Taking the male out of female

So, yes I have been the Masochistic Bush to Germaine’s Bin Laden. I have made false prophecy, incited misunderstanding at best and derided a political campaign spanning decades of oppression. I have become a tabloid reader, the scourge of an independent thinking society and I have to find out why. The topic is women and more fundamentally their value in society.

I know women have less rights, I know women have unequal pay scales, YES! I know women are misrepresented politically and socially but what I don’t understand is why I can’t comprehend the issues. Why am I reluctant to say ‘Yes, that’s shit!’ Why, when posed with a hypothetical situation of masculine power play in the face of feminine submission do I ultimately defend masculinity?

My answer (and this might mark my place on top of many lone male assassins lists) is that just like British culture, males are just a little bit shit. How many males have had a party, desperately wishing for a bevy of buxom beauties to turn up (doesn’t this sentence alone say volumes) alone to faced with a blockade of balls, a multitude of man meat or a copious crowd of cock. Females at this age have ultimate power, they are the true embodiment of Mother Nature, beautiful and powerful yet unforgiving, and boys will do anything to behold them even for the briefest moment of time. I think we are forced to resent, or fear female clout from day one.

Eventually age ravishes us all, liver spots dance on our faces like fairies at a rave and grey hairs multiply like rabbits at a party at the Playboy mansion. Men eventually seek and gain power (from other men) and eventually, like Julius Ceaser we ‘Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war’, avenging our prepubescent rejection from the womanly world and asserting our place as the prince of prick.

So what do men have to offer? Our main attributes derive from the Neanderthal values of the past. Men are competitive, dominant and unforgiving, qualities that are cohesive with modern capitalism. Women are understanding, communicative and foster understanding, qualities that business disparage and professions such as teaching, nursing and human resources exalt. I ask you, what professions actually aid the modern world and what professions leech its soul?

So why do I ask this question? Why do I instinctively jump to the male defensive standpoint? Why do I feel like a serial killer in court with an escaped harrowed victim giving testimony? It’s because half the population are right, we rule with an iron fist only allowing women who imitate men to taste power or the amount of power the old boy network will allow them to briefly savour. We allow the male imitating women into the fold, tick the boxes, congratulate ourselves at being inclusive then stare at their breasts when they’re not looking.

But fear not! The female future is bright. Men cannot put shelves up, we cannot check the oil in the car, hell we don’t even know what a clitoris is, we think it’s a new type of car with 5 wheels and a GPS unit that impersonates Busta Rhymes. We are dolts, idiots, morons and simpletons. Point us in the direction of a hammer and we want to hit anything flat with a pointy end, point us in the direction of a whisk and we think it’s a masturbatory aid. The media acknowledges it, they represent the modern man as a bumbling fool who plumbs the toilet into the hosepipe and then guffaws as he cleans his BMW with a shit shower.

The time for female superiority is upon us, but mankind has been forced into a corner. I haven’t learnt the skills my father tried to teach me and I wouldn’t learn the skills my mothers tried to convince me would help in a new world. I am lost, battered, bruised and confused, wanting to lash out at every feminine standpoint. I overreact, grow to be defensive and fight without reason. I know all this and still fight therefore becoming unreasonable, irrational and illogical.

The stupid thing is all I have to say is ‘Yes, I agree’ and mean it. I would love to, I really would, but sometimes saying ‘Yes’ is the hardest word.

The Spectacle of the Monster with Four Eyes (who was incidentally looking the wrong way)

I have never had good eye sight; in fact at -7.5 I am reliably informed by optometrists that if my eyesight would get worse then I could be officially registered as blind. For the reader being this blind has its uses such as making you virtually useless in the morning and therefore removed from having to answer the door to the postman at 8am wearing your dubious spare pair of “sleeping” boxer shorts that has an opening at the front big enough to fit an elephants trunk, a fireman’s house and the branch of an oak tree simultaneously (trust me I have tried). Of course this ultimately leads to the insecurity and age old image that your girlfriend, fiancée or lover is instead having to answer the door, dressed in their finest lingerie, outrageously flirts with the postman and eventually leaving you for a uniformed man named Nigel, Alan or Mike whose main topic of conversation is that he gets a good amount of exercise every day and is back at home with a cuppa by 3pm.

The optometrists news actually pleased me, with the primary knowledge I could lay blame at the door of my employers for forcing me to stare at a computer screen for too long (proving my point that work will eventually be the ruin of me) and secondly because I would, with my new rating of severely visually impaired, be able to get the odd behemoth pair of brown rimmed specs for free (sellotaped hinge, additional).

So for many years before the joy of contact lenses became widespread, I and thousands of hapless souls like me were forced into hours of humiliation, torture and sporadic bouts of pain. As any scientist will tell you there are certain things in this universe that under any circumstances should not be mixed, these are toasters and baths, chilli powder and foreplay and of course the most dangerous – glasses and sport.

Schools the world over are attended by genetically impaired children who left to Darwin’s survival of the fittest would last about an hour before some grotesque twist of fate would have them blindly walking into an industrial sized blancmange maker or falling into a fiery pit of the damned. Before I was placed into the educational system I was reliably informed that having to wear a block of metal and plastic on your face is considered so cool, the other kids will immediately stop and compare you to the other cool metal and plastic block wearers such as Bill Gates, Elton John and that politician in the brown suit of the TV last night that nobody can remember the name of. These to a five year old are as cool as rambling.

In schools sports me and my spectacled brethren were given two choices: you play with four eyes or with none. Playing with four eyes meant having a football hoofed in your face was not just humiliating but also carried a certain kind of danger, akin to running around a field with a time bomb strapped to your head, ready to drop its load of shattered glass and twisted metal straight into your retina (at least you could see it coming). The other choice was worse, playing blind. The usual scenario involved me frantically chasing the ‘white blob’, only to find out I’d been chasing a plastic bag for over an hour. I often wondered why the other kids had plastic bags stuffed in their short pockets.

School trips were also complicated. One school project focused on the butterfly, its life cycle and how something fairly ugly can blossom into an object of beauty (ahhh what a metaphor for a adolescent glasses wearer), the project ended with a trip to large plastic bubble, pumped up with hot air and stuffed with plants and butterflies, also traditionally known as a butterfly farm. I had never really been out of Europe (or actually past Jersey at this point) so the idea of being immersed in a tropical (albeit fake) world delighted me. There a few moments in life that you can mark as the birth of a personality trait, good and bad and I think this was the proud moment of birth of cynicism and as every British person knows an invaluable commodity when dealing with day to day life in the UK, or speaking to banks or broadband providers

Pounds and Porcine Tears

We are a fat, wobbling mess, puffing and panting our way through our tubby existence. Our children don't go out to play, but from the safety of their own homes, never having to lift their rotund, whale like derrières from the couch, their dumpy little digits thrashing away at their Xbox controller as they blow little Mike from next door to smitherines. These butterballs will enter adolescent life with fantastic hand eye coordination skills but lack the ability to talk to anyone who isn't comprised of pixels and dressed in futuristic war regalia. As they get older the media will make pariahs out of them, they will cry porcine tears and dream of a skinny and slender world of asymmetrical haircuts and 17 year olds who drive brand new cars. To live the dream, they will swallow their pride, dignity and morality. They will join a gym.

I know why most people avoid gyms, its not blood, sweat or tears, its not its testosterone pumped patrons strutting around like two swinging bollocks at a eunuch rally. The reason why people avoid working out is solely due to the mid numbingly tedious music pumped from 1000 speakers (all of are usually directly above where you are sitting). Often its feel like the scene in Star Trek - Wrath of Khan (I know, I was small and it stuck in my memory along with another film where a naked woman got beaten to death with a baked bean can). In this scene, what looks like a common garden slug is forced into a hapless crew members aural canal (obviously not key cast), lays its eggs and waits to strike. The immigrant parasite eventually slimes its way around the ear canal, again and again and again, causing fierce and biting pain which dramatically escalates until the poor sod clutches his head and jumps into the nearest vortex. Gym music, however, is much more severe, its spreads through your auditory synapses like an STD in Texas, ripping them apart with its wishy-washy, over produced banality until your noggin blows clean off your shoulders. Its just a shame I know I'll be whistling the latest Lady Ga Ga song while little Mike chases me through a pixel rendered rainforest, bullets whistling past my ears.

Mother Nature's vicious hand

The new David Attenborough documentaries have scared the living hell out of me.I remember a warm voiced David, like a nice old Uncle bringing you a hot chocolate before bedtime and soothing you to sleep with yarns of dozing jaguars and fuzzy small mammals nuzzling themselves in warm hay. Something has happened and the BBC have had a bad dream, in their apocalyptic new world Gazelle's throats are being ripped out by blood hungry Hyenas whist the newborns eyes are sellotaped open, forced to watch the decimation of thier kin. I remember a time when animal documentaries only glanced at the horrific nature of the wild, this has however dived in to the gorefest head first, splashing claret, sinew and guts without abandonment. I was going to go for a walk after to clear my mind but thought better of it in case a blood maddened prickle of hedgehogs rampaged my ankles, felling me and then finishing me off like a human pin cushion.

So nature is awful, everything eats everything and then eats things back. Imagine popping down to the local pub and having to watch you back in case a group of psychotic 12 year olds dismembered you and ate your liver (though I think this actually may happen in places like Sheffield). The lion, king of the jungle also has a pretty harrowing life, being constantly fought for superiority within the pride and finally ousted, left to scavenge around the wilderness for tit bits (similar to Vanessa Feltz's TV career).

Then I thought Lions don't have it too bad, in fact they don't have to deal with Recruitment Agencies, Tax offices or wasting their Saturdays while pre-pubescent pimply numpties infiltrate every shop on mass. Actually Lion, I would trade places with you in a moment. I would gladly watch you negotiate with Estate Agents, hey, I would even sellotape his child s eyes open whilst you rip his trachea from his still warm body.

On last word, MTV it is okay to show African women's breasts, you don't have to air brush them out on your 'documentaries', they are non sexual, traditional and actually used to feed babies. If that gets 15 year old boys feeling frisky,well fine at least it goes some way to obliterating racism. At least the air headed clots at MTV didn't dress them all in Prada catsuits fending off hyenas and jackals in a perfectly choreographed dance routine.

Cometh the Job Seeker, I have a quest!

OK, so Latin America did have all these things combined with corruption and hey, it even had Twix's! Imagine the shock! Luckily they didn't taste as good and after some in depth research into the side of a wrapper (actually a 28 hour bus journey with ill prepration and no reading material). I concluded/guessed it must be a chemical added to the chocolate to stop in melting at higher temperatures, which as a side product also makes it taste like mud, not a fresh mud or mud that can be easily identified as mud, but something you actually hope is mud, because the other option would kickstart your gag reflex.

After 12 months of hard bribartering (the complicated act of bartering with an offical into how much you are going to bribe them) I returned home, to embrace the tyrannical hard arm of UK corporations and to beaten back into a simpering mess of a man, sorry, worthy member of the community.

Im now looking for work in a community of fear, not good old fashioned terrorist fear that mainly unhinges the paranoid (who, by thier nature are already scared of the backs of people heads and animals talking abusively in crowded places) but a fear that cripples everyone. The fear the corporations have of not being able to make enough profit to buy all the stakeholders a limo full of champagne and high class hookers (is there a school for hookers or a GNVQ? What qualifies high class, do you need an in depth knowledge of fellatio whilst spurting quips from Niche inbetween gobbles). Corporations are scared, spending is cut and jobs are lost. Job seekers (I like that title, makes it sound very Lord of the Rings) are left continually job seeking, like looking for invisible lint in Andre the Giants navel.

Finding work (sorry Job Seeking) now makes me feel like a male prostitute in Whitehall. I'm strutting by Tory politicans Mercades Benz, rubbing my tushie on drainpipes and teasing them to wind down thier windows (or press the down button). Most slow down then speed off, but some do grind to a halt, the window creeps down and then they gasp horribly as they witness the elephant man with inch thick, deep rouge blusher and bulging leather hot pants, seductively licking his garganutan blistering lips. Perhaps I need to work on my CV or not write my covering letter on yellow lined paper in green crayon.

The Pre-rant

I spent years shopping in large supermarkets, mainly due to being a lazy idiot and mainly because this was the time of a slight Twix addiction, something to do with biscuit and caramel in the late afternoon sent me into a mindless frenzy. The staff preyed on my addiction, knowing they had their clammy hands firmly gasped around my man sack, knowing as long as they stocked the 'stash' they had free reign to sell me whatever rotting, fetid wares they could haphazardly throw onto their shelves. So I came home with bags of lettuce leaking brown water, tomatoes you picked up and your thumb slipped into its core like prodding a dead badger you found on the side of the road. I promised everyone I would stop, that I would buy fresh from a local greengrocer, that I wouldn't support this form of self abasing. I had to break free, free from the corporate exploitative arseholes who are happy to sell me rubbish at extortionate costs..I had a plan, leave everything and run away, run away from the large supermarkets, the large banks and the large coffee chains. Run away to Latin America!