Of Pies and Circuses

In Greece, they raise their hands. In Iraq, they throw their shoes. In Britain, we throw pies. This probably says a lot about us as a nation. Like everyone else, when I saw young comedian Jonnie Marbles lobbing a foam pie in Rupert Murdoch's face, as the elderly oligarch attempted to distance himself from years of criminal newsgathering, police corruption and government complicity, I felt like I was dreaming. One of the weirder dreams, where you have to ride a horse made of biscuits, or watch someone you know throwing a plate of gunk down the shirt of the most powerful man in the world. That shit doesn't happen in real life.

Many people have been asking me whether or not I condemn the pie. I would invite those people to stand in front of the mirror and say 'I condemn the pie' without collapsing into giggles. Chucking a foam pie in Rupert Murdoch's face was undoubtedly a silly thing to do- I, too, would have preferred the polite comeuppance being delivered by Tom Watson and other honest MPs to continue undisturbed- but it's hardly Baader-Meinhof, is it? Jonnie Marbles is no more a violent terrorist than Harpo Marx. He threw a pie, not a grenade. It was a stunt. It was, let's face it, a funny stunt. On its own terms, it was a successful stunt- and the problem with successful stunts is that they make headlines.

In terms of distracting attention from his wheedling refusal to accept responsibility for what went on at NewsCorp, Murdoch could not have bought better publicity unless he had personally hired a lackey to shoot his son in the middle of the hearing - an oversight which, at one point in the proceedings, he looked like he was regretting. During the Murdochs' questioning, NewsCorp shares jumped by five per cent, in part because of the pie, briefly splattering the entire debate open in a welter of wet foam, but also because the Sun King played his own part with tooth-aching finesse.

That was the real circus. The man who owns and dictates the news on three continents played to the crowd as a doddering, out-of-touch gentleman executive who had absolutely no idea why he had had back-door access to Downing Street for decades, no idea why his journalists illegally hacked the phones of grieving relatives and a murdered teenager, no idea why his newspapers seem to have bought and paid for the Metropolitan police.

The terrifying thing is that a foam pie in the face is almost certainly the closest thing to actual disrespect Rupert Murdoch has experienced for thirty years. The stunt gives the remaining pro-Murdoch press an excuse to distract attention from the ugly details of the snowballing hacking scandal- but at the expense of showing their fallen prince covered in gunge and baffled, like Emperor Palpatine appearing in an episode of Get Your Own Back. The whole point of the thrown pie as a comedy trope is that it's designed to humiliate, not to hurt - the 'heinous assault on an eighty year old man' line is unlikely to wash for long. One would hope that the police officers currently holding Jonnie Marbles in custody will remember that, rather than treating him like some sort of wanton confectionary terrorist, but unfortunately the only way to find that out would be to hack their phones, and decent people don't do that.

Hackgate is too big and purposeful a beast to be by distracted by a juicy pie for more than a few hours. The status quo has been turned on its head and shaken until the dirty cash falls out. The power elites in Britain and, increasingly, in the US, have been rattled to their core. Journalists across the media spectrum are remembering that their job is to report the truth, not twist the agenda to suit their bosses. The moral panopticon of the Murdoch press, manufacturing consensus for thirty years of war and the pursuit of profit with pictures of tits and celebrity chitchat, has been exposed as a circus of lies and corruption, lubricating politicians into lazy complicity, putting government ministers on its payroll to do its bidding, turning the police force into a bunch of hired lackeys and the justice system into a mercenary sham, pilfering the still-warm bodies of slaughtered soldiers and strangled schoolgirls for a story, any story. Murdoch is eating humble pie (I wish I'd been the first to make that pun) with or without Jonnie Marbles. Can you tear your eyes away, even for a second? No, nor can I.

And that's just what the British government is counting on. Today, in the middle of the select committee hearing, it was discreetly announced that the NHS will be opened up for privatisation- the very thing that nobody voted for, the thing that almost noone wanted apart from private healthcare firms, the politicians whose election campaigns they financed, and -guess who?- the Murdoch press. Last week's Open Public Services white paper threatens to confiscate state-provided welfare, social housing, schools, nursing homes, libraries, hospitals, hospices. The hacking scandal has made it almost to the doors of Downing street, but in the meantime, on the quiet, the agenda of Murdoch's tame cabinet is being signed and delivered. It cannot be permitted. If we believe in a fairer, more honest world, we can't allow ourselves to be entirely distracted by the circus.

Riots and romance: thoughts on journalism, revolution and the anti-cuts movement.

I am in the process of trying to write an article for ADBUSTERS about 'Revolution in the UK'. The question I was set - "can it happen here like it happened in Tahrir Square?"- is broad and, I think, misplaced. As in, I think it's the wrong question to be asking. For one thing, the simple answer is no- of course it can't, it's a completely different country and the conditions that produced the Arab uprisings cannot be replicated here. That simple answer, however, closes down debate on what really is happening in Britain right now. I believe that something is on the move in this country, something important. And it's important to document that something honestly, without resorting to caricature, blithe supposition or wild inference.

I've been thinking about this more in the aftermath of the riot in Bristol this week. There was a vast disparity between MSM coverage of the riot and what thousands of us watched live online that night. I held back from writing a report until, reading the BBC and Guardian coverage the next morning, I realised that noone in the sparsely occupied Bank Holiday press rooms was feeling inclined to dig beyond the official police statement that day. In the age of Twitter, we should be able to do better than that- so I hurried out a piece based on eyewitness accounts and as much insider info as I could collate.

Following this piece, as with my reportage of March 26, I have been accused of bias, of glorifying and romanticising the protesters. I believe this charge, however tritely or maliciously put, deserves to be answered. More than that, I think I absolutely need to answer it if I want to get better at what I do.

On the charge of romance, I hold up my hands, with the caveat that the struggle of citizen versus state is essentially a romantic one. If one cares about accuracy and linguistic craftsmanship, it is very hard to describe these active clashes in a way that does not provoke passion on both sides. This is because the events themselves are moments of high emotion and challenge. Whatever their affiliations, a person's political passions are drawn with fierce accuracy when they are asked for their opinion on a given police ruckus- and every time it happens is another chance to take the political temperature of the nation.

The British people are, however, generally resistant to romance. We tend to get uncomfortable when too much of a fuss is made. There is also an important cognitive dissonance at play: when people read, for example, about children being assaulted by police officers practically on the steps of Parliament, the emotions that stirs, and the conclusions we are inevitably led to about the benevolence or otherwise of the state, directly challenge the desire that very many of us have to believe that the police have our best interests at heart, that our politicians know what they are doing, that the ship of Britain is being steered gently away from the worst of the oncoming rocks. That cognitive dissonance can make people incredibly angry.

Personally, I don't believe that romance can be overlooked- apart from anything else, the rush and thrill of the fight is one of the big reasons riots spread. But just because a riot is romantic does not mean that it is right.

Which brings me on to the question of condemning or condoning. I make no secret of the fact that, quite apart from my journalism, my political sympathies lie with the anti-cuts movement. But more than anything else, since I arrived at Millbank on the tenth of November just in time to see the windows kicked in, I have wanted to understand the nature of the political changes taking place in this country. This is why I have taken care to record and speak out about any instances of deliberate violence against police I happen to have seen. It's also the reason I've resisted the temptation to become member of any political party or anarchist group: it's easy to reel off propaganda (especially if one's style has a sliiiiight tendency to drift towards bombast) but far more difficult really to anatomise a movement and a generation and a nation in traumatic flux.

I believe that riots, and our response to them, teach people a lot about themselves. They have taught me one fundamentally important thing about myself - apart from the fact that I have a reckless attitude to my own personal safety, tossing all 5foot nothing of me repeatedly into violent situations where journalistic integrity forbids any active self-defence. What drags me to the scene of any riot, to any interesting protest currently ongoing, is not just politics, nor thrill-seeking: it's chasing a story that the mainstream press are still not telling properly yet, chasing a an important story, a story to which I currently have unique access as a young person within the movement.

Being inside a big story is exciting, especially for a rookie journalist, because by our nature people who choose this job like to know things other people don't, to be 'in on it', whatever 'it' is, and then to tell the world. This often produces quality, important journalism. But - crucially- not always.

I am forcefully reminded of another story currently running in my own magazine, the New Statesman: John Pilger's reports on the Wikileaks affair and the trial of Julian Assange. Pilger is a phenomenal journalist. I admire his investigative work more than I can possibly say, and I hope one day to be able to meet him in person. However, in my opinion, Pilger's insider access to Assange and to Wikileaks - his understandable glee at which is barely disguised - have nudged him towards glorifying his subject. In my reading, Pilger pre-emptively exonerated Assange of all sexual assault charges, and that is extremely problematic. Wikileaks is unquestionably a force for good in the world, but Pilger's celebration of and reliance on Wikileaks in articles about other subjects are becoming rather predictable. Predictability is anathema to great journalism. IMHO.

If a reporter as renowned, brilliant and experienced as John Pilger can be susceptible to the professional virus of insiderhood, any of us can be, so it's advisable to check repeatedly for symptoms. I stand by the accuracy and rigorousness of my own reporting of the movement in Britain to date, but the potential for infection is there. How could it not be?

There's nothing wrong with a bit of romance, but this movement deserves to be reported honestly, warts-and-all honestly. The voices of anti-cuts protesters, student activists and everyone they represent and defend deserve to be heard clearly, not distorted to the point of caricature. Full-time activists are more than capable of writing their own propaganda. A real campaigning journalist should be able to amplify unheard voices without distorting them. I think it's crucial that hacks involved or interested in resistance movements hold ourselves closely to that standard. I'm certainly going to try my best.

Media lies and the 'Me First' generation

Ooh, look. Here’s some probably-quite-new-fairly-meaningless statistics about youth, gender and mental health from which people with no knowledge of psychiatry and little conception of the complexities of mental health difficulties and young people’s lives can extrapolate almost anything they fancy. What fun. Let’s see how insensitively we can completely miss the point, shall we? That’s probably what I’d be thinking to myself were I an overpaid broadsheet grunt; as it is, I’m an angry blogger, and a youngish woman with mental health difficulties to boot, so all I can do is stand at the sidelines with my modicum of inside knowledge and carp at the immense cocking stupidity that’s been hashed out in the press over the past few days.

Let’s start with the earth-shivering ‘revelation’ that gets wheeled out every year or so: that feminism has failed to make women happier. It’s been standard Mail and Telegraph fodder for ages, but now the Graun have stepped in too, spinning Madeleine Bunting’s piece on how ‘consumerism’ is ‘damaging’ women for all it’s worth. Bunting’s moderate article is drawn from the more thumpingly derivative conclusions of smug pop-psychologist Oliver James, whose job is to travel around the world being surprised that people as rich as he is aren’t happy. He, too, is deeply concerned for the moral and spiritual health of young women, given that recent studies have shown that – shocker – some 15-year-old-girls aren’t very happy and also like a drink. He deplores the fact that “Victoria Beckham [is]consistently the girl they most want to be during this era”. Yes, that’s right. Because as far as Mr James is concerned, Victoria Beckham – 35 years old, world-famous model, fashion designer, businesswoman, former singer and mother to three children – is still nothing more than a “girl”.

James, like Bunting, is simply appalled that women and girls aren’t happy. After all, what more could we want? Haven’t we got the vote now, and the right to work almost as good jobs for almost as much money as men whilst still carrying out 80% of unpaid cleaning and caring duties? Haven’t we got the right to behave however the hell we like as long as we’re not old, or ugly, or overweight, or lesbians, or left wing, or non-white, or happily unmarried, or disabled, or poor? If we’re not all gurning beatifically now, surely that means that we were wrong all along? Shouldn’t we get back to the kitchen and find husbands to bear cookies and bake children for, if we’ll be happier that way?

If you hadn’t guessed, I find all this gawping media speculation about women’s mental health disgusting, if far from surprising: down the centuries, casting aspersions on our mental health has been the number one way to keep women in check and limit our choices, from lobotomies for ‘nymphomania’ in the 19th century, to forced hysterectomies for hospital inpatients in the 1970s, to today’s handwringing over the mental health of women who choose to have abortions, as if women weren’t mature enough to take that risk.

Our choices are pathologised and moralised and muddled together with the very sensitive, completely separate subject of mental health difficulty in ways that are achingly archaic and damaging. Not to mention demeaning, because as well as leaping to the assumption that ‘Women’s Liberation’ has actually achieved its aims, the attitude presumes that what women want – politically and personally – is to be ‘happy’. Who said we want to be happy? I thought we wanted to be free, to be fulfilled, to have the power to make our own choices and to lead our own lives, to be happy or miserable on our own terms. The suffragettes didn't fling themselves under the hooves of royal horses for 'happiness'. They had much more important things to fight for.

Ah well. At least the same sort of crass, derivative statistic-bending media hypocrisy isn't being applied to the mental health of young men as well this week. O hai, Anne Perkins.

New statistics from Childline show that the proportion of boys calling the helpline to seek support for abuse, bullying and other distressing situations has doubled, from one in five to one in three. Rather than something to be applauded - suggesting that the millions of hours poured in by teachers, care workers and child psychologists trying to make boys more comfortable with seeking help have not been wasted - Anne Perkins suggests that this is in fact a sign of the moral weakness of our generation, what she calls "the 'because I'm worth it' generation'" in her rather unfortunately titled article When self-love is out of control.

Perkins' analysis of what makes boys unhappy is no less sexist, patronising and hateful than James' summation of the "toxins" ruining the lives of the young girls whose periods, let's not forget, are according to Mr James dependent on how attentive their fathers are:

There is a long list of candidates: laddette culture, Wags as models…and a massive sense of relative deprivation – always feeling you deserve better than what you have got, be that your boyfriend, MP3 player or your body. This was the It Could Be You era, one stoked by the advent of reality television in which girls such as Jade Goody, who would never have had a chance in previous times, became rich and famous just for appearing on Big Brother.

It was James, Perkins and their ilk in the first place, gangs of privileged media pundits from older generations, who decided that we were the generation that ‘had it all’, rather than, say, the generation who were trying their damn hardest to remain human despite being saddled with the highest expectations and least support structures of any group of young people in living memory. Not that that’s news, of course. Every generation tries to embody in its young its worst fears for itself, and our narcissistic, materialistic, addicted, self-centred, phenomenally up-fucked parents’ generation pointing the finger at us and telling us we’re moral degenerates is hardly news.

In fact, we are one of the less socially mobile generations of the past century; the real ‘It Could Be You’ generation, the generation with the most genuine opportunities for kids from lower income families, is the generation now making these ridiculous pronouncements: Oliver James and Anne Perkins' generation. To recap:

1.We didn't signed up to the women's movement to get happy; we'd rather be miserable on our own terms than Oliver James' fantasy grinning bovine housewives

2.The mental health of women and girls cannot be morally measured, and to suggest otherwise is highly offensive

3.The mental health of men and boys has no cultural value: it is not a sign of weakness or even of increasing distress that more young men are seeking help. In fact, the Childline statistics are to be welcomed

4. Mental health is not a gender issue: your mental health is not related to, or a predicter of, how good a little boy or girl you are. External arbiters of gender are, in fact, something that implicates your mental health rather than the other way around. Mental health difficulty has no moral value, and it cannot be placed on a map of social or gender deviance: it's simply a problem that a lot of young people, as well as a lot of not-young people, are trying to deal with from day to day.

5. Columnists: take your jealous mitts out of your cloth ears and try, please, to understand that the generation you so readily dismiss as narcissistic and frivolous has problems of its own that you can't even begin to comprehend, mainly because so far you haven't bothered, unless you're Nick Cohen.

Here ends the lesson

Burlesque laid bare

For your delectation, for your deliberation, more of me writing about feminism and my fucked-up adolescence for the Naugriad (they have now corrected 'mysoginist' in the crosshead, joys!).

Oh, and in case you were wondering...

Yes, this was me.

Hunter, Hellraisers and Viral Democracy...

Today is the third anniversary of the suicide of Hunter S Thompson. Rest in peace, you mad old bastard, and thanks for the dream. A brief digest of the press this week is enough to prove that this world was never meant for a rule stomping genius like you. ....

****

It's not often I'm driven to a book review by sheer annoyance. Oliver James' Affluenza, however - currently number three in the bestseller lists and rising - is such a staggering load of abysmal, dangerous rubbish that it was review or risk self-poisoning by paper sludge in an attempt to vent senseless rage at the book by chewing and eating it. Affluenza is a muddle of trite social 'observations' strung together by no more than a series of carefully chosen anecdotes, under-researched or unsupported at best, casually racist, misogynist, classist and breathtakingly anodine at worst.

To give James his due, he starts off with a fairly sound piece of reasoning - human beings in the west have come to see themselves as 'personality commodities', and behave accordingly, resulting in massive increases in depression, anxiety and emotional ill-health. This is all keyed in to what James, in a stunning feat of tautology, terms 'Selfish Capitalism'. From there, however, it's all downhill: the first chapter is used to introduce the weary underlying metaphor of the entire 546 page tome, namely that one can become 'infected' by Selfish Capitalism and by personal commodification, henceforth referred to, in almost every churning paragraph of the
book, as the 'Affluenza Virus', or simply 'The Virus'.

This, to me, smacks of an author who liked 'The Matrix' trilogy a little too much (even 'Revolutions'). James' reasoning, however, fails to reach even the limited levels of subtlety commanded by the Wachowski brothers, not to mention that the fight scenes aren't half so cool. The sizzling hero, moreover, leaves much to be desired: James himself is an obtrusive prescence, cropping up everywhere, 'like an itinerant Marie Curie...triumphantly clutching vaccines which immunise us against the Virus, phials of tactics for making the best of the very bad job the world has become'. Oh yes, Oliver, thrust those tactic-phials deep into our sick and trembling 21st-century souls: only you can save us.

Within the first few pages, James comes out with such gems as:

'Whilst poverty fosters survival materialism, it does not result in illness'. (Been to Africa at all, Oliver?)

'women are more materialistic in their preferences when choosing a partner'. (Not explained, not supported, just plonked there as the given background to a series of paragraphs on how the grabbiness of the girls on Sex and the City can be put down to physiology).

Comparing a New York Banker to Chet, the amiable Nigerian taxi driver who had driven James to the meeting -'his apartment was big enough to fit a whole family of Chets'. Yes, because all African descendants like to live in huge, tribe like families, and can be reduced to the same cheery, poverty-stricken archetype. Of course.

I'm really not making this stuff up. All of James 'evidence' is anecdotal. Some unsourced statistics are peppered around the place, but in vague and generalised terms, such as when he declares that, at one Oxford college, one in three female students claims to have been seriously eating disordered at one point in her life, and one in ten is currently suffering. The college, Mr James, was University College, Oxford, and I know exactly how easy that statistic is to find, because I myself used it in a last-minute addendum to an article for my student paper about 6 months before your book went to press. Must try harder.

Now let's talk more about what James thinks about women:

'Do not deceive yourself about the reasons you are returning to work. Do you really need the money? Can you not live in a cheaper house or cut down on your outgoings? The authenticity, vivacity and playfulness of small children is hugely rewarding, a much greater boon than any number of promotions or pay rises...'

'Women who divorce or separate are often more depressed after doing so, even if they were with a truly vile man...before you divorce the father of your child, see a therapist and check what you are bringing to the feast.'

'If you have a daughter who is already showing signs of being a high-flyer, discourage academic prize-hunting and engage with her authentic interests'

[Susan is a talented, high-flying and wealthy advertising executive, interviewed about her self-starting skills]. 'When I made the obvious point, that a relationship in which she might find herself depending on a man must have been rather daunting....' - yes, because all successful women will come to depend on one man eventually, if they want to be truly fulfilled, won't they? Ta for clearing that one up.


What sets the teeth on edge about Oliver James' absurd generalisations on the state of feminism today isn't his casual dismissal, nor the way in which, in a book whose premise is to stop people seeing themselves as commodities, he persists in treating women as base-line baking-tins whose primary purpose is to squeeze out babies. No, it's simply the way he spouts all this humourless, gender-reductionist rubbish so patronisingly and self-importantly, as if he were the first person ever to have thought of this, and wouldn't we all be so much happier if we just listened to him?

Homosexual men and women do not exist in James' fantasy world, and nor do bisexuals, poly- or trans-sexuals, or, indeed, anyone who doesn't see marriage as the ultimate goal in life -his 'four types of marriage', which takes up much of Affluenza's 'women and relationships' section, is good for a giggle. Just don't let it stick between your teeth. When not being casually misogynist in a roundabout advocation of a return to fifties' gender-stratification, James' solutions are primitivist, reductivist, and based purely on observations of one set of people: the white, monied middle-classes. How this book is meant to be the 'sizzling reality check' claimed by its promotional material remains arcane.

What's even worse is that Affluenza is remarkably easy to read, which means that this banal piece of social propaganda will be gobbled up by commuters and stressed middle-class homemakers across the country. Apparently, James is already planning a sequel. Yes, that sound of rumbling, squelching and distant blasphemy is Hunter Thompson turning in his grave.


*****

Elsewhere in the travesty that was once the British press, the Guardian, in a move that was either sheer PR genius, tit-itching stupidity or some sick hybrid of the two, saw fit to launch a blog by the clueless son of an in-house travel writer, detailing his plans for his gap-year trip to the colonies the young, dumb middle-class swilling fields of India and Thailand, for booze, birds and other horizon-expanding pursuits. 'Cliches', declares Max Gogarty, 'exist for a reason.' The comments make excellent reading, and, much to my gurning delight, the poor boy has already made it into the Wikipedia entry on nepotism. Great to see that press hypocrisy is alive and well upon this most auspicious of Wednesday afternoons, even though other Guardian employees have risibly tried to defend the kid by comparing his situation to the Cultural Revolution. I'd feel a little more sorry for darling Maxie if he had anything to say, or enough wit and self-effacing panache to say nothing with style. But this is bland, content-free garbage, and fair play to the CiF commentators who brought this shocking editorial decision to book. Max Gogarty has justifiably become an internet 'virus'.

Daddy has stepped in now, of course, but too late to stop the wave of mostly reasoned vituperation from commentators within the Guardian network and beyond. Rafael Behr bewails, in response to poor Maxie's plight (according to his father, 'he has said that he doesn't like the media world now. He doesn't want to go into it any more.'):

'The web is no community. It is brilliant for some things. It does information, misinformation, entertainment and commerce. It does freedom. But one thing it doesn't do is democracy'

In fact, this is a perfect of example of hyper-democracy in its purest form: the power of the people in an age where the mainstream free press is anything but. Barely twenty-four hours after this 19 year old's self-satisfied Great Sneer diary is launched, hyperspace is ablaze with voices of denunciation, and the piece is pulled.

Forget 'affluenza', this is real modern Viral politics at work: the potential of the internet to spread information and and rouse response to hypocrisy, nepotism and patent class privilege. The press may not be free, but between us we've got the power to bring truth and reason to the offices and boardrooms of the rich and privileged. There's magic in that. Perhaps Saint Hunter would have been proud, after all.

Catastrophe Princesses and other mythical beasts..

Today, Tanya Gold in the Guardian has an interesting take on why so many young women are boozing, shagging around and otherwise checking into rehab wired on cocaine and existential terror: apparently it's celebrity magazines driving us, like so many jimmy-choo'ed lemmings, over the edge of sanity.

In this article, as has been smeared over the covers of every Metro and Reveal for the past twelve months, Britney Spears, Amy 'Wino' Winehouse and other Catastrophe Princesses are wheeled or stretchered out for our scrutiny, evidence of a 'burgeoning trend..of mental illness' amongst young women in the West.

Ms Gold is a high-acheiving woman from a 'nice' family, neither of which preclude her from being shockingly unhappy - I should know, I'm one too. Yes, Gold is in the process of kicking the booze: well done her. So all this sanctimonous twaddle about celebrity culture and size (ugh) zero can't just be an attempt to cash in on a personal sob-story by jumping on the celebrity bandwagon - can it?
Of course not. It's simple, really. The pressure of being a woman in a culture that demands more of you than you can possibly give, the impulse to lash out against the imperfect self, all of this could be solved if we simply switched off the telly and stopped buying Cosmo. After all, girls are so fragile and impressionable that their brittle little brains will break under more than a small amount of pressure to look like Victoria Beckham. Tanya Gold's article plays into the dominant celebrity fantasy of the zeitgeist: that women - especially successful women, and especially beautiful, successful young women - are not strong enough to cope with the pressures of modern living without having their heads confiscated and their children shaved and being stretchered off to Rehab like poor Britney Spears.

In some respects, of course, Gold may have a point. There have been many afternoons, in that black and bile-encrusted teatime of the soul, when I've come to on the carpet, my DMs full of vomit, with an HIV-positive transsexual schoolgirl from southend mopping up the bloodstains on my arms and legs with a copy of The Complete Nietzsche, when I've thought to myself, 'why can't I be more like Cheryl Cole?'

And yes, there have been times, practising Kuburi rope bondage on a rooftop in Haringay with otherwise well-behaved undergraduates from respectable homes, snorting Ketamine off the shrivelled genitals of today's misspent youth and screaming my latest psychotic break to the sky whilst listening to the music of My Chemical Romance, that I've wept for the latest puffball dress or bikini waxing treatment....

There have been nights, getting my nipples pierced by illegal immigrants in Soho, five fags clamped between my teeth, tripping my tits off on a ground-up-and-snorted copy of Heat magazine, that I've wished that I had the figure of Geri Halliwell or the address book of Jade Goody....

And often I've staggered home from binge-drinking in terrible pubs with my pinko commie bisexual friends, mainlining raspberry flirtinis and gang-raping local members of the landed middle-classes with copies of The Socialist Worker, only to bleed my expensively educated brains away in front of Big Brother 18: Stripper Slaughter Nightmare, and on waking to find the words 'what went wrong?' tattoed into my forearms with a blunt stanley knife, I've wondered...what went wrong?

Tell me something I don't know, Tanya, and tell it to me without anodine celebrity name-dropping. Tell me what it's like to be a young (or not so young) woman growing up in a world that wants too much of you.

We are infinitely more fucked up than you realise, and infinitely more in control than the trim-taglined world of 'grown-up' journalism can understand or countenance. We are not catastrophe princesses, fragile and beautiful, living in towers of stacked magazines and slimming guides, waiting to be rescued. You do us a disservice by reducing us to our drinking habits, our eating disorders, and any crushes on Russell Brand we may or may not entertain.

Young women in the West are not as delicate and broken as, perhaps, you would have us be. We may be in the gutter, but we're not just looking at the stars and longing for escape: we're wiping our lips and coming up punching.

You say 'tomato', I say 'fuck off, fascist scum, before I stomp all over your entitlement-swollen yankee gonads'.

Right chaps, my attack-womb is primed and ready for launch. This makes sick. I wish it were satire, I really do, but I fear it's unlikely. The article damns itself more convincingly than any summary could; essentially, it's an expat American telling the British why our women aren't up to standard - apparently, this is because we don't starve ourselves quite so consistently, our 'grooming' isn't rigorous enough and we are, hence, not 'good enough' for him. This is borne out with dire enthusiasm by a sickening little trot out of misogynist anecdotes, including one date where the writer could hardly contain his disgust at his partner eating shepherd's pie. 'This is why no self-respecting American woman consumes carbohydrates after 2pm.'

I'm sorry. What.

What?

It's not the semi tongue-in-cheek reduction of women's comparative worth across continents entirely on their physical appearance and nothing else that bugs me most. It's not even the casual, flippant reduction of even this to a measurement of body weight and food consumption - at one point he actually talks about measuring the difference between British and American women with 'calipers'. He doesn't need to come out and say 'women are pieces of meat'; it's written in every hate-filled line of this piece of slanderous filth. That just pisses me off. No, what really, really makes me goddamn furious is the casual assumption that women are, at baseline, an inferior species: a breed of humanity who are defective unless thousands are regularly spent on their 'upkeep' and 'grooming', who do not deserve the things like freedom, relaxation or a healthy, normal 2000-calorie-a-day diet that proper people deserve - and that if they indulge their wicked habits, they are not good enough for him, Tad Safran, the writer of this article, who self-describes as 'not the greatest prize out there.'

In case you were wondering, Safran is single.

Moreover, the kind of 'superiority' he's talking about is one which affects only the wealthiest and most socially 'grabby' of Americans - the women of New York or LA, whence all of his examples are drawn. For example: although the average US citizen is heavier than the average Brit (gender notwithstanding), there exists within American culture a paradigm by which wealth is displayed via the physical thinness of women , where cultivated thinness demonstrates exactly what Safran calls 'necessary upkeep' : vast amounts of money, effort, self-punishment and available leisure time are spent on dieting, personal training, 'bikini boot camps', as they are on waxing, tanning, dental work and cosmetic surgery, a lifestyle available only to the wealthy few, mostly white upper middle classes in either nation. I'm preared to bet that $800 on beauty treatments per month isn't the outlay of the average American family.

Although this culture of thinness and beauty is gradually spreading across the pond to Europe, no, you're right, Tad - we don't care quite so much. Yet. It's changing: my kid sisters own far more make-up than I do and spend time straightening their hair and saving their pocket money for eyebrow waxes that I would never even have heard of at fourteen. But our standards haven't quite been warped so far that the average UK citizen really believes that thinness is equivalent to beauty: over here, the photo comparison between plump, pretty Charlotte Church and twiglike, tangerine-toned Paris Hilton seems to show Church as the much more effortless beauty. Hilton looks pretty damn scary as far as I'm concerned; what frightens me is that my sisters might not be able to see the difference.


Unethical journalism.

Yes, this article is deliberately provocative in places, and through the glowing red mist I can, of course, concede some of Safran's phraseology to satire. But why was such an ugly, misogynist piece ever published? Of course, the beauty editors at the Times knew that Safran's article would draw attention -as indeed it has, given the number of online comments, many of which make excellent reading. But that's nto a good enough reason for publishing something which, part-satirical or not, is so amazingly hate-filled towards women.
This is a hackneyed comparison, but consider what the response would be if Safran had published a (half-satirical) article attacking the relative deportment of ethnic minorities rather than gender differences. With equivalent sentiments, it would run something like: 'golly, you British, you just don't know how to train your blacks, do you? Over here they'd never leave the house without all that nasty kinky hair properly straightened out, and they all spend thousands per month on dangerous skin-lightening treatments - it's just upkeep, you know, I mean, we wouldn't want them going au naturel! Of course, ours tend toget a little pushy - your blacks are much more polite and obedient, will think twice before just jumping into bed with a white person. Well, I suppose that's what you get if you let them get ideas. Land of the free!'

I'm sorry. That was a comparison that needed to be made, but writing it has made me feel soiled and disgusted, so I'm going to have a cup of tea, check my emails and come back in 5 minutes .....

[later] It actually makes me feel uncomfortable to even think statements like that through grammatically. Certainly no editor would ever publish racist hate-speech along these lines, but this is exactly the argument of Tad Safran's article. It's incredibly distressing, and the decision to publish sexist propaganda like this - tounge -in-cheek or no - is frighteningly disrespectful to women and, indeed, to all of us who see both men and women as complete human beings.

What makes me spit is that I know that this article was partly published in order to make me, and people like me, angry, and that makes me even angrier. So it's okay to publish wildly disrespectful hate-speech as long as we can wind the feminists up and watch them go, is it? Bollocks to that. There has to be a sense of media responsibility - in Britain, of all places, we have a national press that the world relies on for objective journalism relatively unmarred by sensationalism.

Yes, I'm rising by even blogging about this article. Yes, I probably shouldn't even give it my attention: it's bilge, and whichever (probably female, British) beauty editor at the Times allowed it through subbing probably recognised it for bilge. But ignoring them isn't going to make misogynist filth like this roll over and go back to chewing on the bones of nubile anorexics. There has to be outcry, and it has to be loud. This sort of derision, dissection and mockery of women is unjust and deeply unethical. We will not stand for this. We will not stand for this.