because civil rights are EXACTLY the same as civil rapes...

"sheryl crow, james blunt, and muthafuckin' ace of base..."

He also does some awesome send-ups of sexist, violent rap, but how could I not post a song that samples "the Celine Dion song from the movie Titanic"?

Nicked from Femin-Ally:

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work!

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

And, ALWAYS REMEMBER: if you didn’t ask permission and then respect the answer the first time, you are commiting a crime- no matter how “into it” others appear to be.

www.blogger.com hates women

Does that sound melodramatic? Well boo-fucking-hoo, because once again, one of cyberspace's most prominent websites is effectively sanctioning hate speech against one group that, were it directed at any other community, would be smacked down faster than a cock-ring at a Silver Ring convention. Because, y'know, it's not really an -ism to have a go at... women, right?

Actually, wrong. But despite repeated reporting from various groups, the veritable oevre that is I Hate White Women (tagline: "WHY I HATE AMERICAN AND WESTERN WOMEN", in case the anyone was feeling left out) remains online in all its deluded, embittered glory. Of course, any woman of any ethnicity would greet this idiot's "boycott" of their person with relief and revelry, but that does not render his rantings harmless or their continued hosting by Blogger acceptable. Nazism is a joke too, but the Holocaust sure as hell wasn't funny.

So, to abandon reason and broach the moronic inferno for a moment, let's have a closer look at what this angry young man has to say for himself...

I am a white American male (good to know he's far away!) and I hate white women. In a nutshell ("nut" being the operative word), white women are the most likely (any research? Nah, didn't think so) to cheat on you (I smell misogynist heartache!), to divorce you (wouldn't you?), to get fat (again, stats?), to steal half of your money (has he informed the Police? Oh wait, he means getting married - has anyone ever accepted his proposal?), don't know how to cook (my two-year-old niece can feed herself, why can't he?), etc (yeah, ETC, like, that's totally fucking definitive, dude). Therefore, what intelligent man (yes, WHAT intelligent man? Oh wait, he means... aww, bless) would want to get involved with a bitchy white woman?

White women are generally immature (unlike a supposedly grown man who dedicates an entire blog to his peculiar bitterness), selfish, and extremely arrogant and self-centered (whine, whine, whine, WHINE...). The behavior of most white women is utterly disgusting, to say the least (yeah, rejection is, like, so mean).

This blog is my (failed) attempt to explain why I feel white women are inferior to all other groups of women, such as Asians, Middle Easterners, Mexicans, Blacks, etc (because, it's, like, totally not racist or patronising or unsound to lump people -oops, sorry, women- together like that. And, er, you can be any of those ethnicities while also being American and Western).

BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN! (Women: they're just like South African grapes, really).

Pfffft, like the lazy, entitled, hellish Western women that I am, I can't be bothered to wade through any more of his inarticulate idiocy. I wonder which is smaller, his penis or his brain? What glory is there supposed to be in whining about a group of people who have already pre-empted any kind of victory by rejecting you to start with?

So yes, he's a joke. But it's not funny. And Blogger should realise that.

for your viewing displeasure...

Soooo, a few months ago I had a traumatic run-in with a flatmate's friend who thinks grabbing someone round the neck and incomprehension of the word "no" are all you need in your seductive arsenal. I haven't got time to elaborate on what a disgusting little inadequate moron I still know this fuckwit is, but yesterday, for the first time, I was almost able to laugh about it - or at least about him.

I watch Bones, you see; it plays a strong second fiddle to my Criminal Minds obsession. And yesterday I was watching the conclusion of the long-running Gormagon saga. And I saw the monster finally revealed. And satisfyingly shot.

And I also saw, for a second, the vile "Carlos" (as I called him earlier on this blog). That may sound weird given Gormagon comes equipped with a set of dentures composed entirely of human canines harvested from victims, but he has a similar face, hair and repellence. And did I mention I got to see him satisfyingly shot.

I don't know why this makes me feel actually, really better, but it does.

Oh wisevid.com, why do you bother asking me if I'm alright to view the "mature content" of middle-of-the-road cop shows while simultaneously bombarding me with pop-ups of naked women? Is it, perchance, because you are a pile of sexist wank?

Yes. Yes, that's probably it.

tissues and issues

Alright, alright, sorry for the Charlotte Church quote, but it did seem suitably juvenile for the topic. I try not to bleat on about my family too much, on the internet as in life, particularly as there is no longer comparatively much to bleat about - but every so often something sticks in my inner child's craw and I want to shout it from the rooftops. Maybe I'm being irrational, maybe everything really is worse when it happens to me(mo), or maybe I'm just taking things too seriously, but I'm still considerably irked following a conversation I had yesterday.

The topic of discussion was Elizabeth, a mutual friend, who has just leapt from one relationship into another with barely a fortnight's breathing space. The popular explanation for this (apparently repeated) behaviour is that her parents divorced when she was twelve. Now, allow me to issue a disclaimer before I continue; I don't doubt for one moment that even relatively straightforward divorce can be traumatic for any children concerned, and I don't think the existence of some people's horrific experiences negates the legitimate effects of other people's only rubbish ones. But, I do think we should all have a sense of proportion.

So, when Jan trotted out the "but her parents got divorced" line again last night, I said so. I said that I thought that 26 was a bit old to still be clinging so resolutely to the trauma of your parents' split, because at some point (I think personally by the age of 21 or at the latest 25) you have to take a long hard look at your life and decide whether you want to live it as a testament or defiance to your parents, or in the most constructive way possible for yourself. I said that it's never particularly fun or easy to do, but it is possible, and I think it's a process most of us have to undertake in some form or another.

Cue utter horror - But her parents divorced when she was twelve! Her dad ran off with her mum's best friend!

And yes, that's a horrible thing to happen - but one that happens to around a third of children in the UK. The fact is, a lot worse things happen too; including myself, I can think of one person who grew up with an addict and alcoholic, several more who grew up with "mere" drinkers and/or domestic violence, and another whose father left her aged 15 in charge of her two little brothers to go and live with another woman, after her mother had already died. Terrible things happen, and terrible things go on happening because of them - but in the end, you have to build some kind of modus vivendi with them in order to have any kind of life of your own.

Jan's response? But if something traumatises you when you're twelve, it can last for a long time.

And that, dear reader, is what really pissed me off. I don't think it's panhandling sympathy to say that if I and a considerable portion of my friends managed to get through situations far worse than a normal divorce (Christ, most of us would love to have had two functioning parents whose marriage fell apart and who went to court and were done with it in a year) then a very well-adjusted, pragmatic, mature, bright (because that is what Elizabeth is) woman of 26 must be able to come to terms with something that happens - not to put too expletive a point on it - all the fucking time. But no, of course (and this is what she was arguing - believe me, I checked) it's far worse to be "really traumatised" by your parents getting divorced when you're twelve than to have parents who are -somehow laughably untraumatically!- addicted, alcoholic, violent or dead.

And what further pisses me off, is that it's so rarely people who've been through comparable things who come out with this stuff, but people exactly like Jan from very solid, conventional, "boring" (but frankly, that's all you want from parents when yours are so "interesting" they're already passed out by the time you get home from primary school) families; it seems always to be the least experienced who assume themselves the greatest authority on these matters. I genuinely cannot fathom what leaden logic leads to such conclusions; is it because divorce is the only thing they can imagine - because other (worse) things are so totally beyond their ken that they don't seem real and thus can't inspire sympathy?

I don't know. I only do know how much I hate the catch-22 in which they leave me; not wanting to be one of those whiny people who choose to blame their entire lives on their childhood, yet also wanting so much to rub in people like Jan's faces how horrific mine was, to make the point how utterly moronic they're being. I doubt there ever has been, nor ever will be, anything so frustrating and divisive in human relationships as such gaps in experiential empathy. Or is that what the internet's for?

love music, hate sexism

I like bands; proper bands. The actual Misfits rather than them three off X-Factor. But I also like being a girl.

I remember quite vividly the first time it occurred to me that these two things could be incompatible. I was fourteen, we'd just got the internet, and a whole new world of fandom was opening before me. And then there it was; a scan of Kerrang magazine, Davey Havok and Dexter Holland sharing the cover with the headline, "ROCK IN THE DOCK: is rock music sexist?" I never did track down the article, but I even neverer forgot its title.

Those words have come back to me a lot over the years, most times I've read about Courtney Love or Brody Dalle, and every time I've flicked past yet another male-targeted advert in a music magazine. (Yes, I sometimes read the NME; no, that does not mean I aspire to style my manly hair into so improbable a quiff that women will dance on tables in its honour thus allowing me to look up their skirts, Shockwaves haircare). But this week really took the balls-up biscuit. Shipped out to Marylebone because Euston thought it might perhaps possibly be on fire and with a four-hour train journey ahead of me, I trudged into WHSmiths for something to read. Oh look, a new Q! But oh wait, it's shrink-wrapped to FHM.

Er, what the fuck? I stared at it for a moment, processed the fact that one of my favourite magazines had just turned to shit before my very eyes, and walked out of the shop.

I don't care how much it comes down to publishers' alliances, I don't care what snivelling little marketing strategy is behind it, I don't care if some girl whose face has started popping up in the London Lite has taken her "hippy chic" clothes off, but I am fucking livid that a magazine I really respected precisely because it was so much more interesting, well-written, and generally grown-up than its peers has done that for which every successful band risks crucifixion in the music media; sold out.

Well, I'm not buying it. I'm not sure what I'll buy instead (the NME's too flimsy, no-one at Artrocker can spell... maybe Clash will fill the gap) but Q can stick it; I'm sure FHM can tell them where.

montavit: mineral water for morons

Boris Keep Your Promise

Fingers crossed.

"Every morning, I wake up and it's the same. I get up, and I buy the paper, and I circle them all, and I phone them - only to discover they've been taken by a bunch of fucking psychic house hunters!"

Ah, Spaced. It's a bit like the Bible really; constantly quotable to its devotees, a bit of a mystery to the uninitiated. But if there's one scene we should all recognise, it's the one four minutes into the first episode where Daisy breaks down in tears over the horrors of househunting.

I have a motley back catalogue of housemates; Ivy who moved out to the country and spent our water bill money on a horse, Helena who copied (and then stole) my clothes while calling me her sister, Dan who sulked in his room for a month before moving out to a completely fictional house in Highbury... I sure can pick 'em. So it was with trepidation that I began the hunt once more last week to find a place by September.

It started badly, as it always does on gumtree. I realised years ago that most advertisers are incapable of writing anything remotely meaningful about themselves ("I like cooking and music" - well what bloody kind?) but this was the first time I found adverts that didn't even include helpful details like room size and rent rates. It was also the first time I received messages from people wanting to live with me bereft of such basics. Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought that if you replied to someone's advert, you were meant to, y'know, tell them stuff. More stuff than, say, "I have a flat/apartment to share with you and I would be very happy to give you the details if you could reply back". How do these people conduct the rest of their lives, I wonder? How do they pay bills - write back and ask them to write to again instead of paying?

Then came the unhinged, "Hi Flatmate" emails, signed with "Your Flatmate" for good measure - though I suppose at least that person hadn't created an email address of both our names. Another man was apparently more in need of a psychic than a tenant, uncomfortable with actually asking me things he needed to know when he could say, "There are some questions that I need answers to, but didn't get in your email".

And then, because I'm female and thus obviously rentable by the hour, I got this message from an "easymoneyhunny" email address:

Hi, I know you are looking for a room but i thought you maybe interested in some cash in hand work,
it pays £80 an hour and its not for sex, it helps pay the rent, well thats what i use it for.

Lord knows what kind of "hand" work she meant that was "not for sex".

I could go on. Except now I've finally found somewhere I do want to live, with people I want to like with, I'm just breathing a huge sigh of relief that it's over... for another year, at least.

peter pan 4eva

This is a pretty creepy Peter Pan, isn't it? Yet never has an unwittingly sinister Creative Commons picture been more apt for what I am about to write about; the refusal - or, perhaps more charitably, the inability - to grow up.

I'm 24. They have been, to put it mildly, a colourful couple of decades, and (to quote Sandra Bullock in 28 Days) "I have enough stories; I would like a life". I feel I know as much about myself as I'm ever going to, though I also acknowledge that I'm still only comparatively young, and that I could look back on all this in ten years' time and wonder, much as I do now about my teenage penchant for hair mascara, "what were you thinking?"

So why are so many people old enough to know better (and certainly better than my own years allow) so incapable of this? It's a truism that teenagers are difficult; indeed their hormonal and neurological attributes have been compared to a kind of inherent, inevitable madness. But there comes a point, as an uncle once put it, when potty-training stops and you just have to get on with it. Charmed lives ain't what they used to be, and I imagine most of us have experienced the bases for more than a few chips on each shoulder. Most of us probably still carry them, albeit perhaps in more manageable microchip form as time goes on, and we know it. That is not, shamelessly mixing metaphors, to say we never listen to the devil on our shoulder, leading measured lives of self-aware virute, but we know deep down what we might never back down to admit to someone else, and that's fair enough.

I have never imagined humans to be particularly rational beings, much less particularly liable to change (I'd challenge anyone who has worked in Social Services to clutch at such a rose-tinted view) but lately I have been truly astounded by quite how blindly and determinedly ridiculous some of us are. This is thanks in part to two individuals, one of my own age and one in her mid-30s, both (to use the scientific term) totally batshit crazy.

The first (I'll call her Maureen - it suits her somehow, as insulting as that is to any genuine article) is a friend of a friend. Well, I say "friend" - excise the "r" and you're nearly there, with considerably less sympathy for the devil than Mick or Keef could muster. Perfect friends are few and far between, but there is usually a trade-off of some kind - passive but loyal, disorganised but interesting, bitchy but entertaining... This girl, however, genuinely possesses no redeeming features. She is neither nice, nor fun, nor loyal; outspoken but passionless, blunt but disingenuous, and most of all, nasty. She is rude, cutting, critical, throws strops and tantrums to rival a toddler, and even punched our mutual friend the last time we went out, for no other reason than Janet trying to include her in conversation. I understand why Jan puts up with it, from a clinical if not subjective perspective, but what baffles me the most is why Maureen thinks it possible to get away with.

Apparently Maureen likes me. We have, on paper, a fair bit in common, particularly where politics and music are concerned. She has never been anything but nice to me (even when being vile to other people) and the same goes for another mutual friend, Jo, who has known her about the same amount of time. I do put this partly down to the radar all bullies have of who will or will not give as good as they get if provoked, but something else is at work too; a mindbogglingly low EQ. Both Jo and I sense a strong desire not only to avoid crossing us, but also for us to like her; and therein lies the rub - she doesn't seem to realise that how you see someone behave is what informs your opinion of them. Nobody in their right mind (and certainly nobody worth being friends with) could see the way she treats mates and think, "Oh well, if she's nice to me it doesn't matter that she's consistently horrible to close friends of mine" - yet that is exactly how she expects it to work.

And then this week, there has been Emily. Or rather, Emilia, as the world is mysteriously expected to intuit, even on first meeting and from a class list on which "Emily" is printed. Roll up ladies and gents for Exhibit B, Petra Pan at 35, attacking a university course (on Psychology, no less) with all the reflexivity of a turnip. Having known the woman only two-and-a-half-days, one might expect to know where to start - but I don't.

Oh alright then, with the class list:
Lecturer: And is Emily here?
Emily, cantankerously: It's Emilia!
Lecturer, reaching for a biro to correct the list: Oh, sorry, it's down on my list as Emily.
Emily, in the voice of teenage DUH, rolling her eyes: That's because it's on my birth certificate.

Well, perish the thought that anyone call you by your own name, which you personally supplied, clearly without bothering to specify your pretentiousness in the "Preferred name" box on every application form. Within the next gruelling half-hour, she also proceeded to demand to change classrooms ("There's another room with nicer chairs, why can't we go there?") and set our lunch break ("I've been here before, and the food in the canteen is really crap, and it gets soggier and crustier the longer it's left out"). She hijacked every discussion with arrogant stupidity (slamming your bottle of water down on the desk and squawking, "THERE, THAT's a bottle of water, OF COURSE I know that" doth not an ontological or epistemological argument make) and bizarre unwanted insights into her personal life ("I run a rhythmic dance class on top of teaching").

This wouldn't be so bad (well, maybe it would, but this makes it considerably worse) if she didn't think the light of Research Methods shone out of her arse every rare second that she's not speaking out of it; in mere hours, she corrected not only her fellow students, but also the lecturer and the entirety of Renaissance philosophy, with some haughty insight into inter- and intra-personal skills thrown in for good measure.

Of course both these women objectively cut quite pathetic figures, in the truest sense of the word; they are clearly deeply unhappy and angry, and it's a shame. But what troubles me is how they are still so unhappy and angry, and so aggressively so, in integrated adult life. How, but how, do you reach your twenties (let alone your thirties) with such infantile conduct so imperviously intact? I have encountered no shortage of Difficult People - bloody hell, I'm one myself - but how the hell do you make it through both school and university into competitive paid employment (which both this veritable Tweedledum and Tweedledee have) behaving like that?

And yet they have, and since we already so rarely fix it if it's broke - let alone if it seems "ain't" enough to provide an apparently viable MO in ostensibly successful young professional life - it seems unlikely that the Maureens and Emilies of this world will ever change.

It's at times like this I long to swap stats for crack.

the inimitable, irrefutable "sandwich" theory

You get a lot of shit for being a feminist, but the oddest kind is definitely sandwhich shit. For those of you unacquainted with this fantastic phenomenon, this is roughly how it works:

Feminist: *Rational argument*
Idiot: Yeah, well, make me a sandwich, bitch!

Sandwich strikeback has long formed an important part of the misogynist's armoury, but it came to notable attention today as the impotent death knell of what had otherwise been an actual dialogue. As is so often the case (I suppose even (tw)its advocates realise it would sound silly out loud) the exchange took place over the internet, on Facebook to be precise. To be even more precise, it took place in Facebook's 10, 000, 000 AGAINST DISGUSTING JAPANESE RAPELAY RAPE SIMULATION GAME! GLOBAL group, on the moronically-titled thread, "I don't see the problem".

As in any such "shock" thread, metaphorical fists flew from the first, but one exchange embodied the Sandwich Theory most hilariously (subversive font colours blogger's own):


Every girl I have ever met, has a rape story. It seems there's a lot of it about :-O
That, or some women like to rewrite history to make them less responsible for their own sluttiness. Who knows? It could be either.

"That, or some women like to rewrite history to make them less responsible for their own sluttiness. Who knows? It could be either." really, and what fantastic incentives exactly do you think there are for women to "rewrite history"? the sympathy and empathy they'd get? the way people would believe them instead of the man? the fantastic conviction rates? oh wait, none of those apply.

"really, and what fantastic incentives exactly do you think there are for women to "rewrite history"? the sympathy and empathy they'd get? the way people would believe them instead of the man? the fantastic conviction rates? oh wait, none of those apply." Erm, we werent talking about court cases, it was about anecdotal cases, in which case: Sympathy and empathy they'd get? Yes. I dfind that they do, from women and from men. The way people would believe them instead of the man? Yes- Of course you're going to believe your female friend, over a Bad Man, that you've never met. The fantastic conviction rates? Well, who's to say that the 6% conviction rates(since you brought them up), arent a result of women making things up to make themselves look more virtuous? They mightn't be, but we werent there at every case, so who is to say? I'm not blaming women entirely, it's our fault as a whole, for making the double statdard of "Man sleeps with many women= stud, woman sleeps with many men= slag". And for making women ashamed to be sexually agressive/promiscuous. But a lie is a lie. And a man accused of rape has his name dragged through the courts and the newspspers, and his life ruined. The woman accusing him, gets to be known as Miss X. I like the way my uberfeminist pals tend to gloss over that last fact.

"Sympathy and empathy they'd get? Yes. I dfind that they do, from women and from men." & Of course you're going to believe your female friend, over a Bad Man, that you've never met.
people may like to think they are sympathetic to rape victims, but it is often very different in real life. if you get jumped by a stranger in an alley with a knife, then people will indeed be sympathetic. but most rapes are acquaintance rapes - how much sympathy do you think women get when they're not talking about a stereotypical bogeyman, but a popular, friendly guy that their friends know socially and can't believe anything bad of? then it turns straight into, "he must have been really drunk, i can't believe he would have done that on purpose, are you SURE you didn't really say yes", etc etc. the fact is, most rapes are not perpetrated by "a Bad Man, that you've never met" that you cite, and that's a huge problem for any woman disclosing such an attack, either formally or informally.
as for, "who's to say that the 6% conviction rates(since you brought them up), arent a result of women making things up to make themselves look more virtuous?" i can't even be bothered to reply to such a load of vomitworthy shite. if you knew anything at all about this issue from anything more than an uninformed, defensive angle you wouldn't be able to come out with a sentence like that.

I think you should shut your whore mouth, and decamp to the Kitchen Area, where you'll find sandwich making material. Chop chop.

i think that's a poor stab at insult and/or sarcasm, and an even poorer substitute for a rational response. you poor, limited individual.

I'm hearing words, I am not tasting sandwich. Didnt they teach you how to sammich at university?

no, they didn't; i, unlike you, didn't need to learn.


I mean, really, what the fuck? How is this regarded as a normal way to react to a woman arguing with you in the 21st century? Equality ain't fucking nigh...

rumours of my death... etc

I fail at updating.

Therefore, further lolpols.

BORIS KEEP YOUR PROMISE!

As you may or may not have heard, old BoJo is reneging on his election promise to provide Londoners with anything approaching reasonable sex crime victim support - so much so, in fact, that we are now at risk of losing the city's one and only remaining Rape Crisis Centre in Croydon. Please help save it! To that end, any and all promotion of the campaign and coming fundraiser on June 9th is greatly needed and appreciated.

a gap in the lolmarket

Even my mother now knows about lolcats, almost definitive proof that they have gone mainstream (and probably also passé). There have been many variations on the theme (including the infinitely superior lolbunnies - infinitely superior, of course, only cuz bunnehs demselvz iz so much bettah dan enee catz) and lolspeak is applied with varying success to numerous humans as well. The one that springs quickest to my mind is Nick Griffin, immortalised thus (particularly around the BNP membership list leak):

If anyone - or perhaps more accurately, anyone's face - was truly made for lolation, it is the illustrious Mr. Griffin. But wait! - isn't this yet another example of leftie PC nonsense discrimination against the long-suffering BNP? Why stop at Griffin? Why not branch out into... LOLPOLS!



I'll start us off, shall I?

pet envy

"You know how some people who can't have children go to parks and want to steal other people's? - Do you think that's what we're doing with dogs?" So spake Leila on Hampstead Heath the other day, and to be fair she has a point.

My road to animal ownership seemed arduous as a child. At first, I wasn't allowed any; I therefore cultivated an interest in woodlice, to the point where my mother feared opening matchboxes lest they housed one of my many invertebrate wanna-pets. I acquired a canary by fluke when the florist across the road gave me one an old lady had left to him in her will, but little did little Cheepside know that he was to change my world forever with rabbits.

Birds were just a gateway, you see; rabbits would soon become my pets of choice after one leapt into my arms in the pet-shop where we used to buy bird-seed. I promptly presented the creature to my mother, who uttered the fatal words, "No, you can't have one, they're social animals" - which of course I interpreted as a mandate to get two. To my surprise, it worked, and we returned home that night with the inspiredly-named Peter and Benjamin.

Rabbits are quite simply the best pets in the universe. Even from the vacant Cute Factor angle, their wonder never wanes; I defy you not to go as gooey over an adult rabbit washing its face as over a baby grooming itself - "I suppose this is the equivalent of watching an old man shaving", my mother once mused, watching Benjamin perform his ablutions at the age of six. But rabbits aren't just cute and fluffy ("no", interjected a long-suffering friend the other day, "they're really cute and fluffy") they are a delight in ever-changing, unique ways. With a hundred times the personality of a guinea-pig, they are the most engaging, dim-but-not-as-dim-as-you-think animals you could hope to meet.

Rabbits are not stupid. They are certainly not as stupid as any pet manual makes out. But they do exercise their wits in the most footling ways, as perhaps best illustrated by the late Mary Rabbit. Few animals enjoy being given medicine; most will probably try and spit it out. But only a rabbit could keep a pill in their mouth for twenty minutes, only to spit it out when they thought you weren't looking. Nothing if not pragmatic, her techniques for avoiding home-time at the end of a day in the garden were similarly protracted. While the other rabbits scampered left, right and centre before eventually capitulating wherever the broom herded, Mary would instead position herself in some nook or cranny from which, levering with all your might, you would only be able to prod her forward of by about an inch. Yet at the same time, she would regularly stick her head under a leaf and expect the rest of her (rather corpulent) form to be rendered similarly invisible. Rabbits inhabit an axis of logic starker, but not dissimilar, to our own - and that is why I love them.

I have now however been petless for some years, something strange is happening; any animal will do. I used not to like cats; now I hail them in the street. I chirrup at birds I've never met before; I tried to persuade my mother and step-dad to get a dog before they were even officially a couple. Of course, I always knew I liked animals (well, rabbits) but I never realised how very bereft I would feel without them. I am not at a stage in my life where I could fairly commit to the purchase of another, but I swear I am actually getting broody for it - I've gone as far as debating a hamster, and I don't even like the bloody things.

I'm holding out for a rabbit, though, a few years down the line. In the meantime, at least one of my office's executive perks is a rotating cast of dogs I can pretend are mine for five minutes while I make the tea.

"alright, darlin'?"

This post was going to be about bitching, but life was the proverbial and got in the way, in the form of new work. I have recently started volunteering at a Women's Centre which deals, amongst others, with prostitutes - but now I come to think of it, maybe this won't be too far off the original topic after all.

Prostitution is, undeniably, a feminist issue. But that's where it gets bitchy, isn't it? I have always been of the opinion that we should all try and stick to the dictionary definition of feminism as much as possible; however we may each interpret "advocacy of the rights of women (based on the theory of equality of the sexes)", to quote the OED, any feminist position must be justified in reference to this most basic premise.

A lot of the time, in the West at least, we do, and most arguments you hear about feminism follow the tawdry "feminism means hating men"/"no it doesn't, it means wanting equality" binary. If you are lucky, your interlocutor might accept this fact; if you are not, they will most likely bang on about what feminism "really" means, unbeknownst to either actual real live feminists or indeed the Denizens of Dictionaries. But what of feminist factionism?

Let's say we're all reasonable dictionary-abiding feminists who don't want to round up All Teh Menz and shoot them in the penis. Surely we should, by and large, be able to agree on general principles? Not when it comes to sex, we can't. I am not about to essay a treatise on the entire prostitution debate - for one, it's been done a million times before, and for another, I really need to pack for a festival tomorrow - but rather a plea for peace concerning an issue that has played increasingly on my mind in recent weeks.

For many of us, female and male, sex work is an unpalatable concept. But whether one finds it immoral or simply unimaginable, the fact remains that many women do it. Whether they're Happy Hookers™, Crack Whores™ or the "single moms" moronically featured on many a T-shirt, they do it. And while they're doing it, they risk abuse from their punters to the public and everyone in between. So what do we do about it?

And this is where it gets bitchy again. There is a sizeable and vocal mainstream feminist movement against sex work - and I can perfectly see why. Popular culture already sees (or perhaps rather, resolutely depicts) women as a sexual commodity. Women sell everything from cars to deodorants to ourselves, and the everyday effects of this range from the dumb to the disturbing; from endless media commentary on Michelle Obama's arms to my flatmate being followed home by the man who asked, "How much? 50? Come on, you and me, how much?" when we were 19. In fact, Natalie wasn't a prostitute. She was wearning jeans and Converse (you try unlacing them in hurry!) and a jumper, she was walking briskly through a safe part of town nowhere near a red light district, and she must have repeated, "No, I'm not for sale", a hundred times.

What freaked her out the most was that this was not some macho-muppet showing off in front of his friends or trying to intimidate her, but a smart, otherwise polite, man in his 20s genuinely trying to broker a mutually agreeable fee. You can't help feeling in situations like that, that if so many other bloody women weren't for sale, men wouldn't assume you were. Certainly my main problem with the sex industry is not its commodity, but its connotations; what I dislike most about the idea of such transactions is not the (already somewhat alienating) concept of one human being selling their body to another, but the fact that it is so utterly culturally one-sided. Intellectually, I know that prostitution is about much more than "letting the side down", but emotionally, in our current society, that is how I feel. In that sense, prostitution does indeed impinge on any progress towards the "rights of women" as a whole.

But what about the rights of women, to puerilely plagiarise Pegg, as a hole? A woman's rights are inseparable from women's rights, and sometime the twain must meet. A prostitute lets down the side by perpetuating the perception that women are sexual commodities; a campaigner against her local brothel lets down the side by forcing its staff out onto the street, where they run a tenfold higher risk of attack. Ideologically, they are both right; practically, they are both right and wrong.

I personally have no desire (rather the attavistic opposite) to prostitute myself; nor do I believe that it is always or even often a genuine career choice (especially if you happen to be a genuine crack-whore looking to fund your next rock). But nevertheless, the broader, louder, better-funded campaign for Women's rights with a capital "w" cannot afford to... ride? tramp? - sorry - roughshod over women's rights in lower-caste lower-case. It is not enough to dislike prostitution; what we should dislike is the culture that creates it, that empowers it, that requires it. Like countless other feminists, I would love to live in a world where no woman ever had to rent her body out to her landlord in lieu of rent - but that can only happen in a world in which the very wheeze never crosses the landlord's mind. If prostitution is to end, it must do so organically, as part of wider (more important) social change; try to stamp it out, and you're only trampling its agents.

If it is not, I can only hope it will evolve, with society, greater gender equality (it has always struck me as somewhat anti-feminist to campaign for equality through an assumption that equality can never exist in some areas, such as sex work). In any case, there are no easy answers - yet, at least. Meaningful change will take time, perhaps longer than I will live to see. But if we are to make any progress, for Women capitalised and disenfranchised, we must work around, if not across, our differences. For sex workers' and non-sex-workers' sakes alike - as long as they still get it on, can't we all just get along?

facebook says, "all women at your place is nothing put fucking bitches and slutty asses"

Ok, ok, that's not a direct quote from Marky-boy, but it is apparently something he's quite happy to support. In an innovative interpretation of their Terms of Service, which explicitly warn you before creating any group that to "attack a specific person or group of people (e.g. racist, sexist or other hate groups) will not be tolerated" and would in fact "result in the immediate termination of your Facebook account", Facebook are steadfastly refusing to delete "women haters around the world".

In case you're thinking this is just one of those "my ex broke up with me and now I'm well upset so I need some bromance and to bitch about girls for a bit to get over it" groups, here are a few of the creator's pearls of wisdom:


♥
On marriage:
"who gived her the right to say yes or no in the first place...! why men always have to fight to get women attention..!!"
- Someone get this guy on match.com!

♥
On logic:
"one can't divide logic in half as men's logic and women's logic.... logic is only men's prerogative and there's just absence of women's logic, they haven't got it at all... it's a fact and was proved scientifically".
...And there I was thinking Dr. Nik existed only in The Simpsons.

♥
On women's minds:
"you are mindless... i hate your way in thinking..! and this drive me to the way of hating you..!"
- Deep. Oh no, my mistake, just dense.

♥
On female independence:
"women needs some body to take care of them and be responsible of them."
- We can but dream, eh?

♥
On women all over the world:
"all women at your place is nothing put fucking bitches and slutty asses"
- This is probably verifiable by Dr. Nik as well.


And it all comes with zombied-up photos with captions like "big mouth sin of women" and "you brought to men hell..!" Well, quite.
Shout-out to the sane: please join this group in opposition to it. It would be good shizzle if we could get it deleted.

product placement

...and they get bonus points for their delivery option settings; "Mr" or "Ms".
They walk the DailyFail-hating walk!

(NB: For those fortunate enough not yet to have encountered The Daily Mail, I believe the clinical definition is: bullshit).

on lesbianism

The Faculty is, for reasons I have myself yet to fathom, one of my favourite films. It boasts many great lines, in a teenage-blockbuster-about-alien-invasion kind of way, but they really save the best for last (and Laura Harris, right). Any character-assassination will do when the rest of your school has been body-snatched and you're not sure who's still human and who's not, so Marybeth goes for brokely with Stokely. "We don't know what she is", she snipes. "Gay? Straight? Alien?!" Well, quite.

That part always cracks me up, but not so much because it's so ridiculous, as so ridiculously true. If the Greys landed tomorrow, I genuinely belive Julie Bindel would be amongst the first to be lynched for conspiracy. Because people are weird about lesbians.

I am, for better or worse, straight. Unlike Ms. Bindel, I don't think I could change that if I wanted, and as such have no desire to. I have Katy Perry'd a girl, but only once and in the context of a drinking game - I don't regret it, but I wouldn't repeat it. Put simply, I just don't fancy girls. I don't have any close lesbian friends, and most of the time I have little reason to think about female homosexuality. So why are so many of my fellow non-lesbians so very obsessed with it?

One of the first things my friend Poppy said to me when we met four years ago was that she wasn't lesbian. She wanted to let me know because everyone always seemed to assume she was. She thought it might be because of her nose. Over the years, I have heard similar clarifications over hair colour, hair length, tattoos, clothing, dietary requirements, names, music preferences... most things that most people have, really. And I have of course been asked if I am lesbian myself, though only by the terminally moronic after either rejecting their advances or declaring myself a feminist. The utter bizarrity of these nebulous ideas about what might indicate lesbianism could write themselves a whole other article, but let us return to the moment to real live actual lesbians. What's all the fuss about?

I know no homosexual has it particularly easy, but society really does seem to reserve special bile and hysteria for lesbians. Gay men enjoy the dubious stereotype of the bitchy-but-hilarious, styled-to-the-nines, Gay Best Friend. The GBF cuts a merry caper through popular culture, casting a helpful Queer Eye For A Straight Guy here, a seductive glance there, while his doe-eyed Straight Best Friend contemplates how to "turn" him.

Enter the lesbian. Oh, to have her effortless gamine way with men and women alike, her hoiden chic, her babies if you could only convince her... Oh but hang on, that way madness lies, no more of that! Because we all know that lesbians are the worst of both worlds. Gay men love women; lesbians hate men, in fact that's why they're gay. And that's only because blokes don't want the ugly bints - rejected, they can but turn to second-rate sex with other mingers unable to land a man. Queens are style queens; lezzers accessorise their unshaven legs and armpits with dungarees and bovver boots. And they only support abortion (no, not "choice", "abortion") because they're wannabe baby-killers. No self-respecting knight in shining armour would touch a lesbian with a longsword, though he might rape one just to teach the bitch a lesson.

... Um, what? I must have missed the day at school when they teach you that lesbianism is some kind of perverted Satanic cult. Humans have never struck me as particularly rational beings, nor is most prejudice the pinnacle of logic, but let's play devil's advocate for a minute here. Immigrants? Well, they are, to quote Brad Majors, "foreigners, with ways different from our own". When my great-grandfather brought a black colleague from an archaeological dig back to Scotland, neighbours were shocked to learn that he wasn't just dirty, but his pigment simply didn't wash off - it's easy to condemn what you don't understand, and if the odd Dispatches on BNP sympathisers are anything to go by, comparable ignorance exists today. No man is an island, but ours is certainly overcrowded, and I can see (if not agree) that further influx might worry. There lurks a kernel of comprehensibility in some of the most incomprehensible attitudes.

I can also tenuously see but not agree that, as a particularly ignorant and/or paranoid heterosexual man, you might not like them gays because you're worried one might come onto you, like. As a heterosexual female, the idea of personally having sex with a woman does gross me out - because I'm straight. I imagine a lesbian would feel the same about having sex with a man; anyone would feel weird and wrong going specifically against their sexual orientation. So I can see that a heterosexual man might find the idea of gay sex similarly off-putting; I can understand, though not condone, a male heterosexual distrust of male homosexuality. Logically, female heterosexuality might similarly distrust female homosexuality. And yet the most aggressive lesbian-bashers I have encountered are not women, subjectively disgusted by the idea of engaging in lesbianism themselves, but heterosexual men. How the hell does a lesbian threaten them?

Well, I suppose every lesbian does deny poor Tarzan a potential Jane - but so (hopefully) does Tarzan's sister - it just doesn't add up. Viewed through the wider lens of feminism, of course, it makes perfect sense, but it still astounds and terrifies me how extreme and undisguised this particular brand of misogynistic homophobia remains in the 21st centry. At least patriarchy bothers to preach that lap-dancing is empowering, that Page 3 is just a bit of fun, that the gender pay gap doesn't really exist. The fact that lesbianism doesn't even register on Newspeak Radar is an even greater indictment of our society than the existence of such propaganda in the first place. And the sooner we recognise this heterohysteria for what it is, the better.

of mice and men

I was awake till four last night. This is not in itself unusual (I've always been crap at sleeping) but last night, for once, there was a very definite scapegoat for my insomnia. Or rather, a scapemouse.

Growing up in a very old and increasingly dilapidated house, I feared as a child that vermin were but another symptom of material inadequacy - other children had clothes from GAP, other children went on expensive holidays, other children had their own TVs, other children didn't have to watch out for mouse-traps... Though now old enough to spot the fallacy in this ten-year-old's logic, the fact that everyone has mice is one of my sillier favourite things about living in London. Like a campaigner for school uniforms, I find it reassuringly democratic; it's good to know we're all in the same ark.

Esure recently reported that sightings of vermin have increased by up to 62% in the capital, due most probably to less frequent refuse collections. While I would be intrigued to know how exactly one reaches such a conclusion (do they run a Critterstoppers line for upstanding members of the public to report these "sightings"?) they are undoubtedly onto something. People didn't used to talk much about this sort of domestic hassle, beyond perhaps wondering aloud whether Tesco's might stock rat poison; now it is a topic of increasingly zealous debate. Everyone has a mouse story, everyone has a new plan of attack - everyone is beginning to seem worryingly manic, in fact.

I have long harboured an ill-advised penchant for dire horror movies. The Leprechaun series is a current favourite, but you can't beat a good plague. The idea of malevolent giant rabbits or bumble-bees constituting an armageddic threat to the human race has always tickled me, particularly in its hilarious paranoia. I mean, at least in Jurassic Park they were up against dinosaurs - couldn't you just stock up on Raid if the renegade drones were coming? One of the finest scenes of the genre takes place in a kitchen, two girls in strappy nightwear squealing and jumping as they spot more and more ants all around them - on the floor, on the counters, even marching inside the fridge. "What do they want from us?!" one howls, wide-eyed, as the full scale of this sinister invasion hits home.

Except that wasn't in a B-movie, that was in our flat a couple of weeks ago. The ants had appeared suddenly in our fridge a few days before; undercover of the night, we knew not whence, they had sought out our kitchen, of all the kitchens in London, and set up camp alarmingly fast. We didn't know how they'd got into the building, let alone into a hermetically-sealed cooling unit. Already draconian about never leaving food out, there was nothing to draw them in anyway - and yet there they were, tramelling through our kitchen with all the malign precision of Nazis in Poland.

It started with the mice, of course. It was a formulaic invasion, beginning in the kitchen, progressing with droppings and pointless gnawing. I lamented their ruination of a kitchen drawer; "Mate", a friend shook their miserable head, "they pissed in my pasta". Our group fell silent in condolence. Before long, though experienced (I thought) with their verminous kind, the mice in our hice began to baffle. I started to mind their stupidity more than their presence; the mice I was used to ran away when they saw you, darting into some secret crevice with a speed and finesse you could not begrudge, the murine Jerry to your human Tom. But these were different - the rodent MTV generation, they would see you, scuttle a metre or so, stop, and panic. You could almost see the speech bubble saying, "Shit! Where do I go?" One actually charged me in my bedroom; another watched me bathe one night because it couldn't remember how it had got in to get out again. "Go back to the pipes, you stupid thing! Behind the toilet!" I found myself squawking, jumpier than I'd dreamt possible in a bubble-bath and a face-mask. "Mate..." I began in the pub that night. Apparently that trumped even the pasta.

The ants were altogether more sinister, though. As Leila and I still cry to anyone who will listen, "they come back for their dead. Actually come back for the bodies". ("Why, do they eat them?", mused my stepdad, pandora's box of pest paranoia). Their organisation is frightening; you know where you are with a mouse - an ant probably knows where you are right now. "What do they want from us?" seems a reasonable question; evil genius always has a plan.

I have been observing Leila's interaction with our unwanted sub-lets with particular interest. A charity-campaigning vegetarian, I didn't tell her about the mouse poison when she first moved in for fear it might upset her. Now there she stood before me squashing ants with kitchen roll, the Buddhist from the Kleenex advert gone mad. When she found some in the toaster, she wanted to "let the bastards fry". Even for a pacifist, this is war. A war, no less, of hearts and minds. After months of banging on doors to make mice run away before we have to see them, kicking the wall in bed at night to stop them gnawing through, and screaming and jumping in shock when they do anyway, I'd mug for Valium. After Ali's triumphant installation of a plug-in ultrasonic repellent that "makes them go crazy", the mice probably would too. We have started to debate further Guantanamo techniques, like making them watch Waterloo Road. Even the idea of humane traps is corrupted, as Leila gleefully narrates the tale of a mouse accidentally shaken to death inside one. Oh, how the moral have fallen.

It strikes me now that we have crossed a line, quite possibly of ants, and that it can't be healthy. Vermin are no longer a mundane problem, to be dealt with like cleaning the toilet or unblocking the sink; they are an all-consuming enemy upon which to expend increasing amounts of emotion and strategy. Plague invasion films no longer seem so deranged, and we may yet turn to darker arts than dire TV drama. The exorcists of the trade know this well; the name, Pied Piper Pest Control, has certainly reassured our household in its fantasism. I just hope it works before I find myself outside Camden tube preaching the imminence of locusts - for we are living in Biblical times...

stop the war

All this talk of protest must be getting to me; I actually dreamt about this song last night, and woke up with it in my head this morning.
I think I may now need counselling.

I first came across this slogan in a gallery shop in Brussels. I wasn't there to see Boël's work, but it made me smile, albeit ruefully, so I bought the postcard anyway. Belgium had at the time only an interim government, its partition-predictive zeitgeist typified by statements like this and puntastic badges asking, "to .be or not to .be?" Belgian politics have calmed down somewhat since, but I have lately been ever more haunted by Boël's declaration.

We are no longer as a nation in any doubt that "this system is corrupt". From placard-wielding anarchists to the BNP, the one thing we can all agree on is that the state is, well, a bit of a state. It's not just the recession and the private sector, either; the two institutions to come under the greatest fire in recent weeks are the government and the police. When MPs pickpocket the taxpayer and riot police start the riots, it is hard to see very much to "be happy" about. There has clearly been a lot wrong for a long time, and there is in some quarters a palpable sense of relief that the wider media and public have finally sat up and noticed. And yet as right(eous) as such anger is, I find myself unexpectedly troubled by it.

Take The Expenses Scandal™; MPs' assault on the public purse is indeed outrageous - but so is the way in which it has been reported. It is of course sniggerworthy when anyone is caught with their trousers incongruously down, and I am sure that all over the country men have endured excruciating conversations about utility bills in shared houses for similarly smutty reasons to Richard Timney ("Right, so we all owe a quarter of that then?" - "Er no, because we didn't all watch a quarter of MILFs 3"). If I worked at Virgin Media, I'd probably have a good giggle at some of the things customers were ordering too, and if it's funny narrating such indiscretions in the pub, it's bloody hilarious doing it en masse through the news networks.

Except, it isn't. What should have been a cutting indictment of parliamentary expenses was little more than a Carry-On joke. Yes, it spawned wider criticism that is apparently now going to be acted upon (however rashly inept Gordo's own suggestions) but that's not the point; it shouldn't have taken a good smear opportunity for this to make the headlines.

The most iconically offensive thing about that whole affair should not have been the porn, but the plug (no, not that kind - and there you go again, that's how cheapened the topic is). The sheer exploitative rapacity required to claim for 88 pence spent on a bathplug is far more repugnant than any masturbating middle-aged man. I don't even own my house and I paid for our bathplug, because I couldn't bring myself to demand the landlord come round and "instal" something so totally trivial; the NUS might just as well demand blu-tack grants to fund students putting up Betty Blue, The Blues Brothers, Big Blue and Blue Velvet posters on their blue bloody walls. That is the kind of mentality that merits heaviest censure, but if Ms. Smith had unreasonably claimed for a hundred bathplugs or doorstops it would have been lucky to make the text box above a Page 3 girl. No wonder the press are so quick to deplore political sleaze - it is, after all, one of the only things they're quick to write about at all.

The current Police Brutality Scandal™ provides interesting complement. Of course it is deplorable that a man was assaulted (who knows yet how grievously) by a police officer, but before the tabloids take a break from wringing their hands to pat themselves on the back for their moral outrage, perhaps they should remember how long this has been going on without passing hedge fund managers filming it. One of the greatest sources of popular disgust over Ian Tomlinson's treatment has been the fact that he was not a protestor. Because, what? Newspaper sellers, like swans, can only be killed by the Queen? Some dirty hippie would have had it coming? Riot police have been illegally hiding their shoulder numbers and beating up demonstrators for years, and yet it takes Not Even A Protestor's death for anyone to notice.

But this kind of reporting is irresponsible not only in its selectivity, but also in its vitriol. As you may have guessed, I am not the Met's biggest fan - but at least I have thought about why. I grew up with a highly ambivalent view of the Police, shaped in no small part by being in Belgium at the time. On the one hand, I knew that police officers were generally meant to do useful things like fight crime; on the other, everyone knew they were lazy and corrupt. "Why do policemen go around in threes? One to read, one to write, and one for intelligent conversation," was less of a joke than an empirical observation when they boasted the lowest entry requirements of almost any job; the last time her neighbour got burgled, as my mother doled out hugs and Kleenex, the investigating officer asked her, "Right, so did you do it then?" And it wasn't all comedy bungling and bribes; aged 11, I was one of 300,000 people on the White March, protesting the police errors and corruption investigating the case of paedophile serial killer Marc Dutroux. By my teens, I trusted "pigs" no further, with added yoof kultcha distaste for the fact that the unreasonable bastards sometimes had the temerity to arrest my more narcotically entrepeneurial classmates. The only person I knew who wanted to join up (and, depressingly enough, was recently accepted to train by the Met) was a steroids freak who had to move schools four times to stay one step ahead of expulsions for beating people up. Fuck da po-lice pretty much summed it up for me.

And that's a hard mentality to shake. Back in Britain, my default view remained that even if UK coppers were better than Belgian coppers, a copper is a copper is a copper is probably a nasty piece of work. In some contexts, I still think that. But a year spent in that other most reviled public service, Social Services, also made me realise that they're not all like that. For all the bullies who like the idea of hitting people with the sanction of a uniform, there are others who actually do care about public order and victims of crime - the sort whose reports on domestic violence I used to log daily, the sort who build cases against paedophiles.

The sort who don't decide to go into riot policing. Because what happened to Ian Tomlinson was not just the "police brutality" the red-tops are gleefully denouncing, it was riot police brutality, and there is a difference. It is only right that the IPCC investigate the G20 fiasco, but I for one hope they will be looking not only at riot policing itself, but also at its selection criteria. The Met is a large and varied beast; to opt for any division of policing over another implies some personal motivation. The officer who assaulted Ian Tomlinson must be held accountable for his crime; but so must whoever reccommended him for, or accepted him into, a role for which he was clearly entirely unsuitable.

Police officers are frequently baited and provoked to an intolerable extent that most reasonable people could not nonviolently endure; the problem is, such endurance is part of their job description. How anyone manages the superhuman calm and reason required to be a decent police officer is beyond me - but some people do, and they are the ones who have a place in the uniform. They are, however, also the ones who will continue to bear the brunt of the public antipathy stirred up by their baton-wielding bretheren at G20.

I don't buy tabloids, but am sure there's a codicil somewhere in the Gutter Guild's membership rules that ensures at least one of the red-tops has vented its moral spleen at both police brutality and police abuse in a single issue. Reading the sensationalist front page is probably all some people need to commit the crime featured ten pages later, because sleaze and spleen can only ever make things worse. The current debate on parliamentary expenses is a dirty joke; the very real problems both incarnated and faced by the Police have become a Channel 4 "dossier" on a tucked-in jacket and left-handedness - had they managed to pathologise the combination into a rare disease, they'd probably have kept him for Extraordinary People. It should not have to take porn and death to provoke any meaningful drive to snuff out such systemic failings.

The system is corrupt, but it is also corrupted and corrupting, and it will take more than reactionary rage to change that. We are, of course, right to be angry - but that does not necessarily mean we can afford to be. Our government and police force has let us down, but in failing to holistically examine how, why, and what facilitating role the media and man on the street might have played, we are finishing the job for them. The system is corrupt, be happy - because it's the only attitude that is going to help drag us out of this mess.

was she asking for it? did she ask you twice?

Words of Love, Courtney's or otherwise, should have little place in any article about sexual assault. Contrary to widespread uninformed protestation, love – and even lust – have little to do with any kind of sex crime, and it's time more people accepted this. But hearing the song again today, I could not help but be struck by its pertinence. With the IPCC girding its loins to investigate just what percentage of over 150 rapes perpetrated in the capital by the now-notorious John Worboys and Kirk Reid could have been prevented by more competent Police work, a pressing issue is once more a current issue. And thank goodness for that, however brief a flash in the popular pan it may prove.

But for millions of people, it always was. We are all, of course, both sum and part of our experience; the pickpocketed pat down their coats that much more firmly on the bus, the bereaved start at twinges of familiarity in a stranger's face, the redundant turn from the latest bail-out bulletin on the news. We have all loved and lost and been reminded. But there is something sometimes crashingly, sometimes indefinably, worse now. The lie that any rape victim was "asking for it" is as old and sick as the crime itself; its death throes are vicious, yet still we hope (for what else is there?) it must one day die off. But what of its unspoken echo; who is asking twice?

Much is rightly made of the trauma of trial. However sensitively conducted – and that is by no means the norm – any revisitation of any sex attack is a reviolation at its hands, all the more brutal if endured under cross-examination and the spectre of a potential not-guilty verdict. It is easy to see why so many sex crimes go unreported. But how much does the legally anonymous victim really escape, on even the most mundane level?

At this point, just like the real journalists, I am damned if I do and damned if I don't; data is derided and anecdote attacked as bias in any article like this. Ms Hobson must choose, however hopelessly, which Platonic shadows will best illustrate the form; today I opt for anecdote. Society seems to deem it necessary, particularly for a woman, to disclaim any subjectivity as expediently as possible. And so I must confess another's sin; I was recently sexually assaulted, to use my GP's term. It did not change my views of the issue, and I did not report it. I count myself lucky not to have been raped and life is slowly returning to normal. I remember it most days, but no longer every day; I still have trouble sleeping, but he no longer haunts my dreams. Psychologically, the worst is over – but practically, it is yet to come.

Like most victims of sex crime, my attacker was known to me. Or, more accurately, to my flatmate – a longstanding friend from school, she had been moved in less than a fortnight when she suggested I join her on a night out with some university friends. With our third flatmate away and other friends otherwise engaged, I readily accepted. We were a large group, and I spent most of the evening chatting to the one guy I’d met before. Around half-eleven, last orders tolling, we walked to a local nightspot – whereupon all but three of us decided they were tired and had really better get the last tube home.

I hadn’t even been introduced, much less spoken, to Carlos until this point – Ali still wanted to go dancing, so we exchanged brief pleasantries and proceeded to a clubnight. My initial impression was mildly unimpressive, but decent music precluded conversation inside, and Ali seemed to be having a good time so I just danced and nodded as etiquette required. I wasn’t having an amazing time, but I wasn’t having an awful one either. We left and debated where to go next; Ali offered him our sofa to crash on and the three of us set off home. We were all decidedly past tipsy into drunkenness, but by no means paralytic. I remember thinking I’d been right, and that he was a bit of an idiot – more smarm than charm and painful listening – but I felt more bored than threatened. In any case, he was talking mainly to Ali.

Which made what happened when we actually got home, particularly after Ali went abruptly to bed, as unexpected as it was vile. Three things in particular still stand out; grabbing me around the neck, repeating “you have to”, and his utter incomprehension of the word, “no”. I have known that get men embarrassed, persuasive, upset or angry – I had never before seen it register absolutely no effect at all; to him, I may just as well have had my mouth taped shut. I slept with a chair and a suitcase against my door that night, and caught Ali the next morning before she left for work to say I wanted him out of the flat straight away. She seemed surprised, but did it – she even rang me to assure me he had gone.

It was then that the shock set in. I found it hard to adequately articulate what had happened (a friend later said that she had at first been able to make out only fragments beyond the fact that I was “obviously really traumatised”). I fared better second time around telling Leila, our other flatmate; she listened very intently, then pronounced, “Well, he can’t ever come back here, can he? He cannot set foot in this flat again. That’s the first thing to make sure of.” Because that is what every “date”, or “acquaintance”, or whatever other minimising euphemism you want to use, sex attack victim has to do – not cry, not adjust, not heal, not wallow, but worry about the next time.

It’s not surprising that sex offenders prey on those they have easiest access to; it’s even less surprising that it is precisely this group who are least likely to report it, or indeed be believed by the Police if they do. More than love, “easy” is another word that should have little place in any article about sexual assault, but which rapist is easier to report – the one who dragged you down an alley at cliché-point, or the one your friends can’t praise highly enough? The one against whom all your friends will side, or the one of whom your friends can scarcely believe such an act? Because, just so you know, Carlos is “such a lovely guy” when he’s not grabbing some girl he’s just met round the neck, trying to kiss and bite her face. He’s so nice and funny, such good company, the life and soul of the party but such a supportive friend too. He was so good when Ali’s sister was ill, “always ringing to check I was OK, taking me out for coffee, that sort of thing”.

And just so you also know, that’s how Ali described him just after I told her what he did. Maybe that makes her sound like a bitch – I feel that too sometimes, but I also know it’s not that simple, because Ali is otherwise just as lovely as Carlos apparently is when he’s not busy trying to rape someone. We’ve been friends for ten years; I know she’s not a feckless cow. If a stranger had grabbed me like that in the club earlier that night, she probably would have hit them. But because she’d also been friends with Carlos for a couple of years, all normal bets were off. She avoided the topic altogether for three days, even when I tried to bring it up. When I finally sat her down and forced the conversation, she avoided eye-contact instead. “Well yeah, fine, of course, I won’t see him in the flat, but he’s still one of my best friends, I’m not getting involved”, was as lyrical as she would wax.

Maybe that makes her sound like a bitch too – except that she came to my room later that night and said it hadn’t really sunk in before and she was really, really, really sorry. She understood that he had behaved “like an animal” and “like a rapist” (her words, not mine) and said that if she’d realised at the time she would have kicked him straight out. Of course he could never come to the flat again, and of course she would damn well tell him why. But of course she would still stay friends with him, too. He was, after all, “hammered”, “probably wouldn’t even remember doing it”, would no doubt be “mortified” when she told him, which of course she definitely would. (This, supposedly, despite the absence of slurred speech, sleepiness, falling over, vomiting, or drinking any more than I did). And therein lies the rub. God knows we inhabit a patriarchal maze of double-standards anyway, perhaps most of all when it comes to sex, but there is something even further wrong when alcohol consumption can not only impugn a woman for her own violation, but also excuse her attacker.

No-one wants to question their judgement, much less admit they might have missed a sexual predator in their inner circle, and that is precisely why they get away with it – why, in this case, Carlos could only be “like an animal” or “like a rapist” to Ali. Why, in fact, nearly two months on, she has still not taken him to task about the small matter of assaulting her flatmate in our own flat. Why she has invited none of her friends to our party this weekend, rather than inviting everyone else and explaining why he can’t come. Why Leila must do her daily best not to notice that relations around her have silently broken down. Why I am so withdrawn these days. Why Ali is losing a friend.

In fact, about the only person not having to deal with the fall-out of my assault is the man who did it. I wasn’t asking for it the first time, and I’m certainly not asking twice now. And you know what? Neither are Leila or Ali.

* Names have been changed.