Like most failed bloggers I prefer to think of myself more generally as a failed writer. I’ve failed to finish that novel I was working on, failed to put on that play I was thinking about. I’ve been ignored by the finest literary agents this country has to offer, been knocked back by the most prominent production companies working today and had a sitcom rejected by none other than the British Broadcasting Corporation. I’ve failed completely at the very highest of levels.
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As long-time readers of The Zero will know, I try very hard to be always slightly behind the times, a good few feet from the cutting edge, only vaguely aware of what the French call ‘Le Zeitgeist’. You’ll recall how a few weeks back there was a bit of media interest in the campaign against so-called lads’ mags and the lousy, exploitative, demeaning, sexualised, woman-hating culture they encourage. That interest having more or less died down it’s time for me to get writing like it’s something new.
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Here at The Zero we like a bit of the old feminism. We like a bit of the world view that says woman is the [racial slur] of the world, that men have been running the place and doing it badly, that men as a group have been doing harm to women as a group since the two groups first got together and one beat hell out of the other and told it it couldn’t vote for about the next 100,000 years.
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It’s tricky, this male feminism lark. It’s hard, looking like the enemy I’m trying to fight. My latest struggle in this patriarchal madhouse for which I am demographically responsible has been one of the toughest yet: organising a stag do. My oldest and truest friend, my most loyal and loving confidante has, in the absence of a better alternative, asked me to be his best man. What an honour. What a privilege. What a pain in the ass it’s been.
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Not infrequently have I banged on about the potential power of social networking as a force for do-goodery. Not infrequently have I banged on about the tedium of social networking in the hands of most of its users. Conflicted as I am I’m finally a big fan of Twitter, having introduced a blanket ban on friends who might want to tell the world about their old washing machines, their new washing machines or their tedious marriages. Limiting my follows to political types, right ons, social workers and general contrarians, I have a feed of wishy-washy, liberally, pinko-commie news, ideas and arguments.
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It feels like we’re about due an update on the No More Page 3 campaign. It’s been six weeks since I added my influential signature to the petition to rid The Sun of its tits and yet the quickest of flicks through the paper indicates up to ten nipples a week are still featuring prominently. Indeed, this week marked the beginning of 2012’s Page 3 Idol in which members of the public are invited to display their breasts in the hope of winning a grisly five grand and a shot at a long-term career in tit display. If ever there was any doubt that The Sun encourages its readers to judge women on the quality and condition of their breasts, here we have an competition in which its readers are actually encouraged to judge women on the quality and condition of their breasts.
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Half the adult population of the planet has breasts, a fact the other half’s been struggling with for quite some time. Now, I don’t need to bang on about patriarchy and the objectification of women in much detail, partly because I’ve done it enough already and partly because it’s obvious and everywhere. It’s there in our horrific record on domestic violence, in the difference in salaries for women and men, in the difference in pocket money for girls and boys, in the attitude that says a man’s a player and a woman’s a slag, in pornography that casts women as sluts to be simultaneously lusted after and looked down on, in the pornification of pop culture that has singers writhing in bikinis to sell records, in the mutilation of women’s bodies pumped full of silicone and collagen and numbed with botox. Turns out I needed to bang on about it all.
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They did. They killed Troy Davis. Here was a guy convicted of shooting a policeman, a guy who did 20 years on death row in Georgia. Over the course of those 20 years most of the witnesses who put him there changed their minds about what they saw, some pointing the finger elsewhere. Over the course of those 20 years they didn’t find a murder weapon or a scrap of DNA to put Troy Davis as the killer. Seems like maybe he was innocent. They killed him anyway.
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When last we met we were talking about my efforts to stick it to the man via our student magazine. The upcoming issue is themed around sex and I’ve been doing my bit to relate it to ethicalism. Just because it’s a guilt-free, joyful pleasurefest doesn’t mean I can’t turn it into a baffling ordeal of moral dilemmas. I’ve been looking at porn.
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