Sexual Assault Prevention Tips *Guaranteed* to Work

This has been doing the rounds in radfem blogging circles for some time, but for those of you with jobs. lives, etc.:

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.

2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!

3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!

4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.

5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!

6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.

7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.

8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.

9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!

10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

(ripped from Nine Deuce)

Boris, keep your promise!

Funny the way politicans have a habit of mis-speaking before elections, isn’t it?

Take BoJo for example. Before he was elected Mayor of London in what could pessimistically be described as a laboratory for the nation after the next general election (it doesn’t need to happen, people! Vote Green!), he went on record as saying Ken Livingstone’s PR department was eating up far too much money from the public purse, and that if elected he would syphon off 20% of this amount to the woefully under-funded Rape Crisis Centres. For which budgetary breadcrumbs all feminists understandably rejoiced.

A year and a half later, the reality is that potential  and actual victims of rape who live in London have one solitary Rape Crisis Centre between them. Which, for the fact fans, is one small centre for 3.9 million people, and even the future of that centre is constantly in the balance. Yes that’s right, not even two Rape Crisis Centres to rub together, despite BoJo’s promise of £744,000 in extra funding. In our fair nation’s capital of all places.

All these good people are trying to do is get Boorish to keep his promise. You can support them by donating money, or checking out their YouTube video (which is worth it for the feminist eye/brain candy alone).

Feminism and comedy: the good news

To take away the unpleasant yet inexplicably popular new Carr smell, here‘s a slice of good news: Channel 4 has commissioned an all-female sketch show, to air next month. Members of this troupe include the comedic luminary Josie Long, and other people who I haven’t heard of but am assuming are brilliant by association.

Thank you, Channel 4. This almost makes up for ten years of Big Brother.

Feminism and comedy: the bad news

Right ladies, I won’t lie, the bad news is that Jimmy Carr has been opening his mouth near a microphone again. In this article in today’s Guardian he attempts a defense of one particular instance of his oh-so-dark, so-edgy-it’ll-cut-your-ears-like-a-hungover-barber, like-totally moronic ironic sense of humour. The joke which has rankled Middle Britain to its Daily Express-reading core (and believe me, such an offender would usually be awarded 5-star ally status) is about amputee soldiers making a good paralympics team, a punchline which apparently didn’t translate when some journalists rang the parents of the said soldiers and recited it down the phone. Funny, that. Carr’s defense essentially consists of ‘well I say plenty of other awful things and noone seems to mind’, and ‘I was trying to make people laugh’, the latter being a bit like the designer of the Titanic saying, ‘I was trying to build a ship.’

Carr does say plenty of other awful things, though. And now he’s been taken to task on offending the soldiers upholding his right to say them, the interviewer deigns to question him on another of his favourite jocular hot potatoes: rape. An example of his utter hilarity and rapier wit on this subject: ‘what’s the difference between football and rape? women don’t like football.’  Geddit? Geddit? Do you see what he did there? Yes that’s right – expose himself as a misogynist asshat! Not that the interviewer makes this intergalactic leap, though; he notes that because there are women in the queue for the after-show signing, no harm has been done. And Carr himself is even less troubled: ‘I do a lot of jokes about rape, but it’s not a discourse on rape. I do jokes for laughs.’  Call me a humourless hairy feminazi, but a joke that’s truly funny is one which could be recited by anyone with half a modicum of comic timing to an audience who want to laugh. Any joke where you have to hope a certain set of people aren’t in the room when it’s told is clearly based on somebody’s expense. Now ask yourself how many female comics would ever use that joke, either on stage, or even with friends. Now imagine Jimmy Carr doing that joke at a women’s refuge. Now imagine Jimmy Carr having a reverse-Midas problem whereby every microphone he ever touches melts into some sort of rancid liquid marshmallow and we’ll all be happy.

Beautiful Star

Have you heard of Odetta? If you’re a fairweather folkster like me, chances are you probably haven’t. She was an American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a human rights activist, who had Carly Simon weak at the knees and Maya Angelou waxing cosmological. You’ve probably heard of some of the acts she influenced, though: Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, Janis Joplin… she is even indirectly responsible for the career of Bob Dylan, but don’t hold that against her.

Her music is joyful, playful, pissed-off, regretful, angry, and has the power to tie your bowels into knots. The folks at Wears The Trousers Magazine have had the good sense to organise a tribute album, Beautiful Star: The Songs of Odetta, featuring a selection of Odetta’s finest songs sung by a range of established indie artists (Marissa Nadler, Liz Durrett) and up-and-coming, hot-out-of-the-studio new talent (Haunted Stereo, Katey Brooks). Released on November 30th, all proceeds will go to women’s charities (The Fawcett Society and The Women’s Resource Centre), so there really is no excuse not to buy it. Needless to say this tribute to a great under-acknowledged female singer, organised by a feminist music magazine, whose proceeds are being donated to charities aimed at helping women, gets a big feminist thumbs up from EYS. Head on over to their Myspace page and pre-order yourself a good old slice of ear-nourishing feminist do-goodery. Sail away, ladies.

Tweet Your Sherbert

We are proud to announce that Eat Your Sherbert now has its own Twitter page, so you can get updates on the latest posts as and when they happen (as opposed to the twice a week they are supposed to happen but often fail to materialise).

See you in the Tweetosphere!

To femininity and beyond…

The feminist week in bullshit (part 2)

After a slightly nitpicky beginning to the feminist week in bullshit, it would be rude not to mention this spectacular steaming coil of misogyny and pseudo-science, which appeared in newspapers across the board (oh Grauniad, what were you thinking?). It’s hard to know where to even begin with a ‘study’ that didn’t think to analyse any statistics about the presence or absence of fathers before making its sweeping conclusions about family life, conclusions which essentially boil down to the fact that some women must be so cripplingly poor that they see no other option but to resort to having an autonomous identity and sense of individual worth by getting a job and earning their own wage. And when they are forced into such unnatural and unimaginable horror scenarios, their poor confused offspring are left with no choice but to numb the pain by gorging themselves until they burst with sausage roll and crisp sandwiches (on WHITE BREAD), before drowning their hopelessly emasculated sorrows with a molotov cocktail of Fanta and Sunny D, then being driven to school by their heartless (not even wholemeal-)breadwinning  matriarch, if she remembers, on her way to the stinking pit of vice and iniquity which is the workplace for a female parent in the 21st century.

You can practically hear the screech of centuries reversing.

And yet, if people don’t complain loudly enough, this is what the face of (esp. free internet) journalism will ultimately become. Flimsily-concealed agenda-driven ‘scientific’ ‘studies’ attempting to convince us that the dominant paradigm of oppression, greed, capitalism, or another form of gross injustice, is natural and good and we shouldn’t any of us worry our pretty little heads trying to detangle the reality from the immense web of bullshit in which this is all tangled up.

It’s enough to make you want to start paying for papers.

The feminist week in bullshit (part 1)

It’s a shame to be reporting this story under the heading of ‘The Feminist Week In Bullshit’, when the addition of a single pronoun could have earnt it the full-on respectful doffing of the feminist cap, but nonetheless behold the story of enigmatic French photographer/graffiti artist JR, who this week has covered the entire circumference of Ile Saint-Louis in the river Seine with photographs of women’s eyes. Not just any women, that is, but specifically eyes belonging to women from a range of disadvantaged and oppressed backgrounds in the developing world, from poverty-stricken single mothers, to rape victims, to the carers trying to help the legions of hungry, needy, and war-wearied. All staring out unflinchingly at the affluent Parisians as they sashay past en route to the boulot or perhaps to le MacDo. All exposed to the world in giant, unescapable detail, their many tragic stories writ large along the Seine.

Surely this is not the stuff of feminist bullshit? Not in a world full of plastic surgery, pay gaps, porn culture, rape, prostitution, and Richard Littlejohn? Isn’t this actually a celebration of women and a refreshingly relevant and pro-feminist political statement from a (male) artist? Shouldn’t I be all over this like David Cameron in Rupert Murdoch’s bathtub?

Answer: yes. And I am. Or at least, I very much would be, were it not for the well-meaning but unfortunate title given to the project: Women Are Heroes. See that? That’s a thoughtful and pro-feminist project, immediately scuppered by the flipside of the more usual manifestation of the virgin/whore dichotomy. That’s to say, the romanticization of women as a class is as pernicious as the defamation of women as a class. It’s no different from the chivalric code venerating women in exchange for their own sovereignty; assigning a certain set of values (positive, in this case) to a class of people which then forces them to transcend their status as human beings. It’s simple really. Women as a class are neither heroes nor villains. They’re  members of the race homo sapiens, meaning they contain within them the DNA formed slowly over billions of evolutionary years like slow-roasted primordial soup, which DNA allows or causes them (the jury is out, or at least pending publication of the next book by Richard Dawkins) to be decent souls, or dickheads, often both. Just like men, oddly enough. I had hoped that in the 21st century we would be past the whole shackle-rustingly medieval trope of women as visions of moral perfection (when not living embodiments of stinking carnal hellfire filth).

The women whose eyes are currently blazoned across the Ile Saint-Louis are without doubt heroic human beings; had JR only entitled his work These Women Are Heroes, a very different response would have been called for. Such is the power of pronouns. JR take note: one only has to look here to see how annoyingly unheroic women can be.

Yeah but be honest, there are no funny women stand-ups, are there?

Err, in short, yes there are, fool! And here are the videos to prove it. I’m overlooking the proliferation of idiotic comments that inevitably get left after any clip of a woman comedian, which generally take one of two themes: a) it hasn’t got a penis so I won’t laugh at it, or b) it hasn’t got a penis but, luckily for it, I quite fancy lending it mine.

Consider this a cheat sheet for the next time you meet a comedy neanderthal whose idea of an amusing act is some prick taking the piss out of an accountant in the front row for half an hour before engaging in a series of poorly-constructed stories whose raison d’etre is some sort of wank mime.

Or worse, Jimmy Carr.

Ava Vidal

Hils Barker

Josie Long

Liz Bentley

Shappi Khorsandi

Sarah Millican

Kerry Godliman

Isy Suttie

*** update: more funny women (a history lesson) (thanks Rich) ***

Josie Lawrence

Victoria Wood

Phyllis Diller

Jo Brand

Smack the Pony

Lungs

Florence Welch releasing an album entitled ‘Lungs’ may strike you as the equivalent of Martin Clunes releasing an album called ‘Ears’ or Katie Price releasing an album called ‘Boobs’: she certainly does have quite the pair. And her tremendous airbags are used mostly for the good on her debut album, the review of which comes limping in lamer than a one-legged donkey in a neon bumbag, weeks after the event of its release. Having blogged repeatedly about her in the past, when we had a more respectable amount of finger-pulse connection, our excitement was running high about the promise of a full-length offering from the tangerine-headed prodigious young foghorn. And with exquisitely-crafted statues of 4-minute pop gold ‘Dog Days Are Over’ and ‘Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)’ bedecking the record, it would have been hard for it to disappoint; an album full of these sonic gems would have earned a place in the Top One of the greatest records committed to disc (involving a harp and sung by someone whose name isn’t Joanna).

But an album of wall-to-wall styled messy-choppy harp exuberence this is not, nor was it meant to be; the album is layered, and we can track Florence’s metamorphosis from sketchy garage outfit, through her punk phase, fledging into a shouty savant siren, all rumbling and controlled rage, dark and polished as a beetle shell. This progression is made the more obvious for those willing to shell out the extra £3 for the Deluxe Version, which  draws for its extra padding on early demos and remixes of the stronger songs, like a mosquito with self-esteem issues, or a dog licking its own balls. It’s a progression that others in less of a hurry to reap the hurricane of hipster hype would have perhaps tracked over 2 separate albums, but with Time Magazine’s winged chariot and a pre-emptive Brit Award looming large, we find on Lungs a veritably scrapped together patchwork quilt of styles (which, if the image is too wholesome and unFlorentine, is then used to throw a body into a lake).

It’s not hard to see why this album has had the blogosphere, the critics, and the Guardian supplementeers salivating into their mochachinos: Florence Welch has revealed herself in possession of the best melodic piano-/harp-pop sensibilities working in the world today, coupled with a darkly poetic lyricism; and the production on the more epic tracks provides the perfect theatrics for the most glorious of controlled explosions that is That Voice. One track which didn’t make the cut for the B-side material is her cover of Beirut’s Postcards From Italy, but you can hear Zach Condon’s phrasing undulating gently through the record, especially on the exclaimed highs on ‘Howl’. Endearding touches humanize the woman behind the Machine, like the extra ‘w’s she adds to the R-words on ‘Hurricane Drunk’, which will probably earn the ‘British Eccentric’ crown passed on from Kate Bush. Ghoulish warewolf narratives and dubiously-conceived paens to domestic violence notwithstanding, Florence’s greatest triumphs are her plinky harp ditties which her voice manages to whip up into anthems; ‘Dog Days’, ‘Rabbit Heart’, and ‘Hurricane Drunk’ are the three standout tracks, closely followed by the pared-back but jauntily percussive ‘Two Lungs’, the chorus of which should be enough to bag the Mercury alone, if the criteria were ‘originality plus likeliness to stick in one’s head’ and not ‘sod this let’s just give it to the one no-one thinks is going to win’. Ms. Welch may not have produced a bag of Rabbit Hearts, but she has sufficently pulled the rabbit out of the hat to offer up the most impressive album of the year so far.