Transactivism has usurped the struggle of genuinely marginalised vulnerable people and become swollen with the entitlement of spoilt male narcissists. Those people and their acolytes are now telling women to shut up. They are trying to ban lesbians from Pride march because lesbianism excludes the male. Men in frocks now regularly threaten violence and rape […]
The narrative of the powerful older woman in our society is a dangerous and poisoned one. She is the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Past her breeding prime and she knows too much. So if she survives dunking and burning, this must be proof of her ‘pure evil.’ Meanwhile, the macho demagogues, some of whom […]
Big guy who shouldered in front of me to the vegetable stall on the markets kept picking up and fondling everything, laying things lingeringly down. In between handling the produce he was adjusting his own paper bag, at the crotch, for greater personal comfort. I avoided all the produce his omnivorous fingers had touched but […]
What bothers me most about getting older is losing that glorious, elastic authority which I used always to use to shame men out of behaving boorishly. This afternoon we came through the park and passed the boules courts along the riverside, ruled off with low fences like dust baths for human sparrows, and I was […]
The hottest bath imaginable. Coconut oiled my hair. Wrapped head to hip in towels. New book and early to bed, ahhh thank you blissful alone time. I can hear people on the street outside cobbling and shouting, gearing up for their Friday night, and it just seems to drift by like leaves on the wind. […]
On the bridge I pass two young women pushing prams walking with a guy chugging beer. They have their responsibilities, he has his beer. He is much larger than his baby mama, and in order that he can burp, twice, deliberately, right in her face, he has to crouch. Her head is down, she keeps […]
All my life I have been me. I didn’t realise it at first. Presumably, as we say of infants, I was an extension of the everything, was my mother, I was the flitting shadows of the leaves that made up the sky overhead. I was as wide as the ends of the world, as far […]
What a strange feeling to watch Mitch Winehouse, father of the Amy who died young, telling the camera after her death how he felt it was not his place to save her. You can’t force treatment on somebody, he says, and shrugs. Meantime he is running the Amy Winehouse Foundation, his income derived from her […]
Changing the side of the street I walk home on to avoid having to avoid the strenuously charming guy who always seems to be patrolling in front of his shop – often with a pretty girl hanging on his arm, always a different girl each time – and whose carefully-established friendliness and benign compliments have […]
It fascinates me how people invariably preface racist statements with the words, “I’m not a racist or anything, but: [other people are inferior or flawed].” As they say, you have to ignore everything that comes before the “but.” The thorough-going unseen privilege of those who feel most entitled to thus pronounce on other people’s worth […]
So it’s late afternoon and the storm has passed, the light has begun to pearl. I’ve ducked into the local store to buy tomatoes and am issuing barefoot out of their sliding doors and down their concrete steps under the low, spreading tree. There is a man standing across the road behind me but I […]
Being shoved up against the train windows by a much older man whose friends looked on and hooted. Waking up as the blankets were stripped off my upper bunk and the passport controller’s flashlight swept up and down my body. Having to leap from a moving car on a back road after accepting a lift […]
Tony Abbott threatening to “shirt-front” Putin? And that meme that has the two of them side by side, Tony shirtless in his budgie smugglers and Putin shirtless on his horse? It arose the same day he made his remark and it says, “….wait.” I just explained all this to my immigrant boyfriend, a Berliner who […]
A sex offender or child killer gets convicted. Somebody posts about it on Facebook. Their thread fills up with eager commentary, almost lip-smacking: Got the bastard! May he rot! Hope he gets raped inside, hope he gets torn. There’s a self-righteous tone of “He deserves his victim’s fate, only worse.” This vindictiveness and the sense […]
Just watched the opening episodes of Game of Thrones. Until recently I imagined it was a video game: a world all but invisible to me. Turns out it’s a television series. Melodrama. It’s a kingdom of sighs, and costume. I’ve never seen such a celebration of unthinking brutality. Well, not since A Clockwork Orange. It […]
An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them. Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip […]