Feminist Guilt

I am a feminist.

There.

I said it.

I even put it in bold for you.

On occasions the reactions received from outing yourself as one are not dissimilar to those you might get from admitting to voting BNP or I don’t know, not believing in global warming.

wow. offensive.

Why could this be? In my mind a feminist is not discriminatory or ignorant… rather they are forward thinking and egalitarian.

Last year in a seminar, our tutor asked for people to raise their hand if they considered themselves to be a feminist. Out of close to fifteen people, me and maybe one other person did- she asked us why we were and I said “everyone should be one, shouldn’t they?”

If I said the F word to you (feminist, not fuck) and asked you to picture one, I doubt you’d think about someone like me …

I’m young, I’m straight, and I look a bit like Barbie.

Not middle aged, not a butch lesbian; I don’t have a buzzcut, although I do have that certain ferocious demeanour.

I think that it’s about time that these sorts of preconceptions are QUASHED.

Anyone can be a feminist, old, young, gay, straight, male or female.

Perhaps some women use feminism as an excuse to be man-haters, and that has coloured your view on them. But as far as I’m concerned to be a feminist means only that you believe in equality between men and women, so everybody should support it- ESPECIALLY women themselves.

You can be a feminist and wear makeup, you can be a feminist and have sex for money, and you can even be a feminist without insisting people refer to you as a ‘womyn’.

Seriously.. I google 'feminist' and THIS comes up!!!! bleedin eck! (and no that wasn't a menstrual pun)

I feel that a lot of young women see Feminism as some kind of embarrassing taboo- but the fact is that even nowadays the average British male wage continues to surpass the female one by 16%, despite girls generally outperforming boys at GCSE and A Level.

So girls, let me ask you this, would you be happy to be paid less than a man for doing an identical job?

If you answered no- welcome to the magical world of Feminism!

Unfortunately that isn’t really the case Bey. 

‘Vintagey’ and the Anachronism

Okay. I was watching the 2010 film ‘Submarine’, and I was trying to work out when it was supposed to be set. Which I've noticed has become increasingly difficult to do nowadays. I can’t remember the last time there was a new fashion trend that wasn’t a revival of something else, and it’s more and more common for people’s interiors to be deliberately kitsch and oldy-worldy.

At first you only see them in a school~ and school doesn’t change much so I was still pretty clueless. They’re wearing duffel coats though so I’m either thinking it’s modern and a bit hipster or maybe the 50s. Anyway. I see them walk past a P reg car- so AHA it must be modern.

I Wikipedia it anyway. So it’s set in 1986 then?

Why put a P reg car in plain view, I don’t even drive and I know that’s a late 90s registration.

They make so much effort to tint the picture a little sepia and show the main character using a typewriter and Polaroid camera. Then they just go and put something on screen that just SCREAMS nineties and it totally ruins my suspended disbelief.

[P.S I watched ‘One Day’ last month and Sturgess in ‘1997’ drinks out of an Ikea mug I bought LAST YEAR- but to complain about that would just be pedantic.. right?]

Sometimes I wonder why filmmakers bother to set films which you wouldn’t class as a period drama in the past… it always seems so much effort to make them convincing, and often a narrative will work just as well set in 2011 as if it was set in 1986.

There’s a post on UltraCulture (good blog btw) vis a vis this attitude in Spielberg’s Super 8.

Are the noughties (we’re not in the noughties any more are we.. we’re in the teens? Or something… who knows) really that unattractive for us? People are forever extolling the virtues of the past, whether it be the 60s, 70s, 80s or even the 90s- all are seen as idyllic. My mother told me the other day that if she had a small child nowadays she would not feel as safe letting them out as she did with me and my younger siblings from 1992 onwards.

I don’t think it really is more dangerous today. We just hear about it more.

I don’t want to think that one day I’ll feel almost ashamed of growing up in the 90s/early 00s. How will I show my future children (lol) what life is like now when all the photos we take are put through ridiculous hipstamatic/instagram filters, and all the films I’ve seen recently that aren’t the most vapid of romantic comedies are set in the past, or even worse.. are just remakes of pre-existing films; and music is just samples and covers and rip-offs.

NOTHING IS ORIGINAL ANYMORE

You

Hey guys! Welcome to my fiftieth post! I'm being all pensive.
So yesterday I put up a poll on my blog’s facebook asking y’all what you wanted to see more of on here.

And it got me thinking- the most important person on this blog is actually YOU.
It’s weird to think that anyone would read the drivel I want to write about, but it seems more and more so that you actually do! Crazy!

And I don’t know much about you.. I know most of you are from the UK, use PCs and run Internet Explorer. But apart from that I am clueless!

So this is my plea to you to tell me who you are, you don’t need to include your name or anything, just tell me if you know me in the real world, or if you found me by googling ‘are Jedward gay?’ (Seriously that is one of the top things people google to get here), you can tell me you think I’m an idiot- I don’t care, just tell me what you want! I’m never quite sure what’s a hit and what’s a miss.

What do you want me to write about?
Do you like my interviews?
Do you want to know more about your faithful narrator?
What’s your favourite post I’ve ever done?
I’m willing to talk about most things. Srsly I can chat shit about all number of topics [n.b please please please don’t ask me to talk about sport.. I run out of things to say after ‘I was a sub for the third netball team at school… errr I have asthma okay I am like allergic to exercise’]

So basically GET IN TOUCH WITH ME!!! There are a number of ways you can do this:-
By liking my FACEBOOK and writing on the wall
By sending an EMAIL to longtimenodig@mail.com
Or just by commenting on this post after the jump (I don’t think a blogger account is necessary, so you can give me abuse anonymously if you so wish)

If I get any feedback whatsoever from this I will be over the moon! So get tapping away on those little keyboards my little Long Time No Diggers.

Faux-litical Activists

Since, I don’t know- about March last year a number of the people I know suddenly took up an interest in politics. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it’s good to care, right?

But frankly some of y’all are taking it too damn far.

1. OMGZ NICK CLEGG IS SUCH A TR8OR INNIT

I know you think it’s hip and cool to adopt this view because Russell Howard says it a lot (bee tee dubs who else is bored stiff of him already?) but are any of you actually aware of how politics works?

Yes, it said in the Lib Dem manifesto that they planned on scrapping tuition fees, but as you can see here:

The Liberal Democrats DID NOT win. Not even close. They actually came third.

If our government just did everything on the Lib Dem manifesto it’d be undemocratic and essentially veto the votes of the majority of British people: ergo, we would live in a DICTATORSHIP.

Do you want that? No, I didn’t think so. So shut the hell up about Nick Clegg already.

2. I JUST VOTED FOR ***** AND SAID ******* TO AV

In 1872 the British government introduced the Secret Ballot Act. Before this they’d shout out if you had voted Tory or Whig straight after you wrote it down. They stopped doing this because people used to get beaten up for voting a certain way. Furthermore it’s just damn annoying so I’m pretty tempted to beat you up regardless of what you voted for. Capisce?

3. DAVID CAMERON IS THE DEVIL

Whatever your political inclination, it cannot be disputed that our prime minister has a nigh on impossible job. Yes, he’s enforced some pretty austere measures, but he’s not really done that badly has he? Anyway, I doubt any of us are really fit to judge him as I’m fairly certain that none of us have a job with even a percentile of the responsibility his has.

So give the man a break?

P.S you all should vote though, when it comes down to it. People died for your right to decide how the country is run.

Oh. This is pretty gloomy. But believe it or not I’m in an okay mood atm. I’ll write something cheerier next time.

Over and out,

Dollface.