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?