Dazed and Confused

Just fucking spare me

D’know, there are some things that leave me so deeply bewildered by their popularity that I suspect I’ve unknowingly had a run in with a flux capacitor. Whereas all around me are foaming with excitement at the vagaries of popular culture, I’m this close to being smothered by bafflement. Course, you will be dying to know what these vagaries are so here you bloody well are:

Women’s magazines: Who in the fuck wants to read about Rihanna’s latest nip-slip, baking muffins, dying infants and blow-job techniques? This shit has all the relevance of bloody ra-ra skirts.

Astrology: What the fuck? No, really, what the fuck? Deriving from the position of Jupiter that you’re going to lose your job is so close to insanity that you have to winder why Russell Grant hasn’t been lobotomised yet.

ITV1: You know that quote about religion being the opium of the masses? Well modern Britain has swapping Catholicism for Scott and fucking Bailey. ITV1 produces the sort of telly that you sit stunned bomb victims in front of.

Kate Middleton: Jesus, like we need a new definition of the word ‘bland’. She’s an icon for the hard of thinking and those so fearful of change that they develop raging diarrhoea every time the milkman’s late.

The X-Factor: No, I don’t want to see people being pilloried, out-warbled, offered laughable platitudes, stripped of their individuality or sold to Heat magazine. And I certainly don’t want to see it every Saturday night between August and Christmas.

Marks & Spencer: What an utterly hateable fucking shop. If the seething unoriginality of the clothes doesn’t make me drip with bile, the blank-eyed, thin-lipped, wandering post-menopausal women do. I swear, I’d buy used knickers from a car boot sale before I ever handed my cash over in such a spirit-sapping lair.

Michael Macintyre: No, you toffed-up wanker, musing about toasters and the shapes of clouds does not comedy make. It does, though, make for an arena full of people who have such a deeply underdeveloped sense of humour that they still snigger at their own bowel production.

Sigh. My bafflement continues...

Loony Tunes

Sick buckets at the ready

Being a woman is pretty fucking fabulous but do you know what occasionally makes it just that bit shit? No, it's not the crimson tide or building site yawps. It's bollocks like this: a compilation CD I've just spied called 100 Hits: Woman. Yes, it is this that makes me want to grow my own knackersack and furiously twang it.
Christ, how I hate stuff like this. The CD contains 100 songs by wimmin singers and is squarely aimed at wimmin listeners, whoever the fuck they are. It's a vile beast that has been knocked out by some crass music company execs where it is assumed that the nation's female population wants to holler along, misty-eyed, to songs that celebrate femininity/ decry men/ rage against relationships/ promise world domination. It's like a management speak for women who still wear hair scrunchies.
For fuck's sake, save me will you? Exactly how patronising does a product need to get? And at what point did the difference between women and men become so completely gulf-like that the gender groups now demand diametrically opposing music? More than that, the assumption that women want to hear music that's only being sung by women makes me want to spew through my nose. It's meaningless muff-gazing at its worst. It makes me want to lie in wait for any female who buys this hideous blarting just so I can point them in the direction of the 21st Century.
Look, it's the same patronising arse-fodder as the likes of the pink n cuddly Run for Life  campaign or the stunningly disheartening TV show Loose Women. They also make me want to rip off my bra and strangle someone with it. Why in the giddy name of shit do women need their own races or their own talk shows? Can't runners just be runners and viewers just be viewers? I'm assuming that women are as capable of knocking out 10K or understanding intellectual chat as anyone else on the planet.
Problem is that some women think that these steaming bowls of wrong are all about equality. However, my fellow fanny-scratchers, they're not. In fact they're about segregation. That's right, giving the lovely little laydees somewhere to go and play while the rest of the world gets on with the serious topic of living its life.
So if I want to take up running I'll do it with the rest of the runners out there and if I want stimulating discussion I'll jostle with the rest of the population over Radio 4. Oh and if I want to listen to music I'll listen to it according to my own musical taste. Aye, and not according to whether my love tunnel has seen the business end of a cold speculum. 100 Hits? 100 Shits more like.

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.