Doing it all Over Again

My insomnia has returned, and I have returned to writing the novel I will probably still be writing when I am 100. And it is nearly spring, and therefore time to start thinking about preparing for what seems to be becoming an annual visit up North to stay with my favourite blog reader, A, for his annual Eurovision Song Contest party. Don't ask...

Race and Meaning

This morning: 10.30am, Belsize Park, cashpoint outside Tesco.

I am waiting in line to use the ATM. Behind me is a black youth with Attitude. I glance at him and turn back towards the queue.

"What're you looking at? Got a problem?"

I spin round to face him. "No. Have you?"

"What are you looking at? Why was you staring?"

"I wanted to look at you."

"Why?" He is becoming aggressive. "What's your problem?"

"Maybe I find you attractive."

"Oh." He relaxes. "I can understand that..."

"I thought that might go down well." I smugly retrieve my cash from the maching, and totter off down the road.

1997 and the Cultural Legacy of Girl Power

In 1997, I was living in Paris, existing on cigarettes and coffee (but still horribly fat), dating a musician called Jean-Pierre, and writing a thesis on decolonisation of the French empire and its demographic effects on the Parisian Jewish community. I qualified as a manicurist, worked at a salon called Jusqu’au Bout des Ongles, and dyed my hair pink.

Back in London, Five Feisty girls were jumping around in their platforms, banging on about Girl Power. And now the Spice Girls are back.

An article I read this week downplayed the cultural significance of the Spice Girls and the media interest their reunion has generated, dismissing them as of their time. I have to disagree. The Spice Girls represent more than mere transient, poptastic fun. 1997, devoid as it was of i-pods, Facebook and funky ringtones, was a highly significant year, in the way that the final years of a century always are. In 1997, the foundations were laid for the culture in which we exist today, and this was never epitomised better by anyone but the Spice Girls (except perhaps Peter Mandelson, but that’s another story…) Here’s why:

Around 1997, we started to see a new, different kind of openness in the media. Journalistic discourse shifted to the more confessional, with John Diamond writing about his battle with cancer in the Times, Ruth Picardie doing the same in the Observer, and Helen Fielding and Candace Bushnell semi-biographically diarising the relationship dilemmas of the modern woman. Around the same time, Germaine Greer started to lose the plot (it would be 2 years before she insulted F at an academic conference) and suddenly, we were talking about post-Feminism as though the Second Wave had never happened.

Spin ruled over substance. The rise and rise of the PR person, satirised in Absolutely Fabulous, seeped into politics in more aggressive ways than before (New Labour, anyone?), and celebrity ruled. Everyone became an idol. Tony Blair fashioned himself as the leader of the People; Diana was the People’s princess. In the Netherlands, a little known show called Big Brother was in production. It would later come to the UK, playing on our materialistic aspirations, encouraging us to reach the dizzy heights of vacuous celebrity for having achieved nothing.

One may, then, be forgiven for dismissing the emergence of any new celebrity phenomenon in such a fast -paced and short-lived vacuum as a five minute wonder. This may be true of Big Brother contestants, but not of the Spice Girls.

In an era of Feminist uncertainty, the Spice Girls redefined our way. Post the emasculating Thatcher years, the only Feminism we knew was homogenising and reductive, decidedly unfeminine and arguably excluded self expression. The Spice Girls introduced multiplicity into our discourse. They had balls and boobs and non gender-specific categories of identity.

That 4 of the 5 girls are now mothers and 3 of them have been plagued by persistent rumours of eating disorders is immaterial to their success. It is amazing and rare and absolute testament to their cultural significance that the Spice Girls have been able to achieve that level of success without critics reducing them to their biological function.

Now that’s Girl Power.

Having Enough of Having It All

Who told women they could have it all? The person ought to be shot.

Statistics reported in The Independent today raise concerns about the rising age of motherhood. This is – rightly – presented specifically as a health issue, rather than a social concern. However, the article includes the annoying bleatings of a couple of (educated, middle-class, affluent, career) women, bemoaning the double standards of a society that pats Rod Stewart on the back for reproducing in his 60s, but cautions women over the age of 35 against having children. A female gynaecologist was even forced to apologise for urging women to bear children before the age of 30. Based on the available research and statistics of the health complications involved in older mothers (not to mention the strain placed on the NHS), her advice seems very sensible to me.

It is also important to separate these findings from the social implications of the female backlash to such caution. The director of a fertility clinic (gender unspecified) is quoted in the article as saying that society is imposing a “massive strain” on women by “forcing” them to choose between family and career. I disagree. I think that the pressure women feel under to “have everything” comes from women themselves, and that actually, “society” has been more than generous to women who choose to actively raise children and pursue a career.

The idea that women can – and should – be able to have children and take time off work to bring up their families, while at the same time enjoying the same privileges and opportunities as those in the workplace (male and female) who prioritise their careers is seriously misguided. It also serves to undermine the feminist cause from which it originated. First, because it posits an unachievable ideal (no one can have everything), and secondly because why should women who choose to be mothers be entitled to more than everyone else? As time has evolved, the concept of maternity leave has become unhelpful to the feminist cause (whatever the hell that is these days), because the benefits available to working women suggest a societal prioritisation of female biological destiny. Neither does it serve to promote the ideal of overall equality in the workplace: who else is allowed to take paid time off work to pursue their narcissistic desires?

Equality should be about generating choice and options for everyone, not privileging one group of people above another, and certainly not putting so much pressure on one group that you end up taking away their choice. Let’s be realistic: no one can have everything, and it is symptomatic of a very specifically western capitalist greed to expect otherwise.

Am I still a Feminist?

Bilan de 2007

Well I have been extremely blog passive for the last few months, but I love D's round up so much, i will attempt one myself. Here goes:

Best Moment of 2007: Oh God, as committed, strong independent women of substance, should obviously say getting new job. Have to admit it might have been acquiring boyfriend though. Am failure to feminist cause, as would be no good as radical separatist.

Worst Moment of 2007: On my way to interview for aforesaid new job, the taxi driver got horribly lost, and drove me to the Northcott Theatre, rather than Northcote House. He then proceeded to careen all around the university campus in circles, while I felt horrendously car sick and increasingly panicked. I finally spotted a sign that said "pedestrian route to Northcote House" and ordered him to stop, at which point he accused me of being "a fucking bitch" who lied about my destination to avoid paying the fare! He chucked me out of the cab and drove of at high speed with the door still open, and in my rush to get out of the cab, I lost my mum's umbrella. I then had to go to an interview in tears, fifteen minutes late, hyperventilating, with mad hair, torn between a murderous desire to kill all taxi drivers and an equally strong desire to simply go to bed and wish it had all never happened.

Most Satisfying Moment in 2007: look on my former boss's face when he realised I was leaving and he was going to lose my RAE points! ha!

Least Satisfying Moment of 2007: being harangued in the street by a beggar in Bordeaux who told me I was so enormous I could be used to block the Garonne. This was because I refused to say good night to him.

Best Present of 2007: My friend S gave me a leaving present which consists of a frame still from her latest DVD, an art installation project on movement and stasis in Belfast. It is a unique print that no-one else in the world will have ever, and it is wonderful. The installation is currently being shown at a gallery in Havana, Cuba.

Best meal of 2007: has to be oysters and mussels at the cafe pineau in cap ferret. idyllic setting, great food, wonderful friends.

Worst meal of 2007: mistaking curry sauce for tomato ketchup and slurping sticky, gross curry sauce all over my bratwurst. Bratwurst smelt foul and was inedible.

Best exhibition of 2007: I think it would have to be the Surrealist exhibition at the V and A, although both Citizens and Kings at the Royal Academy and the Millais at Tate Britain come close.

Best Film of 2007: The Lives of Others. Emotionally satisfying, narratively gripping, and with a wider historical and political sense.

Number of weddings attended: 4

Number of funerals attended: 0

Number of days was paid twice: One ( a good day though).

2007 - The Round-Up

Best moment of 2007
It has been an annus horribilis, as Her Maj would say. Nothing good happened in 2007

Worst thing that happened in 2007
Am spoiled for choice here. It’s a toss-up between the following:

-New Year’s Day 2007 (should have known then) when my date went horribly wrong and then someone tried to mug me and I ended up stabbing myself with my own umbrella (floored the mugger, though!)
- Being made redundant and spending the rest of the year wishing I’d moved to Italy and kept my job (will never understand my own logic)
- Putting myself on a dating website
- Months of chronic insomnia, exacerbated by the torturous belief that if I went to sleep I would have to wake up in the morning, get out of bed and resist the urge to end my own life. Yes, it really was that bad
- When I think about it though, I am amazed (and clearly very vacuous) by the realisation that the worst thing that happened to me in 2007 – and believe me, it’s bad – is that I gained weight and can no longer fit into my Size Zero hotpants.

Most spectacular wardrobe malfunction in 2007
Runner-up: Accidentally exposing my left nipple (again! – see last year’s round-up), this time to dearest Ken, our revered Mayor of London
Winner: The pink post-it/breast moment

Number of parties attended in 2007
Approximately 365

Amount of really grim vomiting stories resulting from said partying in 2007
At least 5 stand out. I was too out of it to notice the other 360

Celebrity sightings in 2007
- Stephen Spielberg (at a private section of the beach in Malibu – I know all the right people, dahhhling)
- An American Idol contestant (at The Grove in LA)
- Several Big Brother contestants (must start frequenting less tacky places)
- Princess Beatrice (must start frequenting less pretentious places)
- Noel Gallagher and Sara MacDonald (on Wigmore Street)
- Russell Brand (swoon! – in various places)
- David Gest (in Gilgamesh)
- India Knight (in Gilgamesh)
- Ross Kemp, Rachel Stevens, Jeremy Edwards (separately – on Christmas Eve)
- Noel Fielding (outside Annex Trois. J’s sister is a mad fan, and he called her and got Noel Fielding to speak to her, while I pointed my camera ‘phone in his face and took a blurry picture, and Noel Fielding’s friend told me I was out of order
- George Michael (at Café Nero in Hampstead). In fact, it wasn’t him at all, but for weeks, my friend I and I sat there staring at him marvelling at how little he was, until one Sunday he removed his cap and sunglasses and turned out to be black and not George Michael at all
- Les Dennis (scraping the bottom of the barrel here – coming out of the George Michael concert in June)

Amount of men dated in 2007
In excess of 50. I’m not joking

Best date of 2007
The one in the rain with the 22 year old. There was another good one somewhere in 2007, but it all ended in tears, tantrums, a little stalking, a lot of obsessing, and J threatening to call the police on me. My first date with The French One was quite fun too, until we were asked to leave the bar on account of "lewd and inappropriate behaviour". How very George Michael of us.

Worst date of 2007
Again: several contenders. The New Year’s Day date with the food diary and vitamins was not my proudest moment. I had a particularly awful date back in August with someone who had worked in Ghana and the only social observation he had returned with was the proliferation of prostitutes he had had to fend off. He said this proudly, as though they were women with a choice who had chosen to find him attractive. (I couldn’t even imagine a nymphomanic animal wanting to shag him. I left after 5 minutes.) Or the date where we had a shouting argument about the taxation system. He was a facist aged 37 who still lived with his parents and regurgitated their dated, suburban rhetoric to anyone who would listen. I would not.

Sanest and most functional man dated in 2007
The 22 year old

Number of times heart broken in the cruelest and most achingly painful manner possible
Erm, just the once, thankfully

Place discovered in 2007 where one can find – should one be mad and so wish – the highest ever concentration of pathetic, indecisive, dysfunctional, unreconstructed Mummies’ Boys
JDate

Number of evil bitch sisters (EBSs) who extorted flat out of mother in 2007 while i was miserable, unemployed and penniless
One. (The other EBS only managed to extort a holiday out of her.)

Amount of months spent not on speaking terms with said EBS, following pointless argument over tactical voting in general election
Eight (in sane families, people fall out over money)
Click here for an example of my family’s insanity

Number of lovely long-lost musician cousins befriended in 2007
Two. They are twins.

Number of new jobs in 2007
Two

Number of new jobs that made me want to poke eyes out and in which was forced to work in all-male office of racist, xenophobic, sexist, unreconstructed, hateful individuals, but that in hindsight only took because recruitment consultant was manipulative and good at her job, and because i was desperate, depressed, deluded and unemployed
One. One too many, though.

Number of new jobs in which slightly quirky boss is endeared by my scattiness
One

Number of self-help books read in 2007
Clearly not enough