Best bit:

West used to be scared of gay people, he said, but now, “authentic” and “secure in [his] manhood”, he can “go to Paris [and] have conversations with people who are blatantly gay”.

“That’s when I was ignorant to gays,” he said in this week’s interview. “Because there’s a lot of gay people who don’t dress good at all. There’s a lot of gay people that I dress way better than.”

I’m not really sure whether to laugh or cry, really.

My favourite bits of advice she give to people considering submitting an unsolicited manuscript:

If you’ve written several other Vampire novels set in a nihilistic world sometime in the future, do not include all the synopses (together with their word count, of course) which have not been published, these do not have quite as much allure as you might imagine. Futile productivity and a previous track record of failure is not something prospective publishers look for in an author. If you were internet dating and wrote in your profile that this was the sixteenth dating site that you had joined without meeting anyone, who do you think would want to go out with you?

Personally, my advice to aspiring writers would be thus: don’t bother. You’re probably not as good as you think you are. Even if you are, you’ll spend years getting battered by rejection letters, probably never be appreciated, sell badly, and end up with your dreams broken on the cruel wheel of commercial publishing and probably turn to crack as a way of dulling the pain. If I were you, I’d cut your losses, take up a less demanding hobby (such as heavy drinking) and just keep your literary ambitions to livejournal.

It’s for the best.

I couldn’t figure out why women (straight women, at least) wanted to gawk at sexy pictures of other women. Then I realized something: they don’t want to see those models, they want to be them.

Somebody way smarter than me figured that out a long time ago and started making serious cash selling women images and ideas that breed dissatisfaction and self-doubt.

Somebody give this dudely genius a biscuit. Self-hatred and negative body image comes from people trying to sell us shit? Huh. Who’d have thunk it?

Recently I’ve started to notice the different reactions I get from different genders. Obviously I am generalizing a little here, but for the most part, whenever I talk about exercise with my male friends, we talk about the challenge, the excitement and the competition. When my female friends talk to to me about exercise, they almost invariably mention losing weight and simper about how unfit they are and make vague innuendo-laden references to yoga making you bendy. What the fuck?

For the record, I don’t exercise to lose weight. I’m not thin, not even close by industry standards. I have big hips, big thighs and DD cup breasts. Y’know, kind of like a lot of grown women who actually eat food. But I *am* quite fit. And I love it. I love the way beating my personal best time feels, I love hearing my heart pounding in my chest, and I love the independence cycling gives you. But expressing this to others has led to me being called ‘dykey’, ‘butch’, ‘manly’ and, my personal favourite, when I was accused of wanting to be a man.

This got me thinking. Why is being fit and enjoying it a masculine attribute? I mean, it doesn’t even make sense; look at the amount of adverts out there for women to join a gym. Oh, but I forgot. Doing exercise to lose weight doesn’t count. Apparently, exercise goes hand-in-hand with diets for a woman, whereas exercise matches protein shakes for bulking out if you’re a man. The ever-shrinking, increasingly-hairless perfect woman and her enormous, ripplingly-muscled counterpart. Take from that what you will…

Nice.

Rally to protest the situation in Gaza. Tonight, 7.30, Friends Meeting House, Euston Rd, London. Speakers include Tony Benn, Tariq Ali, George Galloway MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP

Demo for the same. Assemble 12.30pm at Speakers Corner, Hyde Park.

Srsly, Facebook, isn’t teh interwebs supposed to be more progressive than that?

Oh, wait. Shit.

Well, fret no longer, for the Times has decreed, in its almighty wisdom, that there is a new breed of feminist (link found at Twisty’s blog). They have thrown off the shackles of duffle coats and dowdy sandals, they have cleansed, exfoliated and blow-dried, and now they emerge, shining and fragrant, to bless us all with their new way of looking at the world. Take the protests against the beauty contests at LSE. According to the Times, getting fucked off about the normality of pitting girls against each other based solely on their physical attributes is “a bit, well, retro”.

Right. Silly me! I would have thought that it was the fact that these contests still exist that counted as old-fashioned, but no, it’s the protesting part that wrinkles the pretty brow of the columnist. Luckily for us, American feminist Katie Roiphe is on hand to clarify:

I think the proper reaction to a beauty pageant these days is to be bored by it. I would have thought that old version of feminism, which was violently opposed to lipstick and high heels, had died out by now. It’s an extinct image of feminism — that you can’t be both frivolous and serious or care about clothes and read books at the same time. And, in a way, it’s sort of depressing that these same old-fashioned battles keep on being recycled.

Yes Katie, it is depressing. It is extremely depressing that people persist on painting feminists as “angry young women in duffel coats”. It is depressing that women who dare to stick up for their rights to be seen as a person get told that they’re just bitter because they aren’t as ‘pretty’ as some shining example of femininity. And don’t even get me started on the Daily Mail article I linked to above. Guh.

Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse. Today it’s simply “Let’s don’t go forward with this act”. Senator Doug Henry, 2008

Found this little gem at the start of Jill Filipovic’s essay, chapter one of Yes means Yes. Simply delightful, no?