In which I tell Nadine Dorries about my sexual history

I have this dream that we, as a nation, will one day live up to the rational, moderate, secular image we have of ourselves. In this dream, sex and relationships education (SRE) focuses on giving students the information and confidence they need to make whatever genital-touching decision is right for them. People will be able to say the words "single mother" without advocating removing the social safety net from beneath some of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in the country precisely because of their vulnerable position. And Radio 4's Thought For The Day will be presented by Eddie Izzard. Every day.

But then I wake up from that dream to find that Parliament has passed a Bill supporting abstinence-focused sex education. Just for girls. Nadine Dorries, we need to talk.

I think almost everything I could rant on the topic has been said elsewhere - why only girls! Boys have sex too, and also not all teenage fumblings are of the heterosexual variety! They also don't all follow the Horny Dude Pressures Insecure Girl model - and if they did, surely teaching the Horny Dudes how to not badger people into receiving the penis would be at least as important as teaching Insecure Girls how to decline the penis! Isn't this essentially enshrining victim-blaming into the law? This lays out the ridiculousness of the proposal nicely, to the point where I almost wasn't going to write about it.

Turns out I had some thoughts, though. Surprise!

Firstly: how much has sex education changed since I left school? I remember the animated video about your body is going to change, an extended film of a woman giving birth, and a whole lot of tampon talk, but nothing about contraception - or, god forbid, consent - comes to mind. Everything I learned about the relative merits of condoms, diaphragms, femidoms and the pill, I learned from Sugar magazine. I wish someone had shown me how to put a condom on a cucumber - and I really wish someone had taught three of my previous naked dance partners the importance of correct post-ejaculation condom procedure, because then maybe I wouldn't be the Morning After Pill Queen. (Four times, you guys. But that is a whole nother story.)

So if kids really are being taught the mechanics of contraception, I'm nothing but thrilled: Judy Blume books are great, but they're no substitute for a comprehensive sex education program. I agree the 'relationships' aspect of SRE is also vital, but one half of the equation is better than neither.

Secondly: the quote from Dorries (as to why she's pushing for this now, when teenage pregnancy rates are falling) on the sexificatory pressures felt by our younger sisters...

Dorries told MPs the sale of porn magazines in newsagents, and high street shops selling padded bikinis for seven-year-old girls showed "how far the sexualisation of young girls has gone in our society".

...misses the point, in quite a sad way. It conflates the pressure to be sexy with the pressure to have sex - which are, to an extent, separate things. I think there's a tendency among adults - which increases when they have children themselves, and as they grow further away from their teens - to be so grossed out by the idea of girls having sexy feelings that they prefer to deny its existence, and assume that all teen sex must be due to the twin demands of Horny Dudes and Social Pressure. So they want all SRE to promote abstinence, Just Saying No, with contraception as a reluctant afterthought.

Do you remember how it felt the first time you really kissed someone you had a huge crush on? How exciting it was, how terrifying, how you were sure you were going to vomit, or come, or both at once? Teenage sex isn't just grim enduring, lying back and thinking of Kate Middleton while a Horny Dude wallops around on top of you for thirty seconds. It can be fucking amazing.

And yeah, there are problems; there are guys who think they're entitled to have a girl touch their wang and girls who don't know they're allowed to say no and neither knowing the finer points of condom-usage, but that's true of adults too. The best chance we have for making things better in the future - for making rape unacceptable, for minimising STDs and unwanted pregnancies, for making happy enthusiastically-consensual sex the norm - is really good SRE now. Which Dorries' "it's cool to say no!" information should be a part of. But there should be a whole lot more besides: there was no shortage of people encouraging us to say no, but very little information on how to say yes: how to say yes safely, what it was we were saying yes to, how to say no-to-that-but-how-about-this?, the very idea that we could make suggestions of our own. Yes opens up a whole world of new questions that teenagers, as well as everyone else, need guidance in answering.

Feminism can stop now. We've won.

You guys, something really weird has happened. I don't quite know how to deal with it, and I just hope that you'll be with me to find a way out of this dense thicket of bizarritude back to the clear, high plains of logic. Just brace yourselves - this is far, far stranger than anything we've dealt with before.

The Daily Mail published a feminist article.

Seriously.

Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University, Janice McCabe, has conducted the most comprehensive study ever of gender bias in children's books, and found that male lead characters outnumber their female counterparts by up to two to one. This disparity was particularly notable with animal characters - male animals star in 23% of books per year from 1900-2000, while female animals lead in only 7.5%. You can even read the full study here to double-check that the Mail's reporting is accurate.

And... it is: they pretty much reported the research straight, free of the snidery and derision which characterises their usual approach to any story which sort of suggests that maybe there is such a thing as sexism and maybe it kind of a little bit might impact on ladies' lives, ish.

I mean, they try to disguise it with the headline (put "sexist" in "scare quotes" and you have "basically won the argument", I guess?), and an intro paragraph saying the research damns all children's books as "inherently sexist", which will "will baffle fans of Alice’s Adventures  in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (ah yes, three books out of an entire century of fiction: you "win"!) ... but the rest of the article just tells you the plain old facts of life, libraries and gender bias with no attempt to belittle the findings, diminish their importance or argue them away with a tirade of blusterous inanities about IT'S POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD blah blah green sheep is this what we fought the Nazis for.

Which is cool! And weird! The Daily Mail: bringing feminist academic research to my attention! I mean: I know the number of people who read past the headline isn't high, and the number of those who read past the first paragraph is even lower, but that usually doesn't put Mail writers off: anywhere they see an opportunity to stick the reactionary knife in, swish-squelch in it goes. So I shall chalk this one up as a tentative victory for righteousness everywhere. We have taken the Daily Mail: the citadel is ours.

And that's why mums shop at Sexism!

There are some kinds of sexism that feel like a punch in the gut. There are some kinds of sexism that are interesting on an analytical level. There are some kinds of sexism that are so brilliantly preposterous that I just laugh and laugh.

And there are some kinds of sexism that make me so fire-spittingly furious that I want to break something in half.

Oh, mums! They are wonderful! They cook, they clean, they change nappies! They are happy never to be noticed, "like the air"! They are basically the Virgin Mary, but now with a new and improved formulation (guaranteed 27% more effective than the leading brand), sponsored by your friendly neighbourhood multinational conglomerate, Proctor & Gamble!

Seriously, "proud sponsors of mums"? We have sponsored schools, those irritating video ads on buses, Guy's Hospital canteen is a flipping McDonalds - and now mums everywhere are officially sponsored by P&G? Did the Mothers' Union take a vote? Is everyone who's ever pushed a baby out of her vagina now required to wear the P&G logo prominently on her (solely for breastfeeding!) chest? And will they be monetarily compensated for this? I should really phone my mum more often.

"The head without a body." Yes, that's not creepy at all.

And the logos at the end? The brands chosen out of P&G's mighty stable to best represent motherhood? Behold: Fairy (Why do women have small feet? So they can get closer to the kitchen sink!), Ariel (wash my clothes!), Pampers (change my nappy!), Pringles (uh, feed me junk food? Not sure how this one got in), and Lenor (wash my clothes MORE!). Ah, the joy of motherhood: there are some experiences so precious that money cannot buy them. For everything else, there's over-priced and unethically-sourced products for performing menial and unappreciated tasks.

The whole thing's reminiscent of the Iceland "because mums are heroes!" campaign: the faux-sisterhood "we totally respect you while defining you solely by the fact that you are a mother, which equals primary caregiver, so good for you but also get back in the kitchen" attitude.

This is not the kind of sexism I really expect to be confronted with during a Sky Sports ad break. Girls in bikinis, new Lynx Eau De Wanquer, instant microwaved sex on a plate, that was all normal - but sanctimonious "be nice to your mum, but make sure you don't link her oppression to the wider social forces shaping patriarchal capitalism!" was just weird.

Ornament vs instrument: living in the body

I found a freckle on my boyfriend's knee that he never even knew was there.

I was pretty gobsmacked by this. Not the freckle - it was a good freckle, but, well, freckles are freckles - but the idea that you could live for 23 years and not know every inch of your own body. Did he not spend his teenage years gazing into mirrors, wondering whether his eyebrows were too close together? Didn't he analyse his arse from every conceivable angle, employing complex arrangements of mirrors to ascertain whether both cheeks were actually the same size? Didn't he count every blemish, every imagined imperfection, and wonder just how hideous on a scale of grotesque to eyeball-meltingly horrifying they made him to other people? Did he honestly never think, "does this knee freckle make me look fat?"

Nope. Because he was an athlete, and, his whole life, his experience of his body was focused on what it could do, not what it looked like. He knows precisely how many sit ups he could do in one go when he was sixteen, but that freckle somehow escaped notice.

It seems like we're very extreme examples of how men and women - or teenage boys and teenage girls, anyway - live in their bodies. (I'm talking about specifically white cis people here, given that that's all I know; I'd imagine that race and transness colour these experiences in completely different ways. Disability, too; I'll get onto my own experience of that shortly, but it comes in all 32 flavours.)

From birth, little boy babies are encouraged to move more, run about, climb higher. People play more roughly with boys and estimate their strength and resilience more highly. Girls, though, are congratulated on being pretty, and long before puberty and the need to be Hot and the redoubled impact of the male gaze assumed everywhere, they're well aware that looking good is good. Their bodies are ornaments, while boys' are instruments.

To give a ridiculous, but still painful, example: I loved swimming when I was a kid. But then puberty hit, with its attendant body hair and fat in new places, and I was literally too paralysed by my disgust at the thought of myself in a swimming costume to even think about getting in the water again. The fixation on how my body looked made it impossible for me to even find out what it could do.

In the last few years, though, my attention has been brought back with brutal force to my body as an instrument, not an ornament: all the things it can't do make the fact that it doesn't look like some platonic Cosmo-cover ideal kind of irrelevant. Which makes swimming - one of the things it can do, and can do pretty well - a joy to be savoured. When I exercise these days, I'm not thinking about how I look, and I'm not thinking about how I will look; I'm not calculating how many calories this length will burn, or how much walking up these stairs will tone my quads. I'm enjoying the pure physical sensation of capability. Of the body working as an efficient machine, taking fuel in, using fuel to move, and taking pleasure in muscles contracting and stretching and working.

I still like looking pretty, I still wear fabulous outfits and wax my legs and occasionally even stretch to lipstick, but my body, with all its aches and pains and minor ailments and major fatigue is always demanding attention, asserting its physicality, in a way that can't be ignored (I no longer remember what it's like to live without back pain, say) that how it works is the primary mode in which I experience my body these days: how it looks has gradually become secondary. Which is sad in some ways: I'd love to be able to wear heels again, but I know that one extra twinge of pain is likely to tip me over the edge from 'exhausted but coping' to 'word-slurring eyelid-drooping wreck'. But it makes the moments of joy in the body's capabilities all the sweeter. Who cares what I look like? My thigh muscles just took me all the way to the third floor, and it was awesome.

On getting your hands dirty

"Working for a charity which supports people who used to be in the Army? That's a bit right wing, isn't it?"

Haha, yes! In that very special right wing way of working to improve the lives of predominantly working class people! Funny thing about helping people with debts, DLA applications and rent arrears: they're rarely from the officer class.

Okay, I admit, I'm getting pretty defensive about this: a whole blog post in response to an offhand comment related to me at second hand might conceivably qualify as overkill. In my ultimate vision of my ideal career path, I didn't plan on working for a services charity: being a typical bleeding heart lefty liberal feminist, the grand plan is still to work with, say, a women's shelter, or a homeless outreach program, but these sort of charities don't generally come that high on funding priority lists (and have I mentioned recently how much money Britons give to saving the fucking donkeys?), so jobs are few and far between. My employers, however, get millions in donations every year, so they can afford to hire a charming and efficient administrator to make their fixing-people's-lives professionals' jobs easier.

And that charming and efficient administrator? Gets to do some pretty good life-fixing too. Seriously, last week I made a man cry with gratitude because I moved heaven and earth to enable him to repay money lent to him by his daughter. Without that money, her kids wouldn't have been able to go on holiday. Without that money, he wouldn't have been able to eat for a month. Without me and the terribly reactionary right wing charity I work for, he would have had to choose between souring the one good relationship left in his life, or risking his home and his already failing health by repaying the debt out of his own pocket.

But I guess because he was in the Army when he was young, he's just a tool of the establishment and I should have left him to rot, right?

I would absolutely love to be able to help everyone who needs it: it would be wonderful to be able to pay off the rent arrears of every struggling single mum, to help every person bewildered by the Disability Living Allowance application process to navigate an unfamiliar and uncaring system, to negotiate with unscrupulous credit card companies on behalf of every person they're trying to force into bankruptcy. But I can't. So if my choice is between making an unimaginable difference in some people's lives while being unable to help others, or throwing my hands up in despair rather than work for a services charity because I think that War Is Bad, I'm not that torn.

Sorry, dude, the revolution wasn't hiring. And may I ask - you're making the world better how, exactly?

Auntie Llama's advice column, with tax evasion, bad shoes, and poor quality photographs

Ah, Tory Britain. So full of sage advice. Did you know, for instance, that the financial crisis of the last few years was caused by a sly, pernicious group within society - a selfish, scheming collection of malefactors who care nothing for the hard-working majority and are only out for what they can scam off the state?

No, not bankers, you doofus! BENEFIT CHEATS!

Those bastards.


Imagine waking up with that outside your bedroom window. Especially if you are, in fact, receiving housing benefit. Clearly, there's only one thing to do, if you are an upstanding citizen with a dedicated commitment to the betterment of this nation.

I love this county.

(My own preferred defacement involved drawing attention to the fact that benefit fraud is estimated to cost the economy £1.6bn a year, as compared to the current 'tax gap' of one hundred and twenty billion... but apparently that's too long to be a good slogan.)

In other sagey onion-flavoured advice, may I suggest that, should you find yourself presented with the opportunity to travel halfway across London barefoot, you decline the challenge?

It also behoves me to suggest that, should you be presented with the opportunity to buy Clarks shoes, you heed this broken-footed blogger's warning.

2582 characters demonstrating precisely why Twitter is not my preferred medium

I've been moonlighting as a pro-choice tweeting crusader for a while now, and it's immensely gratifying to see our dinky litle abortion fund becoming a target for people who find the existence of uterine occupancy options infuriating.

You get the amusingly direct:

@AbortionSupport @keairaroland abortion is murder

(Well, that's me converted!)

You get the "funny" ones:

@AbortionSupport Yur... I just be havin me 6th abortion and me cannot afford to travel back to Errland, who gun pay me. #LostIrishBlackGirl



You get the actually, though unintentionally, funny:

@AbortionSupport Jesus loves you! Jesus Saves. Trust Jesus!

and the just plain weird:

@AbortionSupport Planned Parenthood will kill 500 women today!

WITH THEIR ROLLING DEATH MACHINE OF AIDS TESTS AND PAP SMEARS!

But, as ever, the flat-out obvious offensive stuff never really wounds or annoys. It's the sneaky ones. The ones that don't call you a murderer, exactly, but don't you think the idea that abortion ends a life is a valid argument? It's not that we think you're lying, it's just that 5,000 women a year coming over from Ireland for abortions... that seems an awful lot. I'm not saying abortion's bad, but wouldn't adoption be better?

And now: it's not that we think abortion makes you mad, bad and sad, but posting a link to [yet another] study which has [once again] failed to find any link between abortion and mental illness - well, that's

@AbortionSupport, a rather sweeping generalisation on such a multi-factorial issue.

Now, I can't help but feel that the above chap is rather missing the point of scientific research: when one is looking for a statistically significant relationship between two phenomena, surely the very essence of what you're doing is making a generalisation? An analysis of the studies discovered no causal relationship between abortion and mental health problems - not this girl, in particular, found her experience of abortion traumatic, and her sense of guilt, combined with the pressures of secrecy and the financial stress involved, triggered her long-term propensity towards depression.

In short, generalisation! Not case study. The whole point of which is to look for the relationship (or lack of relationship) between two factors! So criticising the researchers' approach for not being "multi-factorial" enough is really quite silly! Furthermore, "factorial"? Really?

So it was with some relief that I greeted the next mention. At least it gave me a giggle.

@AbortionSupport PLANNED PARENTHOOD IS PATRONIZED BY MURDERERS!!!!



Hello, we're murderers. Twix a sexual health check-up, please.