Regarding the recent AmazonFail fiasco (see here and here if you’ve been under a rock for the past week, or haven’t succumbed to Twitter) I emailed Amzon via my Amazon account to complain. Today, 6 days later, I received this reply:

Hello,

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

Warmest regards

Prabhu Ponmudi
Amazon.co.uk
We’re Building Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company
==============================

I’d say that’s a pretty honest apology. Hopefully the lesson Amazon (and other companies) have learnt is that Twitter, Facebook and blogging are a really good reason to have your PR department working at weekends and Bank Holidays…

Oh my. PMS Buddy:

Welcome to PMSBuddy.com!

PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on “that time of the month” – when things can get intense for what may seem to be no reason at all.

For women, this is a great way to give people in your life a heads-up of when you might be feeling a bit irritable without having an awkward conversation.

What’s more, we will not only keep you informed, but will give you some free advice on what to do about it. With PMSBuddy.com, there is no reason to ever be blindsided by PMS again. PMSBuddy.com – Saving relationships, one month at a time!

Let’s dissect this one section at a time, much as we should dissect the creators of PMS Buddy. Firstly ““that time of the month” – when things can get intense for what may seem to be no reason at all.” No reason at all. Except, presumably, for the misogynist chavinist attitudes that cause you to seek out this handy tool in the first place. This concept is part of the ‘oh noes! Menstruation!’ bullshit that patriarchy (voiced by men and women) pushes constantly. As I’ve blogged about before, menstruation and PMS is used to disempower women’s emotions by misogynists of every gender. Male misogynists use it to explain any behaviour other than open-mouthed sexual persmissiveness and an adoption of the ‘pregnant, silent and in the kitchen’ mother role, and female misogynists use it as an excuse to be spiteful and unpleasant as the social construct of their gender role disenables them from showing any strong emotion. Perhaps if the femlae misogynists who used this as an excuse and the male misogynists who used it to belittle women’s emotions (“she wouldn’t suck you off and then screamed at you for kickin’ her down the stairs? Must be fucking PMS mate”) dropped the PMS myth then the delighftul scumbags who dreamt up PMS Buddy would have to return to their Kleenex-strewn desks and continue jacking off to bukkake.

“For women, this is a great way to give people in your life a heads-up of when you might be feeling a bit irritable without having an awkward conversation.”

Imagine the email “hey everyone! I might be a bit irritable for the next week or so. Not because my normally repressed emotions need to get out somehow before they psychologically destroy me but because my uterus will be shedding lumps of lining and blood into my knickers. I’m so glad PMS Buddy lets me communicate this so we can avoid an awkward conversation! Bye!”

Ah, the shame of having a vagina. How embarrassing it is to have a monthly cycle. How awkward the conversation when you explain to someone that the reason you aren’t behaving quite like the ’seen and not heard’ image of feminine perfection is your PMS. How wonderful of PMS Buddy to bestow their benevolence upon us! Way to further the ‘vagina=shameful” myth PMS Buddy!

“What’s more, we will not only keep you informed, but will give you some free advice on what to do about it. With PMSBuddy.com, there is no reason to ever be blindsided by PMS again. PMSBuddy.com – Saving relationships, one month at a time!”

Free advice? Let’s have a look. On the ‘PMS Tips’ page, PMS Buddy helpfully points confused males towards consumerism to bridge the gap between the strange, emotional creature called a woman that their testicles refuse to let them live without. So here’s the sites the recommend:

1. Flowers, because:

“When all else fails, flowers will always do the trick. They are kryptonite to PMS.”

An interesting metaphor to use, as it posits PMS as some kind of Superhero.

2.Match.com:

“If it’s really that bad, maybe something’s amiss. As they say, it never hurts to look.”

Woman getting you down? Too damn lazy to work on the relationship and treat her like a huiman being? Bought her flowers and didn’t get laid? Then discard her like a used wank sock and get another one!

3. Wine:

Do something special for her and show her you care. A bottle of her favorite wine should help calm things down.

Translation: get her hammered and then she’s more pliable to trying anal without lube.

4. And the piece de resistance, Playboy lingerie

During PMS women can feel bloated and unattractive. Show her how you really feel with some sexy lingerie.

‘How you really feel’ – aka you can’t wait for the icky bleeding to stop so you can start fucking her again.

Once you attempted to solve a problem by throwing money at it (it’s the Western Consumerist Way!) PMS Buddy also has stories from other ‘victims’, so you know that you’re not alone.

If your relationship involves fights, violence and ‘crazy’ behaviour at That Time Of The Month and it requires speinding money to solve, then the problem isn’t PMS, it’s your relationship. Either you’re a dickhead, she’s a misogynist or you’re both idiots. Don’t blame it on PMS, it’s you.

]]> http://viragobites.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/pms-buddy/feed/ 0 viragobites http://viragobites.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/fat-acceptance/ http://viragobites.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/fat-acceptance/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:32:57 +0000 viragobites http://viragobites.wordpress.com/?p=36 ]]>

I am very much behind the body acceptance movement. I think it fits in just right with feminism, and wider issues of disability and trans acceptance. Every week, on my Saturday-Is-Catch-Up-With-Google-Reader-Day, I read inspiring posts from FA/BA bloggers, all living the change they want to see and combatting the misogynistic size-obssessed media as well as their own issues with how they look and how they feel about how they look.

And I love it, I really love that these people exist and I don’t fail to find them inspiring.

And yet I feel so unable to begin my own body acceptance. I have improved, I don’t think I am overweight anymore and I sit pretty healthily at a size 12-14. I no longer binge eat. I can look at myself in the mirror without crying. I have taken clothed and nude photographs of myself with good results, both in terms of their aesthetics and their positive affect on me psychologically. But I do not feel that I can accept me, how I am, right now. Without any extra exercise, without thinking “if only I lost that little bit off my thighs”, without feeling guilty for eating fatty foods, without feeling wistful for when I was slimmer, without wanting to cover myself up in clothes. I can only understand how to feel better about myself if I lose weight, but I also know that even if/when I lose weight that it will not be enough, and that I’ll aim to be slimmer.

I simply cannot imagine how to begin accepting how I am, without moving towards a goal of fitness, or a slimmer size, or whatever. How could I accept how I am, static, without any movement towards being better, smaller.

I know that my body is meant to be curvy and muscly. I despise the aesthetic standards that are put upon us, I despise the fact that I presume that people would prefer me if I were slimmer and I despise the fact that I care about what people think of how I look. I face a constant battle between my rational, feminist mind who knows all this is patriarchal bullshit and my social conditioning and embattled self esteem that still values how I look over who I am.

But maybe this is just the beginning. It will be hard, it’s taken me 10 years to look in the mirror and not want to cry. But I’ve done it. And by no means am I beyond hating myself, but I’ve come a long way. I can do it, and this is the start of me accepting me. For who I am, for how I look, whether smaller or larger, fitter or not, in sickness and in health.

Sadly I haven’t been able to find a version of this advert online but I will attempt to describe it.*

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

Almost every country in the world still has laws that discriminate against women, and promises to remedy this have not been kept

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

(This article may be triggering for ED sufferers)

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 (I’m not fit though, as Grenfell helpfully points out above) 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 and muscled 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.

I never watched Button Moon as a child, but I have watched it as an adult. And, quite frankly, it is a tool of gender role enforcement and brainwashing so shocking that it is a wonder the children of the 80’s are not as repressed and psychologically damaged as the ‘Feminine Mystique‘ families of the 50’s. Wiki describes it as:

“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. 

So I’m reading Shapely Prose and other body positive blogs the other day and listening to Hole on Winamp. Just as I was digesting ‘The Fantasy Of Being Thin‘ and the FWord’s ‘French women don’t get fat‘ the song ‘Gutless’ came on, and the combination of what I had read and ponderings upon the adjective ‘gutless’ all segued together.

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

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

The ‘comparison to woman as insult’ paradigm continues unabated as two boys are forced to fight each other while older men watch, shout encouragement and film the incident. From the BBC:

“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.

You might have spotted this in the news this morning. An online role-playing game ‘Miss Bimbo‘ (incidentally the site has been unaccessible all day, hopefully the volume of hits has brought the site to a halt) has raised concern with parents’ groups. In case you weren’t up with the latest online games popular with 9-16 year old girls, the sites front page explains the purpose of the game:

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.