Feminism: Ur Doing it Wrong

Many years ago I enjoyed a brief but fantastically odd period of internet sex with a tech-support Team Leader from Syracuse, ambulance
NY.  This imaginary sex was good.  So good, Sildenafil
in fact, this site
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 51st-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.
Many years ago I enjoyed a brief but fantastically odd period of internet sex with a tech-support Team Leader from Syracuse, buy 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 51st-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.

May Contain Traces of Poison Feminism

If Genesis teaches us anything, healing
it’s that even the righteous need hobbies. Just as Abraham counted travel and circumcision among his favourite pastimes, abortion
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, page
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.

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