better negotiators” or “great multitaskers”, we can also easily believe that they are “not very good with money” or some shit.

I find any work that even considers the idea that privileged white women do things in any way that is markedly superior or different to the things done by  privileged white  men so ineffably deluded I want to take ALL of the Alanis Morissette CDs purchased in the 1990s and make a sculpture of an enormous plastic masturbating woman and win the Turner Prize with a piece I have called Enormous Plastic Masturbating Woman Wins the Turner Prize.

Anyhow.  The writing.  One of many pieces of crap I saw today. I know little of its author Jenna Price. However, I certainly do know how to Google and, as a Media Professional, could easily pretend I have been aware of the lady’s work as an activist and academic for some time.  And, in a way, I have as she is one of the architects of the local “movement” known as “Destroy the Joint”.

No.  Destroy the Joint is not a competitive league of doobie smokers nor is it the work of those who especially like to eat spring lamb. It is, in fact, the locus for much feminist “action” and so, for my dateless purposes here tonight, a good site for inquiry.

Look. If you don’t know about it, read this hagiography. In short, the campaign sought to reignite feminism through a social media critique of traditional media.

For mine, Destroy the Joint began, very quickly, to Destroy the Point.  As a fairly rash user of social media myself, I made the view known to tens of followers that I found the exercise distastefully onanistic.  The fast cycles of uncritical rage that greeted a number of purportedly “misogynist” incidents – the average comedy of Daniel Tosh, the dressing of children in inappropriate clothing, the naming of a racehorse as a woman – brought to mind the usual pace of my own visits to RedTube.

We sit in front of screens and we suspend our thought to enhance our desire and then we mash our own genitals to the point that they explode in a brief but ecstatic frenzy of nothing especially productive.  It’s a sad little  ragegasm we need to repeat seven times a day  in the absence of genuine congress.

I do not mind a good wank but I have little patience for a bad one and this mean and dessicated  DTJ masturbation must, at some point, cease.  The expense of this libidinal energy cannot be calculated.  We are spending our climaxes in tiny online moments when, really, they are due elsewhere to fuck the system.

Feminism is the struggle against masculinsed violence and feminised poverty.  Or, the acknowledgement that physical violence is enacted disproportionately by men and poverty is experienced disproportionately by women. That’s it, really.

And don’t give me that “there are many feminisms” shit.  Yes, of course there are and my experience of gender is markedly different to that of a lass (or lad) living, say, in Maputo. But, for the sake of fuck, at SOME point, we have to agree about our basic aims and get off this DTJ-endorsed fap-wreck before we all perish from the carnal stink.

There are two chief DTJ problems and the first is that it feels like a cultural studies tutorial from 1991.  I know what it is like to be absorbed in the novelty of semiotics and that “Angrily Calling Out Sexism Wherever You See It” is habit-forming.  The behaviour is compulsive and sometimes, you know, it makes you act before you think and you get it wrong.  SO wrong.  I recall, for example, this  moment in which DTJ ally Anne Summers called a urinal shaped like a mouth “misogynist”.

That the mouth urinals purchased by a Sydney restaurant were very clearly referencing the famous John Pasche Rolling Stones male mouth logo was immaterial; the lavs are on display at a Rolling Stones museum in Germany.

And, that these latrines had been present for years just a kilometre away in Oxford St in the bathroom of a club for homosexual men was not deemed relevant, either. Didn’t matter. Here, recourse to logic and facts would mean a pause in the fun, fast online work of screaming “MISOGYNY”.

In one social media conversation, a DTJ “pledge” told me I was a misogynist for “supporting” (N.B. if one is not objecting along with DTJ then one is supporting rape et al) this “crap”.  As a great fan of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, I couldn’t have been happier when she told me that “a urinal could never be art”.  HA HA HA.

How am I the only person reminded here of the Piss Christ shame of the nineties with Summers and DTJ cast as George Pell? The idea that art (yes, even low or middle-brow art; and that includes Sexist Comedians) needs absolution from the Feminist Cardinal is, to me at least, anathema.

(Was it a similar frustration with dummies that drove both Greer and Paglia to publish on the topic of visual art?)

So. Yes. Bad cultural studies practice is the first problem.    The second problem is that DTJ and her associates actually believe they are healing the faithless.

Look.  Here’s the thing: telling people they are being disadvantaged is a tricky business, Caroline Chisholm. There’s something dangerously missionary in an approach that seeks to draft sisters to a Crusade chiefly at war with nonsense on the behalf of hollow gods.  You are make-believe-slaying paps that snap pregnant celebrities.  Oooooh.

Are these your true adversaries?  Do you REALLY think The Patriarchy will cease to function if you boycott a bar or a performer or a clothing store? Are you jamming the gears of capitalism by defending Chrissie Swan?

No, honey.  You’re not.

Baby, what are you fighting for?  I presume the rationale is that by talking about “Everyday Sexism”, Everyday Women will join the struggle.

No.  Don’t think so.  People aren’t that easily led or recruited   I know the ALP deludes itself that the electorate can be nudged to good by marginal lies and marketing.  Don’t make the same mistake.  Tell your constituency it is the struggle against masculinised violence and feminised poverty.  They are bright and brave enough to hear it.  It is arrogant and unhelpful and even alienating to suppose that they are not.

If you want to politicise someone, here’s a thought: talk to them about politics.

You don’t need some ridiculous spin about inappropriate plumbing or sexist wallpaper or whatever the fuck it is this week to apprentice folk to The Struggle. You need to read some macroeconomics, bitches, and spread the fucking word.

Hey.  I’m right.  I was, in fact, appointed feminism’s door bitch. And, no, you can’t come in if all you have to talk about is The Need For More Women CEOs and Less Sexism in Ads.

I am, however, flexible about double denims.

No one told me the end of a fifteen year relationship would smell exactly like barbecue chicken. But this, as it turns out, is misery’s signature scent. It has been sixty-one days since my partner left me with the words “I’m leaving you” and with little to do but sob into well-finished floorboards.

At first, I sobbed into the floorboards beneath the sounds of Cher: Empowering Homosexual Diva.

I’m listening to Mercury Rev, now. Also, Midlake, Danger Mouse, The Boss and other emotionally constipated white men. Cher is gone but the house still smells of chicken and I cry three, possibly four times every day. Chiefly, I cry in the loo.

Should you feel mildly troubled by this disclosure: don’t. I’m doing okay. I am engaged by projects and people of extraordinary quality. Really. I am working with some of the best thinker-activists you’ll ever meet toward goals no less lofty than civic good. I have loving parents, good, good friends and two handsome cats. I exercise daily.

However, the house still smells of chicken.

Chicken purchased from a man of belligerent friendliness which recalls the 70s Australian bush-chiller Wake in Fright. Chicken eaten in bed. Naked. Chicken consumed with a near-grandiose revulsion between great sobby gulps of unsatisfying oxygen and cries of ‘I AM GOING TO DIE ALONE”.

The cats eat most of it. The cats eat the corpse of the bird with the same heedless relish they will one day visit upon mine. Yes. You will find me dead, smelling faintly of chicken grease clutching the Girls box-set in a hand that has been gnawed to the bone by a tabby named Eleven. Probably.

As you can tell from my elevated and sunny tone, I have grabbed the opportunity for personal development. Just as I have grabbed the chicken: with cruel detachment and in one slippery hand.

Oh, kids. I think I fucked up.

I did EXACTLY what the ethical person ought to in the weeks following an ugly, devastating and unexpected break-up. Viz. immediately find a perfectly wonderful human of great erudition, fuck their hot, tall body to a vulgar mash and then, just as they begin to look at you with rare love, turn into a Succubus of Selfish Hate and apportion to them the blame for all the pain from your previous shitty relationship JUST BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T ANSWER YOUR TEXT MESSAGES WITHIN FIVE MINUTES OF RECEIPT, YOU MAD WHORE, HELEN. (Dude. I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Be my friend. You can’t know how sorry I am.)

I am ashamed. I am ashamed and I am not very good at humans.

I need to get better at humans. I don’t want to do this sort of thing to a sweet person again. And, I don’t want to live in a love-vacuum with someone who loathes me again. I don’t want to cohabit at all. I don’t want to reproduce; my eggs are probably powdered, anyhow. I don’t want to consume you whole.

All I want. All I want. Well, at my age, all I want is to move from unstinting self-regard and a wan obsession with my “needs” and desserts to real friendliness; to genuine intimate and accommodating interest in my fellows.

Also, I would quite like to have sex, eventually.

To this end, I have decided to “date” persons and to do this with an attitude of minimum expectation and of maximum respect. I am aiming to date one-hundred persons by the end of the year so, naturally, I seek your help in attaining this goal.

If you are neither biologically old enough to be my parent nor young enough to be my issue, I cordially invite all comers to a low-cost assignation.

I would like to embrace all sorts of people. However. I should say that I have, ahem, an “issue” with addiction. Particularly alcoholism. I can’t be around it. And, I’ve an issue with those to whom it has not yet occurred that the material conditions of existence determine, in large part, the shape of a person’s life. Yes. I know. I am looking for a moderate drinker from the left. WHAT THE FUCK AM I THINKING?

Good luck with that unicorn, Razer.

Clearly, if you’re a racist, an essentialist or have ever uttered the sentence, “You know, that David Icke makes a lot of sense”, who the fuck even ARE you?

Of course, you should know before accepting my invitation that I (a) will blog all details of our encounter in this space and (b) am really – despite a genuine desire to be better – quite a tit. And I’m not just saying that as a sort of coy double-bluff that will have you refusing with a “No, no! You are clearly lovely.” I’m not. I’m awful. And if we are to have any hope of a second date, it’s pretty important that you are, too.

I have attempted to compress our mutual awfulness in short advertisement form:

Sexually ambivalent middle-aged crank seeks unusually literate hard-left nut-job for mutual distraction from suicidal ideation.

44-year-old newly divorced chicken carcass seeks fellow Marxist snob for complex hate-fucking.

Ageing poseur with unhealthy interest in spanking and the works of Jean Baudrillard seeks recently bathed human.

Baffling old woman with reasonable cans seeks more-or-less sober life-form who genuinely dislikes Coldplay.

This is who I am. I am a heartbroken heartbreaker who never learned to hold her tongue. I think I’m right but am thrilled by those who satisfactorily prove me wrong. I am full of love. I am full of revulsion. I am leaking with compassion. I am the world’s worst snob.

Oh. And I can’t eat barbecue chicken in company.

Anyhow. If you’re up for a meeting in flattering light and don’t mind being the topic of polite inquiry (which will always have ME as its central topic of derision; never you) then be in touch.

My first date is next Monday with a lady from Twitter called Bernadette, She is bringing her mum. Who is 83.

It’s part-heartsickness, part-art. It’s Kathy Acker in Sweet Valley High. It’s Co-Ed Sluts Vol 2 Look Back in Anger. Oh, I don’t know. It’s a way for me to be knee-deep in nuts masquerading as “experiment”. Whatever this thing is LET’S DO THIS THING.

Let’s do the Helen One Hundred.

Today I choose to express my feelings through the medium of animated lady robots.

For a written version on my views of the matter of “body image” “feminism”, you may travel here or sundry other places.

If you are soon to become a groom, here are two warnings urgently required before your wedding date. Well, three, if we include the crucial fact that weddings often end in marriage. First: weddings are a shadow realm of evil where brides are turned into Gollums who scream “We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious” whenever they see a lilac table arrangement.  Second: no one, save for Gollum, actually enjoys them.

Weddings are wicked, tricksy and horribly expensive.  According to a survey conducted by popular women’s magazine Modern Douche, the average Australian wedding now costs slightly more than a spare kidney. The same study found that 97% of all wedding guests would rather stay at home poking themselves violently in the neck with a dessert fork than watch you and your needy new wife slow-dance to the music of James Blunt. The remaining 3% of interview subjects were too emotionally battered to respond and wrote “Christ Kill Me Now” in crayon and sweat on their survey sheets. All those questioned agreed that weddings, and the idea of marriage in general, make about as much financial and ethical sense in this day-and-age as blood-letting.

It is time to stop the senseless slaughter of gerbera daisies, silk and prosciutto-wrapped melon in the service of weddings and marriage rather generally.

To abandon weddings is only to embrace good logic. They really do have an average national cost of $51K and they really do tend to end in an even-more-costly divorce. Why not, as has been proposed by others, dispense with the wedding and just start a sexless life of injured finances now? The only true beneficiary of weddings is the man who sells you your melon. Everybody knows this. Nonetheless, there are deluded soldiers fighting for the right to squander money, melons and promises.

Unless you’ve had the fortune to dodge all news media, you will certainly know that same-sex marriage has become a piping-hot national wedge. Many citizens get quite excited abut the idea as though marriage was, in fact, something new and sexy and not just, at worst, a failing institution and, at best, a legitimate means of farting in front of another person. Same-sex marriage is in all the papers; every elected representative has developed a stance on the matter; every wedding-planner from Toorak to the Gold Coast is saying prayers to Jesus for their legal right to over-charge for cake.

On one hand, you might see the point of this fight. Unless you are a tool whose compassion has been replaced with melon, you’d probably not object to equal legal rights. But, the thing is, same-sex couples were granted the same rights in law as opposite-sex de facto couples by Labor back in 2009.  But, no one chose to make a big hoo-ha about this historic change at the time.  Why? I suggest this is because same-sex attracted people can be as deluded, nasty and selfish as any other bustard.

I can speak with some authority on this matter as I am an Adult Female Homosexual.  While it is true that I can be nasty, deluded and selfish, it is not true that I support, even at the simplest theoretical level, the fight for same-sex marriage.  Actually, I see changes to marriage law not so much as a fulfilment of a human right but as an obligation to eat melon and listen to James Blunt. Or Röyksopp remixes. Or whatever it is we shall have to endure when everybody gay gets their cake and eats it, too.

As an Adult Female Homosexual, I continue to enjoy many advantages. First, and most obviously, my life is an endless pyjama party occasionally interrupted by hot construction workers who pop in to say, “Hey, Ladies. I’m Here to Erect a Building.”  Second, most of my relatives no longer bother to speak with me and this makes Christmastime pleasant. However, my once tranquil life is threatened by the sickness of weddings.  This is just not fair.   Not ONLY was I bullied at school for my orientation, now I am to be punished with an entirely new generation of weddings. Haven’t the homosexuals suffered enough?

Weddings Weddings.  Weddings.  Once, I suppose, they had the practical function of circulating money through communities and affording young couples a good start in life. Now, they have the singular role of justifying the greed of Botoxed Gollums and their frightened Frodo mates.

To wit: the last invitation to a wedding I received contained a stupid, effing, hateful poem soliciting for donations rather than gifts.  I understand that it is now quite common to read something that says, “Rather than something we have already got/Please give us money for our saving pot,”.  Now, I understand that the practise of giving money is commonplace in some cultures but it is a relatively new thing for Bogan honkies and, as such, is nothing but opportunistic bullshit.  If you receive one of these invitation, I suggest you do as I did and forward a 20 Baht note in reply with the RSVP, “I do not care to fund this farce/Your wedding smells of greed and arse.”

With very few exceptions, wedding invitations are postmarked Mordor, Black Gates of Hell and do not promise to uphold a fine tradition of community.  Rather, they build upon a newer trend of extravagant, look-at-me self-interest. Seriously. You seriously want me to look at you for an entire hour, tell you that I thought your shitty Hallmark vows were “moving” and then drop one-hundred-and-fifty bucks in your lap for my pain? If I want to watch people who are ravenous for attention, I can log on to Facebook for free.

Gollum, as you know, has no particular sexual orientation and will gladly take hold of as many same-sex wedding melons as he can. The prefix “gay” does not guarantee any improvement to an institution that passed its Best Before date at about the same time as James Blunt.

So. Anyhow. Before you pop the question, order the melons and enter into a redundant contract with a sneaky little hobbit, you may wish to question your relationship with the Ring.

This little morsel was the last to fall from the bountiful cake of FHM; may he rest in peace.

Have you ever thought about how foul these rental onesies would smell?

There is little doubt you have heard of that catalogue of mortal hope, the “bucket list”.  If you have not, you are very fortunate and I urge you read no further.  However, if you’re a stubborn masochist, here’s a crib: it’s a written tally of the things an individual longs to do before he carks it.

Considered in itself, the bucket list is not an especially foul practice.  Considered within the culture that informs it, it has become the dull work of braggarts.  And, of terrible publishers; at last count, there were 1001 books itemising the 1001 Things To Do Before You Die.

Advice on how to risk one’s life before it ends is everywhere: the average day can suffer decrees to jump out of a plane, join a cult or run naked screaming “pants on fire Supreme Leader!” through the middle of Pyongyang.

For the sake of all that is decent, SHUT UP.  My goals for the remainder of my life are modest and I’d like to keep them that way, thanks.  If I can manage to return my tax return on time and have a thorough dental check-up in the same financial year, I’m ecstatic.

Recently, I poked myself in the face with a gardening implement and stumbled to the rooms of my general practitioner.  Shickered on pain-killers to the point that even a seven-year-old copy of OK magazine seemed a great literary undertaking, I flicked through a deck of cards designed to appeal to the drug-affected and time-poor. These were a mere 52 Things To Do Before You Die.

The first card suggested I “swim with a dolphin”.  Now, this thought might have been briefly entertaining if (a) I hadn’t seen and read this proposal in a thousand cheap pieces of media and (b) we could suppose that anyone had bothered to consult the dolphin population about this inconvenience.  Does anyone stop to think about the thousands of poor sea mammals who spend their lives catering to the greedy whim of unfeeling publishers who have pushed an entire generation headlong into their flippers?

The second card suggested that I “dance like no one is watching”.  This oft-heard Hallmark nonsense never fails to piss me off and make me wonder about the tortured ghost who demonstrated an utter lack of foresight when he wrote these awkward words. Further, my poor skills as a dancer should not be further compromised.  What if someone was watching? A dolphin, for example.  Like they haven’t suffered enough.

Number three? Have Your Portrait Painted.  WHY? Photography is an art and documentary form honed these past two centuries PLUS it costs virtually nothing.   No. I will NOT support a form of expression that has, artistically and technically, long since outlived its usefulness. More to the point, why on EARTH would I BOTHER sitting still for six hours when I have an annual dental appointment to attend?  Frankly, I’d rather have root canal than the attentions of the sort of artist my budget might allow.

Actually, I quite liked Number Four which was “Participate in a Police Line Up”.  I called my local constabulary to make an appointment and they said, albeit politely, “What do you think this is, lady, CSI?”.  There’s no great call for fidgety and unusually fair middle-aged women in forensic photography.  Apparently.

I don’t want to climb a mountain.  I do not wish to write poetry; I spent my late teens doing just that and I’m surprised I wasn’t put in prison for violating the copyright of Sylvia Plath and the health of my classmates.  And skinny dipping at midnight?  That’s just ASKING for a painful mosquito bite in an inappropriate crevice.

Besides which.  I have a tax return to complete.  And a wisdom tooth to conquer.  And figs to harvest and lemon meringue pie to master.  I wish these active-dying people and the publishers that feed their imaginations would shut up.  I have 1001 unglamorous  things to do before I die.

This was written for the lovely folk of The Big Issue.

May Contain Traces of Poison Feminism

If Genesis teaches us anything, it’s that even the righteous need hobbies. Just as Abraham counted travel and circumcision among his favourite pastimes, the prophets of feminism also enjoy active leisure.  We find this has come in two primary forms viz. (a) Getting Really Angry When Some People Call Themselves Feminist and (b) Getting Really Angry When Some People Don’t Call Themselves Feminist.

Everybody needs to blow off some steam, most especially those of us who have a covenant with g-d. And, let me tell you, these judgement-games can be enormous fun. You haven’t lived until you’ve publicly rebuked one of those crazy chicks who bangs on about “the over-sexualisation of girls”.

I often wonder what, exactly, “sexualisation” is as an identifiable process and, more to the point, how one might measure its over-supply.  Recently, I hired an instrument to test my gas heating ducts for harmful emissions and I thought briefly of Melinda Tankard Reist.

Of course, today’s younger keepers-of-the-faith are much nicer than I and have largely abandoned the sporting feminist tradition of keepings-off.  These days, feminism is inclusive and even, and especially, seems to welcome fashion magazine editors. Call me old-fashioned, but I see fashion magazine editors about as useful to the goals of feminism as a penis-flavoured candy bar. Which is to say, not particularly inimical but strongly inappropriate nonetheless. Fashion magazines are no more a viable locus for social change than candy bars are a suitable medium for the taste of penis. One cannot, quite simply, have one’s cock and eat it too. But, again, this is a story for another time and place.

The story for today is Australian and concerns the question of feminist umbrage reserved for those women who elect to call themselves “not feminists”.

One such Not Feminist is unremarkable broadcaster, “Jackie O”.  In a recent cover-story for a national newspaper supplement, Ms O was asked, “do you consider yourself a feminist?”.  It appears that she does not and it appears that she chose not to elaborate on her rejection of the Faith beyond, “But … you know.”  This was enough to (a) ignite the blogosphere and (b) disappoint the author of the article, who helpfully pointed out “but you’re a woman”.

I shan’t go into too many details about O’s career vis-à-vis this denial of feminism as it’s too jizzing boring. Let it suffice to say that the woman, in the great tradition of FM Radio, is paid to giggle and to serve as a Civilizing Influence for a fuming pot-of-vomit. Think of her as Robin Quivers but much, much, much less interesting.

Personally, I was relieved that O publicly declined her membership to my club. If you ask me, it’s too crammed with fashion magazine editors to make room for another unhelpful tit.  I mean. Shit. If we keep letting these people in, all we’ll ever talk about is How Photoshop is Killing Women or Getting Katniss’ Hot Apocalyptic Look. And, yes, there’s room for everyone in an inclusive movement blah blah blah. But, when the actual fart will we start talking about something other than accessories?

Actually, these are the sorts of sentiments that might have been unlooked had O answered, “Yes. I’m a feminist”. At worst, she would have been derided by ladies like me. At best, she would have been schooled in Remedial Feminism by well-meaning bloggers for the next five years.  Jackie O Vs Feminism, I suggest, can only be a zero-sum game.

But, as the author of the O puff-piece reveals, I am out-of-step with modern algorithms. Today, apparently, we are all feminist whether we like it or not.

The English writer Caitlin Moran is gifted of great wit and nowhere is this more apparent than in her oft-quoted Test for Feminism. “Put your hands in your pants. (a) Do you have a vagina? And (b) Do you want to be in charge of it? If you said yes to both, then congratulations, you’re a (c) feminist.”

This is, of course, quite hilarious.  But, axiomatic charm notwithstanding, it’s also quite wrong.  Moran, funny, as shit as she is, is begging the question.

Not being a feminist is not unavoidably the same as disapproving of feminism’s gains. One can endorse activism without being its agent; and the term feminist does imply activism or, at the every least, the inclination to action.  It’s just nosy work, I think, going about demanding that people identify as part as of a social movement.  It is the right of all female, First Nation, same-sex attracted or atheist or religious or whatever persons to NOT be Abrahamically righteous.

In its current compulsive inclusiveness, feminism(s) reminds me a little of the LDS. Making Jackie O be a feminist is a bit like a Baptism for the Dead, intellectually speaking.

One is not ethically obliged to utter the name of the Saviour in life and we are ethically obliged not to utter Her name on behalf of the intellectually deceased.  Getting all Mormon on Jackie O will serve no one very well; least of all the name of feminism.

Many years ago I enjoyed a brief but fantastically odd period of internet sex with a tech-support Team Leader from Syracuse, NY.  This imaginary sex was good.  So good, in fact, that I began to plan a trip to the USA.  Why not?  I could explore unlawful frontiers in pleasure and stock up on quality linens.  Sheet-sets are so reasonably priced in America.

Of course, it did occur to me that crossing an ocean to be tied up by someone with the screen-name Hugh_G_Rection might be risky.  So, I asked around for advice.  “Are you insane?” was one rhetorical reply.  “Have you lost your dog?”.  The consensus was that I should absolutely not serve the unwholesome needs of an IT Team Leader in upstate New York.  This was due less to a fear that I would be killed, julienned and served as a goulash for Satan and much more to our national kneejerk loathing for the USA.

Why, as one colleague put it, would you bother to travel so far with sex with middle-management?  Especially when there are many needy, under-achieving perverts with handcuffs so close to home?  This was not an issue of morality. Nor had it a thing to do with my recreational Health and Safety.  This was a matter of fair trade in which my vagina, rather like Vegemite, had consented to multinational takeover and would never taste the same again.

Needless to say, there is a good deal of plain sense to be seen in trade protection.  Both my genitals and I prefer to buy Australian wherever we can. However, the import of goods should be viewed as quite separate from the export of lust and I fail to see why one should forgo American sex as well as American Vegemite.   I.e. to mistake cruel economic imperialism for pleasure makes about as much sense as confusing breakfast with sex.   This is to say, it makes absolutely no sense at all and, unless you really want to get crumbs in your crack, you should be especially careful to divide one from the other.

It’s been some time since the USA was our major economic partner.  Nonetheless, our great and confusing dislike for the nation has grown even as our two-way trading dwindles. Many public thinkers are more fearful of “Americanisation” than they are of climate change or bird flu and offer long, tedious pieces to the newspaper pleading for the rebirth of Australian culture.

The rebirth of, what, precisely?  Bush Ballads and dreary landscape paintings and a “She’ll Be Right” demeanour that punishes excellence and pats passable achievement on the back? The thing is, Australian culture has been shit for more than two centuries.  Long before we began to worry about our rank as a 51^st-state, it was shit.  After the release of Any Questions for Ben? it was still absolute shit. I thank goodness every day for American culture; a behemoth which continues to give us great cinema, written inspiration and dazzling standards in bed-sheets.

Certainly, Australia is a just and reasonable place to live.  Certainly, I want to experience American health-care about as much as I want to sit through Any Questions for Ben?. Certainly, our nation has produced exceptional mutants who have risen above our fight to the middle.

We can rock and we can play sport with the best and every now and then, we produce a thinker or scientist with something to offer.  Of course, these people always go and live somewhere else.  Usually North America.  But, bugger them, eh?  With their fancy educations and expensive ideas. She’ll be right.  Let’s throw another awful bush ballad on the barbie and talk about the “Americanisation” of the culture and coast along on the mineral boom as though we ever actually did anything to earn our gloriously lazy lives.

Writers rage about it.  People on television rant about it.  Everyday people fume about America displacing our national character, too; as though we had a national character worth preserving.     In defining our national character, we increasingly reach for the things that we are not. The list of things that are unmistakably Australian is brief, unimpressive and probably includes melanoma.  The list of things that are “un-Australian” is relentless and absurd. It’s much easier for us to identify those things that are foreign than anything that might legitimately belong to us.

A country so preoccupied with the business of saying what it is not is bound to resent a country that appears to know what it is.  And so, of course, we dislike and admire the States in equal measure. Even as we talk about America’s failings, we’ve become a cultural parasite on this big, juicy host.

We define ourselves in opposition to America but suck on the teat of its confident culture until we are bloated with self-hatred.  And bloated with actual fat, too.  We can bang on about “fat ugly Americans” all we like. But in 2008, global diabetes research found that we had won the international race to obesity boasting the highest per capita population of fatties anywhere on the planet.

Even as we state our revulsion for the USA, we mimic its worst habits.  And appear to pick up none of its good.  We reject the value of distinctly American qualities like sentiment or eloquence or civic-mindedness; it’s “un-Australian” to demonstrate emotion, to speak passionately and publicly or to become involved in community matters.  But, it’s tolerably Australian to sit in front of the telly eating simple carbohydrates and failing to move for weeks at a time.

I never did make it to Syracuse.  This is for several reasons, not the most of which was a poor exchange rate and not the least of which was that Hugh_G_Rection, as it turned out,  weighed 300 pounds and was, in fact, the sort who confused sex with breakfast.  I mean.  A little frivolous edge-play is one thing.  Functioning as a buffet for steak-and-eggs is something altogether different.

My near miss as an all-you-can-eat attraction notwithstanding, there remains much that I admire in the USA.  Perhaps if we can all learn to openly love the good in this other nation, we might be better equipped to actually like ourselves.

 This was written for my Sadeian Overlords at FHM Magazine. I wrote it naked and slathered in oils because I am oppressed.

In 2010, a theater writer set out to Scotland’s famous Edinburgh Fringe.   When it came to the traditions of burlesque, critic Sally Scott would find no fun.  Except, perhaps, that in the creation of similes.  “Somewhere between a crack addict and a blown-up sex doll” was Scott’s published impression of the gaze of a burlesque performer.

An occasional theater writer myself, I recognize this sketch. Personally I’d often place the burlesque dancer’s expression somewhere between Cthulhu and Rachel Zoe.  Rachel Zoe right after a particularly wet air-kiss from Tom Ford. However, ours is not to quibble with facial degrees of numb-but-sensual conceit.  Rather, it is to learn about the criticism of burlesque in Scotland and beyond.

In a compendium review, Scott awarded the several “ironic” strippers she had seen no more than three stars apiece; in Edinburgh, a charge of mediocrity is more damaging than slaughter.  So, the day the reviews appeared, performers donned their nylons early and marched, or minced, to occupy the offices of The Scotsman.

Tempest Rose, a professed “showgirl sensation”, led the complaint against the reviewer.  She and her fellows, it seems, were worked-up by Scott’s failure to appreciate everything the burlesque revival had done for women.

Rose was acting, she said in a statement, on behalf of “a community” angered by the assertion that her burlesque was about nothing more than tassels and tar-tars. Burlesque, said Rose, “promotes the idea that a woman can be intelligent and powerful as well as expressing and enjoying their sensuality”.

“Women can have brains and beauty,” said Rose.

This is the sort of pish one might excuse from a pageant contestant.  Perhaps if a woman other than Miss Norway believes that this is a point worth making publicly, then she has no real place making art.

But, this is the point that drives a good deal of burlesque: women can be intelligent and sexy and in charge of removing their very own clothing.  Zzzz.

Certainly, the view that a bright woman need not forfeit her libido is one with which I have no quarrel.  But, there is a good deal of burlesque that is performed by women who show much sexual hunger but nothing that makes them seem especially bright.

It is, of course, no crime to be dim. If it were, then our prisons would be full of the off-cuts from Reality TV.  It is not a crime but it is a sin to press a terribly useful thing like feminism into the service of under-done theater.

If I’ve seen one lass in an animal-print tutu drop her boop-a-doop and give us the late-breaking news that women are capable of thought and tassels, I’ve seen a hundred.  Or, at least a dozen since the New Burlesque hit town a little more than ten years ago.

Across this past decade, burlesque has developed a few different subspecies and functions.  First, it was an “empowerment” exercise that, regrettably, took root in licensed premises.   One can spot these performers by checking the ladies for (a) feather headdress and (b) frequent use of the phrase “brains and beauty.”

Then, it became a project of those who have read books.  One can spot these performers by checking the ladies for (a) tattoos and (b) frequent use of the phrase “performativity.”

So, burlesque has been largely practiced and informed by Personal Development or Gender Studies hobbyists.  Which helps us understand both why it’s so bad and so absolutely, cultishly sure of itself.

As burlesque shows no sign of setting down its brains-and-beauty, the time has certainly come for critique. It’s time to alert the community of corsets that their burlesque can no longer rely on a feminist fan dance to save it from review.  Perhaps we could invite the critics of Scotland over to take the ladies’ boop-a-doop away.

Or, perhaps we could make our own efforts as connoisseurs.   A good start, is in seeing something good; something that does not crave approbation for its “beauty and brains” but seeks, instead, to jolt.

The tradition of burlesque can offer us something wonderful.  The idea of identity as a costume that is worn, not a biology that is fixed, can be so boldly illustrated in the sideshow arts. But, most of the time, it is not.  The most sincere artistic wish of many local practitioners is not to detonate gender or beauty or the fabric of identity.  Instead, it is to purchase cute, shiny outfits and take them off in a Brooklyn speakeasy. To an uncritical audience that lacks a Sally Scott.

This piece is adapted from a thingie I wrote for The Age newspaper

Miranda July is the hottest name in independent cinema right now. I know this because a cineaste of my slight acquaintance, whose day-job it is to decorate cupcakes with “satirical” trim, recently told me. “Miranda July is the hottest name in independent cinema right now,” she said as she nibbled a pastry shaped to resemble a rat.

If you have not yet viewed Ms July’s oeuvre, it would be reckless to amend this mistake. Even if her work is both “hot” and “independent”, it is also entirely slap-able and seems chiefly concerned with poor jokes about poop and bad sex. The 2005 film Me and You and Everyone We Know marked July’s first award at Cannes, her directorial debut and the appreciation of anyone who has ever eaten and enjoyed a “satirical” cupcake. It’s awful and cutesy and deniably meaningless.

July is to cinema as the contemporary cupcake is to carbohydrate. This is to say, she is fantastically decorative and easy to consume but ultimately delivers naught but empty calories in a gaudy blast of sugar. In her non-narrative narratives about mildly depressed shoe salesmen and people who babysit slightly injured cats, she hints at depths that do not exist. This, of course, is not a transgression we could attribute to the cupcake. But July’s perplexing popularity, just like the cupcake’s, is founded on the overuse of whimsy.

Whimsy. Like iPads and overly bookish spectacles and bacteria, it is everywhere.

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment in which whimsy escaped from the birthday parties of six-year-old girls and into the business of serious art. We might suppose that this was in the same moment grown and intelligent women stole cupcakes from their daughters. I personally place the shift at about ten years ago when I noticed a large dog sitting by Sydney Harbour.

There are many things to loathe about Jeff Koons. Much of his work is a triumph of money and plastic. Even when he does not work in plastic, he seems, somehow, to be hygienically safeguarded against any infection by meaning. This, to me, is his gravest offence and the primary impact of his stupid sculpture Puppy.

Puppy, who has since scampered to the Guggenheim, is an enormous West Highland White Terrier made of steel and topiary. I have no quarrel with this feisty little breed and find the Westie’s likeness entirely acceptable on headbands or at the birthday parties of six-year-old girls. He has no place, however, rolling over for bloated art.

Thanks to the ruse of whimsy, Koons and his terrier are permitted to feast on the bones of meaning. The appearance of childlike spontaneity excuses a lack of thought and gives rise to a thousand other dogs. The films of Wes Anderson, by way of example, are rabid with whimsy and seem to hint at deep emotional difficulties when, in fact, all they do to chew on the gristle of magical realism and upchuck it at the doorway of art.

In recent comedic seasons, the gifted humorist Daniel Kitson has elected to replace actual jokes with the sort of quirky reminiscence that would make John Irving call for restraint. Once, he spoke with incandescent wit about all he saw wrong in the world. Now, he sits next to bits of obsolete technology in a cardigan and talks about “ordinary lives”.

The popular actress and singer Zooey Deschanel had an elective surgery which saw her brain and taste replaced with a clockwork mouse. Michael Cera, insufferable star of the insufferably whimsical Juno, works to a similar mechanic and if I see one more knitted effing toy at a gallery, I may take a needle and hurt the next “craft practitioner” foolish enough to offer me a cupcake.

As for burlesque. Well. If I had my way, “whimsical” disrobing would by now be a summary offence.

There is, of course, that kind of “whimsy” that has changed the world of art. If Marcel Duchamp had never whimsically thought to sign a urinal and call it art or if Lewis Carroll had never dug a rabbit hole, we might very well be still looking at ordinary landscapes and reading narratives that only take place in the real.

But, these works, fanciful as though their origins might have been, do not simply suggest meaning; they actually produce it. And they do so not, as the contemporary burlesque dancer does, by offering us a whimsical tease to confuse our view but in allowing us the space for interrogation with their bare ambition.

Now so very often in the cupcake half-bakery of art, whimsy dresses the naked truth. Often in a cardigan.

This was written for and first appeared in The Age newspaper.