Sweethearts make better mommas

I always naively think that the British Times is above your common-level misogyny, but it seems I’m wrong again. A piece today on Sandra Bullock’s legal battle to secure her husband’s custody of his daughter is misogyny-laden from start to finish. You see, Bullock is ‘America’s Sweetheart’. The mother of said daughter is a porn star. Ergo, Bullock would be a good mother, and the porn star – the whore, the slut – must be a bad mother. Dammit, the Times author didn’t even try to cover up his blatant bias. Observe:

America’s sweetheart, the actress Sandra Bullock, is being dragged into an unpleasant legal battle to prove that she is a better parent than her husband’s former wife, the star of more than 100 pornographic movies.

…

His ex-wife Janine Lindemulder, 40, star of such video titles as Mrs Behavin’, Sleeping Booty and Dyke Diner, disagrees. She has just been released from a six-month prison sentence for tax evasion.

…

The tattooed blonde remains in a halfway house in Los Angeles until the end of this year when she can seek custody of her daughter.

Now, it has to be noted that the rest of the piece does not paint Bullock’s husband in a favourable light, but none of what he has done previously (even leaving his seven-month pregnant wife) means that he could possibly be a bad parent. You see, boys will be boys! But women who enjoy sex, who have sex because it’s their choice to do so, or who are involved in the sex industry are, de facto, bad people. You didn’t hear it here first.

South African rape survey (BBC)

I don’t think there is one word I could add to this story to make its message any plainer or any more disturbing. These are the cruel realities of life in South Africa.

Some key statements:

• One in four South African men questioned in a survey said they had raped someone and nearly half admitted having attacked more than one victim.
• … practices such as gang rape were common because they were considered a form of male bonding.
• A recent trade union report said a child was being raped in South Africa every three minutes with the vast majority of those cases going unreported.

What?! How long has this been going on, and why has there been no outrage about this before? And why?!

The researcher suggested that:

“… it’s partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men.

Really? Can this adequately be attributed to a patriarchal society and the on-going prevalence of negative attitudes towards women, or do these statistics require a phenomenon all of their own? I can certainly see her point, but this theory still doesn’t explain these staggering statistics when men all over the world have been socialised into those very same forms of masculinity. (And I question, by the way, what a ‘form of masculinity’ is in the first place.) No, there’s something much more sinister afoot here, and I wish I understood what it was. But more than that, and infinitely more importantly, I wish that somebody, somewhere was doing something about it. The responses in this piece indicate to me a complacency about these crimes and an acceptance that this is just how things are in South Africa. I cannot get my head around this at all. And I’m fucking disgusted.

Full piece behind the cut.

In brief: yer all savages

I’m not one to defend the general British public (see forthcoming entry on culture when it, erm, forthcomes) but I feel that I should get my spake in, albeit briefly, about this.

BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman has described the British public as “barbarians” who are too busy working to find time to appreciate art.

I’m not a huge fan of Paxman’s, it has to be said, for I find him more much more offensive and condescending than I do challenging and interesting, and the above strikes me as a typical statement of his.

Here are a few simple sums for you Mr. Paxman: earnings of £XX,000 per year, X children, £XXX,000 mortgage, and £XX,000 in car loans/ student loans/ credit card and other debts don’t leave many of us with whole lot of Xs to play around with. We work all the time, just to make our ends meet. And you wonder why we plebeians spend all of our time working and little of our time perusing art galleries? We’re flipping exhausted!

I would have thought it was f-ing obvious, even to a snob like you who makes considerably more Xs than the rest of us put together, and who doesn’t have to worry at all about where his next paycheck comes from or goes to.

TfTd

I always listen to Radio 4 in the mornings on my way to work. I’m in that demographic now, don’t you know. I’m nearly always leaving as ‘Thought for the Day‘ begins. For those of you unfamiliar with Thought for the Day it is, as the link says, ‘reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news’. I think it would be more accurately described as patronising and sanctimonious reflections from God-bothers full of their own self-importance, but anyway. I find it insufferable.

This morning the Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled was doing his piece. He started off by recounting a tale of how he tried to help a young lady with her suitcase onto the bus. She declined his offer, and brushed his hand away when he offered again. This reaction, he blamed, on women’s constant quest for equality. If it wasn’t for the equality gained so far, he implied, women wouldn’t think twice about accepting help from a man. He tried to redeem himself, of course, by talking then about the disparities in earnings of men and women – and in doing so ‘approved’ of our pesky feminism – and then came back to the quandary of women not allowing men to help them when they clearly need it.

Seriously, Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled? Really? If I give you the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and believe that you genuinely thought that telling a story about a woman ‘in need’ would be a good introduction to a discussion about equal pay rights, I have to tell you that you’re a little naive. I know a lot of women – and I’m one myself – and I’m pretty sure that most of us don’t spend our time declining offers of help from men because we’re obsessed with equality. If you really need to know, I rather think that we women feel that it’s intrusive to be approached by strange men offering help (or anything else), that it can often be intimidating to be approached in such a manner, and that we decline because we feel uncomfortable and we would rather not have you near us or our suitcases. Is that unfortunate? Of course it is. In an ideal world, we would all be helping each other carry our butterflies and rainbows around; in a realistic world, we react as we do because we’re conditioned to do so by what we see around us. It’s got nothing to do with equality, or its lack.

But I’m not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I think that for all your talk of equal pay for the sexes and of narrowing the employment gap, you think we women have got too much equality already. You gave your game away when you mentioned that ungrateful young woman twice in three minutes. You’re thinking, I’m sure, that she should have been happy to take help from you, the Big Man, instead of trying to assert her independence when she was so clearly in need. But the world, thankfully, doesn’t work your way any more. Perhaps the next time you pipe up on Thought for the Day, you’ll remember that it’s not all about you, and that women don’t spend  their waking moments trying to figure out how to get their equality points higher at the expense of people like you.

The women of Britain are disgusting, apparently

Misogyny is alive and well. As if we ever thought otherwise.

From the Daily Mail:

Young British women leave behind their inhibitions as well as their worries when they go on their summer holiday, a survey shows.

One-third of those questioned admitted having slept with at least two men during the same holiday.

One in six has had a fling with three or more men, according to the poll of 2,000 women with an average age of 25.

A quarter of women cheat while away without their partner, although only one in ten is found out.

But boys are as tempted to stray as girls, with the same proportion of men admitting to holiday infidelity.

More than half of the women said it was best to be single during the summer months.

Four out of five has had a fling with a fellow holidaymaker.

In general, the women said they were more sexually active while holidaying.

On average, they have three holidays a year during which they have sex three times a day.

Their attitude to safe sex also appears to relax while away.

Only six out of ten said they packed condoms for their trip, with almost half admitting they do not worry about catching a sexually transmitted disease on holiday.

Despite being away, British women still seek home comforts when it comes to holiday romance.

Englishmen are regarded as the most romantic by those questioned in the survey for More magazine.

Almost half the women had been sexually harassed on holiday, a third had been mugged or had their belongings stolen and 12 per cent said their accommodation had been broken into.

Chantelle Horton, deputy editor of More, said: ?For most young women, a holiday is like a fortnight of Saturdays, so if they are single they will want to party as much as possible. ‘There is still some concern about women being too relaxed about STIs when on holiday, but the attitude is a lot better than it used to be.’

Of course, the focus is all on women and we’re supposed to believe that men behave like little angels on holiday. Not to mention that it is none of anyone’s business who has sex with who on holiday or any other time. But such logical boundaries are of no use to the women-haters. I wouldn’t expect anything else from Daily Bigot readers, but it’s the comments which I find most appalling.

After the jump.

Who cares what you think?

No shocks to hear of this sort of thing from the world’s favourite mass murderer, George W Bush.

From: “Bill Hangley, Jr.”
Subject: His Gift To Us
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2001 19:05:38 -0400

So when the President was here on July 4, I had the opportunity to shake his hand. I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea or not but I did it anyway, and said to him, “Mr President, I hope you only serve four years. I’m very disappointed in your work so far.”

He kept smiling and shaking my hand but answered, “who cares what you think?” His face stayed photo-op perfect but his eyes gave me a look that said, if we’d been drinking in some frathouse in Texas, he’d've happily answered, “let’s take it outside.” A nasty little gleam. But he was (fortunately) constrained by Presidential propriety.

But that was the end of it, until I turned away and started scribbling the quote down in my notepad, so as to remember The Gift forever. When he saw me do that he got excited and craned his neck over the rubberneckers to shout at me, “who are you with? Who are you with?” People started looking so he made a joke: “make sure you get it right.” But he kept at it: “Who do you write for?” I told him I wasn’t “with” anybody and pointed to one of his staff people, who knows me a little, and said, “ask him, he’ll tell you.” Then I split.

Half an hour later, my boss (who had helped organize the event we were at) came up to me and said, “did you really tell the President that he was doing a ‘lousy fucking job’?” No way, I said, I was very polite, I just told him what I thought. Fortunately, he believed me. He wasn’t happy with me, but he believed me.

But anyway, if you ever wondered if the Prez really was kind of a jerk, I’m here to tell you, he is, and I got The Gift to prove it. I’m thinking of making up t-shirts so we can share The Gift with everyone:

“Who cares what you think?”

- President George W. Bush, July 4, 2001

Link (via Graham Linehan).

Johnny Vegas sexually assaults young woman on stage

[Edit 10th May: I've since learned that the claims made in the Guardian piece I've linked to below are possibly unfounded. The piece itself has been removed from the Guardian website. I've not had time, however, to investigate this myself.]

[Edit 11th May: According to Chortle, Vegas began legal proceedings against the Guardian, and that is why the original article was removed. I shall update this post if I hear more.]

I just saw this on Feministing and have copied the piece from the Guardian blogs. Here is the link to the full piece and comments.

Along with hundreds of others I watched a set during which Johnny Vegas, without any discernible artistic or comedic merit, gratuitously groped a young woman on stage. Judging from some of the furious postings on the internet that followed the gig, I was not the only person asking if he had crossed a line.

Vegas stepped on stage to cheers and immediately announced that he had no material, and that he was there mostly to get laid. There followed a short meandering ramble (mainly about lap dancers) before he turned his attention to the audience – and to one young woman in particular in the front row who, he announced, he wanted to be “inside”. Anyone who has seen Vegas live knows to expect the unexpected, and you take a front row seat at your peril. He can appear deliriously and uncontrollably drunk and casually offensive, and he isn’t afraid of injecting a dose of tension by involving members of the audience in his erratic act. But something backfired this time.

The woman he focused on was about 18 or 19 and was very obviously unnerved by his attention. I saw her expression clearly – I was in the front row too, just three seats along. Vegas insisted that she allow herself to be carried on to the stage by six members of the audience – he called them “pall bearers”. She must pretend to be dead, he said, and he would bring her back to life with an onstage kiss. He warned her that there probably would be tongues. As James Williams, writing on the NOTBBC forum after the gig, put it, “Honestly, you couldn’t have found a nervier or more passive girl if you’d scoured all of London – she was like a rabbit in the headlights, but she was giggling and clearly somewhat enjoying the attention, so it just sort of went ahead without so much as a yes or no from her.” As she was carried on stage, Vegas repeatedly goaded one of the pallbearers to “finger” the girl.

Once she was on stage, Vegas told her to lie very still. She couldn’t stop her nervous giggling; he threatened to kick her in the ribs. It didn’t come across to me as a joke – and near to where I was sitting, no one was laughing. Eventually Vegas crouched down beside the nervous girl and started stroking her breasts while repeatedly saying, “don’t fucking move”. Then he ran his hand up her leg and began pulling her skirt up. Every time he looked up to address the audience, she would reach down and pull her skirt back down, but he kept pulling it back up. According to Williams, who had a different view of the stage from me, Vegas ended up “fingering her through her clothes for a second or two”. What I heard was an audible sharp intake of breath from the audience as they realised that the woman was getting much more than the kiss Vegas had told her to expect.

There was an air of menace from the outset, made worse by the fact that Vegas clearly had no idea where he was going with his act. The more the young woman was groped, the more anxious one of the “pallbearers” looked. Then Vegas straddled the young woman, pinning her to the floor, and kissing her for quite a while. Most disturbing, perhaps was that around half the audience seemed to find this really funny. Vegas asked if the curtain could be brought down; when it wasn’t, Simon Munnery, the comedian who had been on stage before him, came on stage and used his coat to screen the pair from the audience.

I’m shocked. And more a little upset. One of my questions is whether or not the woman would be able to prosecute. It seems to me that Vegas committed a chargeable offence, and that there would be no shortage of witnesses. I also wonder if any of the audience reported what happened.

Some of the comments to the Guardian piece are, thankfully, denouncing of Vegas’ actions; while some (see EricConway’s for example) are typically defensive of him. Throw some victim-blaming and ‘youse are all hysterical wimmines’ responses into the mixer, and we have our usual gamut of opinions. I imagine it’s the same on many sites which wrote about this incident.

Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find anything online about the woman’s take on what happened to her, and it feels very obvious that her perspective is missing. If anyone else manages to find anything on this, I would appreciate seeing it.

Refusal to act out Girls Gone Wild results in beating

A Des Moines woman who refused to take off her top and imitate a Girls Gone Wild video had her cell phone stolen and was assaulted by her tormentors, police said. Police said the 18-year-old woman was asked to leave a north- side residence after she refused to undress, but she refused because one of them had stolen her cell phone. While she was being hit in the face over and over by one man early on Sunday morning, another man was throwing Oreo cookies at her, police said. After the attack the woman finally recovered her telephone and left the house. Four young men are listed as suspects in the case. No arrests have been reported. Officers said the victim was “mentally shaken” but declined medical treatment for injuries to her face. [Source]

While she was being hit in the face over and over by one man…

Because she wouldn’t take her top off for men, people. Is this really what we women can expect, and have to look out for, nowadays? We risk getting beaten up if we refuse to strip for a group of men? All in a night’s fun, huh?

No arrests have been reported.

Well why the hell not?

And they say that Girls Gone Wild is just a bit of harmless fun. Well I don’t think so.

Lifetime committment

I’m going to complain about Facebook’s treatment of relationships again.

Not only did I find out through three notices on Facebook yesterday that a friend reconciled with her boyfriend over the weekend, but today I was greeted with this ludicrousness:

Ross and Linda (*) are married. Ross and Linda made a lifetime commitment to one another, and let everyone on Facebook know.

A lifetime commitment to each other? Says Facebook. Because Facebook knows them both very well. What Facebook didn’t mention is that is Ross and Linda actually ‘made a lifetime commitment’ to one another three years ago, have since had a child and are thinking of buying a new house together in the coming months. But they ‘let everyone on Facebook know’ did they? Well thank you, Facebook, for reporting this joyous news. What else do you know about Ross and Linda that they let everyone on Facebook know?

You’re a fvcking website, Facebook. Don’t pretend to know people. Don’t tell their friends about ‘lifetime commitments’ in that generic, presumptuous and obnoxious tone you seem to have recently adopted. I’m fast becoming convinced that you really are being operated by the American Right. Let’s hope Ross and Linda never break up, huh? What then will I be greeted with?

Ross and Linda (*) are now divorced. Ross and Linda turned their back on their lifetime commitment to one another, and let everyone on Facebook know. They will burn in hell now, just as they deserve.

—

(*) Names removed to protect the innocent.

Spare us the ‘People’s Prostitute’ routine…

I know that this piece is over a year old, but it incensed and upset me yesterday when I read it.

The background to this is that five prostitutes were murdered in the south of England in 2006. (The case is currently being heard in the local crown court in Ipswich, and here is a link to comprehensive coverage of the case if you’re interested.) This piece in the Daily Mail Bigot was written by a particularly charming gentleman called Richard Littlejohn. The full text of the piece is posted below.

Let’s get the caveat out of the way from the off. The five women murdered in Ipswich were tragic, lost souls who met a grisly end. I sincerely hope whoever killed them is caught, charged and convicted.

No one with a shred of humanity would wish upon them their ghastly lives and horrible deaths. But Mother Teresa, they weren’t.

And I know this might sound frightfully callous in the current hysterical, emotional climate, but we’re not all guilty.

We do not share in the responsibility for either their grubby little existences or their murders. Society isn’t to blame.

It might not be fashionable, or even acceptable in some quarters, to say so, but in their chosen field of “work’=”, death by strangulation is an occupational hazard.

That doesn’t make it justifiable homicide, but in the scheme of things the deaths of these five women is no great loss.

They weren’t going to discover a cure for cancer or embark on missionary work in Darfur. The only kind of missionary position they undertook was in the back seat of a car.

Of course their friends and families are grieving. That’s what friends and families do. But they should also be asking themselves if there was anything they could have done to prevent what happened.

If you discovered your daughter had gone on the game to feed her heroin habit, wouldn’t you move heaven and earth to get her off it?

Frankly, I’m tired of the lame excuses about how they all fell victim to ruthless pimps who plied them with drugs. These women were on the streets because they wanted to be.

We are all capable of free will. At any time, one or all of them could have sought help from the police, or the church, or a charity, or a government agency specifically established to deal with heroin addicts. They chose not to.

The tortuous twistings of the sisterhood over the past week have been a joy to behold. The 30-yearold Spare Rib T-shirts have been brought out of mothballs and we’ve been treated to the All Men Are Bastards/Rapists/Murderers mantra from assorted Glendas who ought to be old enough to know better.

We’ve heard the well-rehearsed arguments for legalised and regulated prostitution, as if we were living under the Taliban. The fact is, we’ve already got de facto legal brothels on every High Street.

They’re call saunas or massage parlours.

As I remarked when the Labour MP Joe Ashton was once caught in a Siamese “sauna” in Northampton, he must have been the only man in Britain ever to go to a massage parlour for a massage. It doesn’t get much more glamorous than that.

These five women were on the streets because even the filthiest, most disreputable back-alley “sauna” above a kebab shop wouldn’t give them house room.

The men who used them were either too mean to fork out whatever a massage parlour charges, or simply weren’t fussy. Some men are actually turned on by disgusting, drug-addled street whores. Where there’s demand, there’ll always be supply.

This wasn’t a case of women going on the game to put bread on the table, or to look after their “babies”. That’s what the welfare state is for. They did it for drugs.

The gormless Guardianistas simply refuse to confront this blindingly obvious reality. They would rather deify celebrity druggies such as Kate Moss and Will Self than face the truth that hard drugs wreck lives.

What I find most objectionable about all this is the attempt to make us all feel responsible for the murders. There is a nasty whiff of Lady Di about the enforced mood of mourning, with even the Old Bill coming across like hand-wringing archbishops.

At Ipswich Town’s home game on Saturday, there was a minute’s silence. We were supposed to believe that this was a true reflection of the community’s sympathy.

I don’t buy it. Most people went along with it in the spirit of emotional correctness and through fear of getting their heads kicked in if they didn’t.

There was only one thing missing, but don’t bet against it.

When Blair gets back from saving the Middle East, don’t be surprised if he turns up at the funeral of one of these unfortunate women to deliver a lip-trembling, tear-stained eulogy: “She was the People’s Prostitute”.

Now, Littlejohn is a notorious little prick, we all know, but let’s have a look (under the jump) at what he’s really saying.