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