In-betweenery.

The personal is not *always* political, and try as I may there's no way I can take the abrupt demise of my long-term relationship with my partner and best friend, the fact that all my remaining close friends are leaving London this week and my related and impending imminent fucking homelessness and twist them around and turn them into a gritty urban fable that seems to say something profound, in a post-adolescent sort of way, about modern politics. It's a bugger, is what, and that's all.

I could make some sort of comment here about how my heart feels a little like the rest of the country at the moment: mightily bewildered and exhausted and facing a number of confusing new options all of which seem to offer their own special flavour of grim and crawling horror, peppered with a few small delights and the hope that, in a year or two, everything might be alright again, all overlaying a sort of hard and horrible yearning for change, any sort of change, gods.

But that would be trite, and over-simplistic. It's just a bugger.

So this is by way of an apology for what may be scatty posting here over the next few weeks, whilst I get my stuff together and attempt not to have a total meltdown. My headspace is worse at this point than it has been for years, and I really need to sort my shit out without being a bitch to anyone or making some godawful internet gaffe like, I dunno, getting piss drunk and posting naked pictures of myself weeping artsily in a bath.

I'll be fine, I always am, and with any luck by the time I'm properly back the damn country will have sorted itself out too. I'm quietly hopeful.

Three cheers for the internet! (plus a small public service announcement)

Sorry that this is yet another linkdump, guys. Meds withdrawal and general winter craziness have meant I've been finding it difficult to write anything at all this week, and I've had to concentrate on the things I'm being paid to write, which are taking me me twice as long as they normally do. I'm not getting anything properly down until the small hours, and it feels like pulling a thick, heavy rope out of my forehead inch by inch. I'm stressed, and my sleeping patterns are shot, but hopefully I'll be able to return to devoting proper time to this blog before Christmas.

Meanwhile, an article about internet politics that I've been sitting on for a while has just been published by Prospect. I'm really pleased with it, even though something odd has happened to bits of the syntax between my outbox and the Prospect homepage. I love the magazine, have been reading it since I was at school, and am dead chuffed to have my ideas featured on their website. It's like an early non-denominational Winterval gift.

Even though I'm finding it difficult to juggle everything at the moment, it's really nice to think that since I started this blog my writing has grown up to the extent that it's now my real job, rather than just a hobby. Sure, I'm not making piles of money, but I'm paying my rent, and keeping busy enough that sometimes I have to prioritise freelance article gigs over what I really want to write. I miss being able to post something original here two or three times a week, though, and I'd like to get back to that soon.

Oh - and one more thing. Penny Red will be hosting the next Carnival of Feminists on the 23rd, so if you have any recommendations for feminist blog posts I should link to, please post them in the comments! Thanks ;)

Fair enough?

I've a post on Comment is Free today about the equality agenda at the party conferences. Please go read it and comment, help me stave off the tide of stupid. TIA guys.

What Women Want

The past week I've been absent, alternating work with frantic end-of-tenancy cleaning of a house in exactly the state you'd expect after eighteen months of sheltering six extremely depressed precariously employed young people and Neets let down by the government and the economy, surviving on a pittance, on which more later. I have bleach poisoning, and possibly also vial's disease. But right now I have half an hour free, waiting for my small sister to arrive so I can show her the bright lights of London; so I thought I'd point any of you who haven't seen in the direction of Filament magazine.

Filament is a fantastic project, set up by Suraya Sidhu Singh, a multi-talented friend of mine. It's a magazine designed to show erotic images of men that please women, as a counter to the market saturation of male-gaze-oriented images of women, with the assumption that women are actually allowed to have desire of their own, rather than just being the objects of it. So far, so uncontroversial, right? Wrong!

Filament has been in the press recently after Comment Is Free decided to run with the story about how their publishers refused to print tasteful images of an erect penis, deeming them 'offensive' in a culture awash with soft- to hardcore images of breasts and fannies selling everything from porn to purifying facial wash. The extreme controversy and popularity of the article may have something to do with the fact that it's all about knobs (knobs! In the shops!) and has an erection pun in its title. But the piece and the comments are both worth a read if you've ever been interested in the sexual double standard - the same sexual double standard that you, right now, have a chance to do a little something to lessen by supporting Filament. Get ready, here comes the whorebaggery:

To stay in print, Filament needs you to buy an issue, or even, which you can do here. It's full of terribly pretty boys as well as interesting thinkpieces by men and women at the cutting edge of contemporary magazine journalism. They're halfway to their target already- all they need is a little help from open-minded people [and girls with a spare fiver who like to get their rocks off looking at arty pictures of tasty, nubile manflesh].

In case you needed even more persuasion, there's also a regular 'Ask A Feminist' agony aunt column, written by moderately-known shoutyblogger Penny Red, which I hear tell is an absolutely fantastic read, and only a fool would think otherwise. Go and buy the magazine, take back the gaze, and keep knobs in shops.

More shameless whorebaggery

My article on Harman, misandry and honest feminism is currently thread of the day on Comment Is Free, along with a tiny picture of me looking very sulky indeed. Come on in and join the fray, the stupid is out in predictable force!

Blog Awards callout!

Shameless whorebag that I am, please do vote for Penny Red in the Total Politics Blog Awards if you've enjoyed reading it this year. Voting closes soon, so get yours in quick! It takes 2 minutes, you just have to fire them off a quick email.

If you've no other reason, vote for me because it's being hosted by Ian Dale, which, obviously, is gonna skew the results in favour of the right wing of the blogosphere, and balance is always good. Thanks guys. :)

Irony

Right now, I'm getting ready to go on SkyNews and talk about burlesque, and whether or not it's empowering. Programme should be going out later in the week. And I'm planning to say something along the lines of of course it is. It's empowering to feel that you can control men, however briefly, with your sexuality. I'm not denying that there's power there, or that it feels good - actually, it feels very good indeed. But the question is, should we be interested in that sort of power? It's a limited and dubious form of empowerment, and not one that's particularly revolutionary.

So I find it mildly amusing that for the last half hour I've been running around the house trying to find something to wear that's modest but not TOO modest, frantically putting on make-up and doing my hair. Because I can't control sending a message with my sexuality if I appear on telly. All I can control is what sort of message I send.

It's kinda like rain on your wedding day, innit?

Britain's Got Fascists: for the Huffington Post

I know that a) this is a cheat post and b)I'm supposed to be on holiday, not working my tiny butt off trying to get articles down for big online magazines, but here it is: on differences in attitudes to migration in London and New York, for the Huffington Post.

Any contributions to the debate, here or at the HuffPo, would be greatly appreciated. If I get lots of comments they might let me write for them again...

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!).

Fighting the good fight.

I'm currently jacked up on a great deal of Holland and Barrett's finest ginseng and coffee, frantically and gleefully editing Red Pepper's special section on police violence and popular protest, which is due out in May. Myself and many others have put in a great deal of hard work at the last minute to get this section ready, and it's shaping up really nicely. Coverage of recent events in the mainstream media has been woefully lacking - Red Pepper's attempts to reverse that trend have not come without effort, so I hope some of you will read the issue when it's done.

So far, we've some fine contributions from reporters and witnesses who were in the Bishopsgate kettle, along with an academic digest laying out the precedent of police violence against protestors dating back to the Miners' Strike. Contributions from football supporters and mental health service users demonstrate that it isn't just protestors who are being targeted by inappropriate use of police powers, and we've got independent journalists investigating the effects of Section 44 and Section 27 on popular consciousness. All this, and more - possibly too much to actually fit into the print issue, but any content that doesn't make it into print will be syndicated here and online.

Commissioning this edition has been a lot of fun - it's great to excercise my editorial control freakery somewhere that really matters. If you follow this blog regularly - well, firstly, thank you, and secondly, I'd seriously urge you to consider subscribing to Red Pepper if you can, or to donate online if you're a web reader. The lovely powers that be let me do pretty much what I want with this blog, but I do write additional stuff for the print edition, and it's an all-round awesome publication which deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. In case you're wondering, like most of the Red Pepper team I don't currently get paid for any of the work I do for the magazine.

Right, I can't have any more caffeine or I will damage myself, so I'm off to spend whatever remains of wakefulness cross-referencing and deleting extraneous adverbs. If you've time and volition, please share with me your news, links and amusing pictures of cats in unlikely places, because goodness knows I need the distraction. :)


ETA: John Q Publican has also been fighting the good one, with an excellent and thought-provoking initial analysis of the Climate Camp Legal Team's report. Well worth a read.

Beauty and the bitch: radio appearance.

Attention train-wreck observers: I will be on BBC Radio Wales at 1.30 today, talking about beauty, body image, Britain's got talent, and why it's so disgusting that we're all congratulating ourselves so much over letting a less-than-attractive woman acheive something meaningful.

In the blue corner will be Sarah Burge, AKA Real Life Barbie, former playboy bunny and the woman with the world record for spending the most on cosmetic surgery. Other yet-to-be-confirmed guests include a former editor of FHM.

They're going to trouce me and I don't even care. This is going to be fun.

You can listen live here at 1.30; alternatively, it'll be at the same link on listen again.

On Orwellian nightmares.

This week, I have mostly been re-reading George Orwell’s 1984.

Perhaps unsurprisingly to those of you who’ve been following this blog for a while, 1984 was one of the formative books of my childhood and adolescence. I read it on a yearly basis until I was 17. Between the ages of 15 and 17 I edited a clunkily subversive student rag that was called, not entirely without irony, Newspeak. I haven’t revisited the book since 2004. I’d been planning to do so for a while, and this weekend I saw that Penguin have just brought out a super-sexy new red and black edition done up to look like a Stalin-era circus poster, and I was persuaded to part with seven of my hard-earned pounds.

It's been too long. Somehow, sixty years after it was published, this book is once more at the linguistic core of the zeitgeist. Words like doublethink, Big Brother, Thought Police are used by all political factions, indiscriminately and with tongues only half in cheeks. I was struck by the way that terms like ‘Orwellian Nightmare’ were flung around at Saturday’s Internet For Activists conference, at which I was speaking- flung around with a quiet, numinous resentment that I found deeply frightening.

1984 is claimed by both the left and the right, but by far the most urgent message of the book for the modern age is one of paranoia. 1984 is the definitive paranoid novel. Not only is the shadowy state watching our flawed protagonist, all the time, every single second, but nobody really has a clear idea of what the state is watching for, or how far their remit extends – only that the mere act of thinking against the party line, whatever that party line happens to be, is enough to ensure inevitable extermination. The creeping horror of being watched, the loathesomeness of life in a paranoid state, was never more viscerally expressed.

British democracy, as Orwell himself noted in his essay ‘The Lion and The Unicorn’, functions best when it respects the deeply private nature of the British national character.

Tom Harris and popular misogyny: LabourList guest post.

I've put a post up on LabourList, which my friend Rowenna Davis is editing for International Women's Day. It's about Tom Harris (you didn't think I'd forget him, did you?), sex education and women's bodies as public property, and it's a response to a directive to make a lot of old Labour dadalikes cross in under 700 words.

If you get a moment, please do go and join the debate - the comments are already getting pretty fruity. Christ, I thought I had it bad with you lot. TBR, Dandelion, Neuroskeptic: all is forgiven, or at least it will be once I've made myself tea and a smoke and had a nice little calm down somewhere quiet. Oh my yes.

The Queen is Dead. The Queen of England is Dead.

Genitals, ladymen, rabid fans, frothing trolls, music-lovers everywhere: glory at the wonder that is Withiel finally getting his attractive posterior in gear to put his fabulous music (self-produced in our living-room, so if you listen really closely you can probably hear me cackling in the background) on the interwebs.

I said, glory at it!

And make sure you listen to the Smiths cover first. Although Ashtray is my most favourite song of this year. Right, I'm going to cough up my own pancreas. Be seeing you.

Left New Media: next meeting details

Comrades, as requested:

LeftNewMediaForum

Reclaiming the internet

Chaired by John McDonnell MP

Next meeting: Monday 15th December 7.30pm, Grimond Room, Portcullis House, London, Near Westminster Tube (SW1)

If you're planning to be there, please email Owen at jonesop@parliament.uk to confirm attendance and to be added to the forums. Thanks!

Yrs waiting for the van,

PRxx

They Lied To Us.

The past week in the meatspace life of Pennyred has been spent guzzling pink drinks at goth parties, rolling in my own filth and trying to get a job. I feel a sinking sense of despair at the renewed realisation that we were all hopelessly lied to in our youth. Real life isn't the thick slice of fun pie we were led to believe. For example: kick and wail at the notion though I may, I am resoundingly a spoilt Blatcherite brat by inheritance: bright, white and middle-class, scholarship to a nice school, degree from an Eminent University, lots of drive and ambition, relatively supportive parents, neither stunningly unattractive nor a pneumatic blonde fem-bot, both of which happen to matter a lot if you're young, female and looking for work. In short, I've got everything going for me on paper, bar heteronormativity, mental equability and a Y chromosome, but we'll save that little rant for another day.
And yet, to my great surprise, I have as yet failed to be head-hunted for a top job in media, government or M16; I have as yet failed, in fact, to secure any employment whatsoever since being fired from the Shop Job of Doom. And somewhere deep in the saccharine-sticky recesses of my middle-class soul, something feels that this isn't quite fair. This isn't how it was supposed to go! They told us we would be okay if only we worked hard and tried to be pretty! They told us we'd be successful if we studied for the exams, wore the right shoes and had the right parents! They LIED to us!

This city is over-run with kids like me, thousands of us, stunned by the acrid complexity of the real world, weighed down by debt, overdrawn, underpaid, poorer than we've ever been, chasing the rag-ends of dreams we've been encouraged to entertain since birth. Smoking, drinking, guzzling vile chemicals and dicking around with one another's hearts, because it numbs the anxiety, gives us a break from the cruel meritocracy grinning back at us through the curtains of our shabby living-rooms. Begging anywhere for work experience, internships, trying to polish our shiny young faces and even shinier CVs until they glisten with desperation*, paying our way with insecure minimum-wage work that saps the soul and leaves us grubbing in our battered wallets for the coppers to make up tonight's beer.

This was supposed to be the future.

We are probably going to be fine. But it won't be soon, and it won't be in the way we were made to believe. We can't expect to win by playing along, but what else can we do? After all, they're the ones with the power. They've got the money and the guns and the government and God, they sign our paycheques, mark our exams and grade our various crawling efforts to please. What have we got to challenge that?

I'll tell you what we've got.

We have Art and Beauty and Love and Truth. We have a flourishing counterculture that's more alive than anything the mainstream has produced in the last twenty years. We have semiotic sorcerers and guerilla literary theorists. We have Chaos Majick. We have sexual deviancy. We have the talent and the information-delivery media to reprogramme the minds of Young Corporate Leaders and drive them, frothing, into the sea. We have memetic attacks and the vote. Most importantly, we have much better hair.

This was written by a good friend of mine over two years ago, when we were young, stupid and indulging in wildly intellectual drunken reprobation at said Eminent University. To it I shall now add:

Unlike you, we are truly hypertextual. We have the information and communications technology to entirely re-imagine the concept of socio-political power, and we are bright enough and brave enough to use it. We are multi-ethnic, multi-gendered, multi-talented and massively up for a fight, we are no longer frightened of your disapproval, and we have bombs.

Love and Squalour bombs.

Up yours, Mr Meritocracy. We're going to win this our own way.



NB: Pennyred is a CV-enhancing excercise written by a nice cardigan-wearing girl from Richmond who would vote Tory. If you have enjoyed the writing of Pennyred, why don't you mention this blog to your employer? Pennyred is available for children's parties, corporate events and layby buggerings, and is happy to receive payment via Visa, Switch, Sterling, Yen or Euros (no $US) although will accept services rendered, sexual favours or the blood of the innocent.