Young, white (of course) male walking down the street. He has unusually large eyes. Every time a young, conventionally attractive woman walks past his eyes follow her. However, this particular young man is insecure in his role as objectifier not, as you might hope, because he realises women are people not property but *gasp!* he’s sweaty! One eye follows the women walking past him while the other swivels, chameleon-like, to his dreadful sweaty underarms. Cut to him cavorting with a young woman on the beach who looks away, dissapointed, as his eyes swivel to his sweat patches. Then, this beleagured young man hits upon a solution while he’s staring at a young woman on a bus. Sure For Men antiperspirant! The final shot shows him walking down the street, both eyes following two women who walk towards him. Now his eyes can follow them past him, flicking into the back of his head before snapping back, pupils pointing forward, accompanied by a smug smile.

As with many male anti-perspirant adverts Sure uses female objectification to sell this gunk to male viewers. I always wonder if these ads actually work. If randy, poorly social skilled young men see these ads and think “Yes! Finally! A way to ensure BOTH my eyes and 100% of my attention are available to stare at women because after all, that’s what they’re for!”?

Believe it or not there are some interesting points in the subtext of this ad. Women, of course, never sweat. Sweat patches on a woman are shameful nasty things that must be punished with anti perspirant, deoderant and perfume. However sweat on men has, up until recently, been acceptable. A sign of manly activity (even if it is only a red-faced jog to the bus) rather than stinky shame. What this advert does is add to the growing pressure on men to look perfect, seen in the growth of men’s moisturiser ads and the exultation of David Beckham as groomed male extraordinaire. It seems that as pressure on women to be size zero perfectionists the pressure on men increases too. The advertisers will seemingly stop at nothing to destroy everyone’s self esteem and thus ensure we consume their snake oil.

The reaction of the woman on the beach is interesting too – is she annoyed by his sweat or annoyed that he’s letting it bother him? I’m inclined to think the latter seeing as the whole point of the ad is to encourage men to be sweat patch free and thus concentrate fully on ogling young women.

Because, you know, that’s what we’re for – men’s titillation.

*Due to my own absentmindedness I believed this advert was for ‘Sure’ anti perspirant. In fact, it’s Lynx ‘Sharp Focus’ and the nauseating ad is here

This failure to create genuine legal parity between men and women is having “a detrimental effect on women in many countries – sometimes to a devastating degree,”

No shit, sherlock. Next time somebody tries to tell you men and women are equal, that feminism isn’t relevant anymore, that all the battles have been won…point them to this UN report.

Some more statistics to chew over:

• at least 53 States still do not outlaw rape within marriage, and men frequently enjoy total impunity for physical as well as sexual violence against their wives

• while more women are working than ever before – 1.2 billion in 2007 – they are also more likely than men to get low-paid jobs without any social protection and basic rights

• access to labour markets and to decent jobs is crucial to enhancing gender equality, and most regions have a long way to go in realizing the untapped potential women offer for economic development

• It is estimated that one in four pregnant women currently receives no antenatal care, and that more than 40 per cent give birth without the assistance of a skilled attendant

More on this later

The Daily Mail, always guaranteed to raise a feminist’s hackles, ran this article today. Entitled “A role model for ordinary women? No, Miss England finalist is fat, lazy and a poster girl for ill health” Monica Grenfell lambasts Chloe Marshall, the first size 16 Miss England finalist as

“an ambassador not for the beautiful larger lady as she’d have us believe but a poster girl for diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, cancers and all the other devastating and potentially fatal health problems that are caused or exacerbated by obesity”

As Sizenet points out, these health problems are only for the physically inactive. Chloe has said in earlier interviews (for the Daily Mail no less) that she exercises regularly and eats healthily. I’m not going to dispute the accuracy of Grenfell’s writing, Sizenet have already done that for me. What I am going to do is reveal what she represents and how poisonous she, and the beauty myth she represents, can be to women.

Grenfell’s book list on Amazon reads like an awful lot of women’s bookshelves. First on the list is her ‘Crash Diet : Lose 7 lbs in 7 days“. It’s rather interesting, then, that Grenfell recommends a ‘crash diet‘ when she seems to feel that Chloe’s insistences that size zero models (only a UK size four! Grenfell shrieks – that’s a practically gargantuan 30 inch bust, 23 inch waist and 32 inch hips!) starve themselves equates to her “telling the rest of us that being fat is great and that the only way to be a healthy weight is by starving yourself.” Evidently starving yourself so that you too can have super-fast weightloss that’ll all come back on as soon as you stop eating like an anorexic is fine if done under a nutritionamalist’s guidance, especially if you’ve bought their book and financed their country home. But wait! Once you’ve starved those 7lbs off you can’t stop there! What about your Bust Arms and Back? You’d better firm those up. But you can’t stop there! What about your bottom? Your stomach? You can never, must never stop perfecting and toning and starving your body until you too can look like a Miss England finalist. After all, as a former judge of this competition that teaches women to value themselves by the most ridiculously arbitrary standards, Grenfell obviously sees these women as the pinnacle of what we all should be. Oh look, she does!

“When I was a Miss England judge I was struck by how elegant, charming and yes, fit, the girls were. None of them was underweight.”

Evidently anyone who is over a BMI of 17 cannot be elegant, fit or charming, these are personality attributes you can only have if you have the body fat percentage of a clothes hanger. On the subject of BMI, Grenfell seems to think that it “indicat[es] her levels of fat”. Wow, for one of them scienterrific nutritionamalists she sure doesn’t know her job. BMI is your Body Mass Index. It does not, indeed cannot, measure your levels of fat. It compares your weight to your height and puts you in various categories. For the record I run 5 times a week, am a healthy vegan, have recently run a half marathon and I fit neatly into the ‘overweight’ category of BMI (as do many other healthy, normal people) Muscle weighs more than fat so if you are even remotely active in an organised way it will skew your BMI. There are lots of issues with BMI, not least the way it is used to bash women over the head by body fascists such as Grenfell.

But back to Grenfell, the charming insiduous snake that she is. Possbily her two most interesting titles are “The Revenge Diet – Make Him Sorry He Dumped You! Lose 15lbs In A Month!” and “The Beat Your Body Chaos Diet“. The first book’s title presumes that your boyfriend dumped you because you were fat. It had nothing to do with whether the relationship worked or any other normal reason that people split up with each other, no, it was your fat disgusting body and frankly it was a miracle he even looked at you in the first place. So get revenge! Lose weight on yet another crash diet! (leading to yo-yo body weight, a binge/purge mentality, low self esteem, illness, malnutrition, and eating disorder-like behaviour around food) learn to hate yourself and punish your all-too-deserving body by withholding food and scrutinising every inch of your physique! ‘Beat’ your body! Not with a stick (that’s Grenfell’s job and besides, it’d leave unsightly marks) but with your inner self hatred! Beat your body into submission! Even if you’re 6’4 and naturally curvy, with enough beating you will shrink to a UK size four!

To Grenfell the only thing that matters about a woman is her weight. This is all she is judged on (and Grenfell has deigned herself a worthy judge, after all she’s judged Miss England, and with the ability to coldy value somebody on their looks alone why is this woman not sitting in on rape cases?) and if she improves it enough she will be worthy. Worthy of men, worthy of ‘charm and grace’ and worthy to walk the streets as a role model to the young women of today proving that if you just lose weight you’ll finally be good enough.

Grenfell voices what images tell us every day. You are just not good enough unless you are in a constant battle with your body to lose weight, tone up and slim down. To Grenfell we should all be gutless. Preferably with empty, concave bellies being ‘charming’ and ‘graceful’, living on 1000 calories a day, caught in an eating disorder and dying inside. God forbid we should let a woman like Marshall into the public eye to show that beautiful doesn’t have to mean anorexic, to show young women that healthy is beautiful, whatever your size.

Maybe you should contact her and tell her what you think.

“Button Moon was a popular children’s television programme broadcast in the United Kingdom in the 1980s on the ITV Network. Thames Television produced each episode which lasted ten minutes and featured the adventures of Mr. Spoon who, in each episode, would travel to Button Moon in his homemade rocket-ship. All of the characters within the show were based on kitchen utensils, as well as many of the props.”

Each episode begins with a delightful scene of Mr Spoon, his wife Mrs Spoon (who of course takes her husband’s name, thereby reliquinshing her identity, property rights and individuality) and his daughter ‘Tiny Tea Spoon’ (thus named she is belittled, the very act of naming her after the frankly inferior-to-your-average-spoon teaspoon enforcing her subordinate place in the family as a daughter, setting her up for an inferior place in society as a woman.) We usually see Mrs Spoon involved in some charming aspect of childrearing such as teaching her daughter to read, reinforcing the caring, nurturing mother role that women are supposedly better at despite any genetic or biological evidence to corroborate this. Mr Spoon surveys his family with a warm sense of patriarchal pride as he walks out to his spaceship to explore the skies. He then proceeds to leave his family behind (the skies are not for women to explore after all) and, once safely ensconced in his phallic spaceship, he shoots into space, each ejaculation into the skies (which incidentally have clouds, gravity, rain and giant taps that talk – thereby proving that Button Moon is a ridiculous metanarrative of male dominance with no empirical basis behind it, just like patriarchy) a success, driving him into the black skies of exploration and adventure like all the much-lauded male heroes created by patriarchy in fiction as part of the female=passive, male=active paradigm.

Once he is in space Mr Spoon explores Button Moon and uses his telescope (another phallic shaped instrument) to survey more and more of the universe. Meanwhile Mrs Spoon and her daughter sit at home, awaiting father’s return where he will no doubt regale them with tales of his adventures in his phallic spaceship of male privilege.

Thank goodness such rife sexism and gender role enforcement is no longer on our screens. 

gut·less /ˈgʌtlɪs/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[guht-lis]

[Origin: 1600–10 for literal sense; gut + -less]

“During one section of the footage, one of the boys looks into the camera and asks: “Kicking is allowed, isn’t it?”

One of the boys shouts, “he’s crying”, after punching the second child in the face.”

And, just to show that being a violent thug who enjoys forcing people smaller than you to fight as you enjoy the show also includes being a misogynist arsehole, one of the organisers is heard saying:

“You’re fighting like girls. Fight properly”

Fight properly, like a ‘real man’. A ‘real man’ that organises fights between children and sees it as entertainment. A ‘real man’ who views human life as only existing for their titillation (be it violent or otherwise). A ‘real man’ that posts this video on YouTube and the other ‘real men’ who watch it.

How exactly do you fight like a girl? With Barbies? Feathers?

If ‘fighting like a girl’ means not being associated with the scum of the earth, the violent misogynistic imbecilic oxygen-wasters, then I think it needs to be reclassified from an insult to a compliment.

Become the hottest, coolest most famous bimbo ever !

Welcome to Miss Bimbo. Enter the exciting world of the first ever, virtual fashion game !
Become the most famous, beautiful, sought after bimbo across the globe!

• Find your own cool place to live.
• Find a fun job to pay for your needs and all the clothes a Bimbo could possibly want.
• Shop for the latest fashions and become the trendsetting bimbo in town !
• Become a socialite and skyrocket to the top of fame and popularity.
• Date that famous hottie you’ve had your eye on and show the Bimbo world the social starlet you are !
• Even resort to meds or plastic surgery. Stop at nothing to become the reigning bimbo !
• Tackle your 104 tasks as quick as possible to become the rising star bimbo !!

Are you ready to become the hottest of hot Bimbos !?!

Apart from the crimes against exclamation use, what could be so bad about that? Well let’s lift a quote from the Guardian website:

“The aim of the Miss Bimbo beauty contest game, which was launched in Britain last month, is to become the “hottest, coolest, most famous bimbo in the whole world”, and contestants who compete against each other are told to “stop at nothing”, even “meds or plastic surgery”, to ensure their dolls win.

Children are given a naked virtual character to look after. They compete against other players to earn “bimbo” dollars so they can dress her in sexy outfits and take her clubbing. They are given missions, including securing plastic surgery at the game’s clinic to give their dolls bigger breasts, and they have to keep her at her target weight with diet pills.

Although it is free to play, when the contestants run out of virtual cash they have to send text messages costing £1.50 each or use PayPal to top up their accounts.”

From CNN, apparently the site advises that:

“Bimbo dollars is ‘the cabbage,’ ‘bread,’ the ‘mula’ you’ll need to buy nice things and to get by in bimbo world. To earn some bimbo cash you will have to (gasp) work or find a boyfriend to be your sugar daddy and hook you up with a phat expense account”

So. 9-16 year old girls, the site’s largest demographic, are playing a game to hook up with ‘sugar daddies’ to finance their lifestyle, dye their hair, indulge in eating -disorder-like behaviour (diet pills do not a happy relationship with food, and your body, make) and have invasive and dangerous breast augmentation surgery to ‘become the hottest of hot bimbos!!!(!)’

I could be enraged by this. OK, I am. But what saddens me most is how I am not surprised. Young girls grow up with an onslaught of images of women who are airbrushed, painted and dieted to unattainable forms of ‘beauty’ (beauty defined by a cosmetics, fashion and diet industry who profit from us all hating ourselves because, in our desperation, we buy their snake oil hoping it will be the magic elixir that makes us look how these industries are telling us to look) and watching ‘role models’ like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie live off men’s money (whether it’s their father’s or partner’s money it’s immaterial, they are not earning the money themselves nor do they see a need to be independent financially), diet themselves into skeletons and live entirely vacuous lives. Where are the intelligent, independent female role models? And when they do dare to pop up, where is the press championing them rather than discussing their clothes/cleavage/gender?

What do we expect? We exist in a culture that is so noxious to growing minds (any minds really, but growing minds especially) that it’s a wonder any girls grow up vaguely mentally stable at all. The cult of celebrity, especially the cult of skinny, dim workshy female celebrities, only reinforces that being a ‘bimbo’ is the way to go is you want success. And by success we mean having the BMI of a starving African, enough cash to wear a different shade of UGG boot everyday and appearing on TV as a ‘reality tv star’ earning enough kudos to open the odd supermarket and eventually die young of a cocaine overdose.

Incidentally, the site’s owner said:

“It is not a bad influence for young children. They learn to take care of their bimbos. The missions and goals are morally sound and teach children about the real world.” He added: “The breast operations are just one part of the game and we are not encouraging young girls to have them, just reflecting real life.”

‘Morally sound’? Teaching young girls that the only reason they exist is to fit a ridiculous stereotype, avoid work, rely on men financially (essentially prostituting themselves), and the the route to success is through extreme dieting, dangerous surgery and being a ‘bimbo’?

Not morally sound, but it certainly prepares girls for the real world. 9-16 year olds will not see this game as a warning, a joke, a tongue-in-cheek look at society, they’ll see it as normal. It’s part of the many many messages sent to girls each day that dumb is good and skinny and dumb is even better.

And just because it reflects the ‘real world’, that doesn’t make it OK to perpetuate these stereotypes. How convenient that the creator is male, and sees no harm in this pink (of course! pink!) site reinforcing gender stereotypes and using a derogatory term ‘bimbo’ to sell his misogynist wares to unsuspecting 10 year olds.

Fucker.

But. BUT. Not all women do. However much email spam, porn sites and the media will tell you that to be a RealMan™ you need at least 24 inches so you can fuck her so hard it hurts (pleasurable sex in an atmosphere of equality and care is obviously not as important as a trip to A&E, and what woman doesn’t find the idea of a permanently damaged cervix arousing?) and presumably strut around the place as a modern-day Priapus to proclaim your dominance over man (and woman) kind, I’ve never met any woman who is bothered. I like big cock, but only when it’s attached to a partner who realises that a lot of positions are out of bounds or have to be approached with care, and who doesn’t just pound away at you like a pneumatic drill. You can be a lot more spontaneous and experimentative with small and average sized cock, as you don’t need to concern yourself so much with the possibility of pain or discomfort.

What’s important about a lover isn’t his cock size, it’s how he communicates with you and whether he has the right attitude. I’ve talked to and read about many women who had good lovers, bad lovers, exciting lovers, boring lovers…and cock size was never ever mentioned. It just doesn’t matter. (Incidentally, with smaller penises g-spot stimulation is a breeze – it’s just the right length, and when receiving oral the whole cock can be taken into the mouth at once with no worry about gagging or jaw ache.) Straight men like boobs, and ultimately as long as they get to play with them they couldn’t care less about what size or shape they are. It’s the same with straight women. Straight women want cock. That’s it. And my advice to both genders is the same – if a partner is dissatisfied with your cock, your tits, your arse, your pussy…get rid. It’s not your problem, it’s theirs.

Good sex doesn’t come from cock size, boob size, body fat ratios, hair colour…good sex comes from the brain. It’s about communicating with your partner(s), being willing to change your style and try out new things, having an open mind and always wanting to raise your game. With this attitude, both partners will have satisfying, wonderful sexual encounters no matter what size or shape they or various parts of their anatomy might be.

Now, the male gaze has been well documented, argued with and discussed. It’s not a one-size-fits-all patriarchal hat, many images and media ephemera exist for the gaze of women, not men. Although you could argue that women have internalised the male gaze and are now women gazing as men at women well…anyway. There is one place, as a woman, that you can feel the male gaze almost constantly. You may not be aware of it, indeed many women have conditioned themselves to not see being seen, much like a nervous public speaker ignores their audience, but once you step off the promontory and up the lights all of a sudden you’re aware of all these…eyes…

I had it happen today. I stepped out my front door and waited to cross the road to get to my car. The man driving the first car that came past from my left slowed to negotiate the double-parked section by my house and used the opportunity to stare at me. Not just a glance, he stared for a good few seconds and made eye contact. Now if I spot this sort of situation about to happen I prepare a one finger salute, or pull a funny face. But sometimes I am taken by surprise and I’m caught, like a rabbit in headlights, in the gaze of whatever man has decided he has a right to survey me like a slab of meat. Now, a bit of eye contact and some friendly flirting is fine – all part of human interaction. What I am flagging up here is the aggressive stare, where it seems the only reaction the gazer is trying to provoke from the gazee is intimidation. When offered a sarcastic stare back, or a one finger salute, or even a face-pull, the reaction is always anger. A ‘how dare you react negatively to my appraisal of your worth’ kind of anger. Which is why I always feel dissapointed if I don’t manage to fit one of these physical retorts, because I do enjoy irritating such people.

Anyway my point here is that sometimes, if I am not bumbling along in my oblivious bubble, it really freaks me out just how watched I am. All I need do is walk down the street, go into a shop, anything…and I can feel I’m being watched. And it’s really quite unnerving once you realise it. But why? Why am I stared at? Men aren’t stared at (indeed, if you read Norah Vincent’s ‘Self Made Man’ – men avoid anything other than a cursory glance, as anything else is deemed aggressive and can turn into something nasty) so why is it ok to stare at women? Why is it ok to make eye contact not in a ‘hey there’ flirty kinda way, but in a ‘I’m going to make you a sexual object and there’s nothing you can do to stop me’ kinda way?

Women are property. We can be stared at in such an aggressive way because men *own* us. Of course they can stare at us, that’s what we’re for. Our bodies are not our own, they are to be stared at, judged, fantasised about and used for male pleasure (see Figleaf’s discussions concerning women as the no-sex class, we are viewed as sexless and therefore stripped of the power in our sexuality) We are owned, disempowered and objectified by this gaze, all too many women see it as affirmation of their worth rather than the exertion of the imbalanced power relationship that leaves them valued only for their appearance.

So what can we do, faced with this gaze, this exertion of power from a minority of men every day? Well…a little. Firstly, show we aren’t intimidated by these appraisals. Fuck being judged on your appearance – make a funny face, give a one finger salute…whatever. A confident show of disregard for their aggresive stare will annoy them, and while it may not change their ways, it’ll sure make you feel better. Secondly, don’t view these stares as an affirmation of your worth. Your worth lies in your value as a person – physically, emotionally, sexually and psychologically, not in how many men stared at you. Fuck the beauty myth, dress how you want to and know that you as a person are worth a whole lot more than how perky your tits are/big your arse is/tight your top is. Be proud of your body, of course, but don’t see being eyed up like a slab of steak in a butchers as an affirmation of your worth, you’re worth way more than that.

In my experience this comment used to be thrown about by misogynist arses who used it as a retort for a woman getting angry, upset or just feeling any emotion remotely powerfully. After all, quietly comforming to the concept of ideal womanhood does not allow you to shout “fuck off!” at someone who is deliberately picking on you, or telling you what they’d like to do to your various orifices simply because you dared to walk past their building site/van/cafe table. It’s obvious why this comment is used, it relies upon the woman-as-inferior paradigm whereby being called a girl/woman/sissy is an insult because my goodness, WHO would want to be called a woman?!? As well as making obvious your inferiority by calling you just what you are (as if nobody knew you were female! Well, that certainly puts you in your place!) it disregards a woman’s right to have genuine, powerful emotional reactions to anything. Men can be angry, irritable and fed up any day of the month (ok, they can’t cry or show ‘woman-like’ ‘weakness’ but this just goes to show how restrictive and oppressive these gender roles are to all genders) but if a woman shows anything other than delight at fluffy kittens, a peacable smile and eyelash-fluttering gratitude at leery chat up lines then well, she MUST be on her period.

And while, obviously, this attitude from men is to be dealt with via a reasoned (women can reason? Gasp!) discussion of how ridiculous this concept is (or, if necessary, some cherry picked obscenities but please, avoid cunt – it’s not an insult it’s a body part), this attitude from women must be nipped in the bud. Now, the women who propagate this myth tend to use a different method to the aforementioned men. These women will often be heard saying “oh just say you were on your period, then nobody will mind you were a bitch” or “having a period gives us the right to be unreasonable”. Uh huh. And having a fist gives me the right to beat people.

Using your period as an excuse for being unpleasant? Evidently you have no control over anything you do, and on top of that you’re adding to the myth that women only break out of the quiet, pleasant wallflower mould when they are menstruating. Either way you are actually relegating yourself to the moral level of slime (no offence to any fine morally upstanding slime out there) by using a myth that disempowers women and adds to the woman=inferior paradigm to behave however you wish.

Most women have periods.  They bleed for a few days, they often feel more emotional than usual, and that’s about it. It’s not carte blanche to torture people around you, and it’s not a biological occurence that makes you inferior.

Guys, don’t use it as an insult, it makes you an idiot.

Gals, don’t use it as an excuse, grow the hell up.