PMS Buddy

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.

Lynx Sharp Focus – making objectification easier!

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

UN report shocks world by stating the bloody obvious

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

A refreshing role model for our times, or a lazy slob?

(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.

“You’re fighting like girls. Fight properly”

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.