Got Mail?

Fake, but who'd guess?

Don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not but I hate the Daily Mail. No, hate isn’t a strong enough word. I utterly fucking despise it. As a freelance journalist it was the only newspaper I refused to write for and, frankly, if I were so desperate for a shit that I was turtling and a copy of the DM was the only available toilet paper I’d wipe with my own clothes instead.

Apart from the fact that it displays the insight and intelligence of a pissed-up lunatic in a bus station, what with its panicky headlines about immigrants/ mothers/ homosexuality/ Europe/ immigrants, it’s got this weird Sutcliffe-like obsession with taking down every woman it meets.

Jesus, look at the features it runs in the paper and the daily spewing of girl-hating insanity that purports to be its website. If it’s not tearing a new arsehole for fifty per cent of the population by deriding working mothers/ non-working mothers/ happy mothers/ depressed mothers/ mothers just daring to take a shit every 24 hours it’s bitterly haranguing female celebs for getting fatter or thinner or older or scruffy or wrinkled or cellulite-y or any other variable between alive and dead.

Even fucking worse is the way that it presents these features, by using women to bully women. Women may write the gasp-worthy features in their bid to get printed but these 1000-word spoutings are always barbed and written or edited to incite ragingly bitter debates about the worthiness of said women. It’s the national equivalent of watching two arseholed girls tugging at each others’ hair in the street on a Saturday night.

Thing is, the DM even manages to make the female writers victims. Clever, eh? Yeah, they may seem in control by sticking their names at the business end of however many column inches but the fact is that the Daily Mail then throws this fodder (however well intentionally written) to the baying crowds of its pitchfork-waving readers who take it upon themselves to decree whether said woman should be sent back to the kitchen fucking sink.

It’s not just the deeply confessional nature of its features that does women such a staggering disservice but it’s the equally staggering bitterness with which they are received which makes me want to weep. In fact I don’t know why the DM bothers offering space to its female writers. It could save time and effort by rigging a set of stocks outside DM Towers and slapping women in them instead.

And yeah, this rage of mine has been given a sound prod by the recent Samantha Brick debacle but that’s the frigging least of it. Female writers have been spilling their most intimate of guts for the delight, delectation and judgement of the DM’s readers for one fuck of a long time. Thanks girls. Thanks a bleedin' lot.

But what the fuck do I know? While the DM has enraged readers on one side and female writers willing to spill and run on the other the paper will keep weaving its vile magic over the Great British public. Me? I’ll stick to taking more notice of my toilet paper. At least it’ll keep my hands clean.