Public service announcement: another rare personal post.

ETA Saturday morning: I've edited out some of the melodrama but decided to keep this on the net, because it doesn't do to be ashamed of one's mental health. This is not cross-posted at New Statesman, for the obvious reason that it's much more personal than anything I normally put out here. I hope you'll take it in the spirit in which it is meant.

***

Six weeks ago, three things happened in short succession: I broke up with my beloved partner of three years, my entire friendship group left London at once, and, relatedly, I became homeless. Slap in the middle of that upheaval, I have somehow acquired a blog at New Statesman; I've been living out of a suitcase whilst commuting to my other job at Morning Star, and I've been trying to finish my small book, the deadlines for which and several other projects are oh, just whooshing into view. Unfortunately, all I really want to do at this precise moment in time is find secure accommodation, curl up in a bed of my own and eat ice cream in the dark until I feel better. It's hardly bloody Basra. In the grand scheme of things, I'm still rather a lucky person, really. But it's getting harder to stay in touch with why I write and campaign in the first place. It's getting harder to stay angry. And that frightens me.

Writing, which at the moment I have to do at the rate of about 3,000 words per day, currently feels like dragging a large, wet rope out of my forehead, inch by torturous inch. My mental health has taken a turn for the worse. I'm struggling to care. I'm struggling to stay angry. That terrifies me more than anything.

There aren't many things that scare me. The centre-right have taken back my country and imposed dazzlingly punitive cuts to welfare and public services. Across the pond, the American right are winning the fight for ideological control of the world's only superpower. The planet is boiling; the rivers are drying up; the human race may very well be about to tear itself apart. None of that scares me one bit. Give me energy, a cause and a place to stand and I'll shout out against oppression until I'm old and broken and they cart me away. Put me in a room with my own depression and suddenly I'm small and scared enough that I'd rather accept despair than fight bigoty and injustice. That is scary. Compared to depression, Torygeddon and impending global climapocalypse are not at all frightening.

That's what clinical depression does, you see. It takes away your anger, piece by piece, along with every other drive and interest and emotion that ever mattered to you. It wraps you in a dry, stifling blanket of heavy despair and leaves you to shuffle about your daily business, swaddled against the joys of life, the frustrations, the pain. When terrible things happen - like a coalition government closing down your country piece by piece, slamming the door on the young, the poor, the sick, immigrants, women - you cease to really believe that anything can be done. You clam up, clamp down, try to conserve your energy for the monumental task of peeling yourself out of bed, washing your face, rolling a fag, things that were effortless yesterday but now feel like a bucket of iced panic is draining into your stomach when you contemplate them.

Fortunately, I've beaten this before, when the stakes were much higher, when I was younger and madder and battling an eating disorder too. I'm older and meaner now, and I know what to do. I might not be okay for a little while yet, but I'll be okay eventually. For now, I have to keep on battling these currents with all my tiny might.

So here's what you can do to help me. If you have time and energy in your own life, because clearly getting through the day is hard enough without some whiny feminist brat on the internet asking for your input, here's what you can do: send me your ideas. Send me your anger and truth, for the little space in time when I can't access my own.

Send me your rage, your issues, things that make you mad, things that make you want to run into the street and start a revolution. Send me tips, statistics, moments of hope and inspiration. Send me feminist news, socialist ideas, problematic pop culture, stories of suffering and resistance. If you're holding an event or a protest, tell me about it. Email me even just a few lines, to the usual address - laurie.penny@gmail.com. It doesn't matter what's making you angry or whether you think I'll agree or be interested - I want to hear it. I will read anything and everything I receive (I always do!) and respond when I have the spoons. Send me your anger and understand that if the internet is made for anything, it's made for times like this. Because god knows, we're not alone in this big bad hyperspace world, however much it feels like it sometimes

Shiny happy rape culture

So the new government has somehow found time in its recession-busting schedule to propose a law that will grant anonymity to men accused of rape, who are of course the most pitiable and urgently unnoticed victims of woman-promoting-marriage-destroying-single-mum-supporting-violence-preventing Broken Britain. It's not as if the tabloids already paint women who allege rape as lying, heartless bitches out to destroy men and their god-given right to put their penis inside anything that gives the slightest hint of consent - by getting into their taxi, for example. Popular wisdom has it that vast numbers of rape allegations are false, when in fact false accusation is believed to account for only a tiny percentage of reported rapes - no higher than false reports for other crimes.

The Daily Fail have somehow produced both the most table-bitingly offensive assessment of the situation so far - from treacherous misogynist Melanie Phillips, who claims that "after Labour's reign of extreme man-hating feminism, common sense is reasserting itself" - and the most reasonable discussion of the issues for women, from Susanne Moore. "Do we have a Government intent on setting back women’s rights?" asks Moore. Sorry to disappoint you, Susanne, but we seem to.

Moore points out that adults who are falsely accused of child abuse run just as much, if not more risk of having their lives and reputations ruined as do men who are accused of rape - but the question of anonymity for them is not on the table. This is not a policy proposal with any real, consistent concern for the human rights of those accused of crimes. It is a rapists' charter, pure and simple, designed to protect men from lying women who, by not being properly shamed for speaking to the police when men rape, beat, assault and invade their bodies, have clearly had it all their own way for far too long.

Misogynists talk as though speaking about rape and consent is something that's easy to do, something that doesn't come with a social penalty for women, within or outside the legal system. This is not the case - particularly as most rapists prey on women who are personally known to them. When I eventually decided to speak about my experience of non-consensual sex on this blog, I was hounded by accusations of having made it all up. It was a big decision for me to come forward. At first I regretted it profoundly. Not because I was lying, but because as well as having experienced non consensual sex, during which I picked up a painful infection, I am now understood to be a manipulative lying bitch by people whose respect used to matter to me. I stayed in the house for days, not talking to anyone. And then I started getting the emails.

In the weeks after making that post I recieved no less than five emails from women who had recently experienced rape, saying that they felt happier talking to an anonymous person on the internet than going to their friends or the police. Saying that they were worried about telling people because they quite liked the guy, or their friends quite liked him, or because they thought they wouldn't be believed, or because they'd heard awful stories about how women who bring rape cases to court were publically accused of being sluts. Saying that they felt dirty and ashamed and scared and hurt and they didn't know who to contact about their internal bleeding. One of the women who emailed me was just fourteen years old.

Nobody is seriously suggesting that the number of women who remain silent about experiences of rape does not far exceed the small number of men who are falsely accused of rape - but it's clear where the government's priorities lie. It has been proven that naming rapists encourages women to come forward to report rape, just as it has been proven that a culture where women do not speak about rape and non-consensual sex allows rape to continue as an accepted part of our sexual dialectic - which is why anonymity for those accused of rape was waived in the first place. Just last year, when serial rapist John Worboys was eventually put on trial for nineteen counts of rape, no less than eighty-five women came forward claiming to have been sexually assaulted by him. Eighty five. Eighty five women who didn't know that they were part of a far broader picture. Eighty five women who didn't come forward until seeing their rapist's face in the paper convinced them that maybe it wasn't all their fault. Are eighty-five men falsely imprisoned for rape every year? Somehow I doubt it.

In this society, to accuse someone of rape is seen as a crime equal to raping someone. Men accused of rape are always given the benefit of the doubt. Women who get up the courage to speak about rape are invariably accused of lying. And now even our government is calling us liars. Rape ruins lives too - but the new regime seems to be interested only in silencing victims.

Change we've got to believe in?

I've spent the past twenty-four hours, because I am a glamorous and DANGEROUS young activist sort, drinking tea very quietly and having anxiety jags and talking to the television in the manner in which, in my babysitting days, I used to address the terrifying children of strangers. No, don't do that. No, please, don't. Nick, pick that up right now.

Before Wednesday, I was genuinely enthused by politics in this country for the first time in several years. The Sun/Times hegemony was being challenged; the two-party system was being undermined; there was hope. Now, thanks to some planted Murdochian journalists, a shiny-faced man in a tight blue necktie learning how to talk to a camera and a bigot in a cardigan, it's suddenly okay to blame all the country's problems on immigrants, and the ugly shadow of a Tory majority is ghosting across any liberal vision for the next five years.

And I've listened to smiling, scared-looking people repeat the word 'change' to the point at which the word has lost practically all meaning.

The problem with promising 'change' is that it's the one thing that absolutely every politician can absolutely, 100% guarantee. The only thing that you and I know about the next five years, or indeed the next five minutes, is that some sort of change will occur. The economy will improve, or not. Social unrest will escalate, or not. You might decide you don't like safeway instant shepherd's pie after all. Something will change.

Promising change is easy, especially when you're talking to a country that's so unholy pissed off that any sort of change to the status quo will do, at least temporarily. And when you promise change you don't have to talk in specific terms about economic fairness or social justice. When you say the word 'change', everybody imagines the kind of change they'd most like to see, whether it's mass socialist uprising or the neighboorhood being as safe as it used to be before non-white people were invented, when all the locks were made of paper and God saved the queen.

Everyone can get behind a change! As long as it's not bad change, the kind of change we don't approve of. Change like people with unfamiliar faces and accents moving into our streets, change like women divorcing their husbands and demanding jobs and support, change like it not being fucking okay to be discriminate against gay people, non-white people, people with disabilities, change like it not being fucking noble and brave to ask a prime minister on national television what he's going to do about people from Eastern Europe taking all the jobs. Promising change (it's even better if you say REALCHANGE) is easy. Making a better country is bloody hard in the middle of a recession.

I'm not interested in change. I'm interested in specific transformation: transformation of the parliamentary system through direct challenge to the two-party orthodoxy in this election, transformation of our creaking, illiberal democracy; transformation of the state's attitude to women's issues; nuclear disarmament.

It is for these reason that I am going to be voting, in my constituency of Leyton and Wanstead, for the Liberal Democrat Party. Not because of Nick Clegg's golden tie, and not even because The Guardian says so. Because I want a new, more representative parliamentary system in which citizens can feel like their voices actually matter. I like the Lib Dems; I don't think they were sent to save us. I'd prefer to vote for a third party that had stronger links with workers' organisations. But the Lib Dems represent the best chance this country has for transformation on a structural level. And, of course, I'm sick of the sight of Cameron's soft, evil face.

I'm with the Guardian and with Sunny: if we want anything other than five years of Torygeddon, burning jobcentres and bankers' red-cheeked sons deciding policy in private lunches with their friends from university and the nice men from Fox, then we have to vote first for the party most likely to beat the Conservatives in our particular areas. After that, or if there's no clear and present danger of blue peril, grab a shiny off-yellow biro and vote Lib Dem.

And now for something completely different.

Where the hell are we gonna live...
where the hell are we supposed to live?
The Levellers

The battle buses are rolling, the Tory jets are fuelling up and the march of the nice shirts and sinister wives has begun. I'm technically on holiday, which technically means that I'm technically supposed to sit around reading nice books and writing a dreadful one and not technically blog about the election. So, for those of you who, like me, are already sick of seeing their terrible faces, here is a blog that is not, technically, about the election.

The government has just rushed through a bill called the Town and Country Planning (Use Classes) Order 2010. No, it hasn't made the headlines, and probably wouldn't have done so even if it weren't Election Announcement Week, because it's a very, very boring bill. I know, because I've just read it. In between interminable sub-clauses concerning what types of building may or may not be used to store maggot-infested meat* is a slippery little snippet of legislation creating a new dwelling category, 'Houses with Multiple Occupants' - meaning that any three or more unrelated adults living together now constitute a legally separate form of household, requiring separate planning permission and separate housing administration. Sounds like an everyday piece of wearisome local-government wrangling, but let's be paranoid for a second and ask ourselves: who is this set to target?

The practical effect of the legislation will be this: if you're a student, on a low income, a lodger in a landlord's home, a migrant worker, or if you simply want to share a flat with more than one friend who you don't happen to be fucking, any landlord offering to rent you a property will have to go to the expensive beauraucratic nightmare of obtaining planning permission. Even if you can find a landlord willing to take on the hassle, the local council will be able to decide whether allowing house shares will fit in with their "development plan" for your local area - a scheme that has already been test-driven in Loughborough. The number of properties available for people wishing to flatshare will inevitably decrease, rents will rise, overcrowding will worsen, and many of us will simply be unable to afford to live in large towns and cities.

Is this a targeted attack on young people? Let's have a little look at the Manchester City Council briefing on the new legislation:

"Problems caused by high concentrations of Houses in Multiple Occupantion (HMOs) have become an issue in a number of towns and cities across the country. High concentrations can have a detrimental effect on the local environment as well as impacts on social cohesion and services within an area. Manchester, along with other local authorities, has lobbied the government for greater planning powers to be able to tackle these problems."

Manchester and other councils evidently consider people living in houseshares - students, migrants and young adults - to 'have a detrimental effect on the local environment'. They don't like our sort, you see. Not only are we feckless enough to want somewhere to live, we have the temerity to use actual services. The bloody cheek of it.

Let's not forget, either, that those of use who are under-25 and are sick, on low incomes or receiving jobseekers' allowance will still only be allowed to claim housing benefit based on the average "shared occupancy" rent in the local area. Young people are expected to live in houseshares, and local governments will only pay for us to live in houseshares - but they'd rather those houseshares were kept to an absolute minimum. Where in gods'name young adults, students and migrant workers are actually supposed to live is, apparently, not their problem. Starve, move in with mum or leave the cities, they don't care, just don't have the audacity to be young, poor and energetic on our doorstep, thanks.

Where do Generation Y live? Together, mostly. Sometimes because we want to, and usually because we have to. Soaring house prices driven by the neoliberal property fetish and a failure, across the country, to build anything like enough new homes for the past, oh, twenty years now mean that for nearly everyone under thirty, the idea of being able to afford even to rent one's own place is an impossible dream - never mind having a mortgage. No, it's not ideal. I've lived in communal housing for three years, and yes, it's very different from Friends. But there's no alternative; and the makeshift communes of the 21st-century have produced, rather charmingly, some of the most radical ideas and creative projects that Europe and America have seen in decades. I suspected that I was a socialist before I started living communally with other young, poor somethings trying to build lives. Now, I know for sure. My housing arrangements are a significant part of my wanky online bio for the simple reason that they have a sincere effect on my politics.

Right now, I pay half my meagre salary to live in a room the size of a normal person's toilet (we suspect it used to be a toilet before a dodgy landlord modded the place) in an overcrowded houseshare in inner London, the fourth such houseshare I've lived in since moving here in 2007. Nobody does enough washing up, everyone gets on each other's nerves, and we all have to pretend not to hear each other's shagging sounds through the paper-thin walls. We are also family. We play music together, cook together, discuss politics, write together, share smokes and paperbacks and ideas. We may not be related, but we're enough of a family to have agreed to put up a sign in the window endorsing the Liberal Democrats, and we are voters too.

There are millions of us, young, frustrated, eking out a living in warren-like flatshares in every city in the land, and we all have votes, and it's policies like these, put in place by local authorities and blithely given the nod by central government, which engender a strong suspicion that politics has nothing to offer us, that they're all the same, and that the man might, in fact, be out to get us. And sometimes, that's the correct assessment. It doesn't mean one shouldn't get one's wriggly young arse down to the polling station like a responsible person, but sometimes the assessment is correct.

As far as me and my housemates are concerned, we're sitting here waiting for an election, when what we need is a revolution. Not the revolution, the rapture for socialists and dreamers, the big change that's always coming over the hill, the revolution, the kind there's only ever one of. I'm talking about the sort of quiet, radical upheaval that follows in the wake of social agitation and gets things done. The sort of unravelling that prevents the authorities from lashing out at the poor, the young and the disposessed. I'm talking about everyday revolution, revolution I can grab with my hands and show to my friends. I want it so much I can almost taste it.

Looking at these three grinning hairdos, it's painfully obvious that none of them will bring that revolution, even though all three are so frantic to repeat the word 'change' that I keep expecting one of them to voice his desire for the Queen to appoint him Britain's first African-American Prime Minister. Two days into the big push, and I can't persuade myself to feel anything but irritated over this election. Can we have some revolution now, please?

[Muchos Gracias to JH-M for the tip-off]

*Unfortunately for our prospective overseers, the Houses of Parliament are excluded.

ETA: Oh, and the Digital Economy Bill passed. Ugh. Not in my name.

It's not Torygeddon yet.

Hanging around outside the Houses of Parliament last week, angry in the way that only a British smoker can be when it's the middle of winter and they've caught the runny nose that's going around, I met two American tourists who were genuinely convinced that David Cameron was the prime minister of Britain. It was almost impossible persuade these people that Cameron hadn't been in power for at least a year, swooping in to fill the power vacuum left by the universally beloved Tony Blair.

All of this would have been pleasantly diverting if the entirety of the British left didn't seem to be labouring under the same delusion. On the eve of what's supposed to be a huge symposium of liberal thought and policy, can we please - just for one weekend - stop behaving as if the Conservatives were already the party in power?

Because the Conservatives aren't in power yet. If Torygeddon does occur, if it occurs, it won't be till after the election in May. After the election, not before. And yet both Labour and the liberal press are behaving like the ballots are already in. This week on Labour List alone, we've had Alastair Campbell's analysis of Cameron's 'grab a gay' policy [ouch] and Ed Miliband's mortifyingly concessionary open letter to Cameron on the environment.

The Guardian is the worst offender in the mainstream press, with Alan Rusbridger positively salivating over David Cameron's tantalisingly unreportable remarks at the Davos conference today. But the blogosphere is by no means exempt. How much energy have we spent over the past six months offering responses to draft Tory policy plans? How much time have we wasted taking the debate to staid conservative social re-engineering projects like the Centre for Social Justice, rather than laying out our own plans for truth, justice and the revival of the job market?

The Conservative party's ideas - sorry, their slogans - are nonsensical, but at least they have some. Broken Britain! Tax breaks for married couples! Character-building! We can't go on like this! It's service-station paperback political narrative, but it hangs together, and it's reasonably compelling. Labour, on the other hand, after six months of lukewarm, weak-willed, quasi-theoretical equivocation, have just about decided that it's okay to use the word "class". The government has come up with precisely zero policy platforms or post-election goals, almost as if it were hoping that twelve years of overseas conflict, widening inequality and educational meltdown would speak for themselves. It's a very special blend of arrogant defeatism, and it's not pleasant to watch.

It's not as if the people of this country are out of progressive political ideas. The work being done by Power2010 and 38 degrees clearly shows that there's a hunger not just for reform, but for liberal reform. Voting is open for the ideas canvassed at the public Power 2010 conference, which include an elected second house, votes at sixteen and capping political donations. In the absence of any liberal narrative at all within the party system, young people of the left have had to invent a whole new kind of politics in an attempt to force attention towards the real nature of the public's thirst for change. Meanwhile, the only strident politics coming from nominally liberal Whitehall parties over the past six months have been direct responses to Cameron's trashy, pulpy politics. As if Labour and the Lib Dems were already in opposition. As if the left had nothing more to say.

It's not pretty to observe the Sun and other such skin-flakes of the lumbering Murdoch empire drooling temporarily over the Cameroons, but it is expected. By contrast, it's bloody embarrassing to watch the left obsessively picking over what ideas Cameron might or might not have about gay rights, the economy, the environment, the poor, the welfare state, whilst at the same time brazenly declaring that Cameron has no ideas. We're discussing his PR machine, his policy platform and his hairstyle with precisely the same sullen illicit exactness with which you might spend a lonely evening examining the vital statistics and profile pictures of your recent ex's new squeeze on facebook, downing shots of cornershop vodka and wondering what she's got that you don't.

That sort of thing is perfectly acceptable behaviour for a week or two, but really, guys, it's been months. It's time for whatever part of the British liberal conference represents the Sensible Friend to turn up, take the booze and recriminations away, and force us into a long hot shower of self-analysis so we can move on and start laying out some coherent, practical ideas of our own.

ESA proves that Labour has betrayed its core values.

I spent this evening watching a black labrador slurpily lapping the shoes of a major think-tank director whilst its owner thought up ways to lie to me about his party's attitude to the poor and needy. In a speech given in conjunction with Progress, David Blunkett MP set out to demonstrate just why the Tories are so very, very different from New Labour. The former Home Secretary quoted Aneurin Bevan, who described the Conservative party's habit of using government policy to shore up the assets of the privileged as "sucking at the teats of the state".

"That sums it up pretty well", said Blunkett, who went on to describe how the evil, ghoulish Tories, are planning to reduce the size of the state by selling off central and local government functions to private companies in an effort to save money, because they, unlike Labour, care about money more than about people.

Mr Blunkett omitted to mention the small matter of the Welfare Reform Bill 2008, with its stated aim of saving cash by getting a million people off sickness benefits and back into work whether they are up to it or not.

Angry feminist Tuesday

I get angry when debates are skewed by lies and weasel words on both sides, as is happening right now with the debate around prostitution, trafficking and the Policing and Crime Bill currently going through the House of Lords. I get angry when the people whose side I'm nominally on, the people out to protect women first and foremost, the good guys goddamnit, make up, distort and exaggerate statistics. And I get angry when media outlets use that exaggeration to dismiss the whole debate - in this case, to claim that there are almost no trafficked sex-slaves working in Britain today , a claim which has led other commentators to alledge that trafficked women are not worth public funds and anyone suggesting otherwise is -and I quote - 'hysterical'.

I get angry when punters, bystanders and sex worker organisations claim that it's not okay to criminalise men who rape sex slaves, because that might make it a little harder for non-coerced prostitutes to earn their money, or even - shock, horror! - make it harder for yr average punter to get his no-strings fuck.

I get angry when groups that pretend to be supporting women try to push through illiberal clutches of contradictory laws based on bad statistics. And I get angry when I see clusters of people tearing each other apart over laws that, even if they are put into place, will leave us with exactly the same situation: namely that prostitution, an industry in which the overwhelming majority of sellers are women and nearly all buyers are men, will not actually be legal or illegal - it'll be just about illegal enough and just about stigmatised enough that those who sell sex get almost no protection or support from the law or their local communities, whilst still just about legal enough that 10-15% of men are free to pay for sex without having to consider the humanity of their partner whenever they so choose.

I get angry, too, when I make the mistake of reading my words twisted by idiots online, my feminism rubbished, my ideals mocked. I get angry when I hear, time and time again as my profile as a feminist writer grows, that I'm a prude, a frigid bitch, that I hate sex, that I believe in a sterile female supremacist state, that my sisters and I believe all heterosexual sex is rape. I get angry when I am lied about. No other kind of political writer gets their very selfhood, the deepest most intimate parts of themselves, trampled in the most malicious of ways by total strangers - only the few bloggers, journalists and authors who are brave enough to tackle feminist issues in the public sphere.

I get angry when I'm told that I am not allowed to take offence when women are objectified and served up as pieces of meat by the media, when I'm called a prude for hating the prevalence of lap-dancing clubs and wanting those clubs to be properly designated and licensed, when I'm called a crazy, bitter bitch for hating the fact that I can't leave my fucking house or even open a goddamn webpage without seeing pictures of unreal female bodies served up as the ultimate ideal that I should aspire to, when I hate being told to buy more things so that I can look perpetually young, odourless, hairless, shaved, de-sexed and dehumanised. I get angry when I'm ridiculed for wanting to own my sexuality, and wanting others to be allowed to own theirs.

I am a feminist. I am pro sex-worker, morally indifferent to the notion of a sex trade, fantastically opposed to the sex trade as it operates in Britain today - full of rape, abuse, sexual slavery, grooming, coercion and objectification. The voices of prostituted women who aren't having a good time are the only ones we don't hear - plenty of rape apologists, plenty of feminists getting it wrong, and plenty of people responding by telling us that those feminists are hysterical bitches who hate all men and all sex. A few brave people are trying to redress this balance: Rebecca is one of them. Go and read her blog before you read anything else.

All this anger makes me horny.

And when I'm horny and angry I need to get off if I'm to be any use to myself or anyone, not that masturbation is ever that much of a chore. So I go hunting online for a quick pornographic fix. But yknow what? All the porn I can find online involves raping, hurting, punishing and shaming women, endless thumping shots of cocks going into holes that just leave me cold and upset. I click on one that looks like it might be alright, only to watch thirty seconds of a young woman actually crying and screaming 'ow, ow, ow' whilst a disembodied cock fucks her in the anus. I hate it. It makes me want to throw up. Does that mean I'm a frigid bitch who hates sex? Apparently, yes.

The truth is that we have not even begun to tackle the sexual objectification of women in our culture. Slapping a ban on lapdancing clubs or fiddling around with the laws on prostitution will achieve sweet nothing unless it's backed up by cultural change - although it's always our right, as feminists and advocates of free speech, to object to the treatment of women in the sex industry or anywhere else, if we so choose. We are trying to hold back the sea, when instead we need to be building armoured submarines and diving into the water all guns blazing.

I am personally, right here and now, sick of being objectified by this culture, sick of denying my selfhood and performing for others and apologising for my wants and needs and desires. I'm only 23, and already I have starved my body into nothingness, I've nearly died from hunger and come out the other side, I've stripped on stage and felt no joy, I've experienced date rape and had sexual partners tell me I'm dirty and women tell me I'm a slut to my face, and every day I am forced to see thousands of pictures of how my body should look - plucked, shaved, starved, limp, white, pre-pubescent, drained, dead - and encouraged to beat myself into that mold - and yet people tell me that my experience is invalid, that my feminism is anathema, that I am 'bitter'. As a woman in my 20s I am told that I should constantly aspire to look sexy - but I shouldn't sleep with too many people, I shouldn't sleep with anyone on the first date, I shouldn't appear too keen, I shouldn't be 'slutty'. I am an object; I should aspire to be the best possible object I can be.

THAT is what objectification means. It's a denial of selfhood and sexuality and identity so absolute and all-encompassing that most of us don't even notice anymore that we've been duped.

Well, I'm sick of being an object. I'm sick of apologising for my 'frigidity', for my feminism, for my rage at not being allowed to express myself sexually and yet being expected to perform and bullied if I object to men, strangers or otherwise, treating me like chattel. There's something thundering inside me about to be unleashed, hemmed in by anger and the bawling of stupid, ignorant misogynists. I feel like my anger could howl away inside me and consume me if I don't let it out. I want to scream. I want to hit things. I want to climb on some high roof and yell that I'm a person, that all women are real people who deserve to be treated like human beings, until they come and drag me off for being 'hysterical'.

But don't mind me, I'm just your crazy neighborhood feminazi. Take me away before I upset somebody.

Me, the Patriarchy and my Big Red Pen.

I'm back from the Feminism in London conference, where there were tears, standing ovations, rants, arguments (one between me and a nutty racist apologist in front of about a hundred bloody people) and where, in Bea Campbell's words, 'a good old think' was had by all. My brain is buzzing far too much to give the event the full write-up it deserves, so that'll have to wait. Meanwhile, here's what I did on the way home.

Defacing sexist tube adverts is something that's been pioneered by the Feminist groups I'm involved with in London over the past couple of years, but somehow I never seem to have had a pen, or a sticker, or the nerve, at the right time. At the conference they were giving out free permanent markers, so I shoved a couple in my pockets. The last session on prostitution, rape and objectification made me chokingly angry, and as I walked back to the station the anger was still there. Anger on behalf of the women I spoke to who have been raped, abused and silenced, anger that my sisters and I still have to live in a world where rape goes unpunished and child abuse goes unspoken and women starve themselves to death in their thousands in order to take up less space, where girls are brought up to hate their bodies and service men and be quiet and say sorry and fuck when we're asked to and shut up when we're told to unless we want to be thought of as crazy fucking bitches stupid cunts whores slags, certainly not fit enough for Rod Liddle to shag after a few drinks ha fucking ha ha.

And on this journey home, with all this rage and frustration boiling in my head, it just so happened that I saw one too many adverts trying to sell me painful, expensive surgery to increase my 'confidence'. 'All it needs is a little nip-tuck', the advert promised, next to a photograph of a woman with unreal breasts bulging out of a skimpy top and her head thrown back in a gormless grin like someone had shot her with a tranquilizer dart.

And I thought, hey, screw you. I've got a big red pen.

So I took my big red pen, apologising to the people I stepped past like the ridiculously English person I am, crossed out the slogan, and wrote 'This is not normal - fight sexism!' in big red capitals across the advert.

God, it felt good. It felt good, and it felt naughty - naughtier than shoplifting did as a kid, and the rush was bigger and better and braver. It felt so transgressive. Everyone was staring at me. I was invading sacred advertising space! I was breaking two of our biggest taboos - one, you NEVER mention that there might be something more important to a woman than looking whatever is currently considered 'sexy'; two, you NEVER talk back to the adverts. Never. Not allowed.

Thrilled, I got off the tube carriage and climbed onto the next one along, where I did exactly the same thing on two more adverts. I continued in this manner, with commuters muttering and tutting and one elderly lady giving me a big thumbs-up, until a bloke in his thirties sitting opposite me beckoned me over - crooked his finger and beckoned - and said - 'Come on, what's the problem, isn't it the woman's free choice? Can't she do what she wants with her money?'

I said: 'Of course she can. Just as I can do what I want with my big red pen. She's free to pay people to mutilate her and I'm free to attack people for trying to persuade me that I should do the same, or that my baby sisters should, or my friends. That is MY free choice, and MY free speech. And by the way, the woman in the picture doesn't really look like that, see that little halo around her boobs? Photoshop.'

We screeched into the station, and I jumped off and onto the next carriage with a rush of blood and bile to my head, feeling suddenly powerful.

Because today I know something for sure about the free choice of the theoretical woman the apologists talk about, that theoretical woman who's glad she spent her money on cosmetic surgery rather than education or her financial future, that theoretical woman who just looooves to look good more than anything, that theoretical happy hooker without a care in the world, I know something about the theoretical choices of those theoretical women conveniently put forward by every patriarchal apologist I meet - I know that my choices are just as important as theirs. I know that the choices of the former prostitutes with PTSD who I met today and the choices of the thousands of feminists I know and the choices of the millions of women who would really like to feel safer and stronger in their bodies and lives, that those choices are just as important as any choice we might make to cut ourselves up to look sexy. And you know, I can live with challenging that choice.

By putting up adverts telling me that to feel confident I must look a certain way, for the purposes of which I must have surgery, the owners of these adverts are taking away MY choice to feel good about my body. But with my red pen and a little courage, today I took that choice back. And I feel more powerful, and more confident, than I have in a long time.

Little Lolitas?

[This entry comes with a trigger warning for mention of rape and abuse involving young girls. It's also possibly the angriest post I've ever written.]

Thanks to a new book, 'The Lolita Effect', and a kiddy-sized pole-dancing kit marketed to six year olds that got attention on both sides of the pond and, of course, Miley Cyrus, the 'sexualisation of young girls' is in the press again. Cue a great deal of handwringing and think-of-the-children-isms in the same international press that, this same week, gave a good deal of coverage to child-rape apologists.

All of these stories are just begging, just laying back like the wanton little semiotic nymphets they are and begging to be illustrated with faux-naive photos of young girls in suggestive states of undress - or, more frequently and legally, parts of young girls. Merely, of course, to demonstrate how awful it all is.

Western society has a curious doublethink going on over young girls and sex. Whilst young boys are acknowledged as having and acting upon sexual desire from a young age, the notion of young girls being sexual is still shocking - but it's also exciting. From the pages of playboy to music videos to porn, girlhood is sexualised and undeveloped female bodies fetishised as the ultimate in naughty fantasy. This trend has been going on for decades, and yet when real little girls do what they're told to do and play sexy, the hollow hypocrisy of the commentariat is deafening.

M.G Durham, author of 'The Lolita Effect', has a novel solution: why not actually tell little girls that it's okay to enjoy sex? In Carol Midgley's review of 'The Lolita Effect', she notes that 'some believe that shielding girls from sex for as long as possible — preaching the abstinence message and the pregnancy/STD/victimhood perils of sex — is the only way [to counteract The Lolita Effect]. Durham disagrees. Girls do not need “rescuing” from sex, she says. Merely the media’s one-dimensional, profit-driven version of it, which is based purely on male fantasies without a nod to female needs or desires.

'Rather, girls should be encouraged that it is their right to enjoy it, thus reclaiming their sexuality from a culture that increasingly positions them as passive, objectified sex kittens who are not encouraged to actually want sex or get any pleasure from it yet are mandated to be desirable to males — to look up for it but not, of course, act on it, for that would be sluttish.'

This fantastically sensible suggestion has not stopped the book being promoted in the press with straplines such as Lost Youth!. Nobody, moreover, has yet thought of asking young women and girls themselves what they want. What a silly idea: everyone knows that young girls are merely ciphers for the steamy fantasies of artists, advertisers and pop psions: they have no personalities of their own, and no agency to speak of. They are told what to want, and they'll damn well like it; they are the embodiment of patriarchal desire, and as such their own desires are irrelevant.

Curiously, I don't remember myself and my schoolmates morphing into vain, vacant sex-dollies between the ages of twelve and seventeen. As far as I recall, we were all people then, no matter how many parts of our growing selves were stamped down, stretched out, primped, polished, squeezed into shape or mercilessly stifled, and with any luck we're all still people now*. I do, however, remember being judged relentlessly on the way I looked, and being miserable because of it. I remember how my body and desires and the bodies and desires of every young woman I knew were ruthlessly policed, and how that process informed my feminism.

Now, this is the point where you might want to go and get yourself a strong drink or roll a fag**, because I'm about to talk about my childhood.

Like many people, I was emphatically not a Little Lolita. I was a pug ugly kid. No, really. I had braces, a scowl, an awful haircut and enough acne that I wouldn't have been surprised to be approached to be the new face of Pizza Hut. I often went out in unwashed clothes and forgot to brush my hair, which grew long and straggly. I used to look with envy at the same girls the papers are currently lambasting, the girls with boyfriends and the beginnings of breasts to fit in their push-up bras, the girls with highlights and lipgloss who strutted through the schoolyard in the shortest skirts they could get away with. Those were the girls who got attention and respect - from our peers and from the adults. Every magazine and advertisment I saw, every programme I watched, every message I got from parents and my peer group and the few friends I had told me that my selfhood was irrelevant because I was not beautiful, that my life would be immeasurably better if I looked more like those girls. I am reliably informed by my teenage sisters that the message has not changed in the past six years: if you're a girl and you're not sexy, you may as well go and lie down in a skip right now, because you're worthless and nobody will ever love you.

Note that I said sexy, not sexual. We were expected to look sexually available at all times - but if we actually were sexually available, we quickly developed reputations as slags. None of the effort we put into our appearance and behaviour was actually meant to result in any actual sex for us, because that was dirty and dangerous. We were supposed to look good, not feel good.

When sex started to be something that my classmates did together, the language at breaktime was all about what so-and-so had let Chris F. Studly do to her. Had she let him see her tits? Had she let him finger her? Had she let him put his penis in her mouth? All of it was - and still is - about what boys are allowed to do to you.

Which was doubly confusing, because at the time I was not only too shy and ugly to get a shag, I was crashingly horny nearly all the damn time. Nobody ever told me that would happen. The girls we were meant to look up to dressed for sex but didn't seem to be very enthusiastic about it - whereas I would have given my train-tracked eye-teeth for five solitary minutes of fucking. Sexualisation was never my problem. The problem - for all of us, whether we were pretty and popular or library-dwelling trolls - was that looking sexy was a game you had to win, whereas sex itself was forbidden. More than that: sex was dangerous.

You see, we were surrounded by rape. Not just rape as an airy warning, something that meant that you shouldn't walk down Eastern Road in the dark or catch night-buses on your own, but rape as a real, tangible thing, that had happened to people we knew. In year 9, after a school disco, one of my classmates claimed to have been raped by the class stud in the nearby park. Both she and the boy were immediately expelled. I still remember vividly how, in that same term, a girl broke down in a Maths lesson because she had been raped as a child by her stepfather. Eventually, after being caught sexually engaging with her boyfriend on school premises, she was suspended too. Not only did rape happen to some of us, if you were unlucky enough to be one of the ones it happened to, you faced punishment and moral judgement. God forbid you actually engaged in consensual sex - that was even worse.

This wasn't the case for the boys, of course, who could shag around to their hearts' content, and frequently did, without having any moral judgements attached to them. Their bodies and developing desires weren't policed by their peers and their parents as ours were, their sexuality was not taboo. Biologically, of course, this is more than illogical: whilst many men do not experience sexual feelings until puberty, women and girls are in theory capable of sexual pleasure and orgasm from early infancy, not that they are old enough to understand what that means. Whilst boys' first experience of heterosexual sexuality tends, these days, to be visual - catching a peek of a dirty magazine or simply being assaulted by a naked female body on a billboard - many girls' first experience of sexuality is of a parent telling them not to fiddle in their knickers without ever explaining why it's dirty, bad and wrong.

It's a trend that has held true for decades: the 'sexualisation' of young boys does not raise many eyebrows these days. Who cares if young lads watch porn from the age of thirteen, internalise the messages of pornography and violent rap music? Whilst young girls' sexuality is forbidden in any form apart from sartorial pantomime, young boys' sexuality is encouraged in almost any form (as long as it's a heterosexual form), with violence and the dehumanisation of women part of the language of schoolboy culture from an early age.

This is not entirely young boys' fault. The men I know today are largely mature, understanding and decent. But when I think of the fear I felt of young men as a child, when I think of the way they sexually terrorised me, my female classmates and each other, I cannot help but get angry that this is so roundly ignored. When I read statistics that tell me that one in three teenage girls has been sexually abused by a partner, they seem ludicrous at first - and then memory kicks in.

Sitting in a physics lesson, aged fourteen, I suddenly feel something hard, cold and sharp poking up under my skirt, prodding into the seat of my knickers. I jump, and turn around. The boy sitting behind me, Aidan his name is, is shoving a half-metre metal ruler into the fabric covering my anus. My expression as I turn makes him laugh. He withdraws the ruler, and the boys sitting either side of him echo him when he starts to yell at me, 'do you love it? Do you love it? Do you love it?'

Not knowing what he means, and not wanting to make an even worse mistake, I shrug. Aidan is triumphant. 'Penny loves it up the bum!' he squeals. 'Penny loves it u-up the bum!'. Everyone laughs. The teacher swoops in, and shushes them, and glares at me. What have I done to encourage them?

The author of the Lolita effect is absolutely right to point out that what I needed back then, what young women desperately need, is more, not less, honest sexuality. Little girls are already sexual - but instead of teaching them about sex, we teach them to fear it, just as the rest of society fears female sexuality. We teach them to become objects for others' enjoyment, rather than acknowledging that they themselves are capable of positive sexual agency. These days, young girls learn that sexuality is simultaneously shameful, dangerous, and the only sure way of gaining attention and popularity. We culturally castrate young girls before they're into training bras, and then the Polanski defenders, the critics of Little Lolitas, our parents, our teachers, our peers, tell us that little girls are all immoral because we're so clearly begging for it.

It makes me want to smash things. It makes me want to smash things like my sexuality has been smashed - into a thousand painful little pieces. These days, I'm a feminist. I understand that I have sexual agency, I understand that my body is not shameful, I know it's okay to like sex, I know that that doesn't mean I'm a slut or a slag or that I deserve punishment or to be treated like an object. I know that logically, but the damage has already been done, to me and to millions of others. I want us to stop talking about young girls as if they were not people. I want us to acknowledge a range of female experience. I want young girls to be allowed to be sexual without being taught victimhood, and taught that victimhood is all we deserve.

Above all, I want people to stop being so bloody frightened of young girls' sexuality, and the promise of positive, equal sexual experience that it entails. The sexuality of young girls is not there for the enjoyment or artistic appreciation of men, it's not an excuse to rape us and hurt us and shame us and punish us, it does not make us wicked, or manipulative, or slags. Young girls are people - not Little Lolitas, not tiny shameless sluts or else hopeless sad cases, we are all people, and we all have a right to healthy sexuality. Instead, we are offered a selection of ways to be victims, a smorgasbord of sexual shame and self-denial. I call time on this hypocrisy - right now.



*Although I just bet Sarah Williams is still a pen-stealing bastard, knowwhatI'msaying.

**people reading across the pond: I'm not advocating the gentle rotation of queer people as a relaxation aid, this is a piece of British smoking terminology. Don't you just love this weird fucking language?

Seriously, what the fuck?

I'm sure by now most of you will have picked up Dr Kealey of Buckingham University's disgusting piece in the Times Higher Education supplement this week, in which he advises university lecturers to treat their female students as 'perks', and enjoy watching the little hussies 'flaunt their curves'. (KJB has a brilliant satire on the whole fiasco over at Get There Steppin'). Addressing his article to the only members of the academic profession who really count - straight, male ones - Kealey advises his chums to have fun flirting, because everyone knows that 'normal' young women are more interested in men than in their education:

"Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

"Enjoy her! She's a perk.

"She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife...as in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch."

Kealey has expressed his irritation that women have failed to 'get' the article, which was intended to be humorous, or semiotically playful, or both, or something:

"Because transgressional sex is inappropriate, the piece uses inappropriate and transgressional language to underscore the point - a conventional literary device. At a couple of places, the piece confounds expectations, another conventional literary device, by employing the good ol’ boy language of middle aged male collusion."

Anyway, the T.H.E editor says that it's the humourless feminists are to blame for denying Dr Kealey (with, Laura Woodhouse points out, his 45 peer-reviewed papers, 35 scientific articles and two books) his right to free speech. Of course, feminists haven't called for Kealey to have his tongue cut out of his fatuous head or, indeed, even asked for a retraction, they've merely called him out on his pathetic sexist jerkery,but even so:

"If we cannot have freedom of speech and robust debate in the academy where can we have it?"

...yep, that would be the same 'academy' which is still cutting funding from women's studies courses all over the country. Clearly some speech is freer than others.

This pile of festering bollocks has not deterred feminists across the country from taking a stand, with Feminist Fightback offering to treat Dr Kealey to a seminar on respect for women in education and the NUS leading a campaign against misogyny in higher education, with Women's Officer Olivia Bailey collecting stories of personal experience of sexism at university which will be published anonymously over the next few days (send yours to olivia.bailey[at]nus.org.uk).

But wait, there's more! Today, another male academic has been enjoying having a great big media-sponsored male privilege soapbox to shout from exercising his free speech over the evils of contraception in the Torygraph:

"The idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman’s body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition. [The institutionalised sexism of the Saudi government]is arguably as bad, but I don’t see how they are actually worse than saying that a woman’s reproductive organs cannot feel pain, as must be the case if the preborn child is simultaneously a part of those organs and unable to feel pain. In fact, if such is held to be the case, that at the physical core of her femininity a woman is insentient, then it strikes me as no wonder that there is wife-beating, with stoning not far behind.

"No one did more work than the then Cardinal Ratzinger on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which magnificently presents the inseparability of the sanctity of life, sexual morality, social justice, and the pursuit of peace. When he comes here as Pope, let that be his theme.

"Today, condoms are practically thrown at children...and women must poison themselves in order to be available at all times for the sexual gratification of men."

This, from a commentator who claims to be a liberal voice, tiptoes merrily down misogyny lane into the steaming ditch of the completely sodding bonkers, but there it is, prominently placed in a national broadsheet. A woman's pure untainted fertile reproductive system is not only the core of her personhood, it is sentient, yes, sentient of its own accord, able to independently process subjective perceptual experiences. Well, I for one can't remember the last time I had a conversation with my uterus. It strikes me that David Lindsay, who is in his own special, mad Catholic way actually trying to speak on behalf of women, may have heard of the core feminist text 'The Vagina Monologues' and made some misplaced assumptions about the content.

Oh, and also, the contraceptive pill is a horrible poison that prevents women from doing 'what comes naturally', and the Pope should make it stop, because women don't enjoy sex anyway, they only use contraceptives to satisfy male desire like the manipulative little SLUTS they are. Jesus saves!

This matters. It matters that high-profile academics and commentators, who hold the keys to learning, to advancement and to power, hold these views and see it as their god-given right to express them no matter who they hurt. It matters, because these words do hurt. They hurt more than these men, who clearly find it exceptionally difficult to understand that women are people just like them, can possibly understand. It hurts, as a person who loves books and science and learning with a bone-crunchingly hard passion, to be told that my brain is merely incidental to my body, that what my teachers and superiors, most of whom are male, obviously, are interested in are my curves, my tits and my arse and my magical sentient uterus.

And they wonder why women fail to put themselves forward for top jobs after university. They wonder why only 30% of women science graduates, compared to 95% of men, go on to do research or get jobs in their field. They ask why so many women in higher education and beyond feel like frauds in academia, in business, in the arts, in science, why women lack confidence, why we fail to put ourselves forward for promotions and pay rises. This sort of thing is fucking why. And you may like to think it's all in good fun, but I'm not laughing. I'm not laughing at all.

Alternative culture = fail

So back in 2007, when I started writing this blog, I worked for the flagship store of Cyberdog Industries. You know, the company that makes a lot of money selling overpriced poorly-made clothes to ravers and cyberkids and goths and metallers and the occasional indie Camden scenester who wandered in by mistake. My job was to stand around looking tiny and curvy and having a pink mohican and not complaining when tourists tried to feel me up at the information stand. I still like some of their clothes, though, only place you can get really reliable neon.

Well, anyway, Cyberdog has just launched a new t-shirt, which will no doubt shortly be glowing in every alternative club in London and Europe. It's called Tit Tetris.

No really, TIT TETRIS. The shirt, for those of you too lazy to click the link, features helpless women being flung to their deaths into a massive pile of female bodies. HOW VERY EDGY.

Ugh.

He'll be back.

I was in the pub when we got the news about Purnell, and had already had a cider or two. Proceeded to get roaringly drunk with some gorgeous redheaded goths and indulge in pleasant fantasies involving Purnell never ever coming back.

This morning I've got a headache and the distinct impression of having been beaten up with a giant smelly flannel and I'm just not sure that this means very much. Apart from wee Jamie getting a shoo-into the pathetic disintegration of this government. Thanks Jamie. Of course, yours is already being talked about as 'the biggest knifing yet'. Could that be because the former Home Secretary has a pair of tits, I wonder?

Oww, god. My head. No, seriously, this is why I don't drink anymore. I lose both my sense of perspective and my dinner. I'm going to work behind a huge pair of sunglasses. If anyone has any cheerier perspectives on this whole debacle, please do share them.

No Tears for Blears

Guys, before you read this, I feel obliged to insist that however pissed off we are at our politicians, it's still hugely important to vote tomorrow. Meanwhile, though, is anyone else completely sodding disgusted with the filibustering going on down on the Westminster farm today?

In case you’ve been living in a bag eating candles, Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith have just resigned, leaving us without two quite important cabinet ministers, with Blears giving a statement timed to do maximum damage to Brown just before Question Time today. 'Rebel' Labourites are calling for his resignation and they just might get it. Guardianistas are rubbing their hands and cackling armchair anarchy into their cappucinos whilst the government crumbles around them. Brilliant. Thanks, Hazel, that's absolutely what we needed to get us back to what's important in politics, like that grassroots unrest you keep talking about despite the fact that you wouldn't know community organisation if it jumped out of your tiny designer handbag and hit you on the head.

I'm not about to disagree with anyone who believes that Brown should be gone, and soon. Far from it. But this isn't a measured process of leadership challenge, it's not even a response to public pressure: it's a playground pile-on born of panic over the woeful expenses fiasco, and it is STUPID. It's stupid, it's so stupid and so childish and so far from what politics should be about that it even makes bits of Blair's government look good by comparison.

To explain what I mean, let's take by means of comparison another Labour resignation speech by another shamelessly goblinesque gingerite: Robin Cook. Here is the text of the speech; even as a 16-year-old with no faith in mainstream politics I remember being roused. The idea that politicians of principle could challenge their government so nobly and with such knife-twisting decorum, in protest at a military offensive which the people of Britain and the world were desperate to halt in its tracks, was exciting. It was magnificent.

It was magnificent and they went ahead and invaded Iraq anyway. They didn't listen to parliament, they didn't listen to two million people on the streets of London, they didn't listen to international opinion. They went ahead and did it anyway, to the cost of many thousands of Iraqi lives, hundreds of British lives, billions of pounds poured into the defence budget and a permanent soiling of this Labour party in government.

Labour 'rebellion' from the backbenches actually used to mean something, before it was stained with futility and disillusionment. Now, as Nick Clegg (the only person talking any sense today) declared at Question Time, 'The country doesn't have a government; it has a void'.

I'm not impressed by this 'rebellion'. I'm more impressed by the weary loyalty of Alan Johnson as he - please gods - prepares for potential leadership than I am by Blears' smirking, scruffy attempt to play rebel-without-a-cabinet-portfolio, even if she does have that very shiny motorbike. I don't think it's responsible to knock over the cabinet from within, not unless your prime minister has just declared martial law. Which Brown, for all his shambling clampdowns on Habeas Corpus, hasn't.

What depresses me is that this 'rebellion' is not a matter of principle for any of the ministers and MPs involved. It's a cowardly, schoolyard attempt to kick an unpopular prime minister when he's finally down, just like the weedier gang-running kids who yell 'we never liked him anyway!' when their school bully is dethroned, and it's come far, far too late. It's not about the politics: it's about their own jobs, a sorry attempt to cool down public and press indignation at an expenses scandal in which they are all culpable by attacking the man who, for better or worse, they chose to lead them (313 Labour MPs nominated Brown over the fantastic John McDonnell, with only 29 nominations, in 2007). I am disgusted with all of them. And what's worst of all is that they're probably doing the right thing, for the party and for the country - finally.

Sod this. I've already sent in my postal vote. I voted Lib Dem in Haringey, because they're the only party I have any respect for at all right now, since the turncoat bloody anti-science backstabbing technophobitch Greens came out against stem cell research. To hell with all of them and their terrible lying faces. I'm going to get mashed on some cheap cider and read Jean Rhys. Bye.

The 'Evil Poor'.

Over the past few days, I've been watching in horror as prejudice against benefits recipients and the unemployed stacks up in the press and on the internet; as people decry even a small hike in taxation of the super-rich whilst advocating leaving the poor to stew in their own juices; as a slew of right-wing commentators have articulated their hatred of the welfare system on this blog. Like Dave Osler, I find it logically inconsistent that so many people seem 'to demand cuts in invalidity benefit and public sector pensions as a response to the financial crisis, yet explode in splenetic rage at the idea that the richest of the rich should pay tax at a rate slightly more in line with the bulk of the population.'

Dave has addressed the question of the class-war-that-isn't; what we need to talk about urgently is why, precisely, it is not okay to make even the slightest hint of a suggestion of putting the merest policyette into place that might slightly disadvantage the rich - sorry, 'wealth creators' - but it's fine to pour scorn, mistrust and hatred onto benefits recipients and the underpaid? When did it become alright to treat people on low incomes as if they were an entirely different, morally deficient species of person? When did it become alright to call the poor 'evil'?

No, really. Let's not forget that this week the Orwell prize for blogs was awarded to NightJack, a blogger who claims to be a white, middle-aged police officer posting about his experiences in the force, passing over, amongst others, the esteemed Alix Mortimer whose hyper-boots I am unfit to lick. One of his winning entries is entitled 'The Evil Poor'. Initially I assumed that the title was ironic. It isn't.

'This phenomenon of the evil poor has spread so that not a town in England does not have it’s unfair share of Kappa clad, drugged up, workshy, wasters swaggering through the town centre streets with a can of lager in the one hand and a bull mastiff on a string in the other. They aren’t out looking for a job or a chance in life let alone a wash.....They just want to get high, shag your 14 year old daughter until she is pregnant and nick your stuff. Sorry if that’s a bit bleak but it’s a lot true.'

I understand why we need to at least entertain the barely-literate frothings of the paranoid authorities, but must we give them a special prize too? Or shall we just all form a line to do a massive poo on Orwell's grave?

As John Scalzi eloquently explains, being poor is not a moral judgement. Poverty is something that the rich can choose to ignore, relying instead on lazy stereotypes churned out by a press that hates the disadvantaged. Poverty is not an identity. Poverty destroys identity, stripping you down to a struggle for life's essentials, consuming you with anxiety. Poverty is not an exclusive, alien community: poverty divides communities and fosters social alienation, aided by a government propaganda machine which encourages people of all classes to mistrust and spy on their fellow citizens. Have you seen those DWP 'we're closing in' adverts? Those ones with the voiceover by the actual Mysterons? You'd have to laugh if they weren't so deadly serious about stamping down on the 1% of benefits claimants estimated to be genuinely fraudulent - despite the fact that legal tax evasion by the top 1% of earners costs the country seventeen times as much as benefit fraud.

And poverty is the ultimate hallmark of inequality, the signpost which the struggles of all other minority groups use to rightly attest to their own marginalisation. Poverty is not restricted to minority groups; poverty can happen to anyone, without warning, especially during a recession.

I'm it all seems so very, very obvious, so fundamental to any notion of decency or political justice, that I'm forced to wind myself back to a point where I can see how some people might ever even think that leaving people who can't work, are out of work or are low-paid to be destitute and to starve is something that we can justify to ourselves, as citizens of one of the richest nations in the world in the 21st century. I can't understand how decent people could countenance such a notion. I'm trying to understand.

Poverty in this country exists. To claim otherwise is crassly ignorant and stinks of privilege. Absolute poverty exists. Nearly four million British children are growing up below the breadline, and some of them go hungry, or their parents go hungry so that they don't have to, on a very regular basis indeed. In winter, grandparents surviving on the state pension have to decide between food and heating. There are also 400,000 homeless households in this country. Four. Hundred. Thousand. That includes plenty of kids. These homeless people are either sleeping rough, leaving themselves at real daily risk of death by exposure or violence, or precariously housed in hostels and shelters, usually with little or no money for food, clothing and basic necessities. But relative poverty exists, too, and relative poverty has been shown to be equally damaging in terms of destroying social cohesion, damaging mental health and holding back progress. The real hurt of being poor goes beyond mere cold and hunger, although both are never far away in modern Britain. Stein Ringen says, in What Democracy is For (2007): 'It is about dignity, the ability to make choices and live one's own life, the risk to children, the feeling of exclusion.'

If you're wondering what a spoilt little rich kid like me is doing sounding off about what poverty is and isn't, you're right to do so. It's not done to talk about money in this country, for some reason, especially if we have it. There's an obscene fashion for whinging about how skint we are whilst conspicuously consuming. Well, I think that's crap. I think that until we can admit our own privilege, we have no business even *talking* about social justice. So I'll start with myself.

At the moment, I regularly find that I have a good deal of month left over at the end of the money, and I do not yet earn enough to pay tax. I am a twenty-something trying to make it in the big, bad world of journalism, I'm supporting a disabled partner and housemates on benefits; things I can't afford include meat to stop me getting anaemic, bedsheets without holes, a place to keep my clothes that isn't the floor, and any sort of holiday. In the years when I was really messed up, I was briefly homeless, and living on £10 a week after bus fares. I've slept in warehouses and on coaches. I've lived on porridge for weeks. However, I come from money. My parents became wealthy towards the end of my teenage years, and although I'm on a tight budget, if I ever got in real trouble I wouldn't, for example, have to sign right kidney away to a loan shark. I could call my dad, and, yknow, he would stop it all. That's privilege. I live in a nice warm houseshare with only a few mice. That's privilege.

Being rich isn't all about disposable income, either. As you will know if you follow this blog regularly, I am currently in recovery from a serious and life-threatening illness, anorexia nervosa. Because I was lucky enough to have parents who could pay for private healthcare insurance, when my illness led to physical collapse in 2004 I was able to be treated in a really decent mental institution, and that probably saved my life. If you're dying of anorexia and you have to go to the NHS, it's a very different story. All of the famous lady writers who did their time in loony bins - from Susanna Kaysen to Elizabeth Wurtzel to Sylvia Plath - they all went to private institutions, too. You don't hear back from the state-mental-healthcare graduates quite so often. In my recovery, too, money means a lot. In times when I really have been poor, not being able to afford proper food really took my mental health back down to zero. I couldn't afford to eat anything 'safe', so I just didn't eat. Now, although it might mean that I can't afford a drink in a bar or that new pair of shoes, I am able to ensure that I have enough food that I'm comfortable eating in the house. I firmly believe that if I was from a less wealthy family, and if I had been less fortunate in my choices after university, I would be much iller than I am now, presuming that I'd survived to my twenties at all. That's significant privilege. Having the chance at a second chance is privilege. My capacity to be shocked by how much privilege I enjoy is also a privilege.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sitting here every day beating myself daintily up over how terribly privileged I am. That sort of thing is self-indulgent, doesn't solve anything and is a very bad habit to get into. An even worse habit, though, is ignoring the fact altogether, and that's something that quite a lot of my middle-class friends, even the bleeding-heart liberals, have occasionally been guilty of. Refusing to believe in poverty, inequality and social injustice doesn't make it go away. Inventing some plausible reason why everyone poorer than you deserves to be poorer than you will not make it go away. Persuading yourself and anyone who cares to listen that even some poor people are 'evil' is disgusting, disingenuous and frankly cowardly, and it sickens me.

Fuck.

Oh jesus, they killed him.

The bastard police killed Tomlinson. They killed him in cold blood, without provocation, and then they lied about it.

Here's the footage of them beating him, whilst he has his hands in his pockets, minutes before he collapses and dies.

Oh god. With their horrible dogs. Watch the video. Watch the slowed-down version. Do you see any evidence of police medics trying to help him, and being beaten back by protesters, yknow, the official story, the 'natural causes' story? Do you hell. Fucking liars. Fucking liars.

Ian Tomlinson wasn't protesting. He was walking home from work, wearing civvies like he'd been told to so that the protesters wouldn't target him. I don't want to imagine what his family must be feeling right now.

Men die in London every day. But this death was different. This was unprovoked murder, at police hands, and I didn't know this man in life but I am sitting here in tears, because, you know what?

I genuinely trusted them.

That's what bites: I trusted them. I didn't trust them to behave altogether decently, because I'm a frothing little paranoid Red, but I did actually trust the police not to assault unarmed old men with heart conditions, at least until I had concrete evidence to the contrary. I read the reports and I thought: that's dubious, but it's probably an accident. I mean, we should investigate it and everything, but I'm sure it's going to turn out to have been an accident. A man with a weak heart gets caught in the crowd. Tragic, but not police murder. The police don't target innocents without provocation, they don't beat people to death with sticks, not in my city. Not in this country. We don't do that here, I mean, especially not since that cock-up with De Menezes. The police wouldn't do that, would they? Not in this country.

So help me, I actually believed them. No longer. And, do you know what? Never again.

I am bloody angry. I am mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more. I am also frightened. I am frightened of what the response of the civil authorities will be when they realise, as they must do now, that they can't get away with this anymore. That covert violence is not an option anymore. Not now we have the technology. Not when we had a thousand wired-up reporters in that police kettle, reporting from the frontlines.

There's going to be a vigil for Tomlinson. Details will be posted here as soon as I get my grubby little hands on them, and I hope you'll join me. Right now I'm going to go into the garden and scream.

ETA: A demo has been called, at 11.30am this Saturday, the 11th of April 2009, outside Bethnal Green police station in London (just next to Bethnal Green tube) Protestors will demand a public inquiry into the death of Ian Tomlinson and express their anger over the police brutality involved.