Posie Rider

RUINED COTTAGE - poempoempoem

2011-05-11T15:37:00.004+01:00

Among the hills
peaked sunshine mounted on a globe
splits shafts of ray through the slow glades
in crevices dewy still from morning intimacy
a local time lapse only a speaker knows to notice
to move between
in slits above nature a loftier freedom can be spied
places a soul might soar to if embattled clouds
oppressed less, if splattered hillsides offered less fast-moving
cavities of twilight and exposure
later, the developers have turned digital, &
the spots of light which were your artifice will be rationalised away
now, limbs unveiled through moss & mulch
cleave at half glimpsed & inflecting & counterflecting displays
of shade and pattern, seemingly inwardly but distant,
the unconsumable eye, for the pleasure of the
self-contained and concocting parcel of a man
a hierarchy of peace arbitrates, midges offend
& dry hillsides spiked with broom, jewelled with
rockford husks & creases where crime collects make me cautious
I love to walk
but in travelling, there are too many signs of MAN to
fit me too. i saw a stream of rubbish in Peru pour from a town
into the toothed gullet of a pig
he slowly mounted up the steep ascent of indiscriminate & familiar
need, stealing with silent lapse to join the road
where in our van the water we doused the engine with to
cool seemed before my eyes yet another, & the vomit
i passed from rum & dust & transport, seemed yet another stream
On I passed
there's pleasure in remembrance, in collecting
the ownership that comes from being discrete
& experience, that folds in pasture
inappropriate first love, deeper joy, delusions
& it's a takeaway, for the living to live now
beyond me i take as an offence
Thus did I steal
from climate peace & solitude & in place install
deeper dregs of soul, hoping to gain from this a
literal fuck, a communion or a sign,
i think in terms of a fishing line grazing the lake floor
or cadging from stars
superstitious only of wording & self-conscious in
immortal emptiness & the walking of dogs
recanting screens i've looked on & all indecent looking
pacing hours through shadows moving between
struts on breeze blocks through windows where you
are looked on in the looking
through the fifteen windows i now see i see
fifteen windows
standing on a chair i see hills i will drive to
follow a speck swallow through a thoroughfare &
ask what chase i hope to gain from this
greeting & inarticulate harp

recently published in the Other Room Anthology 3, with thanks

Languish: I write on...

2010-12-08T23:56:00.000Z

Girls Smash, Grrls Riotous!

2010-12-07T13:58:00.014Z

I don't know if anyone saw this - The Daily Male's Hi-Larious reportage on last week's student protests in London: it went under the headline Young, bright and pretty: The day girl students went to war over tuition fees... and the pupils who just wanted a photo for Facebook

Yes, you can see where this is going. Some highlights:

"among the thousands of people who brought chaos to Westminster yesterday, a remarkable turn-out of well-dressed, well-spoken teenage girls swelled the ranks."

"If you had seen them in their short skirts and trendy scarves, you might have thought that a few chants and a bit of banner-waving would be the limit. But almost as soon as some mindless thugs began trashing a police van abandoned in the middle of Whitehall, the girls went into battle."

It wasn’t quite Cheltenham Ladies College, but several of these girls, it emerged, were from respectable schools and decent homes."

"Had this been a girls’ schools winter camp somewhere, it would probably have been quite fun. But somehow the backdrop of the Houses of Parliament – not to mention the police corralling these youngsters with thousands of hooligans, yobbos and criminally minded troublemakers – lent it a rather different beat."

"What made it different was the feminine touch, if that is the right phrase to describe so many young female faces joining the rebellion."

The reasons for the Mail's confusion can be isolated to three main issues. These are:

1) the class
2) the sex
3) and the attractiveness of the protesters.

"Why," asks the Mail, "would a pretty person be unhappy? Why, indeed, would anyone who had gone to the trouble to buy a nice scarf have cause for complaint? What luck if you are a girl, to have a fine face and bright disposition! Your parents are already proud of you, and one day they will offer you to a man along with a good dowry, and he will take care of you. But wait, you want to go to University first? I suppose Kate Middleton did it and it didn't do her any harm, she met a Prince after all, and she was only middle class to start off with! In fact, it is imperative for you to go to University my sweet."

"BUT WAIT! Government cuts slashing arts and humanities budgets??? My little dear, how will you take your Eng Lit degree now? You can't study the hard sciences, and you're not nearly pragmatic enough to earn a living after you graduate. I mean, I never intended you to work a day in your life. If you don't meet Mr Big Income, or Mr Royal, will Mummy and I have to fork out for your needless perusals of Shelley for the next twenty years? That seems deeply unfair, and we have been planning on retiring to the Caribbean for so long."

"No University for you, India, and damn the consequences. India? Oh my goodness, is that her, in her Cheltenham Ladies College blazer, with her arm around a man with Tartan trousers and dreadlocks, shanking a copper? Good god, little India has become a socialist while we weren't even looking!"

Middle class parents - I, Posie Rider, urge you to support the anti-cuts league, protect your daughter's futures! If she doesn't go to University somewhere like Oxbridge, Durham or St Andrews, and study a solid liberal arts degree, god only knows what could happen!

WE KNOW WHERE THIS SORT OF THING LEADS!

PUT THAT WOMAN DOWN!

And better luck this week, girls! Keep smashing, keep looking great! xxx

Poetry Openned - new poem!

2010-11-09T12:52:00.005Z

Hello Readers! Some of you were lucky enough to see me and Francis Crot providing anarchist situational site-specific poetry gold at the intersection of white corridor a and white corridor b at the excellent relaunch of the Openned poetry reading, 27th October, Corsica Studios Elephant and Castle. Justin Katko made a gruesome video of the same (all up in my grille he was, both flattering and slightly shy-making, even for a seasoned performer like me!) For those of you who FAILED to attend, here's a poem from which I read on the night. Of course it was a collaboration so many of these lines were missed, intercepted or radically re-worked, so even if you were there this will be highly illuminating. xxx

lEEDs radio 1xTRA

if you want to know where the party is follow the search lights
and if you want to know where Leeds is
follow the search lights
and if you want to be close to me, well, I can't relax
while next door's floodlights cast your erection's shadow
across the bed and up the wall like greenhouse gases
it's not me
it's the planet i'm thinking about
don't hate on me if i ask you to express yourself less
or express less of yourself, i have stuff on, to get through
before the night comes and i take my daily nytol
perhaps my period will be over by then
the slit gunk that cleaves my mystery from you like the beef from its Wellington
the choice to dress everything i feel in mucous membranes is intriguing
but ultimately distressing
during his twilight crumbfast Tim Westwood introduced me to a more radical urban experience than i
had in ten years living in Brixton
now i live on the two red lips on my inner thigh clearence
we live in a small house
are charged tuna for rent
stapling milk to bread and through the postal vote i say
we should save ink and spend Thursday finding flowers
according to my coordinates there is samphire in Fort William
scratching the shore like deep fat, the row that will never erupt,
the significant ideological shift that is occuring right now but which I just don't, like, feel in my guts,
we both accepted the pretext that he was the Crow while you bit his head off
make a bullet hole in my heart for next door's bass player to rest his plectrum
i know what happened to the bees they are buried on Lindisfarne
an ad hoc braille for honeymooners feet from the earth's core that says
hey, tread soflty for you tread on my
treadmill
women, beware women,
wear distressed denim and tight skirts
and riot for other people's pensions and avoid crash diets
live breath and die on candles, moonshine and white wine
give me a good dress allowance, tight lace and breathing space
let me upstage grime core djs and slip up on grammar school euphemisms
for people who aren't like, black white straight or gay
i'd have to say that my greatest poetic influences are Sister Nancy
the Presidents and the lines i steal from Jow Lindsay
like
baby, play those sexy tunes and get that birthday sex
like
baby, call the doctor, all my arms are legs
(hey, Mike, you think it's fucked up that today's anticapitalist twenty-something poets were
tweenagers when SClub7 were storming up the charts? Well, you were probably like 25 when McCauley Culkin got lost in New York,
how fucked up is that?)
backhandhing a bankerite across threadneedle street i note
a deleterous effect upon the crimson surfaces her dread steps expose
the incandescent finale to my protest the fleck of her eyelashes across the wax on
wax off taxpayer my flash mob rallied
it's not our domain they're mastering it's our friends they're slashing
it occured to me today that my aunt and that pervert in the cafe ARE the undeserving poor
gosh, i thought, that's sad but don't let them trap me in conversation
i am not dead while my bones are translating some of your vibrations
into a set text
your celebrated singularity invigorating the essayistic practice of great artists i know including chloe and bex
turn a new page, do the ps & qs, get righteous
open your neck and let me siphon two poisons for my thighs are glass rock
rob reed composed three hundred pages of moving poetry while travelling to norwich
he took the megabus via poland and now he's back in shoreditch
turn up bedtime at the corners
change the tampon, let it be
ask rob reed what he saw
by ipswich's golden mile
did the urbsurburbs break their banks
and weep barely forty minutes into their trial shift
some chance
cheryl cole has done all the crying
you'll ever need to do geordie girls
reed turns in his sarcophagus, why,
even now he is trailing in the polls

Why can't we have a bloody revolution? Why not?

2010-10-21T23:24:00.015+01:00

Friends, the cuts are disturbing and regressive! And I must say, I've been very disappointed by your lack of revolutionary fervour. Parliament still stands, Cameron is unhurt and nothing, I repeat, nothing, is on fire.
Can't we have a bloody revolution like in The Dreamers?
I attach some images to inspire you!

Lara is so techno!

2010-10-07T11:29:00.003+01:00

My good friend Lara Buckerton produced this amusing summary of me, which I thought I'd share with you. It seems to be some sort of website which assesses the words and tone of your blog and pronounces judgment on your age, sex and mood via the use of a complex algorithm no doubt - I don't know where Lara finds these things, she's so techno! I do of course take exception to a couple of points, well a number in fact:

a) it tells me I am a woman, but of course I reject all claims to the existence of a 'female' writing, whether that 'female' is located in a male/female/intersex/other body, although how they guessed in my case is beyond me;

b) it states that I am between the ages of 66 and 100 (gasp!) and though I refuse to make any complaint, seeing the discourse of 'women not wanting to age' as inherently sexist, I would like to point out that I am as yet in my early thirties and suspect that they assumed I was wise beyond my years due to my ability to spell and punctuate (often lacking in the young) and my delicious sentence structure - a clear consequence of having no formal schooling until the age of 8 and having learnt to read by pouring over Elizabeth Gaskell. In which case, please note me as a female of around 170 years of age and do me some credit;

c) my style is personal and not academic?? Have at you!;

d) it tells me that I am happy most of the time. This, I assure you, is not the case;

Click here and see for yourself!

SO busy

2010-09-23T17:28:00.007+01:00

Lady readers, Darlings, apologies for my slack posting. I have been so busy working on my BOOK(!) A Year Off the Ward and culturing this season's batch of lovely psychedelic Morning Glory seeds (tee hee, don't tell my mental health case worker Lauren, she'd be furious as they'd *probably* send me back into a psycho-neurotic hell-hole, but who frankly cares?) that I've had little time to update my beloved blog. SO, a quick run down of activities, diary style.

Late August.

I attend Climate Camp, or The Camp for Climate Action, Edinburgh. Don't worry, I didn't get up to too much mischief - not! I attended some fascinating debates on the future of the green movement (it's looking very ropey, everyone is so obsessed with fixing our pointless economy that they've stopped worrying about the planet. Economy - planet = death of everyone (only we go and live in space or something, which, let's face it, would be awful. I can't even watch Star Wars, (which is a very accessible film) because it looks like 'space' (you know, grey walls, electronic panels, little windows looking out onto stars: bleak!) How would I cope if ecological meltdown forced me to live in space? I'd basically just have to give killing myself a proper go for once, which would be a shame). Why can't the bankers understand that? Anyway, here's a picture of Melody, Lara and I protesting with our new friend Rowan outside Gogarburn, the RBS' devious rural headquarters. Don't the police just look hilarious?

Even later August

I return to London. Emergency meeting with my agent Olivia Bloomsdale-Corfu. She tells me to get my bloody useless act together and get the book finished. My mind is in meltdown! I've never had to work before, not properly, this is beginning to seem like all too much.

Early September

I jet off for a week to sunny La Rochelle. I eat beef carpaccio with delicious tomato and basil ice cream. Resolve to buy an ice cream machine on my return and try out some exciting flavours. Garlic? Sorrel? Yum!

Mid-September

Olivia is back on my tail. The deadline fast approaches. I feel another breakdown coming on. I notice this article in last month's Guardian, on women in the workplace, and how they're too shy to ask for a pay rise. How ridiculous! I had no idea (having never worked) - is Olivia ripping me off? Should I ask for an advance? It would certainly inspire me to get going on the book...

This week

London Fashion Week! I rediscover HATS! Resolve to buy this season's entire collection of Hedonist Millinery. Winter 2010 is all about HATS!

I also Easyjetted up to Edinburgh for the launch of this lovely little magazine, Scree, edited by Lila Matsumoto. A review of the night is here by the lovely Colin Herd, there were ambient sounds provided by glitchy bloop darlings Conquering Animal Sound, shoegazing electromaestro Dead Leaves, the formidable Lamplighter and heartbreaking, wild-fen crying Illiop, which made me feel like the heroine in an Icelandic remake of Wuthering Heights, a feeling to which, you may imagine, I am quite, quite partial. Poetry was provided by ME, also nick-e melville, a cool political concrete poet who gave me a copy of his book and a hug - I like him, & I urge you to find his book. Francis Crot charmed the crowd as ever, but honestly he's such a wonderful and unpredictable performer he could basically just read us sections of last month's G2 at random and we'd be like "Oh how clever, ha ha ha!" He's that good.

Kisses!
xxx

August - a Cultural Month

2010-08-19T15:30:00.006+01:00

Hello lady readers.

Just checking in from the Edinburgh Fringe!. Tragically, my slot on the Poetry Takeaway 'slam' stage on the Royal Mile (due to take place now) has been cancelled due to gross mismanagement (cancellation notification through Twitter? I ask you Tim Clare) so I've taken a moment to fill you in on all my exciting going-ons in Edinburgh, city of arts, theatre and meddlesome twenty-somethings.

I began my tenure in Edinburgh (I'm staying at the Malmaison, no student hovels for me, sharing a bed with a sweaty Tamburlaine from the Cambridge ADC this decade, thank you very much) with a trip to The Kitchin, Edinburgh's only Michelin starred restaurant (can you believe it?) I ate fois gras at least twice, once in my starter and once in my main, and was unable to move by the time the lemon and sorrel tart was effortlessly deposited in front of me by another ninja sommelier. I would heartily recommend the experience, and the food, for anyone of appropriate incomes - don't go if you can only just afford it, it'll be 'a total bum-out', as Melody said when I refused her a second bottle of claret. I could (of course) afford it, it's just important to stall such dependency in one's middling income friends (Melody's landscape gardening company has been hit pretty hard by the recession, and with so many parties to go to on the weekend, she finds it hard to get started at the beginning of the week, and tends to write off all work until Wednesday. It is the Summer after all. Thank god I don't have a job!)

I digress. After stuffing myself silly with bulimic duck, I found myself in a late night stand up session by Dutch rude man Hans Teeuwen . The misogynist gaffaws some of his more risque jokes raised in the baby-testosterone emitting teenagers affront of me belied the complexities of his politics (he's a real defender of free speech and ranted against religion in a eulogy for assassinated Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh - YouTube it I dare you), he is probably a feminist, after all, and made everyone who laughed sound very stupid indeed.

The next day I saw Paper Bird's production Others a play about how bloody easy it is to 'other' other women. For those of you who have just been born, or didn't take a degree in the humanities, 'othering' is a term found in Lacanian, postcolonial and feminist theory predominently. It is a way of designating someone as 'other' from yourself and shoring up your own fragile identity in relation, or against, how you perceive your other. My other, for example, is probably some kind of post-feminist, or, god forbid, one of those women for whom feminism is simply not an option. Yuk. And if this play taught me anything, it's to be extremely careful about who you other, because it's desperately important that women try to achieve solidarity rather than marginalising one another in order to feel good about themselves. The play script was put together from letters written by real women who the play writers/actors had previously designated as others. After having explained the concept of othering to these 'real' women (who obviously had not taken a degree in the humanities) they asked them questions like how they felt about themselves, what are they afraid of etc, in order to find ways to identify with them. It was a moving and inventive piece, I immediately liked the actors (not others) but did feel that too little was made of the texts sent up the real women. At moments it came perilously close to dance theatre, something which I will absolutely not abide, and there were a few too many scenes where they repeated the initial premise of the play (Hello, I'm going to ask you a few questions to find out how to understand you) instead of using proper dialogue, which seemed like wasted space (of course I had grasped the premise in the play's first moments, and didn't need it explained to me, although I am very intelligent...). I would ultimately recommend it.

I think now I must leave this computer. I ran into the delightful Armchair Books on West Port because it was raining and begged to use the computer to find out about the cancelled poetry reading (read his bloody tweet if you want to be shocked by human indifference. Too ill to text me Tim Clare? But have enough energy to recommend the play you saw last night you careerist fuck). Anyway, the bookshop people have just offered me tea but I don't think they mean it. Better leave soon.

More reviews to follow - I'm about to head to Climate Camp! Hunter wellies in tow.

London Cross-Genre Festival!

2010-07-15T11:26:00.010+01:00

Experimental women writers (and their multi-gender audience) crowded the halls of Greenwich University yesterday, and indeed they will be crowding it now, as I write this on my new mauve tortoise shell covered laptop in the back of Aunt Lily's Bentley. We're racing toward Hampshire to begin this weekend's celebrations in honour of the virgin saint, Marcellina, and if it weren't for my prior commitments and raging (although somewhat lapsed) Catholicism, I would have been delighted to stay for the entirity of the festival, which goes on until the last female poet finishes her noodles in a Greenwich eatery on Friday night. If you're not similarly occupied or don't, god forbid, have to work, I strongly advise you to 'tfl' your route at once and go along in time for the lunchtime recess. A menagerie of delights await you, and I'm not just talking about the sandwiches.

If you were there yesterday, you might not have seen me, as I was crouching in the back row behind Justin Katko who, thank goodness, is so tall that he didn't notice me! You'll excuse my reticence, fellow wordwrights, but due to an unfortunate incident involving a bottle of Frangelico, my face and the floor, I am partially disfigured at the moment (Emmeline says it is merely a 'largish bruise along one side of my face', but I won't let my fans down by letting them see me not 'at my best').

Amongst the wholly enjoyable performances, I was delighted by Caroline Bergval, who seems to be able to unmake and remake language at will, like an illogical egg, opening up all of its little foibles to scrunity and exploring its political and sexual connotations, like a comprehensible Derrida. Marianne Morris' utopian love and disgust soared in a delightful Canadian lilt above electronic beats like the thinking (and then thinking and then smoking and then some more thinking) woman's George Pringle, and if it is possible to want to take out a rental on a Brooklyn appartment with someone purely based upon their solo performance of a multi-voice play after a nine hour transatlantic flight, then Corina Copp would be the woman to do it with. I would simply like to have a conversation passing her in the hall to the bathroom in the morning, She has some of the best sentences I have ever heard.

In other news, Mike Weller was there with the best shirt I have ever seen (apart from one I have seen on Jow Lindsay which depicted a fountain) and Luke Roberts managed to field the most ridiculous questions I have ever misheard from an audience with a level of humility and restaint rarely seen in today's distopian times (ps. yes men were allowed to speak at the conference, we're feminists, not monsters!)

I am only sorry that I have missed (because it is probably taking place now) or will miss performances by fellow lady poets Sophie Robinson, Francesca Lisette and Frances Kruk who are as feminist as it is possible to be without being, well, me. Emily Critchely is a genius (she is the conference's organiser, along with Carol Watts) and will be given the keys to a feminist poetry city in the heavens when we all finally reach it.

Perhaps I will dedicate this weekend's celebration of St. Marcellina to female poets everywhere. If I had not been given freedom of my pen, who knows, maybe I would have turned to the spiritual life instead. There is clearly a connection between female creativity and faith, if only because a religious life was one of the few escapes from the mind-deadening baby-farm of marriage in the middle ages and beyond and before. Even though I suffered the perils of a Catholic schoolhood (and the subsequent breakdowns) I would happily consign my body to Christ to avoid hideous ownership by a patriachal Lord, or even worse, a peasant. Although I would look the part, in the citadel of my mind, I would be writing poetry!

feminist wall chart

2010-07-12T09:57:00.003+01:00

For all of you out there who just find the baffilingly high amounts of different feminist traditions a tad confusing I have included a link to a fabulous wall chart that explains it all for you! Life hasn't been this easy since Mummy forgot to pick me up from Tumble Tots one afternoon and the sports instructor drove me all the way home and gave me a drumstick lollipop to subside my tears.

Feminist Wall Chart (hang it on your pink Smeg fridge with pride)

Hugs and Pugs x

Hitler's cat's mistresss

2010-07-08T10:16:00.004+01:00

Emmeline and I have been looking through her old family photo album and we stumbled across this sensational snap of her old Aunt Ratzingher III, a mistress to Hitler's cat.

Look at this shot of her yawning on the pussy grave of Kempa, Hitler's pet.

Charming. Sometimes I think Emmeline's family herstroy might be more thrilling than my own, but it's not of course.

Will keep you posted with any more kitty shots.

Toodles!

Pt 4: The fact that there are no women in the tournament

2010-07-04T13:45:00.000+01:00

No one ever talks about the FIFA Women's bloody World Cup do they? Why isn't that covered more in the media? Sexism, that's why.

Toodles! x

Pt 3: Racist World Cup Sexism

2010-06-29T13:43:00.000+01:00

It didn't take long to spot another case of World Cup Sexism. This time, childish alcopop for infants WKD have charmed us with their 'women can't watch football' advertising campaign, of which I have found this shocking example.

A more shocking example, as yet not available on the internet (which recoils in disgust) says:

THE OFFSIDE RULE FOR THE LADIES: IF THE FLAG'S UP, IT'S OFFSIDE.

Part 2: Wags

2010-06-28T13:27:00.004+01:00

Yet more sexism in the World Cup! The Daily Male have taken it upon themselves to bastardly declare that calling WAGs WAGs is sexist; sexists.

A guide issues by the Equalities Commission says the term WAG is "now in danger of overuse and arguably sexist".

A spokesman from the Equalities watchdog said: "You could argue (that the phrase is sexist), in the way in which it was used, if it was being used in a particularly derogatory way or to pejoratively target a group of women."

True, it's just a shame these women happen to be strumpets.

Vagina sofa

2010-06-28T13:20:00.000+01:00

just purchased this incredible sofa for my loo.

Pt 1: Sexism and the World Cup

2010-06-15T16:02:00.006+01:00

In celebration of the 2010 World Cup, Lynx have launched a series of 'patriarch' posters, each depicting a 'buxom babe' in a familiar celebratory soccer pose. These will be running in several countries, with the respective flag of each waving in the background.

How RUDE! This really is the final straw. Everyone knows sports bras look nothing like this, and that the woman photographed is probably a model, not a real lady footballer.

Once again, when we were tucked up safely in our beds, snoozing away, dreaming of equality, sexism has struck. Never relent ladies: we must maiden on, never surrendering to the so-called 'hand of man'.

To rebel I have decided to monitor the World Cup in close detail - looking out for any slurs against female kind. I am ready to strike!!

Posie and Out x

Home sweet home....

2010-06-11T14:38:00.003+01:00

You're probably all wondering where my life's intimations have disappeared to in recent months? Well.. I've been decorating!

That's right Lady readers, as well as throwing myself into my poetry, I have also moved house and decided to make yet another fresh start! Naturally I decided to resettle again in the N1 and I can assure that the area is impeccable. I live opposite an organic cheese shop and an Odbins, although there is admittedly the sad presence of a Sainsbury's Local in between them, like some cursed unstylish philanderer ready to come between you and your man.

And talking of men I cannot stress enough that this re-location has very little, in fact it has nothing at all to do with men, nor does my sudden immersion into the poetic scene (I all know what you're thinking: poesy + Posie / the cathartic forests of verse x genius = Depression). But my reasons for moving are purely theraputic. Spending most of my time penning that incredible literary object: A Year off the Ward, has brought back all kinds of memories that I could really do without.

Indeed, I shall be recounting some of them here on this blog. For instance, do you remember the chapter about my eating too much around Christmas time? Yes well that's just one part of my journey into the recreational boarders of insanity. Heaven.

So, I have been spending the last month or so putting the finishing touches to my new, much larger and opulent abode. I have included some 'design ideas' for your viewing pleasure below. But best of all Melody Wittgenstien has found me the most incredible workwoman's hat to wear as I paint, hammer and drill.

See above.

Isn't it charming? Why, yesterday I went to Hackney for some reason (to be honest I'd rather forget about the entire expereince- incredibly dirty place) and I wore it there as self defence. It worked a treat and some young people were rather complimentary.

Toodles!

P.S.

2010-06-02T15:40:00.003+01:00

Not that I would ever take the Megabus of course. It would only be for 'research purposes'. Instead I've persuaded Aunt Lily to attend so we are taking the family's pink helicopter from London. Toodles!

ninerrors Newcastle poetry-fest and sleepover!

2010-06-02T14:41:00.006+01:00

Yesterday, on Radio 4, I was listening to one of the 'culture' features (I forget which, although I think I was stuffing Spanikopita at the time, so perhaps it was Front Row). The presenter happened to mention that a lot of very interesting art is being produced in Scotland at the moment, and being exhibited in Glasgow to be precise. This was in relation to the new Saatchi exhibition in London, Newspeak, which, by the way, was described as quite uninspiring. The reviewer mentioned our friends in the Hebrides in order to point out that very little of this art ever makes its way to London, and for this reason, very rarely becomes popular in the Saatchi sense of the word. He also pointed out that the situation might be remedied if art critics from the London-based media ever actually bothered to leave their concrete-soaked environs and make the trek up North (that is, discounting the annual month-long binge that is the Edinburgh festival, in which the entire population of Hampstead is transplanted person-by-person to the leafy urb-suburbs of Stockbridge, leaving poor North London to deteriorate into a less squelchy landscape from Drowned World.)

Now, this London-centricity struck me as decidedly unsporting - bloody-minded perhaps - and got me thinking that unless we children of the Capital extend an stuffed olive or two up North soonish, our Caledonian compatriots might just as well devolve off entirely (aka claim independence from the English oppressor) and take all their desirable socialist principles with them, leaving Bohemians like me stranded on a mere bit of an island inhabited entirely by Tories. Clearly, this will not do.

Thankfully, these reflections chime with the exciting news that I will soon be heading up North - not to Scotland sadly, but better near than ... never - to the bustling industrial city of Newcastle, which Melody tells me is a cross between a Jules Vernesque cityscape and Reading: FUN!

The occasion is the launch of a poetry collection to mark ten years since the passing of Newky poet Barry MacSweeney, who also wrote a collection called Odes. The title of the new collection, complied by poetry wizard Linus Slug, is no coincidence, although following in MacSweeney's wake has proved tough (I myself am a contributor) due to the complex historical inheritance of the ode form, as well as MacSweeney's own unique interpretations. Some questions raised include what is an antistrophe? What would Sappho have done? Was Elizabeth I altogether fair to Spencer? To find the answer to these questions, you're just going to have to purchase the beautiful book aren't you?

There's a facebook group which contains a beautiful album of photos charting the books' creation, as well as ample information on Slug's ninerrors blog. Oh, and the reading takes place in Morton Tower in Newcastle on Sunday 27th June. Why not come and drink wine with us afterwards? They tell me its grim up North, but with a Megabus heading staight for Pimlico booked for 8am on Monday, who cares?

Posie in public - reading success in Cambridgeshire!

2010-05-24T15:14:00.007+01:00

I'm utterly refreshed having returned victorious from a visit to the playground of my late teenage mind, the University of Cambridge. As well as having enjoyed a nostalgic Dolmades Kebab at Gardi's (still standing! still counter-hegemonic!) and a vigorous cycle to Grantchester on a be-basketed bicycle, I had the utmost pleasure in giving a poetry reading to some keen young students who reminded me all too much of myself as a siren of truth circa 2001. The temptation to ink the JCR was quickly dismissed in favour of late talks into the night, over endless bowls of noodles & impossibly weak spliff, concerning Aeschylus, the Utopian potential of renga and the lyrical verse of Kool Keith. I've been so sad since I got back to N1 having left Cambridge's gentle shores that I've returned with a frenzy to the drama I began there as a second year - Put That Woman Down!: the life and times of Meredith Lynchfield, Cambridge Suffragette and Assassin, in three Acts. Emmeline is heartbroken - I promised to take her on a kitty voyage to Eel Pie Island yesterday to throw an effigy of King Charles VII into the Thames to commemorate the capture of Joan of Arc at the Siege of Compiegne, but I told her she'd have to wait until the 30th to commemorate her burning (I thought we'd torch the French Embassy). Needs must when creativity calls.

Here's a nice picture of me in front of a display created by clever techy Mike W-H to accompany a reading from my chapbook, tristanundisolde (Arthur [C]hilling Press (at the moment at least!)) It communicates how I feel better than I ever could do myself in words.

Helpful imp Joe Luna over at All Over the Grid / Fallopianyoutube had this to say about my collaboration that night with shouty-man poet and mere part-time patriarch Jow Lindsay:

"Posie Rider & Jow Lindsay’s reading on Friday night (21st May) assumed much less than it would perhaps be safe to assume a Cambridge Reading Series night of experimental avant-garde poetry would assume, but by this very play was able to open up a space in which the performance of the reading constantly flirted with, insulted, disparaged, castigated, comforted and barely became a means of effecting a communitas based upon what was already there, what we already have, and what we might possibly become. Recent national political discourse was both appropriated and mocked, but also re-constituted into the political space of the reading, tracing a line of constant watchfulness over the machinations universally predicated upon and in the name of the folk whilst at the same time tragically powerless to prevent those machinations from organising/mobilising satirical negations & refutations of constructed collective identity. The creation of the radical experimental "we" through such a gathering was tempered with a dangerously isomorphic "we" of satirical invective and absurdist comedy, the laughter of the audience perhaps the most realistic effect produced by the Wagnerian, mythological, polysemous diatribes flitting between the two barely realistic personas of the poets. The potential for a delineation of a universal WE to be reductive and obscurantist is enormous, and these are the precise means by which corporate advertising and party political affiliation seek to homogenise humanity into demographics and target audiences destined only for differences in the vagaries of their consumption and tactical voting preferences. To say, as I believe I heard Posie Rider say, that "we are the poets laureate" in the midst of an exhausting and increasingly overwhelming dialogic code is a re-appropriation of a political right and the creation of, or at least the exciting image of, a fragile community existing, fleetingly, in the heart of the multi-national flux of assumed identity. What is "assumed", that is, taken as given, a priori, implicit, hereby becomes inverted to be that which is passed over in haste, ignorance or ambivalence, and what must be attested in the act of the reading is the human capacity for engendering caucuses of radical community so that we may attain enough trust to assume in the positive sense once more. The figures of Jow Lindsay and Posie Rider are mythological tricksters, ever playing with our trust in assuming that we are assuming the same thing/s as the poets we heed. We are not simply given to assume that we can all trust each other and can therefore sing together the firmament of the new world, but rather the intimidation and awkwardness these trickster aspects produce in the audience (for example, naming specific people in the audience, something I’ve seen Lindsay do a number of times both in improvised performance and in published work) work to make the sense of place more malleable in order that we may mould new ways of listening to and being with each other. Those moments of joyous augmentation, (self-)plagiarisation and re-organisation result in a mixtape-like quality that presents not only a plurality of voice, but voices of real collective experience and instantaneous memory.

Only by carving difference into the universally reductive notion of humanity itself can we become truly human, and by dint of this, humane. That is the axiom at work on the macro-level of experimental poetry communities and the micro-level of the individual reading.

This is also how readings act theatrically without becoming theatre. The creation of such communitas is contingent upon its only lasting as long as the reading itself, its durational nature perhaps the key to the feeling of common endeavour, even if only articulated negatively. Lindsay’s exhaustive prose performances are, I think, a beautifully doomed attestation of the occasion of the reading as the productive mechanism by which communities are made, defining themselves against both an undifferentiated humanity-at-large replete with built-in sensors to detect love, companionship, truth & beauty as well as by more positivist means declaring a space for the activation of radical subjectivities inexpressible within the nexus of the everyday uses of language. The temporality of the reading as play is therefore the crux of the meaning of the performance in terms of its delineation of our time, our language, our wound, our response. It is the proper occasion of song which frames and therefore reveals the event itself as constitutive of a collective grand narrative forged from the desire of those for whom pre-packaged national, gender, ethnic or sexual identities have become useless and restrictive."

Instructive, n'est pas?
xxx

A belated happy birthday to the pill!

2010-05-14T14:03:00.005+01:00

IS FIFTY YEARS OLD (last week)

Whoops I missed a day or two.... (if you'll excuse the pun)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2010/may/06/pregnancy-maternal-mortality

Suffragettes attack the post! Yet again my brilliance strikes at the core of patriarchy...

2010-05-11T23:24:00.014+01:00

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the talk Fe:MAIL – a history of how the suffragettes attacked the post to really ‘get their message across’ (if you’ll excuse the pun). The talk, given by the Scot Dr Norman Watson at the Women’s Library, explored how our suffrage ancestoresses managed to destroy around 8,000 letters during their attacks on post-boxes during the years 1912 to 1918, when WW1 paused the movement and women finally set about running the country themselves for a change.

“But how?” I hear you ask. “Not – how did they run the country – but how did they attack the post-boxes?"

Well, that’s a very good question.

They used ink, pots of ink to be precise, whose corks had been craftily loosened so that when a young lady, incensed by social and political inequality, really had just ‘had enough’, she could throw the ink pot into the post box where the dark liquid would slowly trickle over its contents. Envelopes from the time show that they really did get quite, quite black. As a result people missed their mail and the campaign gained publicity, although it must be said that the postal campaign hardly endeared the public whose correspondence was destroyed; it was a risky move to encourage wider support for the women’s cause.

On a lighter note, postcards (again you must excuse all my witty puns) were also jolly useful to the suffragettes. They ‘postcarded’ comrades about upcoming meetings (sometimes using suffrage code) and sent postcards depicting recent events to raise support for the cause (clever Kodak produced photographic ‘postcard’ film which meant the campaigners could produce images of events within hours). Two suffragettes even travelled to Number 10 as ‘human letters’, i.e. wearing placards, but the patriarch prime minster Asquith described them as ‘dead letters’, or rather letters that were lost, and refused to read them. Oh and it is also probably worth mentioning that they smashed up quite a few post offices too, using stones and hammers- but no one was ‘hurt’.

Dr Watson, a journalist, doctor (in the academic sense that is) and all round renaissance man, has taken it upon himself to explore the history of the suffrage movement in Dundee, and to great effect. For instance did you know that Winston Churchill was the MP for Dundee (isn’t that queer?) and when he gave a speech to his constituency in 1908 the stealthy Pankhurst sisters decided to send him a message (again, another pun) by dropping a pile of slates onto the roof above the patriarch’s head, ruining his address. Hurrah women!

But what the talk really brought home to me was the importance of the suffrage movement at a regional, rather than simply at a national level. The attacks on the postal system really brought this home (unlike those poor inky letters). The attacks on mailboxes were carefully coordinated throughout the country and required the team work and in-depth planning of women’s organisations in all towns and counties, so that their ink pots went flying all the same time in order to create maximum publicity for their cause. Watson bemoaned the lack of research into the activities of WSPU across the country. Indeed he inspired me to research the herstoy of my own town to be entitled, The Feminists of Wo-Hampshire.

HOW TO 'INK' A LETTERBOX

Below I have included a short guide for any of you thinking about ‘inking a letter box’ in protest, although one must remember that it is awfully hard nowadays what with those awful CCTVs everywhere.

(1) Ensure you are carrying a muff in order to disguise your ink.
(2) Ensure the cork in your ink pot is loosened but not totally removed (you want the ink to slowly trickle down the letters), and you should probably carrying a hammer for good measure, possibly some explosives.
(3) Make sure no one is about when you chuck it in, however be sure to choose your time carefully, usually just before the patriarch postman is scheduled to collect.

Run away, fast, after you’ve posted your little protests surprise

Tories threaten to disenfranchise non-middle-or-above class women, single parents and gays. HELP!

2010-05-07T05:45:00.001+01:00

2010-05-05T23:57:00.000+01:00

the photo below is a mannequinn by the way; its not a real woman.

STAND UP FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS: DO NOT VOTE CONSERVATIVE

2010-05-05T23:53:00.002+01:00

TORIES WILL LOWER THE ABORTION TIME LIMIT TO 20 WEEKS. THAT'S REALLY BAD. I URGE YOU LADY READERS: STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS AND VOTE FOR ANYONE BUT THAT EVIL WIZARD DAVID CAMERON.

TODAY THE TIME LIMIT, TOMORROW MORE SEXISM, ALL THE TIME.

A wooly vagina I saw on the F-word- genius!

2010-05-02T23:54:00.002+01:00

Shopfront sexism strikes again!

2010-04-30T12:38:00.011+01:00

I was wandering home after a delicious meal at a French bistro in Soho last night when I was confronted with this shocking window display in the shoe shop Kurt Geiger on Regent's Street (the store was worryingly close to Hamley's).

As this image demonstrates, the mannequins were lying on their backs with their legs spread high in the air (modelling the frightful shoes) indicating a provocation for sexual intercourse. They were dressed in corsets and bras; some were wearing no knickers.

But it doesn't end there. Inside the shop, visible straight on through the store's glass door, was a electric neon light 'Peep Show' sign that read "Great shoes available downstairs' - ultimately likening the the sale of sex to purchasing some pretty disgusting, over priced strappy sandals.

It was awful. In the middle of central London / a tourist area / next to England's most famous toy shop.

Sexist stilettos, misogynistic mules, lecherous loafers... what's next?

It completely ruined my coq au vin, which I can tell you now was jolly expensive for a supposedly rustic French dish.

Does shopfront sexism know no bounds? We need to take that jump out of its step.

Write in to Kurt Geiger to complain and berate at online.info@kurtgeiger.com.

My Great Grandmother, Constance Lady-Rose Rider

2010-04-27T14:04:00.002+01:00

Isn't this cool? I'm going to do it on my back tonight. Toodles!

Does chauvinism know no bounds: Skype is offically sexist

2010-04-19T14:08:00.003+01:00

I have just been skyping Emmeline (she's at an opera festival in Armenia) and the following just popped up on my screen:

European and American women are too arrogant for you? Are you looking for a sweet lady that will be caring and understanding? Then you came to the right place- here you can find a Russian lady that will love you with all her heart. Can't find a queen to rule your heart? How about beautiful Russian ladies that have royal blood and royal look? Here you can find hundreds of portfolios of these fine women of any age for every taste. Please excuse us if you are not interested.

Beautiful Russian ladies - http://moscowdatings.ru

Can you believe it? I can't believe sexism can travel this far? No I am NOT interested, and just for your information Russia IS in Europe you misogynistic wart. Needless to say I have initiated anther campaign against these male war mongrels. I have been prank calling them on Skype all afternoon with a voice generated message saying:

Vladamir Putin makes me sick and Lenin had a tiny brain.

If that doesn't get their goat then I don't know what will! Female (European) wit rules supreme once more (and no, I don't want to marry you, internet pervert).

2010-04-18T13:40:00.007+01:00

En garde!

I would like to draw your attention to marvellous blog post on Joan of Arc - a key symbol of the American Feminist movement.

"The Suffragette Movement’s Use of Joan of Arc’s Image

Joan had been an important symbol of American patriotism since right after the Revolutionary War, when an Irish immigrant named John Burk wrote a play called “Female Patriotism Or the Death of Joan of Arc.” By 1912, Americans were quite familiar with Joan’s stirring exploits. For any citizen who had missed all the books, plays, and works of art, Ringling Brothers toured that season with a $500,000.00 extravaganza that boasted 1200 actors and sensational special effects.

The following year, Americans marched on Washington, demanding that the Constitution be amended to grant women the right to vote. Suffragette parades in England had been led by a woman dressed as Joan since 1911. United States women happily borrowed the tradition for the Washington march: the Women’s Suffrage Procession featured a progressive attorney named Inez Milholland mounted on a white horse."

Of course they did- I myself have often mounted a white horse to various friends' fancy dress parties. Although arriving on my trusty steed to Melody's nautical themed 21st birthday party was admittedly a little bit tenuous.

The post has actually inspired me to research what symbols my Rider ancestoresses used in their various campaigns against the male race. I plan to psychoanalytically link their favourite animals to their various personality aspects using the Jungian concept of anima.

Of course my psychiatrist friends tell me that the two are totally unrelated - but I shall prove them wrong! x

Women and Kebabs: An Orientalist Perspective

2010-04-13T22:05:00.010+01:00

Hail lady readers!

My Aunt Lily once said that theory is like the backbone of fish swimming down the river of life. I quite agree and I, like a strong willed Tench, have vertebrae packed full with the goodness of precocious thought. Indeed the other day I started thinking the prejudice attached to women consuming greasy food. The result was the mistresspiece below, which would make even Baudrillard blush.

I include the hefty essay 'Women and Kebabs: An Orientalist Perspective' below for your viewing pleasure. After reading it I'm sure you'll be puzzled as I was upon discovering that it was rejected by the Feminist Review. Philistines!

Women and Kebabs: An Orientalist Perspective

Although it was dark at the time, the other night I started to see the world in a whole new light. I was out with some friends and after several rounds of very strong lychee martinis and a bop around the Groucho club I felt it was time for my ceremonious Saturday night kebab.

I have always loved kebabs. At university ‘The Kebab King’ van was permanently parked outside my halls of residence, and even when I once found a little piece of blue plastic in the meat, I kept on eating the stuff; just grateful in the knowledge that I hadn’t choked to death. But on said night, and of mildly discombobulated mind, my decision to order a large lamb doner was not met with mutual adoration.

“Are you seriously going to get a kebab? That’s gross!” my male friends preached, (and these are heterosexual alpha male type men). “We’re just going for the burgers.”

I had to ask myself the question: what’s so wrong with women eating kebabs? In fact the more I thought about it kebabs have become a kind of self-defence mechanism for me. I don’t mean in terms of binge eating or bulimia, lord no, but as a weapon to ward off over-enthusiastic males. I often find that an awkward moment at the end of an evening can quickly be distilled with the words “Cor I could murder a kebab!” Men just don’t like it, and quick to follow male dislike comes the rest of society.

Information in the press about the unhealthy properties of kebabs is all too often framed in references to women’s health. Of course they aren’t good for you. They can contain up to 140g of fat, which is twice the maximum daily allowance for women, and the calorific equivalent of a wine glass of cooking oil. Yet women in particular are penalised for eating them. For instance Kerrie Catona was recently lambasted for eating (quote) ‘a mammoth kebab laden with lashings of mayo after a night out with a female pal in Blackpool’. The Daily Mail was disgusted when the ‘mum-of-four happily scoffed down the unhealthy feast, despite vowing to shed weight after unflattering pictures of her on holiday were printed recently’. Similarly when Jacqui Smith was criticized for announcing that she would not feel safe ordering a kebab in Peckham, one has to ask whether she was disliked for her dismal inappropriateness, or for the fact she likes kebabs?

Okay, so kebabs aren’t good for us and that’s why they’re frowned upon, right? Wrong. If Foucault has taught us anything it is that life’s just not that simple. My friends don’t grimace when I order chips or a jumbo box of chicken wings. In fact when I (occasionally) smoke a Vogue cigarette they think I’m the coolest lady in London N1. From Eve onwards a woman’s relationship with food has been riddled with complications and this is just another far too complex rant about what they might be.

Feminists teach us that one reason women are scorned for indulging in unhealthy foods is because piling on the pounds directly interferes with their so called ‘bodily maintenance’. Shows like You Are What You Eat (C4) starring the witch-like

Scot, Dr. Gillian McKeith, are perfect examples of how the media regulate the female body and force subjects to abide by the rules of dietary control. What’s more, these programs are often violent in their regulation and frequently televise white working class mums being shamed by their middle class rivals (think Trinny and Susanna) for their obesity and for pushing the disease upon their children. In short they are blamed for not understanding the basic principles of nutrition. Now I don’t approve of obesity, but I understand that being fat is rarely a straightforward question of ‘choice’. I was lucky enough to have been raised by an Auntie who was a marvellous cook and grew her own vegetables, so from a young age I was taught how to maintain a healthy balanced lifestyle. However, there are some who are just not so fortunate.

In fact ‘make over’ programs such as these are distinctly post-feminist in their outlook, purporting a view of femininity that depends upon women having consumer power, i.e. enough money to buy their organic apples and free range chickens from M&S. In this respect eating bad foods not only demonstrates an inability to regulate ones body, but also implies a lack of education and consumer capital. One could argue that the kind of food you eat symbolizes your degree of social privilege. For instance: Grouse / upper class; Sushi / middle class; Burger / working class. But what of the kebab? It is a dish so badly frowned upon that it must represent more than simply being working class. But what?

In order to understand the stigma of a woman eating a kebab we must first consider its history. The word ‘kebab’ refers to a number of meat dishes in Arabian and Eastern cuisines. Do these eastern origins have something to do with the disdain surrounding its consumption? In his seminal study Orientalism, Edward Siad taught us that images of the east are social constructions that reflect the values of the voyeur as much as the viewed. A long line of feminists have traced links between western concepts of femininity and Orientalism and I believe that understanding the relationship between them could hold the key to unlocking the secrets of Kebab Stigma.

In a fascinating study called Beyond the Frame Deborah Cherry explores the relationship between orientalism and female subjectification in the 19th century. Cherry makes the persuasive argument that the expansion of the British Empire during the reign of Queen Victoria introduced alternate cultures into Britain and this new ‘imperialism’ from overseas provided a physical and refreshing open space for British women to develop alternate modes of femininity. The introduction of Orientalism, Cherry argues, offered 19th century feminists an opportunity to redefine themselves by allowing women to depict their emancipated modernityin contrast to the subservience of ‘native’ women. In fact the occidental trend to dress in Ottoman-inspired clothes became so popular amongst ladies of London that they started stocking them in Liberty's. The juxtaposition between the occidental ‘Other’ and the Western woman allowed feminists to express their independence and defiance. It granted them a social and artistic space within which to act by flouting convention without being improper.

“So what does all this have to do with kebabs?” I hear you ask.

According to my argument, eating a kebab isn’t just about eating a fatty piece of (very tasty) meat in between two slabs of pitta, nor is it’s condemnation based simply upon its high calorie content. Rather the eastern promise of the hearty kebab, which makes it an explicitly non-western food type, means that it acquires a symbolic value that challenges norms within our own society. It is the ‘Other’ of takeaway food types. Yet at the same time the kebab is not only ‘Othered’ simply because it is from abroad, but because, as I have previously mentioned, it is a means of flouting bodily regulation. Scoffing one down also challenges the post-feminist ‘norm’ of the white middle class woman by associating its eater with the working classes. In this respect its condemnation resides in its symbolic status as a food type that functions as a deliberate means of flouting social convention. Think about it: is eating a kebab that different to donning an Ottoman dress and walking round London in the 19th century? They are both foreign and, at times, shocking. But more importantly they are both statements that challenge preconceived notions of western femininity.

It is precisely the foreign Otherness of the kebab, its Orientalism, which makes it the most self-conscious type of fast food. Unlike its American cousins the burger and southern fried chicken, the Otherness of the kebab make its unhealthiness function as a symbolic expression of defiance, as women consciously indulge in corporeal deregulation. Kebabs are self-functioning symbols of her choice to defy these norms. In other words when I get a kebab I am not only associating myself with the malpractice of poor bodily regulation (and subsequently of being working class / poorly educated), but I am positioning myself as a free agent openly ascribing to its means of social defiance. Eating a kebab is like sticking a finger up at society; filming it and then playing it back to society with you in the audience (and if you don’t get post-modernism after that metaphor then you probably never will).

We must take this time to honour the kebab. For it is Othered as women like us are also Othered by the media, by misogyny and even by other women. The kebab represents all of this and more. In eating it we are consciously swallowing down all that is frowned upon. It is the martyr of food types, and so we must show it respect. Go forth, eat, and when you do eat with pride (but don’t have too many because you will die from high cholesterol).

Oh please BBC, if you keep this up I'll delete iplayer from my Favourites

2010-03-25T13:33:00.002Z

I just ever so quickly wanted to once again critique the ruthless chauvinists at the BBC. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, sexism rears its ugly head once again, this time in the form of a documentary about young feminist activists which seems to think its O.K. to imply that we have some sort of mental problem!

Now, anyone who knows anything will be well aware that I suffer from acute nervosa, i.e mental breakdowns, but this has very little to do with the fact that I tend to hate men, or, more specifically, patriarchy. Indeed, it is a loathing that gives me strength in times of need. For instance, I was once about to buy a kilo of sleeping pills in my local Sainsbury's when I spotted a copy of Nuts! magazine, which sent me into such a steaming rage that I soon forgot my original purpose.

The documentary went oh so much further, however, by suggesting that feminist women have some sort of problem. This was made as obvious as the sea by documentary maker Vanessa Engles, who snooped around asking parents: "And what do you think started these malicious thoughts in your little girl?"

Piss off Vanessa! No one wanted you at their feminist meetings, filming with your nosy camera, they just wanted to be on the telly. PISS OFF!>

The only problem I suffer from is 'seeing too much', just like King Lear.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/01_january/27/women.shtml

Cinderella shall go the prom!

2010-03-24T13:19:00.002Z

Hail lady readers! Finally those bigoted southern (north) Americans have succumb to the power of sappho (pictured to the right)! The lesbian who wanted to take her girlfriend to her high school prom wearing nothing but a suit and a 'knowing smile' has won her case. It was ruled to day that the evil institution had violated her human rights (note the non-gendered use of 'human', yes).

read about it here

It reminds me of a not too dissimilar affair that occurred my middle school, St Agatha's of the Gaping Bosom's school for Young Ladies, when I wanted to direct a rendition of Macbeth using a lesbian couple to portray the indefatigable relationship between the lady Macbeth and her protagonist war-lord husband. However, apparently it was "too ahead of its times" and "would upset the audience", particularly the dildo scene.

Toodles!

Tristanundisolde! Chapette book of the YEAR

2010-03-04T17:19:00.003Z

LOOK!

Isn't it lovely? And it's MINE, by ME! Hooray! Many thanks to the chivalrous, man-about-town, Mr. Harry Godwin Esq. of The Arthur Shilling Press for taking a chance on a gal like me. I truly am the happiest gal in town. Pink fizz for all.

Details can be found at The Arthur Shilling Press website - obviously my books have sold out all at once, flying off the shelves like the proverbial 'hot cake', considered to be a cross between a scone and a pain au chocolat, but live in hope, readers who may have missed out. Fingers crossed for a pdf, or get in touch with Hal or I for a sneaky e-look.

Once again I am published!

Women and Pots! Why didn't someone think of it sooner?

2010-02-01T16:16:00.002Z

Look out for my article in KnockBack magazine!

From Pots to Pot and then back to Pots Again

2010-02-01T09:00:00.001Z

From Pots to Pot and then back to Pots Again, my third historical endeavour after Persephone: The Musings of a Woman in Perpetual Despair, which won the Britney Spears prize for Creative Writing, and of course my seminal debut, The Suffragettes- Why?, is soon due for publication and I am so excited! Just as I was suffering under the burden of my annualistic offering being delayed I suddenly pulled myself together and said:

"Posie wake up! You need to finish that three thousand page historical pamphlet charting the feminist movement from the the ancient civilization of Ur through to the present day using the medium of pots!"

Of course publishers, labouring under that putred beast we call commercialism, weren't interested in the manuscript, but luckily I have enough money to print 700 copies just for me and my close friends. It's really rather facinating and I have sent an extract to the sublime Knockback magazine.
People often say to me, “Women and Pots? Wow. How could you take on such a grand endeavour?"
Well I tell you now, it wasn’t easy. Being a lady Feminist really does take its toll. Not only do I have to take the occasional call from my bank manager informing me that my notoriously large trust fund has once again trebled in size, but I am often forced to sit around the house all day doing absolutely nothing except trying on all my dresses and then not going out in them, before once again settling down to save womankind using nothing but a a bottle of Martini Rosso and an overactive imagination.

So look out for my latest work and if you would like a free copy just email me! Toodles! xx

Women: inherently irrational?

2010-01-27T17:18:00.006Z

Halt, lady readers, don't book your hostels in Cambridge just yet, as the Valentines launch has been postponed. This time, it's not because I tried to kill myself, but due to publishing technicalities. I'm not bitter, but I do wish I had a bloody boyfriend. Oh the world of a lady writer! Speaking of Lady Writers, in 1925, Scottish Lady writer Willa Muir penned Women, An Enquiry, in which she frustratingly linked the Freudian unconscious with the female gender, and the rational, decisive consciousness with, you guessed it, men. Now, far be it from me to support gender essentialism: I've met plenty of Transfolk and I tell you, it's definitely not as simple as all that. Some mornings I don't feel anything like putting on a bra, and my formidable skills at Scrabble alert me to the fact that frequently I am able to be perfectly rational and on top of things, unlike poor Willa Muir who thought that women were given an important 'creative outlet' in motherhood to match all the fun inventions and science the boys got to do. Silly bitch. The irrational, spontaneous and emotional outbursts of the unconscious/women could, Muir claimed, be channelled creatively and supply society with valuable growth, vitality and humanism, something which starchy men, trapped in their mechanical functionalism, were unable to supply for themselves (for some reason).

Generally, I disapprove, but when it comes to publishing schedules, perhaps Muir was right about women's inherent inability to meet deadlines. Now, one publication which definitely did get off the ground successful was Issue 2 of the Cambridge Literary Review which launched last night in (you'll win a pair of my knickers if you guess it successfully ...) yes that's right, Cambridge! I was trapped in familial pow-wows last night with Aunt Lily over what to do with vast chunks of the family 'fund' which were invested somewhere truly ghastly which might not exist anymore (further proof of our gendered inability to cope with masculine rational constructions, I'll thank you Helene Cixous). The outcome of this was that I missed the launch, which promised to be a good one, with readings from tender Valkyrie Marianne Morris and Tony Robinson from Time Team! I was very glad to have a poem I composed in honour of fleur du mal, Tom Chivers included, and to be able to represent the gritty London scene in the formidable, ivory cloisters of Cambridge, like a female Jude the Obscure, although of course I still use my cantab.net address occasionally.

Do please check it out. Finally, many apologies to those who turned out to see me at the Edinburgh Student Fringe Festival's feminist poetry event, Shout Out! on the 18th Jan, where I had intended to read. After walking around an intimidating student union, full of 'young people' and scores of the sort of idiotic girls who are produced like Sea Monkeys every time a new 'mega-trend' takes off, this time wearing fake fur jackets and palpable Topshop irono-novelty brogues, I chanced upon a sign which made me realise the reading had in fact taken place the day before. Proof, if proof is necessary in your gendered framework of fixed texts and unambiguous language, that women are subject to what Julia Kristeva calls feminine time, which is circular, reproductive, and eternal, in contrast to masculinity's linear, teleological time and its association with culturally valued 'progress'. I contend that if the poetry reading had been feminist, it would still be going on now.

Finis

(or is it? another feminist question)

A Year off the Ward: a Posie Rider work in progress...

2010-01-12T17:57:00.004Z

The mind is a complex organ, and try as they might, clinical psychiatrists have yet to concoct the correct combination of suppressants, stimulants, narcotics and anti-hallucinogenics to remedy its many, many disturbances. Sound like you? Then you're just like me, and will love my new book!

A Year off the Ward, soon to be published with WPR Books, charts a year in which I attempted not to get sectioned under the Mental Health Act, or because I was stalking someone. My loyal readers will be glad to know my valiant attempts to stay ostensibly sane are finally being bundled into a collectible tome, and they will have been with me throughout the journey via my blog, a garbage heap of the mind like no other. Anyone remember September 2008-August 2009? Let me jog your memory in my book!

And, if you happen to be in Cambridge on the 14th February, you can come along to the launch. It's at Heffers! More details to be announced as I'm currently in frenzied chats with my publishers to ensure the book is in tip top condition, and that I make sure its in proper sentences before I commit it to PDF.

Find below a sneak preview to wet your dripping appetite! It follows the first few weeks of January 2009, when I tried to overcome my mental disturbances by improving my body image through strategic anorexia, and learnt some important lessons about feminism on the way.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

January

“Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind

shapes itself to the body, and roaming around its gilt cage, seeks

only to adorn its prison.”

Mary Wollstonecraft

I returned to N1 full of Christmas cheer. A fortnight in Aunt Lily's cottage had reminded me of a kind of happiness I had forgotten long ago, weighed down by the perils of modernity and psychosis. I dread sentimentalising the domestic, but there is something so comforting about spending one's days on brisk Hampshire walks and one's evenings roasting Ladurée mincemeat macaroons over an open fire while Aunt Lily microwaves yet another Marks and Spencer Turkey Crown with extra stuffing. Hitherto, I had thought of kitchens as essentially vulgar things which are best buried in the depths of a copious town house and populated with willing staff able to whisk up a chickpea bake and send it flying up a dumb-waiter at the ring of a midnight bell.

Now, however, I found myself craving the aesthetic qualities of the Arga as much as I once yearned for the Georgia O'Keefe printed screen that currently shields the entrance to my modest cuisine from prying eyes. A great change had come upon me. I went online and started a twelve month subscription to Country Living. I packed away my more outrageous (and blood splattered) wall decoration in favour of distressed pine and vintage cross-stitch baby primers from Islington antiques market. I bought holly and mistletoe and put them in a blue chipped enamel watering can and soaked my white Habitat sofa in tea to make it looked antique, like I did as a child in a school project on the Magna Carta and, most troublingly, I started baking.

It all started with Christmas Gingerbread Partridges, a kind of crisp cookie made with a hand-crafted copper cookie cutter and decorated with delicate icing designs. It was another one of Aunt Lily's great ideas, like taking mescaline at my parent's funeral. The partridges were intended to be tree or package ornaments, or decorative gifts for friends I'd missed over the holiday period. Having no friends as such (except Lara, who's a bit too grown up for that sort of thing, and Melody, who's afraid of pigeons, which are a bit like partridges) and no tree, as I had no burly boyfriend to bring it in, and am not a post-feminist after all, I found myself at a loss as to what to do with all the things. They were so, so hard (like rocks), so I didn't dare attempt to eat them. At first. Soon I had discovered that, if soaked in tea, coffee or any hot liquid, they eventually softened to an edible consistency. At 5.0g of fat per partridge, and with little to do between New Year and Pancake Day, it wasn't long before I'd transferred my mental turmoil to my thighs and, whilst trying to run away from the ward with a basket full of gender-normativity under my cook's arm, I had in fact booked myself a ticket straight back to the ward aboard a special convoy vehicle like the ones they use to transfer the obese around airports.

......... to be continued!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Merry Christmas indeed!

2009-12-22T13:00:00.005Z

I've left the slushy doom of London for Hampshire with Aunt Lily. She avoided the dangerous roads by saddling her prize pony, Emily Davison, and sending her to the station to meet me - such a clever pony. I can't ride, unfortunately, having had a series of equine dreams as an infant which my psychoanalyst attributed to penis envy - since then, horses have always struck me as inherently patriarchal, even when ridden side-saddle. Emily courageously led me on foot through the icy forests to Aunt Lil's, and we've been sharing bottle after bottle of mulled Martini Rossi since Sunday night.

A couple of Christmas treats for you then, a la Posie. Firstly, Laura Dekker, a 14 year old Dutch female has been found on a Caribbean island after running away from sexist bureaucrats who have been trying to stop her achieving the world record for the youngest individual to single-handedly sail around the world. The record is currently held by one Mike Perham, a 17 year old boy from Britain, and apparently the authorities intend to thwart Ms Dekker until she's old enough for it not to be a record, or until a younger boy comes along who's able to beat her. Well sod off, cried Ms Dekker, as she escaped from her captors and sassily sailed off to the Caribbean, proving herself to be both physically and mentally capable of the trip, as well as a feminist icon in the making. We've heard of the plight of Shakespeare's Sister - but what about Sir Francis Drake's? Or Columbus'? Let her sail - Elizabeth I would have and how cool was she?

Secondly, Rage Against the Machine are Christmas number one! I've never heard of them before, I think they're some kind of funk band, but isn't it great? Better than last year's Christian fundamentalist rip-off vom fest.

Finally, three cheers for Melody who is the first woman to walk the Channel Tunnel alone without informing the authorities. She's text to tell me that last night she became so bored of waiting in Folkstone that she parked her Merc in a privet hedge, slipped stealthily, like a fox, through the barriers, underneath a high speed train and into the Tunnel itself. She's just resurfaced in Calais and, having only stopped once for a quick pee beneath a signal, is resting in a refugee encampment and sharing her story with local would-be travellers. So not only has she beat the system, she's also helping to overhaul the Anglo-French fascist immigration policy. You go Melody! She's hoping to make it to Rouen by the evening clinging to the underside of a HGV.

So, hope you have a lovely time and all my festive kisses to you, wherever you may be, as long as you're not a Post-Feminist!
xx

Psycho(self)analyst

2009-11-28T18:00:00.005Z

Well, the first few weeks (weeks? has it been longer? Massive delirium) of my self-analysis have been fraught with mishaps and misdiagnosis.

At first, it seemed my ego had formed a pathological identification of itself with a lost-loved object, later I seemed to have returned to a stage of anal-narcissism, for a little while I was concerned that I was cathecting purely onto imaginary unconscious objects (thus treating my own body as the object of the beloved) and most scarily of all I seemed to have ceased object-cathexis altogether and be floating in a state of schizophrenic bliss, converting latent thoughts to 'real objects'.

I ruled a father complex out at once because Daddy was such a dear, and besides he died when I was only three on the River Thames at Marlowe. Aunt Lily may of course have brought me up all wrong, but with Showalter I'm inclined to disregard Freud's thoughts on the narcissism and neurosis of homosexuality as just plain behind the times. Surely homosexual thoughts can't be evidence that I fancy myself? I nearly married Ann and she was nothing like me: much less attractive and rather stupid to boot.

I wish I could diagnose myself as an hysteric - feminists go crazy for the early divas of female hysteria, and Helene Cixous thought they were heroes, valiantly and quite reasonably responding to patriarchy's oppression. There's some wonderful stuff about Obsessional Neurotics in Freud and their strong reactions to the repression of ambivalent thoughts about loved ones (all the boyfriends I've secretly hated) but it doesn't fit - I'm too messy to have an OCD. It's a shame, as other hysterias are mostly caused by confused object-cathexis as a result of a faulty Oedipal repression (after the infant realises they're not going to have their wicked way with the mother/father, they quickly put it out of their mind at once and form an ideal image of the parents (Super-Ego) to act as a conscience against any other silly incestuous thoughts). Pathologies can apparently be caused by incomplete repression - Freud describes animal phobias in this way (eg. Wolf Man) as well as hysteric ticks or convulsions, which are the unconscious' way of expressing the chafing repression, which the conscious mind resists. I have been known sometimes to lash out at strangers or swear suddenly, but I'm not sure this qualifies as le grande hysterie. But, I'm disinclined to believe I got the Oedipal stuff wrong: it's so elementary. It would be embarrassing.

All that's left is psychosis, which is supposed to be brought about by the foreclosure of a primordial signifier, the Name-of-the-Father: a nice and complicated theoretical type condition, which also rejects universal patriarchal signifiers, a massive plus and very much up my street. Also, there's a withdrawal of libidinal energy from the outside world, which fits as my love life is dead at the moment. The delusional formulation (libido turned inward to ego and fantasy objects) makes an awful lot of sense as I can be a little self-involved, and Emmeline (my cat) tells me I live in a dream-world, which I always thought is absolutely essential for a great writer, like Tolstoy. I have cause to reflect on the period in which I wrote Me, Tim and my Quim (which was once to be made into a major Hollywood film, before the recession hit etc) and in all honesty I can say I must have been suffering from some pretty severe delusions: in the novel, I have a passionate and highly literary love affair with my psycho-sexual counsellor, while in reality I did not have any kind of affair with my psycho-sexual counsellor, though not for want of trying.

Unfortunately, psychosis is a rather indistinct condition, basically quite a lot like neurosis, and its existence has been contested. I don't want to be neurotic, as it reeks of desperation, and if it comes to that I'll just diagnose myself as perfectly sane and perhaps a little under-stretched intellectually in my current employment. That's the beauty of being a Lady Psychologist, readers!

xxx

Self-Medication, Dr Freud

2009-11-10T12:27:00.004Z

SO I've been a little patchy recently in le blog as I've been having a psychotic episode. Or two. Or twenty seven. Probably since I've last web-logged there have been as many episodes of Hollyoaks as I've had psychic traumas, and that's including the Sunday round up and taking each portion of it as a stand alone episode, so probably about six in all I guess. And I don't even watch Hollyoaks.

Recently, you see, I've been writing my memoirs for publication on the divine Women's Parliamentary Radio, entitled A Year Off the Ward, which is an account of my admirable mental health in the last twelve months or so, and how through positive thinking, creative sublimation and vigorous self-medication I have managed to avoid a) suicide, b) self harm (sort of), c) stalking (again, sort of), d) violence, aggression towards the young, petty theft and arson (all except arson have been a little patchy I admit). Most importantly, I have avoided being sectioned since June 2007 and, like a repeat offender recently released from prison, the fact that I haven't been sent straight back within the month certainly calls for a celebration of the diazepam-and-white-wine-spritzer kind.

However, writing my memoirs seems to have plunged me into a relapse. Now I know what you're thinking lady readers, this should have sent me running to my blog, or encouraged me to compose a series of Mental Health Tweets, which would probably have me lambasted like the poor dear who wrote very sensibly about her miscarriage (did you see it? if not she said:

I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because
there's a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

Wonderful says Posie! I couldn't have put it better myself.) God knows what the modern middle class neurotic would do were it not for the ready opportunities to monetise one's disturbances. However, I thought that, with the book coming out, I'd keep my material 'fresh' as it were, and try to sublimate furiously through a series of monoprints of female saints castrating dragons figured as menstrual hallucinations (coming soon).

That having failed, I turned to my trusty Freud, the beloathed Father, to do a little self-therapy. I have, you see, run a little slow on the trust fund this season and, with no Christmas shopping done to speak of, need to prioritise my outgoings in order to buy those Jo Malone candles for Emmeline, and Aunt Lily's yearly kilo of Laduree fig macaroons. A therapist, therefore is out of the question, and as feminist critic Sally R. Munt rightly termed such bourgeois femmes as myself 'consumers of therapy', who pay £40 a week so that someone can tell us our thoughts are valid, I am happy to sacrifice this luxury for the greater good.

So, having briskly skimmed through Mourning and Melancholia, Totem etc & Freud's entire case notes on Hysteria (supplemented by readings in Elaine Showalter, the darling, so that I don't get too carried away). I am now to proceed with psycho-analysing myself. Keep updated for next installment! Emmeline is going to hypnotise me now.

2009-10-28T15:29:00.001Z

I've been Googling the hell out of women all this week and do you know that Tori Amos is a feminist?

The worst jobs in the world for Women? Posie Rider investigates...

2009-10-23T17:03:00.003+01:00

Lady readers! I must apologise for my absence of late. I've been incredibly busy drafting A Year off the Ward, which looks set to be published but only on the condition that I first pen a serious exploration of the dumbest jobs for women in the UK. I know what you’re thinking

“This is Posie Rider- a middle to upper-middle class urban haute bourgeois lady writer with a trust fund large enough to purchase a small African country- why would she be writing an article on air-head jobs for women?”

Well readers, that’s kind of the point. The piece is designed to be incredibly shocking, namely because of my hostile reaction to employment opportunities miles beneath my superior intellect. For instance last week I spent a whole three days working in a ‘PR’ company in the ‘HR’ department, which mainly consisted of me ordering Marks and Spencer’s mince pies online and emptying packets of ready salted crisps into little bowls to go with the ‘dress-down Friday’ bar that opens each…Friday. God it was hell. My incredible brain hadn’t been so distressed since I got a B in my Art A-level. Those of you who have had the honour of seeing my incredible artistic offerings on this blog will know that such a claim is totally unfounded and the equivalent of stealing an ice-cream from a small child playing in the sunshine and possibly flashing your genitalia at her: perverted and wrong.

This week I’ve been working in an supposed ‘organic’ kitchen, which I thought would be a more pleasant pursuit, but how wrong I was (my toilet cleaner is more organic than the contents of their culinary offerings). When embarking upon a recipe for Sorrel, Leak and Venison soup I was rudely told to put down my chopping knife and start preparing some egg and cress sandwiches. Egg and cress sandwiches! This was a shop on the high street in Holborn (I sought a position in Borough Market but needless to say there were none available - sigh) but even in this run down cafe I was most shocked by the substandard eating habits of the masses. Next week I’m going to be a receptionist at a hair salon where, in order to fully embrace the role, I am required to peruse those awful publications that go by the name of Heat and Grazia.

However, once again (as with most of my literary purists) I do all this all in the name of great art. For upon completing this terrible article I have been guaranteed publication of my ground-breaking A Year off the Ward.

I (often) feel like a female Jesus! It really is too too much to bear the weight on womankind, and yet I go on... Toodles! x

Ah Dave Buss, I presume?

2009-10-02T11:34:00.000+01:00

So, I've been researching David Buss and it turns out he's the professor of psychology at the University of Texas, which explains A LOT.

Sadly, this also means that I will be unable to attend any of his lectures and confront him over his very sexist (and probably uninformed) claims about women in the bedroom.

In the mean time I am going to start drafting a very rude email accompanied by an excerpt from my up and coming scientific pamphlet: Dorian Lay.

More insulting assumptions about women in the bedroom!

2009-10-01T01:56:00.003+01:00

My nemesis, the so-called 'scientist' (science-tit more like) David Buss has decided to compile all his stupid ideas into one book for our reading pleasure. It's a work upon why women want sex, and Dave really knows what he's talking about. Tanya Gold reviewed it in The Guardian.

She writes:

"Then I learn why women marry accountants; it's a trade-off. "Clooneyish" men tend to be unfaithful, because men have a different genetic agenda from women – they want to impregnate lots of healthy women. Meston and Buss call them "risk-taking, womanising 'bad boys'". So, women might use sex to bag a less dazzling but more faithful mate. He will have fewer genetic benefits but more resource benefits that he will make available, because he will not run away. This explains why women marry accountants. Accountants stick around – and sometimes they have tiny little feet!"

As ridiculous as Dave's theory may seem - I can't help but think there's an element of truth behind it. My past experience with 'bad boys' aka Gerald (although actually just a whiny sack of congealed chauvinistic gunk) and 'bad girls' aka Ann (although actually just a chav) has shown that they were not faithful mates to me. Maybe it's time I skulked around the Men's shoe department in Harrods on the look out for a man with size six feet? Or stand dressed like a prostitute outside KPMG?

Basically the possibilities are endless- thanks Dave! Oh how I'd love to shove a vagina cake in your mouth and watch you choke. But that not being an option (because I don't know where you live YET) let's move on to explore Dave's other really insightful observations about the opposite sex:

"And so to the main reason women have sex. The idol of "women do it for love, and men for joy" lies broken on the rug like a mutilated sex toy: it's orgasm, orgasm, orgasm. "A lot of women in our studies said they just wanted sex for the pure physical pleasure," Meston says. Meston and Buss garnish this revelation with so much amazing detail that I am distracted. I can't concentrate. Did you know that the World Health Organisation has a Women's Orgasm Committee? That "the G-spot" is named after the German physician Ernst Gräfenberg? That there are 26 definitions of orgasm?"

OK the last part is quite interesting (Meston is Buss's 'female co-writer', although is probably non-existent- a construct designed to confound women and make them buy the book. If she is real she's probably an illegal immigrant!)

"And so, to the second most important reason why women have sex – love. "Romantic love," Meston and Buss write, "is the topic of more than 1,000 songs sold on iTunes." And, if people don't have love, terrible things can happen, in literature and life: "Cleopatra poisoned herself with a snake and Ophelia went mad and drowned." Women say they use sex to express love and to get it, and to try to keep it."

I'm sorry Dave but that ^ is definitely NOT true.

"Meston and Buss also explain why the girls in my class at school went down like dominoes in 1990. One week we were maidens, the following week, we were not. We were, apparently, having sex to see if we liked it, so we could tell other schoolgirls that we had done it and to practise sexual techniques: "As a woman I don't want to be a dead fish," says one female. Another interviewee wanted to practise for her wedding night."

This is not the 19th century, stupid women! Although they're probable friends with Dave which explains why they're incredibly stupid.

Yes, upon reflection, I remember that awful summer when every single girl at Our Burning Infant Hearts Primary School lost their virginity in the graveyard. I was the only one who didn't. Not because I was a feminist at the time you understand, but because I was writing my precocious historical work; 'Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Life in Haiku'. All my life history is revealed in my upcoming work 'Posie Rider: A Year Off the Ward' published by WPR Books, in which I cover my time and school and psychoanalyse myself to buggery in an attempt to stay sane.

Back to Dave and the part where he really excels himself:

"Women also mate to get the things they think they want – drugs, handbags, jobs, drugs. "The degree to which economics plays out in sexual motivations," Buss says, "surprised me. Not just prostitution. Sex economics plays out even in regular relationships. Women have sex so that the guy would mow the lawn or take out the garbage. You exchange sex for dinner." He quotes some students from the University of Michigan. It is an affluent university, but 9% of students said they had "initiated an attempt to trade sex for some tangible benefit"."

Would these kind of books ever be written about men? I know plenty of intellectual artistic types of males with lawyer girlfriends to keep them afloat. Indeed having a giant trust fund and a family heritage stretching back to the Norman Conquest, I too have had to bare the brunt of men only after me for my good looks and cash. I fight them off on a regular basis, if not with my copy of Simone de Beauvoir then with my sheer intelligence, which I can tell you now, most of them seem unable to handle.

Men sleep around for self-gain just as much as women, in fact I think they may do it more often. If you think about a successful ugly man wanting a pretty (dumb) girlfriend odds are its in order to improve his image. Now that's worse than just wanting economic independence like Virginia Woolf or Coco Chanel. That's buying someone's body and selling your own soul in exchange for improved self-image.

Be damned! Flees flea say I!

So inspired by Dave's miraculous study I have decided to write my own faux scientific pamphlet entitled:

"Dorian's Lay: How men sell their silly souls for sex"
by Posie Rider.

Plus I'm all over this Dave Buss character like a rash... I'm going to tell him exactly what I think...

And i wasn't alone in thinking Strictly Come Dancing attire is 'trashy'

2009-09-30T01:02:00.004+01:00

Look what I've found:

One of the two professional costumiers that supplies dresses to Strictly is DanceSport International in Croydon. DSI hires the dresses to the BBC, and then sells them to anyone who could possibly want a half-dress made of fringing and feathers in some eye-burningly luminous shade. Twenty-five dresses worn on Strictly are being shown on the DSI website as I write, prices on application. Every dress is based on a leotard; some of the celebs choose to wear something under the leotard, others don't. Even the virtual nudity that features in so many of the Latin routines is fake, although the grotesque bump and grind is real enough.

I know. Anyone would have thought I had written that, but it was in fact Germaine Greer.

Read the rest of her article in which she whole heartedly agrees with moi here.
Great minds think alike.

He's Back...

2009-09-29T00:21:00.008+01:00

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into your living rooms Chris bloody Hollins rears his ugly sexist head.

You may remember Hollins for the sexist remarks he made last year to innocent news present Sian Williams. I of course stepped up to the challenge and made my thoughts known to the BBC (aka the Basically for Boys Corporation), but they refused to meet my requests and Hollins is still allowed to run wild of licence fee payers televisions insulting the female race.

And now he's managed to worm his way into Strictly Come Dancing! I can't believe he's been allowed to set foot on the set for this 'family' show. Bruce Forsyth presents it for god's sake, although I'm sure even his hands are not clean from the putrid stains of chauvinism.

Look at this video of him yapping on about himself:

< SEXIST!
Quote: "I can't wait for the tight outfits..."

We all know ballroom dancing is pretty misogynistic anyway. Those gaudy dresses are terribly revealing and remind me of that awful debutant's ball I was forced to attend during my late teens. I of course spent most of the night alone in the toilets writing poetry, a pass time more worthy of my creative talents. Apologies, I digress. But what's more even shocking is my concurrence with the Daily Male when they criticised the skimpy 'dish cloth' dresses for 'cheapening the show'. I was of course one of the angry viewers who called in and made my thoughts KNOWN to the BBC. You just can't get away with skirts that short before the watershed. I refer you to said article. And then of course there was the sexist ageism evident in the dismissal of the lovely old biddy Arlene-what's-her-name.

And just when you thought it couldn't get anymore sexist... Chris Hollins is a contestant!

<"TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF HER!": sexual harrassment on live telly.

Lady readers, I would urge you not to vote at all, but if you must know that I am officially endorsing Natalie Cassidy (aka Sonia from Eastenders). I admire her courage for appearing to national television despite being extremely overweight. Her winning might set a positive example to other young fat girls.

We fight on and we fight to win! Toodles!

'A Virgin's Tale' after Bridget Bardot

2009-09-22T21:41:00.004+01:00

Bridget Bardot, French existentialist sex kitten, has just turned 75. Retrospectives of this formidable blonde's life have caused me to reflect on, well, my own life. Like Bardot, I was at my prime in my youth. Before I discovered barbiturates, before booze, long before I discovered men, my first love was writing. I was a prolific writer even before my earliest memories, when Aunt Lily tells me I would scrawl nonsensical letters up the walls of the family house, convinced that I was a new prophet after having been given a Good News Bible by a well-meaning Popish cousin. Christianity would not hold my formidable imagination in thrall for long.

I finished my first opera Thebes, A Virgin’s Tale: Parts 1-9 by aged eight, then began to experiment with higher artistic forms including drama, mime and philosophic dialogues. One of my most precocious works from this period with which you may be familiar, Persephone: Pythagorean Musings of a Woman in Perpetual Despair, won Little Miss Brain Award, Hampshire in 1993 - past winners include Philippa Gregory, Marie Curie and Diana,Princess of Wales.

Having exhausted the genre of Socratic Discourse at the ripe old age of twelve I turned my talents to poetry, fiction and historical writing. You may be familiar the historical biography Eleanor of Aquitane: A Life in Haiku and my later work The Tears of the Wood Nymph which won the Marianne Keyes prize for Creative Writing. And now let me treat you to Greek Tragedy I composed on a holiday to the Lake District aged 11 in the style of Handel's Aces and Galatea.

Thebes: A Virgin’s Tale

ACT 1 Scene 1

The Temple of Apollo, Thebes. A CHORUS of Humming Birds stand centre right.

Chorus: The Oracle The Oracle The Oracle!

A Virgin steps down from the Temple of Apollo in Thebes. She is followed by a host of wild animals, including finches, mice and rabbits. She holds a basket of wild oats which she begins to symbolically sprinkle on the ground.

The Virgin: Hail! I hear a new morn dawn in Thebes
What can it mean? What can it be?

The Rabbit: This is a new context.

The Finch: I feel like I’ve been pecked.

The Mouse: Oh an Oedipal effect.

Chorus: The Oracle The Oracle The Oracle!

The Virgin: Philomena I am called and my tragic tale applaud
For now I share with thee how cruel the world can be!
I was born alone

Chorus: Alone Alone Alone!

The Virgin: The mother was a whore

Chorus: Whore Whore Whore!

The Virgin: To the temple I did come.

Chorus: Attention!

The Army of Zeus enters stage left. Step forward ZEUS disguised as an attractive athlete.

Zeus: I have come to Thebes to find a Vir-------gin!

Chorus: Hap Hap Happy!

Zeus: What’s this?
A little girl to pillage.
Best looking in the village!

Chorus: Run Run Philomena!

Zeus: To make her mine
Will be no crime
Cause she’s so fine!

Chorus: Rape Rape and Death!

Virgin: Nay I shall not relent
My will cannot be bent
Although a maid of humble offing
I shall not be pushed into boffing!

Chorus: Apollo Apollo save her save her

Virgin: I am scared as Laius
When screwed up and cursed us
Poor me like Antigone
To an underground home shall flee

Chorus: Zeus Zeus is in your house!

Virgin: Ay me so I see
But he shall not steal my chastity!

VIRGIN Exits.

Zeus: To pluck her virgin’s tooth
I’ll have to use a hoof
Disguised as a fine horse
My plan shall surely take its course.

ZEUS and THE ARMY OF ZEUS Exit.

Chorus: Yes we’ll make a killing for there’s no chance of Zeus wining!

The Rabbit: Poor Philomena!

Chorus: Zeus will surely woo her!

The Finch: She’d love to ride a pony!

The Chorus: And Zeus is just a phoney!

The Mouse: Nay she cannot fail!

The Chorus: For it is called a Virgin’s Tale, a Virgin’s Tale!
Oh Oh Oh it is!
The Oracle The Oracle The Oracle!

The curious case of the Bluestocking Pony and a warning to us all...

2009-09-14T13:20:00.004+01:00

Can you believe it? ANOTHER one of my great ancestors has been written about AGAIN in terribly important historical work. This time it's about the bluestockings and my great great Auntie Polly Constance Rider.

She features in a wonderful book by the author Jane Robinson called Bluestockings - The Remarkable Story of the First Women to Fight for an Education. I read about it on the F-word. Although my great great auntie is not directly mentioned a dear anecdote pointed me in the right direction:

... the story of Constance Maynard, for example, appears across several chapters and eventually the mention of her name is like rediscovering an old friend. That Maynard’s father tried to bribe her out of accepting a university place by offering her a pony seems to tickle Robinson in particular, as she brings it up repeatedly. You can almost see her eyes rolling.

Well indeed, because my great great Auntie Polly Constance Rider, was indeed that very Constance! She later married a Maynard and dropped the Polly (she went on to work for Mi5 in Moscow and they thought it was a bit of a giveaway). But what Robinson doesn't know, and what history books won't tell you, is that she accepted that pony with eager joy: and do not roll your eyes Robinson! For she used that pony to become a highway robber, which gave her financial independence, the kind an education could never buy.

Indeed as feminists we must step outside of these pre conceived 'notions' of 'education'. It's very small minded. The whole of life is an erudite force cleaning the tunnels of our minds like a lavender-scented aromatherapy candle (divine!). In this respect one has to conclude that you are either born highly intelligent or just plain dumb, and I think we all know what category the Riders fall into.

Hugs and Pugs!

Posie Rider: My life as an Activist

2009-09-13T12:27:00.005+01:00

Now as you'll all know I am descended from a long line of female activists dating back to William the Conquerer's consort Matilda de Ridier IV, so after reading said article in the Observer today, which considers why women are better campaigners than men, I feel that, as an obvious voice of authority in such matters, I am total liberty to extrapolate.

Lady readers, we all know that women make far superior campaigners because:

a) women have and still shoulder the burden of man's prejudice: "we are the Jews for all seasons" as my Aunt Lilly used to say. As a result we are forced to take to arms in order to defend our lot and thus demonstrate our skills.

b) women represent the future of humanity.

c) (the obvious) women are better than men.

d) the media trust women more than men, mainly (and this is scientific fact) because we have longer hair.

e) most women are too stupid to understand anything, rendering them incapable of activating against anything compesmentus. As a result any female initiative seems more impressive than in really is. In fact sustained female efforts to effectively act in unison in the name of politics is extremely rare when you consider the woman:political cause ratio. Of course many women have attempted to master the group dynamic but often land up lost in large out of town supermarkets, or in cat fights over what colour paint to use on thier activist posters. Some can't even open their own front doors.

I personally am dead set against violence - "the pen is zen, the sword is fraud,'' as my Aunt Lilly used to say. You'll be able to see from my letter writing campaigns against the very sexist Ricky Gervais and the bigot sports presenter Chris (I can't even remember your surname) something from the BBC, that these campaigns have indeed proved most effective and will no doubt go on to change the course of humanity itself.

In the mean time I have a lovely afternoon planned making a courgette tart. Melody is coming over later and we're going to play scrabble. Toodles xx

Why Women Are Really Afraid of Psychologists

2009-09-09T09:30:00.002+01:00

Last week's news coverage of a would-be psychologist's proof that women are 'genetically predisposed to be socially conditioned in certain ways', aka to be afraid of spiders, while men are less likely to fear spiders, has to be the most depressing thing ever. EVER. Here are some highlights from the Sky News coverage.

Why Women are Really Afraid of Sexist Spiders

Psychologist Dr David Rakison from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University tested 10 girls and 10 boys, all aged 11-months, with pictures of spiders to see how they reacted. He showed them images of a spider next to a fearful cartoon face and a spider next to a happy face. Dr Rakison's report, published in the New Scientist, states that the girls looked at the picture containing a happy face for longer than the scared one. However, the boys looked at both images for an equal amount of time.

He concluded that the girls found the happy face puzzling as they were expecting to see the spider paired with a frightened face.The psychologist said these tests show that girls have a genetic predispostion to fear the arachnids in contrast with boys who do not ... He linked the difference in results to our hunter-gatherer ancestry when he says women had to be wary of dangerous animals to protect their children, whereas men used more risky behaviour in order to be successful hunters.

Let's ignore the obvious - that 20 individuals tested is not representative of ANYTHING - and have a little look that Dr. Rakison's conclusions.

Firstly, I must ask, why didn't they monitor the amount of time the girls looked at the image of the spider? I had to delete the tarantula image from the article just to write this blogpost! There's every chance that they just enjoyed looking at the happy face. People are cute like that.

Or perhaps the girls, by the age of four, have learnt that spiders are often frightening, and were intrigued by the mixed messages being sent by scientists. This would have nothing to do with their innate predisposition for fear, more to do with their enhanced sensitivity to social mores in the abstract, which the silly (or 'indifferent') boys lack.

Another technical problem with the research is that Rakison doesn't seem to have used a control. In this case, I imagine an image of something innocuous like a circle or triangle next to a happy then scared face would demonstrate whether the amount of time the children looked at the image had anything to do with their enjoyment of the expressions thereon, or sheer confusion of the object and expression being put together.

Rakison's 'social' conclusions don't make sense either. I'm sure any mother would willingly mash a spider or fling a snake out the cave door to save her precious little ones. Otherwise she'd have to stand on a boulder or something squealing until a Manny Man came home, by which time the kids would all be dead.

More convincingly, maybe women in this day and age are allowed to indulge their fears more in infancy, and are encouraged to take delight in the attention of others (a nasty tarantula on my pretty pink dress, eek!) whereas men are encouraged to overcome them in shows of bravado. Social construction of gender anyone? Oh nevermind.

Anyway, none of these musings on the sexism of spiders matter anyway because

TWENTY INDIVIDUALS TESTED IS NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF ANYTHING.

Back from the brink of marriage and alive - just!

2009-09-07T17:53:00.000+01:00

Lady readers, I can only apologise for my absence. Yesterday was clearly the worst day of my life, but I awake renewed and refreshed for, thank god, I'm not married!

Things went from bad to slightly better to pretty bad again on Saturday, as Ann was placated by her pizza, but soon high and buzzing from the Cherry Coke I served her as an accompaniment. She came as close to being drunk on sugar and E numbers as any woman I have ever seen over the age of 12, reminiscent of a childhood summer I spent in Portugal trying to get drunk on Malibu ice cream, and then just Malibu. Attempts to entertain her were fruitless as she babbled half incomprehensible nonsense about her family and childhood and the difficulties she faced as a worshipper of Sappho (who she's never read, I ask you!) in the blustering North. It was all rather too moving for me, and I accidentally fell asleep picturesquely in my bio-form Habitat beanbag, to be unceremoniously awoken 7 hours later by Emmeline. Morning had come, and Ann was already in her dress.

Now, we'd kept our dresses a secret from one another so that it would be a lovely surprise. Just to clarify, mine was this one.

As a feminist bride, I'd thought long and hard about what to wear, critical as it is to uphold one's political principles while doing justice to one's admirable waist (cf. the Suffragettes with their great hats). Having decided that my virginity, soul, modesty and so forth were decidedly un-'white', in the bridal symbolic spectrum, I decided to opt for a revolutionary black. Obviously it had to be vast and puffy, and cinch the waist to the vanishing point. I mean I was bloody well getting married. You can't tell from this picture but I also wore an enormous boat shaped black hat based on a Elizabethan design after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This represented feminism's defeat of patriarchy (and my love of QE1).

Anyway, knowing me just a little bit (enough to be my wife) I thought Ann would have picked up on my fierce, yet feminine, yet feminist, yet fashionable, tendencies, and swapped her frock for a frock coat, top-hat and little cane like the gorgeous Marlene Dietrich. How else would we achieve the desirable and chic gender-bending irono-androgene feminist-couplage I've always dreamed of? Sort of like...

The desire to flout gender conventions through revolutionary dress was clearly the last thing on Ann's mind. From nowhere, hundreds of bunches of white lilies had appeared and filled the house (symbolic of death, surely? Poor stupid Ann, she should've paid attention at the Waterhouse exhibition). White bows decked the staircase, sugared almonds in grotesque pink were boxed up and patterned with love hearts. LOVE HEARTS. There were love hearts everywhere, all over my potato stamped (U+26A2) symbol recycled crepe paper table cloths, filling up my mooncup shaped vases, and all the dead roses I'd put out in ironic reminiscence of the Miss Haversham bits from Great Expectation were destroyed. Ann thought they were depressing.

And her dress.

I don't know how to explain it, I don't have the words, or the stomach. I've looked all day for a picture that approximates its horror. This is the closest one I've found.

That really finished it off. I couldn't marry Ann. Ann was clearly a maniac. I mean, what's the point of marrying a feminist if you're going to wear a dress like that? Getting rid of Ann was harder than deciding not to marry her. At first she didn't understand, then she didn't believe me, then she wanted to kill me. As she came at me wielding the phallus shaped pinata I'd planned to destroy during our vows, I had little choice but to let Emmeline pounce. She's always very defensive of her mistress. There was blood everywhere, like in Carrie.

After the attack, I ordered Ann a cab. I was feeling generous and pretty guilty about everything, so I got it to take her to the National Express depot, not Megabus, which is pretty awful. I only hope she could afford the fare. She doesn't know London very well.

And what have I learnt? Perhaps that relationships, either with women, or men, are not my strong point. Perhaps, as Emmeline often advises me, I need to pursue the solitary course, concentrate on my writing, develop my many undeveloped talents. A woman's way is hard, but only alone can she enjoy the self-expanding freedoms of solitude.

And Ann, this is for you. Though you are uncultured, this may help you formulate your grief. I'm so so sorry!

I have not had one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead

When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to me,

"This parting must be

endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."
I said, "Go, and be happy

but remember (you know well)

whom you leave shackled by love
"If you forget me, think

of our gifts to Aphrodite

and all the loveliness that we shared
"all the violet tiaras, braided rosebuds, dill and

crocus twined around your young neck
"myrrh poured on your head

and on soft mats girls with

all that they most wished for beside them
"while no voices chanted

choruses without ours,

no woodlot bloomed in spring without song..."

Really worried about Ann...

2009-09-05T21:04:00.003+01:00

I've just managed to get away from Ann for a moment and readers, I must confess, I'm extremely uncomfortable. I had of course realised that Ann was something of a 'diamond in the rough' - I'm reminded of Moll Flanders, or the winkle-picker one from Tipping the Velvet - but her behaviour today has been less picaresque and more...dare I say...'pikey'.

Now that's a horrible term, I know, and I wouldn't dream of using it normally. The Riders, as I have mentioned, have a long socialist history - my Great Aunt Geraldine famously donated all but one of her five country estates to the National Trust (she kept Scotland, it was the biggest). I have read widely in Marx and really identified with Tess of the D'Urbevilles, poor duck. But Tess didn't have a Sony XBox. Or a Lacoste sleep suit. Or cold sores. And she probably knew what risotto was (Ann thought it was rice pudding).

I don't mean to complain, it's just the weekend's not going how I thought it was going to at all. Ann "wasn't hungry" this morning when I produced my celebrated Eggs Posie (Eggs Benedict but with garlic mayonnaise instead of Hollandaise - yum!). She wolfed down a Bloody Mary only to sick a little in her hand and scream at me for 'feeding her ketchup', and wasn't calmed until I made her a Nesquik from an old packet I once accidentally bought for Emmeline. And she was palpably uncomfortable at the J. W. Waterhouse exhibition I took her to this afternoon. She didn't even find all the little nymphs pretty - I'm worried we don't have anything in common!

What shall I do? She's busy playing Street Fighter now but she'll have finished this level soon (oh god, I can tell by the music, what's happening to me?) and will be coming out to see if her risotto-replacement pizza is ready. The wedding's tomorrow. Oh god...what if Melody was right?

Ann is here...

2009-09-04T12:14:00.002+01:00

Ann is here and I must say I'd forgotten how 'boisterous' she is. Can you believe that she doesn't know what a artichoke is? She saw one in my organic vegetable box and thought it was a toy character from the film 'Alien'.

I've managed to steal away to my (non-pink, yet feminine) laptop to write this while Ann plays on her Sony X-box. She brought it with her, all the way down from the north on the Megabus via the M4. Not my chosen mode of transport, but the Riders have been noted for their socialist tendencies in the past so I shall not gripe.

4.48 Psychosis

2009-09-03T06:56:00.000+01:00

Now as you know I've been feeling pretty down lately: finally I discover happiness as a lesbian and the world seems to turn against me! But at least homophobia has provided me with the kind of dour inspiration required to write 'A Year off the Ward' which looks set to be a tribute to gonzo journalism meets earl grey tea meets illustrated children's book.

However in spite of some irregular, whimsical journeys back into the 'ward of my mind', I have been experiencing withdrawal symptons: I'm missing those soft lined walls, the smell of surgical spirit, my slightly damp mauve pillows, and the lavender soap Aunt Lily used to send me. So cue my old dear friend Sarah Kane and her prolific work of the stage: 4.48 Psychosis. It transports me right back in the mental turmoil of insanity as fast as you can say 'sectioned'! Why it's a modern master(ess)piece.

Sarah was an inspiration to us all. RIP. We once met briefly at a Jackie Kay poetry reading in Waterstones in the mid 90s, but she was from Essex and failed to see things from my point of view. I was in the haberdashery department of Peter Jones when I found out she'd killed herself. I made a vow right there and then, in front of the fuchsia pink wool I had selected for Aunt Lilly's winter scarf, to never do to the same. It's the responsibility of lady writers, such as myself, to preserve our prolific talent to enlighten ignorant women across the world. Poor Sarah. (However, one has to remember that she was AWFULLY sad at the 'end')

This adaptation might be of particular interest to you readers. It's an incredibly profound adaption by those budding young TV film makers at Lincoln University. It really brings back all the pain and confusion I felt last summer.... but NO MORE! Ann in coming to stay this afternoon and I have laundered my cath kithson sheets and even bought us matching floral dresses!

Melody disapproves of my lesbian wedding

2009-09-02T23:45:00.003+01:00

Melody has just left after a very long and very 'honest' tea party. I had prepared a delicious spread of cucumber sandwiches, lemon tarts and vagina cakes, alongside a pitcher of Irish coffee, to break the news about my civil partnership with Ann.

Melody reacted badly. She claims that I'm not taking my lesbianism seriously and that its just a 'phase' I'm going through. She obviously doesn't care about my feelings because actually, as it happens, Posie is very much in love and wounded to the core! Ann is coming down to stay with me this weekend and I'm insisting that Melody button up and be civil. I'm going to have a supper party to celebrate our engagement on Saturday, I'm going to make Raclette, and be happy and be a lesbian forever!

my REAL feminist wedding

2009-09-01T15:06:00.006+01:00

Ann (my new lesbian lover) has come crawling back to me in remorse, begging to be taken back. Of course I always have my head firmly screwed in the love department of Store Posie, but when it comes to Ann I just don't know what to think. She's an artist you see, and tres passionate, which probably explains why she's asked me to marry her. At first I thought she was mad: sending an engagement ring by courier pigeon is a touch bizarre, even if the diamond is too small to be taken seriously. I was determined to say decline, but then I came across this article in The Times by that stupid Ellen Levenson (poo-head). It's called 'My Real Feminist Wedding' and it's about her maintaining her feminist tendencies during the nuptials. Let's take a look shall we?

"The first feminist thing about our wedding was the nature of the proposal. I do not believe that men have to propose to women, but neither did I feel comfortable proposing myself. If he had said yes, how would I ever have believed he wanted it as much as me, rather than saying yes to keep me quiet? After many conversations about whether we would get married, and, in fact, after we had provisionally booked our venue, I insisted on a proposal. He duly went away and planned my nonsurprise, popping the question on a hill overlooking our beloved London, followed by a fancy dinner."

So you basically bullied your man into marrying you? You need a 'fancy' dinner when there are people dying in the world, when there are people even dying in London??

"Asking my dad for my hand in marriage was not going to happen either. My dad, whom I get on with brilliantly, advises me on many aspects of my life, but I am a grown woman and he does not give me permission to do anything, just as I do not give him permission to do the things he wants to do."

Well my Dad's dead you silly bitch (both he and my mother were killed in an unfortunate punting accident when I was a wee sprite). How insensitive.

"Nor did my fiancé and I spend the night apart before the wedding. We already lived together, so, as we were about to make a big public statement, who would be more comforting to be around than each other? We went out for another fancy dinner, walked along the Thames and congratulated ourselves on being so clever. The next morning we got a cab to the register office; we walked into the marriage room along with all our guests and took our seats at the front."

Another 'fancy dinner' hey? Smug bitch. And what if one's a raving Catholic and doesn't want to use the registry office? I'm not a crate of bananas entering the country you know. And worst of all she remains convinced that she's not a Fumbie:

"Fumbies are those women who forget about their feminist ideals the minute they get a ring on their finger and become a simpering bride, given away, obedient and letting men speak for them. Of course, no wedding can be truly feminist. In our own feminist wedding, did my husband and I check that it wasn’t only women making the food, or cleaning up the venue? No, we didn’t. Symbolically, at least, we felt our wedding was as feminist as it could be."

Well of course it's not! You can't marry a man and call yourself a feminist! I was furious. And then I realised, marrying a woman, well THAT would be a real feminist wedding, wouldn't it? And if I went through with it well maybe I'd be published in the Times too?

I'm still pondering the dilemma over a cup of mint tea and a platter of home made flapjacks. The pigeon only arrived a few hours ago and Emmeline Pankhurst (my cat) soon had its eyes out. The little minx even hugged the ring, which I had to exchange with her for the latest copy of The Economist.

Esther Rantzen's Double Dealings - A Posie Rider Investigation

2009-08-27T11:33:00.001+01:00

Ok so I'm now a journalist! Here's my first scoop - enjoy, be appalled, write a letter, torch a car! It's about CORRUPTION!!!

Esther Rantzen (TV star from such shows as, oh you know, Crime Watch or something, and general ageless gurner) has, as we all know, been campaigning to become MP for Luton South. Rantzen has sidestepped like a crab into the runnings following MP Margaret Moran's decision to resign after her embarrassing expense claims were revealed. Ignoring the blatant fact that it'll take more than a lute to save Luton (for lute read 'nuke'), Rantzen is planning a form of slash and burn in the wake of messy politicians, and has publicly called for greater transparency in parliament. Weirdly, however, Posie's prying has revealed that the clever minx is in fact the director of a series of complex secretive companies. Listed under her directorship is the eerily named, 'Jembex', which records show is a sinister Private Unlimited Company.

Now, not being an expert on banking, money, the law, or anything really (except feminism) I consulted Sharlene Spiteri (not real name) from Companies House, a sort of business museum on the river (next to a really nice pub). Huddled in the nice pub next door, and taking painful drags on her pastel blue Sobranie, Sharlene (this is a false name) was on edge as she told me the truth about Rantzen's dealings. Concealing her face with a russet pashmina, leaving only the barest crack through which to insert aforementioned Sobranie, she confessed that in the five years she had worked there she had only come across one other private unlimited company: "They are extremely rare," she said.

PUC's are unusual, she explained very slowly and a few times, because they don't have to file accounts. An obscure legal loophole, which, despite valiant attempts, Sharlene (real name Kate) couldn't quite enable me to understand, means that a PUC avoids any kind of public scrutiny by not filing records of how money passes in and out of it. It's like eating in the dark, she sighed, eventually. Now, this strikes me as very peculiar, seeing as Rantzen is attempting to rise to the dizzy heights of Luton supremacy on a platform of transparency (not a transparent platform, which would reveal altogether too much of Rantzen's private affairs (if she happened to be wearing a dress/skirt, which of course she might not be, even though she's a woman))

Interestingly, even though the company can obscure its monetary dealings from the worthy hack through legal skulduggery, it DOES still have to produce a register of shareholders. AND Jembex's shareholder list shows that other than herself, the only other shares in the company are all owned by Rantzen's three children: Jem, Bex and Will. Why Will? Because a second company - Wilcox productions - is also headed by Rantzen, but only has her children as shareholders. It allegedly is a production company, but my investigations prove that the only production it's invested in is the production of inherited wealth. What on earth is wrong with a nice simple trust fund? Aunt Lily never went through all this hassle and I'm doing just fine!

A Year in The Mind of Posie

2009-08-20T11:46:00.006+01:00

Well readers, those of you who have worshipped at the temple of Posie since those heady days of mid-2008 (is it just you Lara, or are there others too?) will remember that it is nearly a year ago that I was released from hospital after an unfortunate self-harm episode with a Bic disposable razor (in hot summer pink). The past year as been full of trials and tribulations: failed relationships (yes, Anna and I aren't speaking, it turns out the orchid wasn't mine) psychotic episodes, restraining orders and endless literary rejections (Harper Collins, I'm talking to you). I've also gained 5 pounds in the last two days, which I didn't even know was possible.

BUT on a positive note, this is one year in which I haven't been sectioned! Hurrah! To celebrate this fabulous achievement, I'm planning on writing a book, entitled 'One Year Off The Ward', or something else, not yet decided. I was inspired by this BBC article on Annualism an exciting new form of publishing which sees self-obsessed bibbles (usually journalists) confessing that they did one particular thing for a year which, in publishing circles, is tantamount to saying: I'll provide the text, you sell 50,000 copies and we'll let the public provide the critique. In shorthand - this is some money making nonsense here!

Some examples include Neil Boorman's Bonfire of the Brands where an oaf pretended he didn't always have his shirts fitted in kooky West London boutiques, or Hephzibah Anderson's pointless Chastened: No More Sex in the City, where she manages the extraordinary feat of not getting laid for a year. There's even specialist titles like A Year Without 'Made in China', in which one woman recounts her rollercoaster experience of looking at labels in shops and not buying certain things like funny little plastic gonks and Kikoman Soy Sauce.

And it's not just my year of fraught sanity which I'm planning on turning into a compelling narrative: it turns out there are lots of things I've done for a year now which could be newsworthy. Being a feminist and living in North London are obvious places to start, but what about my year of celibacy? Ok, that'll have to be next year (Anne's bra is still folded meaningfully in the fridge next to the milk) but the way things are going that'll be no-problem-o. I've also downed the booze content in the last year, only been to Hampshire 3 times and not assaulted anyone! (apart from Martin's son Jake, which I don't think counts because he's a minor???)

These changes, I can tell you, are MASSIVE in my life. Who wouldn't want to read about them? Hampshire Exhile or Ex-Hamp: My Life out of the Shire, are working titles at the moment. Also, it was just over a year ago I had the trust fund settled ... perhaps call for a Tom Hodgkinson-esq biopic in the nature of How To Be Idle, where I recount my day to day experience of doing absolutely nothing except for watering my window box a little before it died (due to neglect) and trying on all my dresses, but not going out in them, safely buffeted by the wealth of my aunties.

Ps. if anyone has any stories to share for inclusion in prospective My Year Failing to Get an Arts Council Grant (because I live in London and didn't fill the form in properly) please email me!

Ahoy there!

2009-08-20T09:29:00.003+01:00

Sorry for my absence for the last week gals. It's been no doubt lonely without Posie in your world and I haven't had an easy time either. Its been tough, but after much timely deliberation I have decided that I am in fact a lesbian.

I've been on this cruise you see:
http://news.varadinum.com/lesbians-save-the-world-one-cruise-at-a-time.html

"A lesbian eco-friendly cruise?" I hear you ask. Yes that's right. It all started when Melody (landscape gardener to the stars, who is at the moment tending to Gwyneth Paltrow's organic vegetable patch) who is EXTREMELY zen / eco-friendly / earth-mother, suggested we go on this amazing cruise which uses absolutely no carbon emissions whatsoever! So we did and on board soon realised the the ship was destined for Lesbos island!

On board I met Anne, an artist from Suffolk. She's by far my social inferior, but you know what they say readers: 'love knows no bounds'. We haven't done anything physical yet, and its quite difficult communicating by letter all day, but I think I might finally be happy.

Lesbianism- I can't believe I hadn't tried it sooner (except that time in 2002). It's brilliant! Anne and I would sit around plaiting each others hair and sharing period stories. Heaven...

Toodles x

PS Anne if you're reading - thank so much for my painting: I love orchids!

Oh Fuck Off.

2009-08-11T10:07:00.001+01:00

Another 'latest bloody study about women' reels its ugly head once more...

2009-08-11T09:40:00.004+01:00

Hi gals! Just when you thought science had unearthed every possible truth about women, another ugly American lab rat reels its ugly head to correct you. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind rats and I actually love science (I got an A at GCSE!) however, one has to ask the timely question: do these people have a f**king clue what they're talking about?

Point in case: the latest research has shown that women who are optimistic have a 9% lower risk of developing heart disease and a 14% lower risk of dying from any cause after more than eight years of follow-up.

In comparison, cynical women who harbour hostile thoughts about others or are generally mistrusting of others were 16% more likely to die over the same time-scale.

First, what the hell does 'follow-up' mean? Is that a form of malnutrition? Second, I know exactly what category I fall into. Since my break up with Martin earlier this year I've been feeling so happy and content with myself that I think I might live until I'm 102! Ha ha ha hahaha. Yes. However, I also know how it feels to want to stab strangers, especially when walking down the street on a Tuesday morning in the rain with a stonking hang over, wearing no shoes having just woken up by a canal in the suburbs of Manchester next to a tramp with his trousers down. That certainly didn't do my life line any favours at all!

Also has science ever given any thought to what might happen to the lovely optimistic women when they're 'hostile' sisters run at them with nothing but a big grudge and a carving knife? They wouldn't live so long THEN would they smarty-pant science?

Everyone have fun! Love you gals!

Hugs and pugs x

Achtung! Action for Archives.

2009-08-10T09:45:00.001+01:00

Just a quickie, but I hope you'll help in the Action for Archives campaign! Academics, historians, literary types and other like minded intelligentsia are forming a campaign to stop bloodthirsty bureaucrats from pillaging The National Archives under the leadership of uber-bureaucrat and current Chief Plunderer of the Scroll Natalie Ceeney, who famously referred to libraries and archives et al as 'The Knowledge Industry'. My brain just cracked a little, I hope yours did too.

Please keep abreast of the activities of these zesty guardians of knowledge at www.action4archives.com and look out for their upcoming petition. Examples of depressing monetisation tactics at the expense of public services and the pursuit of truth to sign your name against include laying off specialists while rewarding management with pay increases, introducing parking costs, stopping access to microfilm records and reducing opening times.

They will be stopped and given a talking to and will mend their ways.

Flaneusette technique

2009-08-07T13:58:00.004+01:00

I've been reading a lot about psychogeography and, inspired by what I read in Peter Ackroyd about Islington's interesting past (did you know it used to be a diary farm? Fabulous!). So for the last couple of days I've been wandering the city in a PCP addled stupor (can't get opium, must make do) and keeping this journal of my voyages. More to follow!

Day one

I'm walking around feeling nothing. I trip and everyone helps me up. There's nothing to see here, I've learnt nothing. The city isn't melancholy today. I'm confronted with a chugger I recognise, we went to college together, we arrange to have coffee later. No one minds me today. The air is circulating up these aisles, I'm a heartbeat, I'm welcomed. I'm keeping the city alive, in its loop. Everything is in order, it's just as I remember. Everyone has been in these places before, they're filed, I want to make a sketch. Everything is forthcoming, the light touches everything, the grid is illuminated. When the clocks chime I chime with them and then we get to our knees and share as one this remarkable sensation of absolute purpose, absolute belonging, a composite beast who's extremities more in syncopation, we've eliminated the selfish gene and like a slime mould slug we relinquish precedence to those of us designated as a head and they direct us. We've given ourselves over to the city, each other, its past, we're hugging the kerbs familiar with each speck of grit we're pressed up against its canyons and our fat is rolling into them, what fat we have. There's a city in our minds as pure as stone that even we can't alter, it connects purely to itself, unapologetically presents, and we walk its streets as real as any others and the light touches it everywhere and it's everywhere and is like anything, palpable and recognisable in its stability. Each speck of grit belongs and all surfaces are touching. I didn't grow up in the city and find this all refreshing, it's a solid and I like to jostle with all its atoms there are no A roads here, there are no wet fields along the A40. I like its dead voices, they outnumber the living, they remind me of aunties. I like the flows and the ley lines and the impressions of heat left by strangers for whom I have an infinite regard. Someone has just followed me forty paces to return a sheet of paper that I dropped on purpose. They weren't even being sarcastic. I tell them it's a note and when they read it they find it's an incredibly personal letter directed to them, offering sensitive advice about some issues they're dealing with in their life at the moment. They say it's been an incredible help. They ask me to go to bed with them so I do.

Day two

The next day I am out walking the streets trying to collect things I find, I'll make a scrapbook. But tomorrow there'll be a parade, some nationalist thing, followed by speeches and music, so the streets have been decorated and swept, they've even moved on the homeless and the children who sometimes ask you for pens or try to sell you cigarettes. I'd brought an extra muffin to give to one of them but now I eat it myself. I consider leaving a record to somehow sully the streets. It would mean anyone coming along after me would be more successful in finding ephmera, but I don't have anything. All I have is a crumb of muffin which I drop and see fall into one of the big tarmac canyons which yesterday I think I might have been vigorously licking, where there now isn't anything not even those tiny rounded bits of broken glass. But before I leave I see an impossibly swollen ant appear and carry the crumb off. I follow him with my eyes for a while but he's going in the opposite direction so I leave.

to be continued....

Laptops for Girls

2009-08-04T14:51:00.003+01:00

After my FWord featured article, Pity in Pink, hit the internet at the beginning of the year, you would have been forgiven for believing that the purveyors of PINK LAPTOPS might have rethought their strategy of tarring all of femininity with the same pinkish brush. You'd have been wrong, however, as this new PC World ad featuring the Dell Inspiron demonstrates.

I can't find a way to embed the video as it's on this slightly creepy Dell based blog (seriously, who cares?) but please follow this link to explore yourself, or if you're not sure, let me give you a run down. The advert begins with a slightly incredulous female voice, who tells us 'My world is fashion', what she means isn't exactly clear - is she a designer? Or a seamstress? Or just really into clothes like, you know, a woman. Either way, it is really quite important to her that everything she owns is colour coded. But how can this be achieved with something like a laptop, which you only generally have one of unlike clothes and shoes and dresses which come in lots of different colours and which you change frequently? Scream! Should she, for example, buy the pink Dell Inspiron to go with her pink shoes? Or the blue one to go with her blue jacket? Shit! Which one? Best go with the pink really. And why? Because MY WORLD IS PINK. And fashion. Her world is pink and fashion. Where does she live? Really, stop keeping us in suspense, what does this woman do??

They don't need to tell us what she does, or why her world is made of Pink and Fashion, because she is Everywoman, a competant and non-individualised figure with whom it is easy to identify. We can identify with her because she likes pink, and shoes, and laptops that are the same colour as our shoes, like us.

National Orgasm Day!

2009-07-31T13:41:00.004+01:00

Anne Summers is trying to sell us more sex toys by drawing our attention to the fact that couples use dildos too. "But at what cost?" I hear you ask. I refer to the following:

"The results from a poll of Ann Summers' customers dispels the common myths that sexual exploration is a personal pursuit, and reflect a new togetherness about achieving satisfaction that celebrates the unparalleled enjoyment of sex in loving partnerships."

Well, Ann Summers (or is that MRS Ann Summers) discriminate against the sexually liberated single woman, why don't you?

In protest, I suggest that we all do NOT have orgasms today. This is as bad as racism! Put your clitori to work gals and keep your legs closed at all times.

Posie and out
x

Vagina Doughnut!

2009-07-30T18:14:00.008+01:00

Great news culinary enthusiasts! My good friend and accomplice, Ms Chloe Mona Ivy Head, has produced for my, and your, delight, this sublime VAGINA DOUGHNUT EXTRAVAGANZA. As well as being an inventive chef and feminist, she's also an excellent artist, creating Giottoesque renditions of Bacchanal women in states of religious exaltation over those objects sacred to all womanhood: the bottle of Gin and pint of Cider. All hail!

Which brings me to make a little confession. You may note how this pastry-tastic pussy is extraordinarily life-like, and you'd be correct. It's modelled from life. Mine.

YEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Women and Burgers: A Traumatic Account

2009-07-27T19:55:00.000+01:00

I have been experimenting with female writing recently, and I have to say, I think I’m rather good. The following piece was inspired by a revelation I had the other day. For years now I’ve considered my low self-esteem to put me at a severe disadvantage, but actually I think it might have aided me in my sublime quest for female truth. Why on Friday night I had my brocade Cath Kithson wallet stolen / I dropped it on a bus after one too many bottles of Chablis with close friends in Primrose Hill. Of course I never think about these things; my head being like ‘a quick forest / filled with sleeping birds’, so only realised my fatal error when out buying myself a little treat from M&S on Saturday night. I was most alarmed; I had a mere £1.50 on my person and was forced to shop in the discount section of Sainsbury’s. I had to stand next to a man with a ponytail while surveying the rows of rotten burgers and then I had to buy the rotten burgers because it was all I could afford: awful!

So anyway the following is an exposition of that most traumatic experience written in the female economic style (i.e. disrupted syntax):

I skip, I, I, I, skip. I skip. Why does honey in the rain disappear? I loved you once. Oh red compile, I saw you making that pink sludge in your fingers. Oh how could, I forget those fingers you have. Their meat. Yes I know that, now, but at the time I was so lonely without you by my side and the burgers. I ate every one of them and you said I was greedy. Was I, greedy? Maybe. Who can tell? The long clod of myself, the wavering banded brackets of love that I would pour out all the same. The man with the snake like grey of silver ponytail: “Beauty,” he said. “Beautiful burger, I am yours.” Breathe.

L=A=N=G=U=I=S=H

2009-07-24T16:10:00.000+01:00

There aren't enough spiked words to satisfy you
or unlikely couplings
Double fuck of double entrende there
is no tongue in the piano
When I try to excrete vacuole tempests I am only trying to please you
My faith is not on fire now
Punch the baby in my stomach into a phrase for you
There is no dictionary for dissonance
Virgin generator of spiteful prose
No formula for discordance
I am trying to stick a pin in a page for you
I am burning my damp folds to retrieve a language for you
Gestalt bullshit djinn wreck never happened
The only thing in my hand makes unfortunate sense
Is a well of black sand entirely unpoetical
The fridge has no answers I am composing
Millenarian prose from last week's crossword answers
(half of which I got wrong anyway)

It goes purse eppicecass spear romeo orcs
esau spear eliot, sabre pistol opart styx
intuition chaucerian, menecrates inge
from which you can judge that I read
a very pretentious magazine

Intelligent women have better orgasms

2009-07-23T15:55:00.003+01:00

Boffins say...

Is the above true? I'm not sure. I'm often thinking of other more esoteric things while having sex, which can distract from the task at hand. Questions like 'Whatever ever happened to the Amber Room?' or 'Palestine: a two state solution?' The list is endless...

Miss England...oh dear I don't know what to think.

2009-07-22T23:33:00.006+01:00

Ok, so Rachel Christie has become the first black Miss England, and I don't know WHAT to think.

On one hand, she's a formidable woman: an accomplished athlete (like her uncle, Linford Christie) who's struggled through a difficult childhood (father fell into crime etc) to burst through the white bastions of Miss England and "to show people, the younger generation especially, that you can do something positive with your life." She's also 5'10", which is awesome.

On the OTHER hand, Miss England, like all beauty pageants, is an outdated parade of female bodies which carelessly objectifies young women.

Should we really be inspired by these sorts of competitions? Prowess on the track is something to be proud of, and in this Male interview Christie says that it is this drive to support herself as an athlete that encouraged her to seek a legitimate modelling career on the side through Miss England. But I have to ask, isn't flaunting one's fortunate bone structure in order to be ranked above other women a high price to pay in order to support yourself, however much you care about your career?

I just don't KNOW. You see, I really am happy for her. I would like to draw something inspiring from this event. I mean, if Miss England must go on, it's surely better that the sorts of women who win it are competent in other aspects of their life, have careers and ambitions, and don't fit the godforsaken whiteblondebigboobedairhead stereotype.

And what's worse, the runner up, Lance Corporal Kat Hodge is, you guessed it, a soldier. Here's a picture of her holding a bloody great big gun like Tank Girl (with flawless eye make-up, may I add). I mean...I'm a pacifist and everything but...oh God she's a woman holding a gun how can I NOT like her? And did you know she received a commendation for bravery when a punched an Iraqi insurgent who'd just snatched two guns from her truck and was threatening to kill her. Scream!

I'm sorry, Object girls I'm with you, but I just can't help but like these women. If Miss England carries on bestowing grace on women of undue merit, I'm afraid I'm going to go over to the other side. I might even enter, I've definitely got the thighs for it.

I suppose the real test is whether they'll ever get round to giving the award to an outstanding woman who doesn't happen to be gorgeous...

Vagina Island

2009-07-20T00:05:00.007+01:00

You can imagine my excitement upon discovering that only a few miles away from our resort in Italy lay Vagina Island (pictured). Vagina Island is one of southern Italy's best kept secrets and was home to the Vulvac tribe led by the famous Queen Ovarian.

Discovered by the Swiss in 1 BC, the ancient island was entirely populated by women , or so they thought, until the said men (obviously women weren't allowed to travel back then!) ventured down into the island's cave in search of gold only to find the Vulvac's treasure was of a male variety. Yes, that's right lady readers, the Vulvacs traded in men. Thoroughly ahead of her time Queen Ovarian overthrew her husband, seized control of the kingdom and ordered the island's tallest mountain to be crafted into the shape of a giant vagina. Women ruled supreme and men were sold to work the land whilst female kind turned her mind to higher pastimes, such as philosophy and art.

Herstorians know all this because of the cave drawings left by said explorers before they were mauled to death by the mythical sea creature known as 'The Blob', which scientists have recently identified as being a modern-day Walrus.

Vagina Island's ecosystem operated in total accordance with nature. There was peace on the land, sister loved sister, and soon enough they developed the technology needed to manufacture sperm so decided to do away with men altogether. Herein lay their fatal error. Never before has the expression 'empires fall from within' rang more true, for when the population's menstrual cycles became synchronised with no men around to dissipate the overwhelming barrage of oestrogen with pure prejudice, oppression and misogyny, the island imploded. The entire city, Phallopianinia, was buried underground, leaving only the famed Mount Vagina in tact.

I'm reading a fascinating study on it the moment by Camile von Vag, who's been desperately trying to raise funds to excavate the site.

Will let you know if I hear anything of note about their ancient culture and way of life, you know.

Been there got the t-shirt!

Toodles!

Jessica Smith - my new fave lady poet

2009-07-15T10:00:00.000+01:00

I found this great poet/artist/gal about town through the web and I think she's great! She doesn't just write normal verbal poetry, but also visual poetry and tactile poetry, which even I hadn't heard of before. I think it involves printing poems on cushions or something - I once had a chopping board with some lines from Beckett * for example. I tried to find a bit on her website that wasn't part of her C.V. but I couldn't, so I'm not really sure what it's all about, but she provides some of the best answers to interview questions I have ever seen:

PK: Would people know it if they read your work?

JS: Oh, yes. My entire oeuvre, such as it stands, is one giant love poem. Not to only one person, but rather, an ode to Love. I'm a die-hard Romantic. You saw this silly quiz on my blog, right, "Which of the 9 muses are you?"
When I took the quiz I was Erato.

and

PK: Was that when writing began for you? When you were 14 and all these harsh realities were thrown your way?

JS: No, no. I was writing much earlier. I started writing poems as soon as I could write...I began writing songs, plays, and novels around age 10, and still have many of those things. Although I continued writing novels until I was 15 or so, and I still dabble in prose fiction, I decided at the ripe old age of 12 that I had conquered all forms of writing except poetry and that my major energies would focus on that genre.

Bloody marvellous! And poetry is really where she's at still. I can't show you most of them as they're a bit all-over-the-page-y. You should check out her blog, looktouch.com. I really like this one though, it's called Valentine. Here's some info:

This is a cumulative valentine. The note within indicates the recipient. The box contains: 1. a small red rhinestone heart that I found a few weeks ago; 2. a gold heart-shaped locket my dad gave me; 3. a transparent heart that my neighbor (Mrs. Cole) gave me; 4. a small gold heart that my friend Emily gave me (2-4 are childhood mementos); 5. a cut-out heart from my mom that says "to jessica love, mom"; 6. a heart-shaped red, white and blue pin with one star for a sweetheart to wear for her army-lover during WWII; 7. a pink rhinestone heart I found on the street in Berlin; 8-10. three paper cut-out hearts (I don't remember their significance).

She's almost as barmy as me!

Seriously though I love this and am going to order one and send her the money on Paypal and try to rekindle my love for my useless ex-boyfriend Martin by sending it on to him and pretending I made it. Guys love this sort of stuff, right? And I can cunningly change the name on the slip by simply ripping off the surname. It's like it was meant to be!

* If you're interested, the chopping board said:

Homonum: At that moment, I look out --- and there, before me, as far as the eye could see, were castles, filled with what they my country people call un pape sanguinaire.

Wagram: And what does that mean?

Homonum: The country-folk would translate it as a self-satisfied potato.

Gender Museum...somewhere!

2009-07-13T09:45:00.000+01:00

Can anyone tell me where this Gender Museum is? I desperately want to go, but I don't have a clue where it is, and the website is in some strange Cryllic language, help! Answers on a postcard to 'Posie's Abroad Dilemma', the first person to tell me gets a return Ryanair ticket to whichever country it is and a pack of 70p local Marlies on landing.

ALAS!

2009-07-10T15:38:00.000+01:00

For all the girls who are hitting the town tonight, don't spend TOO long getting ready, for you may find that your morne-like christall countenances shall be netted over and (Masker-like) cawbe-visarded, with crawling venomous wormes. Why do ye embellish and adorne your flesh with such port and grace, which within some few dayes wormes will devoure in the grave? Why pamperest thou that carren fleshe so high, whiche sometyme doeth stinke and rot on the earth as thou goest?

Also, Max Factor is bloody expensive. Alas!

And Finally...

2009-07-08T11:45:00.004+01:00

Two great reasons to remind me why I'm leaving the country and leaving the lot of you in this sink hole...

Melanie Phillips of the Daily Male in "The collapse of sexual norms has destroyed the bulwarks around marriage. And the gay rights agenda is very much part of that process." scandal! The Harpie thinks:

A liberal society should be tolerant of gay people. It is good that social attitudes are now far more relaxed. People's sexuality should be an entirely private matter and should not be the cause of prejudice or, worse still, aggression towards homosexuals.
But is the gay rights agenda really about tolerance, or is it about trying to stop heterosexuality being the behavioural norm?

Posie Rider slits her wrists in newspaper bigotry depression scandal. Read the full article at their website if you, like me, no longer want to live in this country.

Also, Emma Morton of The Sun warns that chaps are doomed because boffings have managed to culture little spermies in petri dishes for baby-grabbing women to harvest instead of putting up with years of tedious, soul-snatching 'bonding' with a man (aka sperm in a stick) before you can convince him to impregnate you.

Morton warns that this sort of madcap science could soon make men 'redundant'. Ha ha! I say sod off boys! I never liked them anyway.

Holidays!

2009-07-08T11:02:00.004+01:00

Hey Girlies,

Melody's now officially a Buddhist so I'm going to join her for a week on Holy Isle to finish my latest historical endeavour: Put that Woman Down: The Amazing Adventures of Meredith Lynchfield. No technology allowed so you'll have to do without my witty observations on vaginas and other such things for a time.

PS I'm also in talks with Women's Parliamentary Radio about publishing some of my work, it seems that news of a political maestro with an incredible talent for poignant postulations about stuff that really no one much cares about travels fast online.

HUGS & PUGS

We shall met again,

Posie xx

Fuck off Fedora! I cocking love Venus and Serana Williams

2009-07-06T18:03:00.004+01:00

Look, I find Wimbledon incredibly boring, but even I could put aside my frightful memories of school girls tennis (where I first experienced the joy of menstrual blood soaking through a white skirt) to enjoy this weekend's Ladies Finals, and the incredible display of skill, dedication, and downright female bloody brilliance exhibited by the Williams sisters.

Let's put reigning champion Serena against Fedora next year and see who wins, eh? My money's on Serena. And how about not making the Ladies Final the penultimate Saturday spectacle, followed by the terrible climax of the Men's on Sunday? Why not give these athletic stars the triumph they deserve, rather than upstaging them with 'men'? Oh, because you're a chauvinist, Wimbledon. I see.

Hoo-bloody-rah!!

I wrote a poem about a fucking river (for Tom Chivers)

2009-07-03T08:05:00.000+01:00

(my new poem)

woman on the pebbles will kill or be killed

asphalt river hear ye

though I have sat where torrents recall no slush

I am drawn by your ceramic explosions

your waves snapped underneath and smoothed over

with clothes laid in respect.

there are beads of patience in this fell river

not where ants carry ants, but where between bites

enamelled flesh can be tapped

to purge freezing oils

where the cuff lavender is brought alive to claw to earth

where we are buried to stay cool and grow white hands

to reach and tuber

and come to fruition and bask without a song.

so be drowned or drown over exposed leaves shaking

restless lover, who’s keeping their feet wet

carved sweat

& toes resplendent knife upwards through satin

to coil imprints around the upright stones

& mark an embrace before evaporation

I am repeating on you.

this body is a factory,

this room, a weaker shade of tea.

molluscs have been sun dried and clasp to the billowing wood

margined by choke

unchinked and unshafted

flecking tremulous

& I had rather root without

than soot in synthetic barbered grass

and smiles of parcelled glue

when there are births of teased and tortured glimpse

to be tweezed or cuticled from the corpse of morn.

I will not dive unless I know the pebbles are not rasped

nor fill a cup with oil

or clothe a gasp in brick

or seek respite in lists and chat

or segway to a revolution, while

my love has gone amongst the flids

to fashion me a yearning -

he was half buried

in tarmac when we met

to make himself chaste.

with his lute fricking he charms scimitars!

he is a silver fish in the backwash!

& how am I to explain

this beetle on my breast?

go easy on the glory hole

cracked forest!

its arc is in tatters

boats full of stones

are held and sunk by knotted necks, green swans

nappies round catkins

the soft rabbit’s fingers of the weeping willow shorn at the wrist

shredded by pikies

spike dog shit three times thus.

this creased and sweated life we live beneath pages, in surfaces

we air condition panic and

would rather waste ink than miss a chance to bite.

(this volume is dirty)

skirts can only rustle now

peel winter off in cracks,

& wrinkling hours, jellied, impoverished

spoilt milk and spilt sleep.

better the life in the bubble of privilege, between pages,

basking fingers in slipped through sun

in the crease in the wall from the half cut window.

better the cack femme manages fate

than banal judges grid us to oblivion.

De Ridier Battle Helmet!

2009-07-02T08:44:00.000+01:00

THE British Musuem have sent me this image of the Ridier Battle Hat atop a willing intern, complete with dried entrails of a Turk from circa the disasterous Fourth Crusade. Pwoar! I just can't wait to take that bad boy out with me to Truckles tonight! Feministe fashions bar rumba!

Comtesse de Saint-Ridier

2009-07-01T12:14:00.002+01:00

I found the strangest thing when I arrived home the other day - a letter from the British Museum informing me of an archaeological artifact uncovered near my ancient ancestral home in Hampshire.

Being a fervent feminist-Marxist-occasional Maoist (as a teen), I naturally shy away from my patrician roots. However owing to the exciting content of the letter in question I feel obliged to equip you with a short her-story of my great ancestoress the Comtesse de Saint-Ridier, aka the Amazonian of Hampshire.

The Comtesse was a bold woman who lived between 1638-1684 - that's right - during the English Civil War. Her husband the Comte de Ridier (of French origin) was sent into battle and perished in the ballads of dead men's cries on the field of battle (N.B. great creative description - use in prose). Naturally the two had been Republicans who strictly adhered to the codes of the Bible, so that each time they whipped, pillaged or ate a servant they would instantly to the priest confess their sins and be most joyously accepted back into the fold of sheep.

When the Irish launched an unprecedented attack upon the family castle in 1642 the Comtesse defended the fortress for at least two days. She became know as the Amazonian of Hampshire and called upon her maids to take to arms. They wore bright bronze helmets and nothing but bloomers, boots and facepaint (painting to the right is an artist's impression).

The Irish surrounded the mighty Ridier battlement and resolved to starve her out, but following reports from her chambermaid of a secret tunnel running between the grand ball room and a nearby dairy farm the Comtesse proceeded to defy the enemy by tipping the castle's entire supply of potatoes over their lepricorn heads. However, after celebrating their clever coup the Comtesse asked to be shown the tunnel in question and was most agitated to discover that she had misheard: the maid had actually said 'fairy charm'. It turned out the young gal was having her period at the time and had turned quite quite mad. The Comtesse swore never to trust in the sisterhood again.

Needless to say the poor maid was whipped and exchanged with the Irish for five potatoes that were soon consumed and twelve hours later the Comtesse most willingly surrendered to the brutes. She later retired to Herefordshire, where her legend preceded her, never again to trust women. How very different the Riders are today indeed.

And now the most exciting news! The British Museum have unearthed the original feather-plumed hemet in which she fought the Irish. Of course I was most flattered by the prospect of seeing my great ancestress' head regalia stand alongside the Rosetta stone, however the museum seem to consider it "of relatively little histroical value" and so have offered it to moi!

This is fantastic news, although it has come somewhat late: I must now wait an entire year for Ascot. Can a lady still wear a giant girl-skull hat of pure bronze and ruby ostrich pearl to such events? No, maybe a mere woman could not but a feminist can!

So glad to be home. Toodles xx

PS must have a matching one made for Emmeline Pankhurst - she gets awful frock envy ...

Go Jeff Koons, but then...

2009-06-30T10:53:00.003+01:00

So I was most impressed when reading on the Guardian website that that the artist Jeff Koons and I share a common vaginal passion:

'Koons is fascinated by sex - it keeps coming into our conversation, in a conversation about beauty for instance. "If I think of the word beauty, I think of a vagina", he replies. "I think of the vaginal - personally...'

That's fantastic but then...

'...That's what comes to mind for me, or Praxiteles' sculpture, the ass ... "

oh dear....

'The ass he's referring to is that of the Venus of Knidos, carved by the ancient Greek sculptor, Praxiteles, and displayed in a temple that allowed pilgrims to view the goddess of love from all angles. Classical writers tell that enthusiastic beholders stained the marble statue with their ejaculations. And this is a clue as to why he's keen on sex, as an artist. Eroticism has always been the territory par excellence where lofty ideals are betrayed by basic physical drives: where the beautiful becomes banal. This is why it made sense for Koons to explore pornography as art - because when we lust we are all Jeff Koons.'

Humpf. Patriarch. Leave me vagina alone.

Glorious, I return!

2009-06-29T08:40:00.002+01:00

Hail, readers and cohorts! And welcome to all my new American friends. I'm back and 'all up in the UK', complete with lots of new lingo and a huge boozy grin after having been reunited with my old friend Martini Rosso. I'm a little jet-lagged after having been travelling for 26 hours, all random and painful connections and mishaps included (I sort of missed a plane a little after I caught up a little too quickly with the M.R. at Philly. It turns out it doesn't mix well with the over-the-counter diazepam I picked up at Walmart. I was eventually found wandering the airport and was popped on a good old BA flight and sent on my way by a kind, though slightly patronising, staff-type person.

On board I met an attractive but gauche young 'grad' student (??? I don't know what that means either!) who started telling me how excited he was to go to England and about various other spiritual experiences gained on his many travels, so I quickly put him off scent by lecturing him on the virtues of staid community life, then explaining the plot of the sublime Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell to him (and no I didn't see the fucking TV adaptation, though I'm sure it was dreadful). After an hour or so's laborious retelling of what is really quite a short book, he was suitably lulled, so I quickly slipped in my headphones and watched Bride Wars (inexplicable dross - avoid) followed by He's Just Not That Into You, which conveys the timeless "he doesn't love you/maybe he loves you/you're a pathetic dolt/he's cheating/you have no judgement/omg he does love you now you can marry him" message with effortless grace. A sigh and back to Cranford.

BUT just an hour ago I received an email from this young star-traveller, whom I had left this morning in Gatwick with one of my cards and with the idea in his head of avoiding London in favour of the quaint pleasures of Knutford. Instead he set to writing a poem for me about this 'incredibly moving experience', detailing all the other things in his life that had taken about the same time as our little literary chat, and their absolute insignificance compared to unimaginable, life-defining hour and 23 minutes he spent talking to me. BOR-ing! I knew I had him pegged for a chauvinist on the plane (exhibit A: beads. B: a tattoo of a bird on his thumb), but this really took the biscuit. Because every time an attractive and young (I am both, of course) woman discourses competently on any subject, even an intentionally alienating and uninteresting one, does a man treat her as an intellectual equal, a fellow traveller in search of the truth, a worthy friend or adversary? Of course not! Instead he falls hopelessly in love with her, and becomes incapable of offering any stimulating responses to her conversation unless they're directed at her knickers, or her 'beautiful soul' (excuse me while I raze off my own corneas).

And what are intelligent women to do? Stop being so intelligent is the only thing that comes to mind. That, or quickly get yourself a boyfriend as the best guarantee of being completely ignored my men in conversation thereafter (the no-chance-of-lady-garden-access:no-beautiful-soul paradigm). The moral of the story, and the general content of the email I returned to the pathetic lad, was:

"Of course you find me interesting, I AM interesting. The fact you find this surprising/intriguing/fragile and rare only proves that you are a person with terribly dull friends and also a massive chauvinist. Do you think I found you interesting, or did you just take that for granted? Now begone!"

Lady readers, beware the advances of doe-eyed graduates with romantic notions, lest 'he's just not that into you' becomes 'he's completely obsessed with you and I think he's written a fucking poem about it'. Help!

Poesie Rider - is there no end to my transatlantic stardom??

2009-06-25T05:25:00.001+01:00

Great news fans! I'm hitting the bright lights of Buffalo tomorrow for the final leg of my sell out poetry tour of the Americas. Those of you based stateside should seriously check me out!

Back in Blighty soon for Martini Rosso.

xx

Feminist Poster competition!

2009-06-20T00:44:00.001+01:00

It's a poster competition for feminists! click on the above title to access the website and vote for your favourite tribute to the great Mother of Social Movements. I have to say I would never normally engage in this kind of 'street art', however I shall make an exception in this case.

I'm designing one right now... so watch this space!

Voting will begin for this poster theme at midnight, 22 Jun 2009.

Why not submit your own poster?

Meow!

Look there's even my trusted friend, the old Bic razor...
If you're going to self harm at least do it like a feminist.

American Lady Poets

2009-06-18T19:27:00.002+01:00

As the internet brings me news of the Daily Male's sexist musings from across the pond, so I can bring to you the wonders of America via the internet (except, of course to my many American readers, who of course have all that sort of thing on tap, or from a 'keg', which I suppose has a tap? Will check).

Anyway, check out this great book from American Poets Project, which accumulates poems from the WOMEN's MOVEMENT like a tampon accumulates sweet earthmother blood. Read this poem from the collection, edited by honor moore (cool use of no-caps!)

Spot the conceit! I REALLY like this poem, but don't you think, equally she could, like, NOT wear the dress? And personally, I don't run unless I'm being chased. Maybe that's the point of the poem? I mean, she's obviously not out jogging or she'd tell the MAN (aka reader) to wear tracksuit bottoms and comfy shoes. Oh dear! Exegesis crisis!

An Answer to a Man’s Question,
“What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?”
by Susan Griffin

Wear a dress.
Wear a dress that you made yourself, or bought in a
dress store.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear elastic,
around
your hips, and underneath your nipples.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear a sanitary
napkin.
Wear a dress and wear sling-back, high-heeled shoes.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin
underneath,
and sling-back shoes on your feet, and walk down
Telegraph Avenue.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin and sling-
back shoes on Telegraph Avenue and try to run

Rock on!

'Womankind defies nature', says Daily Male

2009-06-17T14:42:00.015+01:00

Praise be! The Daily Male has once again shared with us their little perils of wisdom! This time they're warning all us broody females not to have children too late, because we might not be able to have children.

My cat Emmeline Pankhurst sent me an email with a link to this awful article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1193296/Have-baby-35-Meet-deadline-risk-missing-motherhood-say-doctors.html

It preaches that women should definitely have babies between the ages of 20 and 35 or risk having a successful career. Thanks to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists for drawing our attention to the 'optimum age' for childbearing and the 'epidemic of pregnancy' taking place among 40-somethings. Even if this is scientific stuff (which I doubt it is, see below) there is no need to phrase it so crassly.

I personally can't stand children, but maintain it should be a woman' s right to chose when, where and how she should open herself up to the world, almost bleed to death and give birth. On the other hand birth can also be a beautiful experience- I remember when my old college friend Natalie gave birth to triplets in a water tank. She had eight epidurals and said it was better than the summer solstice.

But do you know what this really reminded me of lady readers? Nazi Germany? 1935? Persecution? The Fascists started making up medical facts to prevent Jews reproducing, whilst constructing despicable laws to prevent Aryan and Jewish weddings. Well I say to you, same sex marriage- no one's too happy about that are they? And what do we really know about the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists anyway..?

Mine Fuhrer is that a copy of The Daily Male or are you just pleased to see me?

Thanks Melody!

2009-06-16T12:35:00.002+01:00

Look at the cool picture Melody sent me 'on e-mail' this morning. Thanks Melody - it cheered me up a treat and emmeline Pankhurst says meow too. xxxx

Wallpaper

2009-06-16T11:33:00.006+01:00

ALERT ALERT! I am finding it extremely difficult to locate some of my old friend (see left) stateside.

Oscar Wilde once said that America was a violent country because its wallpaper was so ugly. Well I say it's because they don't have the sweet nectar the colour of my womb. AND I might add that there is another book also about wallpaper MR WILDE which I suggest you consult, 'tis called The Yellow Wallpaper (by Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and it is about female depression and psychosis. The tale is actually based on the life of my great great grandmother, Beatrice Rider, who accidentally shot herself in 1889. The body was found by my great Aunt Lilly who now has a severe aversion to wallpaper, especially of the yellow variety.

The hunt continues... Not that I need Martini Rosso you understand, I mean I am totally over my break up with Martin. You might think it strange that I'm addicted to a drink that starts with his name, but reality is a social construct and that is your opinion.

Poesie Rider in the New World!

2009-06-14T16:45:00.005+01:00

Look! I'm on tour in North America being a poet! Fuck you Steve! I've gone to a land where they can appreciate me, as a woman, for who I am - a woman! More news and photos soon darlings! xxx

The door of poetry is Openned (sic) - for MEN!

2009-06-05T12:28:00.005+01:00

Hail, readers. As you well know, I am a writer, and like to dabble, dawdle and dip my brush in an intimidating range of media (plays, novels, histories, polemics, masques etc). As if that wasn't enough, I'm also an able poet, having wowed the world with my psychoanalytic thriller Gulf Scream, Labial Elegiac and the recent Aphorisms for my ex, which extends over many more hundreds of pages than I dared to publish to my blog (for legal reasons, I've been told: apparently some of my honest admissions in that work, for example the details of how I hacked Martin's internet banking and stopped the child support payments to his ex wife, could actually be used as evidence against me. Whoops! Has no one ever heard of artistic licence??).

Anyway, last night I had the good humour to attend a poetry reading in the 'Xing the Line' series (pronounced Zing the Line I think, poets eh!). I went along primarily to schmooze, I mean why else would I go, and met some very attractive Beta males who had lots of interesting things to tell me about themselves. All was going well until, two glasses of Rose down, I encountered literary sexism of the kind that hasn't been encountered since William Wordsworth nicked all of Dorothy's best lines. I was told at point blank range by the curator and tsar of a prominent poetry reading series, who shall remain nameless (you know who you are, Steve) that I, a lady writer, was unsuitable to make an appearance at his 'night'. I was informed, however, that if I wanted to pass my poems to a MAN to read, or make a short video of myself reading them in a bikini with a soft core Bashment backing track, I would be allowed to participate, but otherwise, no!

Once more the mesmeric ivory bower of the literary establishment was Clossed for women. The fact that other ladies have been admitted to these readings is merely further proof that sexism is rife in the world of poetry: does everyone remember Working Girl? That film, apart from being solid gold entertainment, taught us that it's not only men who polish and buff the glass ceiling - women can be raging, careerist chauvinists intent on keeping other women down as well. Like little Tess was abused by the Ivy League show off bitch, Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), so little Posie has been cast to the wayside by the sorts of trustafarians who can take a year out to complete a 'Poetry MA' merely in order to meet a few people who they could meet anyway by merely attending a poetry reading and offering around a few cigarettes and looking 'needy and interesting'. In my early twenties I had no time for such things and, until Aunt Lilies' estate was wound up, had to labour and toil hard in Miss Selfridges as a personal shopper merely to afford a panino at the Nero's across the road in my lunch hour. Any poems I found time to write were scrawled on the back of a receipt for shoes, and my first novella, Me, Tim and My Quim (now a major motion picture) was written entirely on an All Bar One wine and nibbles menu. It's experience like that that makes a great writer, like Hemingway, not arsing around and paying good money to be deemed a 'qualified writer' by an academic institution. (I should say as an aside that I am now enrolled in Birkbeck's Summer Course in Female Memoir Writing, but what of that?)

Anyway, having been turned away so cruelly, there was nothing for me to do but consume further Rose, vom a little on my skirt, then come home and plot my revenge. This post, set to lay waste to the blogosphere, is merely the beginning. I have skills, for example internet banking fraud, and I have rage on my side. I've also just had a contraceptive implant (which stops your period for three years girls!) so, like Lady Macbeth, I will cry unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty!

Step one, an protest poem! I feel just like Brecht! Enjoy!!

Openning the cowl

I am self published!

Hark lute! Thumb me an envious tune

and autopsy reveal

the various instances

of the demise of the crowd song.

Openning the cowl

I am self kettled!

Authoritatively pilfering

lyrical nonchalance from

complacent bloggers all set

on their own aggrandisement.

Openning the cowl

I am self-harming!

Just to see if I can write.

Trade marking utterances best left be

or taken out used worn destroyed

passed out again

through the thigh of a pig.

Pour into moulds the

filling of the Arctic Roll tube

as capillary excess waste

laden tissue damage

but let’s turn this about

and call it dessert!

This is like me!

Fanny art!

2009-06-01T12:38:00.000+01:00

Hi gals! Thought you might like this... The one on the right is actually my friend Fran; she just loves tattoos and thought she'd go all out for her thirtieth!

Isn't it pretty?

Can men be feminists?

2009-05-30T12:11:00.001+01:00

William Godwin, John Stewart Mill, John Lennon, the list of male feminists is endless(ish), but can men ever really be feministing when they lack that all powerful 'fe' suffix?

Posie Rider says "no". Men jumping on the band wagon of female endeavours has been going on for years. They have taken over cooking (Jamie stole the limelight from our Dehlia); clothes (Matthew Williamson); and makeup (transvestites and media types). And now Feminism too?

Well I say "no", you bastards. My ex said he was a feminist but he wasn't; he was a fucking liar! J. S. Mill travelled round the east end of London distributing 'contraception literature' to prostitutes because he believed in the sovereignty of free speech: he was doing it in the name of liberalism, not feminism.

Feminists have argued that liberalism even hinders the agenda. Although she is my idol, I had to take on board Dr Kapur's* comments about Catherine MacKinnon at a recent feminist networking lunch. Kapur argues that MacKinnon's discourse of liberalism (particularly neo-liberalism, which sporned the deathchild post-feminism and it's evil twin 'men can join in too') only works to 'victimize' women. Discussions of female rights have spiralled out of control, as Western values dictate the agenda and acquire the despotic qualities of patriarchy. Feminists like myself aspire to label the conditions of alternate cultures as good/bad; just/unjust, without having any concept of the complexities at hand. For instance, I only found out the other day that Egypt was in Africa. How could I have known that when I live on the other side of the world?

I can only conclude that if feminists must be cautious when conversing with our sisters from abroad, how are men expected to understand the problems of women? They 'Other' us because they must.

I DO like Martini Rosso though.

* Please see Kapur's wonderful book Erotic Justice

Saw this and thought of you all!

2009-05-28T12:05:00.003+01:00

By the way- do you know Martini Rosso only contains 7 calories a gram?

Toodles!

Aphorisms for my ex - hot new poem in the Poesie Rider series!

2009-05-26T17:05:00.004+01:00

Aphorisms for M.H.

Do you realise that I
am making the sound
of writing so that I can
look over your shoulder?

I am the cleft in the cold
recesses of your flesh. I
am like a flesh-jar.

Can you see me when you
Are looking the other way?
I am out the window.

Do you know that I read
your emails when you are
asleep? I think they are
dull.

You never introduced me to
your mother but I don’t think
she would have liked me.

I am working my fingers
into your scattered lines, I am
keeping myself busy now.

Today I called your house so
you would answer and so I
could check that you were in.
I hung up, like a serial killer.

I am prickled all over at the
thought of the moths in the blanket.

I am treating your smile like
an upturned dog. Restful.
Deceased.

I am the leaves settling on your
limbs and becoming damp.

I am the thrusting of green
shoots through soil. I am pacific.

I am waiting 40 seconds
between each ring now.

I am looking at pictures of your
ex wife once or twice a day now.
I think I am in love with her.

I cloy morosely. I cool myself
with spittle.

I cherish your admin. I retrieve
your deleted cookies.

I am elevating the ordinary
to an art form out of contempt.

I am devilling your eggs
(like a woman)

There is a peach famine and
I am employing sanctions.

You asked me how I was
doing and what I was up to.
I hate you, please die now.

The Beauty Myth Exposed - embrace ugliness!

2009-05-15T14:45:00.002+01:00

As I sat upon my porcelain loo this morning, I was amused to read a feature in G2 concerning women and that terrible word, make up. A fellow feminist, Julie Blindel, had written an article about whether make up, when applied to feminism, masked our hypocrisy like a burkini, or merely slipped off like so much water on oil. Should feminists be allowed to use make up? Should they refuse in principle? Is personal choice part of what feminism was about in the first place? The Guardian featured this story, and were so astonished at the various responses of their surprisingly literate readers (They used punctuation! They can spell!) that they thought they'd glorify them in print by publishing a selection of letters.

The range of opinions through up no surprises: Make-up-attracts-men=bad; make-up-express-self=good; I-have-a-rash-need-make-up-look-terrible etc. What fascinated me was the angle of argumentation concerning the 'beauty myth', and the pressures women are under to look good. See the excerpts below.

We all know the truth of this; most of us have experienced the different reactions when we're dressed up and when we slob out. No one has said that succumbing to the endless pressure to "look good" is a betrayal of feminism. However, I would say that we owe it to ourselves to be honest enough to acknowledge those pressures.
I think the personal choice argument [regarding makeup] doesn't entirely take account of the difficulties involved in not wearing it.

Now, I quite agree that young women are under pressure to look beautiful, and that unobtainable body shapes are thrust in our faces on a daily basis to such an extent that I really sometimes forget that I'm a woman at all. But this isn't the point, is it? The point is that women who go around without make up on are, allegedly, made to feel like pariahs. Perhaps this is the case, but as a woman who doesn't wear make up at all, ever, through sheer forgetfulness rather than to make a 'point', I really can't say I've noticed the slightest bit of difference in the way I am treated, compared to women who wear make up.

And I have yet to see the evidence to prove that this 'truth universally acknowledged', that women encounter 'difficulties' through not wearing make up, makes any difference as to how people actually dress. We may all hate ourselves for our rubbish hair and our un-made up faces, but we go out like that everyday just the same.

Honestly, I haven't seen a person who didn't look absolutely terrible for weeks. I must see one genuinely well dressed, well taken care of individual perhaps once a month, and that's not to say anything about their innate physical attractiveness to start with. Because whatever feminists say, and I say this as a feminist, there is no 'difficulty' concerned with personal appearance that cannot be overcome by simply not giving a sh*t. Now, it may sound drastic, but rather than take on a) the self-censoring media, b) cosmetic manufacturers; and c) global capitalism, worthy targets of our scorn though they may be, it really might be best just this once to accept that looking like crap really is the price you pay for choosing not to look good.

I say this as one of you, a badly dressed and blotchy faced woman, whose only accessory is a cigarette and who hasn't worn make-up since I got my face painted like a zebra at Lovebox. There is no way of getting round the fact that 9 times out of 10 your face will not look like it has make-up on it if it doesn't have make-up on it, just as there is no way of ignoring the fact that 9 times out 10 no one cares if you have make up or you don't.

If you're not that attractive to start with, putting some make-up on is not going to stop traffic, and leaving it off is not going to cause hoards of school children to follow you down the road screaming 'witch' until someone tosses you in a pond just to see if you float: everyone is used to seeing people looking haggard, exhausted and, well, a bit rubbish. One more make-upless face is just one more person to ignore in your meaningless flaneusette wandering around your alienating city in your empty life. Embrace it!

Stuff the politics - I love the Queen!

2009-05-14T12:24:00.000+01:00

Of course my heart is with Queen Elizabeth I, but what's not to love about our current sovereign? Purple jacket with yellow tights? What a legend!

And, if her incredible sartorial tastes aren't to your liking, check out this incredible quote, which I know for a fact she said to the Ambassador of the Duke of Wurtemberg.

"I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married."

Ha! Posie joke!

Feminist Quote of the Day

2009-05-13T21:45:00.000+01:00

"I became a feminist as an alternative to becoming a masochist."

- Sally Kempton, journalist

Think! before you kill your husband by talking

2009-05-12T09:31:00.001+01:00

Has anyone seen the new Think! advice advert? It's one of those helpful ads that warn us docile members of the general public not to do stupid things which might result in our own deaths. My FAVE new ad is this Think! ad that warns against the perils of using mobile phones in the car.

For those of you can't be bothered to watch the video below, here's the storyline:
The screen is split down the middle, with the man on the phone in his mancar at night on one side talking to the woman on phone in kitchen on the other. "How did it go?" she asks, "It went really well," he replies "Blah blah I'm a man, and I'm on my way back now. I'll tell you about it when I get home." "OK, well, the dinner's on and the kids are in bed," she says, just before he crashes the car, gets covered in blood and so on.

Tagline: You don't have to be in a car to cause a car crash. As soon as you know they're driving, kill the conversation. (Instead of them, geddit?)

Well, thanks Think! for pointing out that it was the woman's fault for blathering on while the poor man was driving. Who called who, huh? Before she killed him, he was probably just about to say something like "Don't you know it's dangerous to talk to me when I'm on the phone in my car? I have to go to abide by the law and good sense." To which she would reply "I'm so alone! Please, don't hang up." To which he would reply "I know that, as a woman, you have no faculty of Reason (cf. Kant) but can't you trust in my superior masculine understanding and concede to my judgement?" The subtext, no dammit, the hypertext of this advert clearly demonstrates that he's trying to get rid of her, and she's all "How did it go sweetie?" just enforces the unfortunate notions that women:

a) talk too much
b) have no common sense
c) are so homicidaly bored that they would rather risk the lives of their loved ones than put up with another moment's emptiness and silence between the last kid falling asleep and hubbie coming home with his tales from 'the outside'.

Mobile phones and cars are a fatal mix, of course, but please, there is such a thing as personal responsibility of the driver for switching the damned thing off or, my lord, not answering! I think we all know who the douchebag is in this infomercial, and I hope I'm not alone in being glad he ends up dead. Whoops!

JS Mill (pwoarr!) and Harriet Taylor

2009-05-11T17:17:00.004+01:00

Uplifting thought of the day:

In addition to their marriage contract, JS Mill undertook 'a solemn promise never in any case or under any circumstances to use [the legal powers of a husband]' against his misses. He and Harriet disapproved of the existing marriage law because it 'confers on one party to the contract, legal power and control over the person, property and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will'. Harriet retained 'in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no marriage had taken place; and I absolutely disclaim and repudiate all pretension to have acquired any such rights whatever by virtue of such marriage'.

Not that difficult, is it boys?