Just a quick one...

Unless you've been holed up in a cave on the outskirts of nowhere, you'll be aware of the whole 'Protein World ad thing'. You know, the poster that's angered a lot of people:

And yeah, they're not wrong to be angry. How do you know if you're beach body ready? You just turn up at a beach. That's literally it. Now, initially, I was on the outrage bandwagon. For about 25 seconds. But then I thought about it, and a couple of things became very apparent. 

One: this ad is not a million miles away from what you'll find in the average women's weekly magazine. Come early spring, they're full of diet tips and exercise plans on how to look "beach body ready" - and not only that, the worst offenders print photos of famous women in bikinis and list reasons why these women shouldn't be wearing bikinis. They circle tiny overspills of flesh in red, and print things about how Celebrity X has put on weight since the breakdown of her relationship, and pass judgment on Celebrity Y's "post-baby body" (and if ever there's a phrase that needs to be banned outright, it's that one). Yet to my knowledge, no-one's protesting outside Heat magazine.

Two: this poster is really boring. Simply from a marketing point of view, it's nobody's finest work. The bright yellow and cold grey colour combination can't save it; the whole campaign is yawn-inducing. Why? Using an airbrushed-to-the-hilt, scantily-clad woman to sell something was a tired strategy ten years ago, never mind in 2015. It reeks of a last-resort idea, sketched out hastily at 4.55pm, when the team had to come up with something before the end of the day in order to be able give it to the boss in the morning. It's just not very clever, is it? The amount of thought, creativity and imagination that's gone into that poster is LIMITED, to say the least. And yet look at the publicity it's generated. You can bet your bottom dollar that the Protein World PR guys are toasting their breakfast meetings with champagne, cackling with glee at the column inches, the think-pieces, the Twitter trending.

However, the above doesn’t mean that I disagree with any of the protests that have come about as a result of the advert. I am wholly in favour of them. I love that girls have gathered in swimwear to stand by the posters; I love the alternative images of the ad that are doing the rounds on the internet; I am fine with people defacing the posters. And some really smart stuff has been written in response to it. 

 

But do you know what would have made a good protest? A quiet, stealthy boycott of the company and their products. Perhaps combined with simply tearing down or defacing the posters, if you want to show you're really miffed. It's clearly designed to be provocative; the sweetest comeback would have been to not react, to not give them the attention and the publicity - but to also not buy the products. I'm not business-minded in the slightest, but I should imagine it's quite worrying when people suddenly stop buying your product and aren't even mentioning it.

Next time, we should hit them where it's really going to hurt - in the bank balance.

I have a habit of forgetting how much I like John Mayer, but DB played me this track recently and I can't stop listening to it. There's something about it that makes me want to have a little cry though.

A book-based blog post

I'm at the end of a week off. After becoming known in the office as the person who never takes any of her annual leave*, I came to my senses and decided to take a Whole Week Off. It's been blissful, I'm not going to lie. I've spent far too much money, watched far too many make-up and beauty tutorials on YouTube (we've all got our time-wasting habits), and have sort of temporarily moved in with Drummer Boy. But that's a whole other blog post in itself, so I'll hold that thought for now.

But best of all, I read a whole book in the course of about a day.

That didn't used to be an achievement. I've always been a fast reader - I remember 'racing' Laurence Chacksfield in Year 5 to see who could be the first to finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I did 636 pages in the space of two afternoons (and won, most importantly). Not bad for a ten-year-old. But now I'm lazy about reading anything longer than 1200 words during the week. Spending all day every day typing, retyping and re-arranging words has made me loath to try and absorb any more of them when I get home. This week, however, I had time, glorious time, so I dove headfirst into Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty.

It's a well-paced thriller/crime drama (it manages to pull off being both) about a successful scientist who begins an affair with a rather mysterious chap, and is later attacked by a colleague. These sets of circumstances collide - somewhat predictably - in a grim fashion. While the plot itself is unspectacular, the writing is taut and elegant, and the characters are proper, well-rounded people (you feel you could know them). Sometimes, novels that flip back and forth along a timeline can be frustrating, but in this tale, it's skillfully done.




I got a hefty stack of books for Christmas (some of which are there on the right), but have barely made a dent in it yet. I have very nearly finished Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (second from bottom), and have been totally awed by it. She covers everything from the complexities of girl friendships, to how we deal with rape and sexual assault, to how, in our culture of 24-hour news and constant social media updates, we respond to tragedy and disaster. She is wise and eloquent, but her wisdom is shot through with humour and empathy, so reading her work is like spending an evening in a quiet bar with your cleverest, wittiest friend. Two stand-out chapters are the one where she conducts a complete, scathing and brilliant post-mortem on the Fifty Shades [of utter wank] phenomenon, and the aforementioned chapter on tragedy, from which the following lines are taken:

"I have never considered compassion a finite resource. I would not want to live a world where such was the case."

Now there's a thought that rings in the ears.


Truth be told, I'd love to do this in video form - a sort of "here's what I'm reading this month" vlog (and I shudder at that word, it's a heinous portmanteau), but I lack the equipment and editing skills, and I'm paranoid that when played back, my voice would sound like an overexcited nine-year-old's. Still, it's an idea I might hold on to. 

*For ages after I started, I felt bad about taking any more than two or three days off - because a) my struggle to remain sane and anxiety-free when I have nothing to do is well-documented, and b) I was initially genuinely worried that I would forget how to do my job.

Have a slice of sunny pop-rock - I know nothing about this band, but this is a catchy little number.

Alternatively, there's this - it's one of my current favourite running songs, and it's also almost faultless.

Things I would like to see happen in 2015

...I lied, I basically wrote this AT work. It was a quiet day.

1) For the media to stop giving Katie Hopkins the column space. Like a fight outside a pub, they need to just leave it, because it's not worth it.

2) For the media to also stop asking famous people whether they're feminists or not, like they're compiling an international register. It's getting really boring, and it's also putting me off people. I don't really need to know whether or not the woman who plays Penny in the Big Bang Theory is a feminist.

Because the thing is, if you treat something like it's a Massively Divisive Issue, then it never becomes anything other than a Massively Divisive Issue. Why don’t we just assume that everyone is strongly pro “women having equal rights” and “women being perfectly capable of making the decisions that are best for them”, and so on? Of course, we know that not everyone is, but if we all start acting like it’s the absolute norm to be Strident Feminists, eventually the non-feminist types will start to feel like the freaks.We can hope.

3) A distint lack of naked photo "scandals". Taking photos of yourself sans clothing, to share with a partner, is not a crime. It is a very normal thing to do - the first thing humans drew, with pebbles on cliff walls, were other naked humans (probably) - and let's face it, we're never going to be any younger or more attractive than we are right now, right this second. Making naked photos of someone who isn’t you and hasn’t consented available online is a crime. It's hardly PhD-level astrophysics to not be a tremendous jerk.

4) More excellent TV programmes with badass female leads, a la Carrie from Homeland. I want a female House, a lady Sherlock, a woman version of Rust from True Detective.

5) A complete overhaul of the current political system, please. (I never said these were going to be realistic goals.) I would like people who've had real jobs doing the nation's admin; people who know what works when it comes to education, healthcare, energy, transport - and/or who are prepared to listen to those who do know.

6) More women on TV. Fucking. Panel. Shows. Again, it's not hard.

7) For up-and-coming writers, musicians, artists, and all other creative types to support each other, help each other out, promote each other's work. I just think it's important. Good karma and whatnot.

8) For fewer judgemental bloody think-pieces on things like cereal cafes and Russell Brand.

9) The complete disappearance of clickbait and "listicles" (irony acknowledged).

Happy New Year!

This old chestnut...

Happy New Year and all that. Personally, I'm hoping that 2014 is going to be a vast improvement upon 2013, which was - to put it politely - patchy at best. I'm going to kick off the year with a feministy rant. Sorry.

I love a daft stock image.

Shortly before Christmas, I spent most of a day writing a piece on whether society still judges women who choose not to have children, as part of a staff writer application (miraculously, they liked what I wrote). Now, normally, I'd be all over that shit. As someone who has always found the whole pregnancy and childbirth thing utterly terrifying, and who has only recently started to think "aww, kids might be fun", it's something I could bang on about for yonks. But my word limit was around the 400-mark, so not nearly big enough. I like to throw all my thoughts at the page and see what sounds good, so small word counts are tricky. I also felt a bit bored by the topic - like "we're really still having this conversation?" But we are. I even asked my mum - not that she's the best person to ask, Mrs Daily Mail - and she shot back straight away "yes, we do judge childless women, without a doubt".

So here's the unabridged result of me throwing some thoughts at my laptop.

For all the progress we've made in a few decades (the vote, education, employment, equal pay - in theory if not in practice - and contraception), feminism's still got things to do*. It's got to deal with all the insidious stuff - the attitudes, the media's representation of women, how women are treated by the legal system - stuff that is, arguably, harder to tackle. If you want legislation changed, there are procedures you can follow - campaigns, petitions, advocacy groups - you get the picture. It might not be easy, it might not be successful, but there are ways and means, paths that have been trodden. To change attitudes, you have to shout into the wind and hope that enough people hear you. You have to call people out when they say things that are narrow-minded, unintentionally offensive or just plain stupid. At best, they might accuse you of not having a sense of humour, and at worst, they might be hostile, aggressive and threatening.

*Despite what Angela Epstein said on Newsnight a couple of months ago, when they did a piece on Everyday Sexism. I didn't know Ms Epstein wrote for the Daily Mail at the time, so I sat there and seethed about how contrary and deliberately obtuse she was being. When I looked her up afterwards, it all made sense.

Anyway, back to the thing. Womanhood and motherhood remain inextricably linked, despite all the progress that's been made. The notion that you're not a fully-fledged human being until you've produced a new one persists - if you're female. Women who choose not to have children, and instead throw their energy and intelligence into their careers, travelling the world, or simply going about their own business - quite happily - still have to deal with questions and remarks that are loaded with judgement:

"When are you going to settle down?"

"Give it time, your hormones will kick in."

"You'll change your mind."

From aging relatives hoping for grandchildren, you might expect it. But I've had the latter two said to me by male friends my own age. In my case, I happen to think they're right - I would like children, it's the personally having them I'm not so keen on. If it was simply a case of planting a tree and plucking a baby off when it was ripe, I'd be all for it. Or growing one in a tank, like Sea Monkeys. It's the giving up my body in order to grow a little human that I have the issue with. And then forcing it out into the world. It's the biggest physical commitment there is, and only women can do it, so when it's men saying "oh darling, you'll change your tune", I get a little riled and want to spit back "how the bloody hell would you know?"

The flip-side of this was pointed out to me by a very wise friend - it's incredibly rare that you hear parents saying that it's not all it's cracked up to be. There must be some people out there who have children and have found that were they able to go back, they wouldn't have had them. You don't hear those stories, because it would be horribly damaging to the children in question to find that out. There are people who never planned on kids but had them, and wouldn't change a thing, but that's a far more socially acceptable position to take. Society needs to catch up and recognise that motherhood isn't something that women have to cross off the list - we need to stop having conversations that run thus: "she's very successful, yeah, top of her field. Never had kids though". Making and raising new humans is such a commitment, such a life-changer, that you have to really want to do it. It's the unwanted children, the resented ones, who will suffer.

One day, women's choices and decisions aren't going to be the subject of endless judgement and debate. One woman's way of doing things won't be seen as representative of the whole of womankind. We will all - men included - just be allowed to get on with things. And let's hope that day comes sooner rather than later.

I don't have a sex playlist (well, not as yet, but you never know) but if I did, this would be on it.

And when I went for a very chilly, rainy run the other day, this song made me feel invincible.