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.

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?

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.