Adventures in Misogyny

So. As discussed in my previous entry, the State of Adulthood is proving frustratingly elusive at the moment. This ongoing quest for the dubious Holy Grail represented by Grown-up-hood is not helped by the presence - in what feels like every area of my life - of men whose behaviour can only be described as dickish in the extreme.

In other words, feel free to read this as a kind of open letter to the men in my life, the men in the same city as me, and really any men I ever come into contact with, however tangentially.

Dear Men,
(This first part applies specifically to those lovely men I sometimes know as 'colleagues', although your behaviour is not such as to really merit the adjective 'professional'. It is not, nor will it ever be, appropriate to deem women 'bitches' because they get a haircut which makes them less attractive to you. Neither is it appropriate to describe another colleague as a 'dog' or a 'fat cow' because she committed the heinous crime of walking past your desk on her way to the photocopier. I will not catalogue the full extent of your misogyny here, because frankly it makes me feel sick and small and scared to speak to you or walk past you for fear of the inevitable comments on my appearance this will later result in. What I will say is that you manage to make work a pretty horrible place for me to be a women. Thanks for that.

Of course, the presence of nasty men is not just limited to my work! Oh no, there are many of them just roaming the world at large. Case in point: the other night I was round at a friend's flat. After dinner and a catch-up, I prepared to head home. The time was late but not too late, the way home a fifteen minute walk through a bustling part of the city centre. This is a walk I have taken before and feel perfectly comfortable about. This is a city I know intimately and thus I felt capable of making the decision to walk home by myself. Had I had more cash on me, had my boyfriend been awake, my decision might have been different. But I weighed up the options and felt it was a calculated risk.

A friend of my friend's flatmate did not feel so. This man was a stranger, someone I had been making polite small-talk with for a minute in the hallway as he entered with my friend's flatmate. He proceeded to tell me that he 'would not allow' me to walk home by myself. I tried to reason the point with him but he remained insistent that he 'would not let it happen'. As he failed to offer alternate options, I was at a bit of a loss as to what he expected from me. Chivalry is one, manners another, but being instructed by a stranger on what he will and and will not allow you to do purely by virtue of the fact you are a woman and he is a man, is nothing other than misogyny.

Men of the world, please reflect on these truths.

Thank you.

Pride is followed...

Today is one of those days in which I seem to be failing spectacularly at adulthood. Not failing in an inconsequential, hilarious way but failing in big, scary, one-step-from the gutter type ways. The first thing I miss on these days is living with my friends and not my boyfriend, who is ridiculously successful at everything he puts his mind to. He cannot sympathize with failure and is so optimistic that he rarely even recognises it for what it is.

Failure feels to me like really terrible period cramps coupled with the type of anxiety that mkaes it difficult to breathe. It is mainfested in sweaty palms and teary eyes. It is intensely physical and at the same time it sucks me into a mental fog difficult to see a way out of.

I can deal with all of this under normal circumstances, but at the moment I feel as if my life is totally lacking in normal - I'm lost and I don't know where I'm going, so every failure seems to loom large on the horizon.

www.thefword.org.uk/features/2009/09/feminism_and_th

Same people, different place: Part Two

The Lad
This familiar temping character is impossible to ignore; he flaunts his disdain for the job at every opportunity, and so rarely lasts beyond the first three weeks. The Lad in any of his various incarnations can be recognised by the stock anecdotes which his conversation consists of. These will invariably fall into the categories of: Drunken Banter, Drunken Exploits, Drunken Misadventures, and Drunken Sex. This sequence will be repeated ad nauseam. NB: The recurring motif of 'Drunkenness' may well be specific to The Scottish Lad - further research is required before this point can be settled definitively. It is also important to recognise that The Lad's conversation may seem initially to encompass a broader cultural spectrum, due to his liberal references to film and television. However, do not take this initial impression at face value, as further investigation always exposes the fact that these references do not signify any sort of individual opinion or critique but are merely meaningless reiterations of the relevant catchphrases from said televisual works.

The Bitch
The Bitch is characterised by a seemingly obsessive desire to recreate the conditions and experiences of high school. She pursues this aim with a single-minded persistance, and any attempts to thwart her will meet with a blind fury. She is all the more dangerous as her determination to create exclusive cliques among the temps is such that she will not recognise boundaries, and often strikes out at either the temp agency or the company she is working for. For this reason, her reign is usually volatile. While it can be tempting to attempt to side with The Bitch and so avoid the sniggers and frosty silences which characterise her enmity, the consequences of this can be unpleasant. A bitterness and anger lie at the heart of all The Bitch's endeavours and these emotions are both difficult to feign and painful to experience.

Same people, different place: Part One

Every temp who has worked on several different placements will remember the moment that realisation hit. Not so much the revelation that training will always be patchy at best, supervision limited, and the rights of the temp worker non-existent - although these are indeed truths about employment universally acknowledged - but rather the realisation that across each separate placement - albeit in entirely different sectors, with entirely different companies - you have been working with the exact same people. Sure, you may be sitting next to Rachel instead of Ruth, Sean's hair might be slicked back with Wella instead of VO5, but the essentials remain as unchanging and immutable as the Monday morning despair.
You will be surrounded by a gallery of recurring characters, each of whom I intend to examine in detail over the next few days of Real-life Observation. Stand by for nail-biting exposes, including; The Swot; The Old Git; The Lad and The Bitch, among others!

Death by Corporation

Tomorrow will be my first Dress-down Friday as a working woman. When I was unemployed I felt as if each cumulative day saw the erosion of a tiny bit more of my self-esteem. Logically, I knew blah blah blah recession, everyone in the same boat yada yada yada. Not my fault my graduation coincided with such a shitty economic period. Yet each morning it was as if the squidgy mozzerella ball of my soul had in the course of the night been savagely attacked, beaten and left for dead by the rough side of the cheese grater. I felt raw and somehow lessened.

I'm sure you can predict the ending to this story. Yup, I have a job now and kinda wish I didn't. The idea that tomorrow is meant to be this big fucking treat - ZOMG we get to wear jeans, forget that £38.50 you owe me, I'll do it for free! - makes my throat constrict. Of course, I guess the really sad thing is that I'm actually looking forward to tomorrow - dammit, I want to wear my jeans...

Daily Fail

You think the Daily Mail can't get any more misogynistic or idiotic. And then you read this.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1140543
Riddled with logical fallacies, sweeping generalisations and jaw-droppingly sexist assumptions, this article takes the Mail's non-existent standards and drags them through the proverbial gutter.

GRRRRRRRR.

Gender stereotypes? In your face!

Last night:
1. Alec informed me I had painted my nails all wrong, and did I know I was meant to push the cuticles back first?

2. He went on a sex strike. Yes, you read that right. Let's just say I had a little yeast infection last week which the correct pharmeceuticals have now taken care of, but before I ventured to the chemists I experimented with a little home remedy (thanks Google!) which apparently was just so repulsive that my junk is now tainted for life! Good times!

I suck at being a girl, don't I?

Eyebrow Pity Party

I have never liked my eyebrows. I inherited my dad's predilection towards eyebrows which insist on colonising not just the brow area but the entire forehead, ridge of the nose and a goodly portion of the eyelids. The hairs are coarse and black and sprout in no discernible order or shape. In their natural shape they do not so much frame my face as dominate it, exhuding a dark and forbidding menace which destroys the the subtle hazel gleam of the eyes below.

This situation was not aided by a fall on top of a radiator at age three, which split my head upon, and left scar tissue which bisects my left eyebrow horizontally. Of course my eyebrows are made of sterner, hairier stuff than a bit of dead skin, so the left eyebrow proceeded to carry on its growth below the scar tissue, creating a massive new outcrop of hair in a patch unparalleled by its fellow on the right.

My early teen years were blighted by the presence of these eyebrows. I discovered feminism early, and interpreted it in my own way, deciding that I would wear make-up, but altering the hair on my face was one step too far for me, the ambassador of modern and progressive womankind, to go. I will gloss over the painful experiences which ensued, and pass on to the purchase of tweezers at fifteen.

You might think my story will now come to a happy end, with my transformation from ugly duckling. Sadly, it was not to be. The scar tissue under my left eyebrow means it must be plucked into a spindly little curve just a couple of hairs wide. Instead of looking like a yeti, I look like a pluck-happy freak. My nose becomes the centre of my face, and seriously, is that ever a good thing?

I don't think there's an answer to this dilemma. I've been experimenting with the hairy little buggers for six years now and every possible configuartion of hairs just looks heinous. I'm curious to find out if there are any fellow sufferers out there though - perhaps some kind of Eyebrow Alliance is called for?