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.

"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.