To belong to a minority is to be an unwitting ambassador for that minority.

I get this with my Jewishness quite a bit, this expectation of me to represent my minority. People sometimes get quite pissy at me about the Arab-Israeli conflict, as if I'm somehow personally responsible. On a less vile level, it produces minor annoyances. I'm often asked what I think of things, often quite politically-sensitive things, "as a Jew". Suddenly the spotlight is on me, and I must speak for my race!

I've been guilty of this myself - I remember one time at school (I was about 14 - that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it) I asked a black boy who I really didn't know that well about racism and his experiences of it. He was a nice kid and we had a great chat about it, after which I was much more enlightened (not to mention quite disgusted) but looking back on it, I cringe at my own attitude. Although I came from a standpoint of anti-racism and wanting to better understand the mechanics of racism, my expectation that he would be all-too-pleased to drop everything and educate me was pretty racist in itself, albeit in a subtle and not-too-heinous manner. As it happens, he was all-too-pleased to talk about it, but my sense of entitlement was wrong.

Similarly, I'm often asked how I feel about things "as a woman". "As a woman", how does this make you feel? "As a woman", what do you make of late-term abortions? "As a woman", do you like porn? "As a woman", are you offended by rape jokes? "As a woman", do you have a near-uncontrollable urge to twat me over the head with a large heavy object?

From what other standpoint would I answer questions? As a man? Would I adopt a male perspective to fit in with the prevailing male culture, acknowledging that the only time I'm allowed to adopt my own, female standpoint is when someone asks me what I think "as a woman"? Because although the people who ask such questions do so from a woman-friendly, receptive, usually pro-feminist standpoint, they are unconsciously underlining that the female experience is generally regarded as secondary to the male experience, and that on this occasion you're fortunate enough to have been granted permission to express an opinion. Thank you so much patriarchy, I am so grateful for that!

Also, I am just one woman, and a slightly odd woman at that. We're not all alike, you know. Whenever I answer these "as a woman" questions, I always feel the need to add a "but that's just what I think!" postscript to my answer, lest the person in question take my response as wholly representative, or dislike my answer and take it as a black mark against my entire gender. And of course, it is doubly ridiculous because women are not actually a minority at all.

I am sick of having to be a good ambassador for everything about me that isn't male and WASP. And of course, I have only those two things - many people are much less lucky, being called upon to answer privileged people's questions about queer, non-caucasian, trans, disabled and goodness knows what other issues.

What if I don't feel like being a good ambassador anyway? What if I feel like taking my clothes off and running naked down Camden High Street? Don't worry, I don't actually feel like doing that. Well, not at the moment anyway. Maybe after a few mojitos. The point is, I should be allowed to behave as badly as I like without it being a black mark against all women, and I shouldn't be called upon to speak on behalf of all women when I am just one woman.

I can only ever speak on behalf of myself.

Thought for the day

"Sexual liberation" is often confused with sexual availability. What sexual liberation should mean is feeling able to:

have as much or as little sex as one wants with consenting adults

say yes or no to any individual consenting adult

say yes or no to any type of sexual activity

All of which means that a woman swinging from the rafters in Agent Provocateur handcuffs isn't necessarily sexually liberated. And a woman not having sex until marriage isn't necessarily sexually repressed.

"Sexual liberation" is often a complete joke. Women are so often encouraged to play into generic male fantasy in the name of it, with the labels of "frigid", "repressed" etc slapped onto any woman who doesn't want to play ball.

You are liberated if and only if you make the sexual choices that you make freely and without coercion, if you feel able to say the words "yes" and "no" without guilt, and if you let yours and your partner's desires and fantasies guide what you do in the bedroom.

There is something that has bugged me during my many years of cramped houseshares with thin walls: why do young women make so much noise during sex?

Basically, if a heterosexual couple under the age of 30 are having sex anywhere in the vicinity, you'll know about it, because the female half of that couple will be screaming like a porn star. I'm sure that there are many young women who do genuinely feel compelled to be very vocal during sex, and I don't have a problem with that at all (as long as I don't have to listen/look them in the eye afterwards). But I can't believe I'm in the minority for not feeling the need to scream from the rafters. And there is NOTHING wrong with my sex life.

I blame porn. My theory is that a lot of young women feel pressure to make a huge amount of noise during sex, because there is this idea that women are supposed to make a lot of noise during sex, so they're way more vocal than they actually feel like being because that's just the way you show a man you're having a good time. They're putting on a show for whoever it is they're sleeping with.

Conversely, I do wonder about men making noise during sex. Men aren't supposed to make a lot of noise, are they? A bit of grunting and heavy breathing is de rigueur (yes, my house has very thin walls) but I've never heard a man making anywhere near as much noise as women tend to.

I just can't believe that the amount of noise a person actually feels like making during sex is gendered. I could definitely be wrong though - obviously men and women are pretty different sexually (take a look in your pants!). Most people believe the sexes to be very different sexually in less simplistic ways too, although it's debatable how much of that is innate and how much is due to social conditioning. Certainly women are statistically less likely to orgasm during penetrative sex, so you'd think they'd be making less noise, no? At the end of the day, nobody really knows because it's impossible to quantify. But I for one am very suspicious of the idea that women are supposed to make lots of noise during sex. I suspect that women actually vary greatly in the amount of noise they feel like making, but that out of the ones who don't feel like making a lot of noise, many do so out of a sense of duty.

I now have a mental image of a subversive porn film in which the woman is on top, riding this guy as if he's just a disembodied cock, growling and grunting a bit, and he's just lying there screaming YES! YES! OH MY GOD! YES! YES! FUCK ME! FUCK ME!

Hmmmm. Perhaps I need to get out more.

Susan Boyle

I was going to write something about this, but Tanya Gold has done it for me.

Why are we so shocked when "ugly" women can do things, rather than sitting at home weeping and wishing they were somebody else? Men are allowed to be ugly and talented. Alan Sugar looks like a burst bag of flour. Gordon Ramsay has a dried-up riverbed for a face. Justin Lee Collins looks like Cousin It from The Addams Family. Graham Norton is a baboon in mascara. I could go on. But a woman has to have the bright, empty beauty of a toy - or get off the screen. We don't want to look at you. Except on the news, where you can weep because some awful personal tragedy has befallen you.

We see this all the time in popular culture. Do you ever stare at the TV and wonder where the next generation of Judi Denchs and Juliet Stevensons have gone? Have they fallen down a Rada wormhole? Yes. They're not there, because they aren't pretty enough to get airtime. This lust for homogeneity in female beauty means that when someone who doesn't resemble a diagram in a plastic surgeon's office steps up to the microphone, people fall about and treat us to despicable sub-John Gielgud gestures of amazement.

Dunno about you, but I think Juliet Stevenson is one of the most beautiful people alive.

Bitch

I really think we need to reclaim the word "bitch". I'm not suggesting that we start calling ourselves bitches, wearing t-shirts that proudly proclaim our bitch status. I'm suggesting we start using the word "bitch" for men too.

Men are just as bad as women for indulging in nasty, bitchy behaviour, but there isn't a word for it. The one label that succinctly describes backstabbing, gossiping, undermining, subtle verbal abuse, manipulation and malicious social engineering is gendered female. Ridiculous.

I do think that in children, bitchy behaviour is much more common in girls than boys, because boys are encouraged to settle fights with their fists. But once you get to an age - say, 14-ish - when boys are expected to grow out of punch-ups, they become just as bad as girls.

I can think of so many times in my life when I've observed a man or boy being a bitch. I can think of a few times when I've been the target of bitchy behaviour from men or boys myself. Why the hell shouldn't I call these boys and men bitches? That's what they are.

Bitch is a fantastic word. It's completely descriptive of a poisonous brand of evil, cowardly bullying. It's one of the most vibrant, descriptive words in the English language and I certainly have no intention of stopping using it. What I don't understand is why we're not using it for men too. It's about time we did.

Happy Mothers Day

To be honest, I think Mothers Day is a bit pants. It's just a Christian thing that's been turned into a Hallmark Holiday. Now, being a secular Jew, I don't celebrate Christmas or Easter unless I'm staying with Christian friends, so I don't really see why I should have to celebrate Mothers Day when I'm not even at all close to my mother.

It's just as bad as Valentine's Day, for similar reasons. On Valentine's Day, men are pressurised into buying flowers and chocolates for their girlfriends and wives, which allows them to be as crap and ungrateful as they like on the other 364 days of the year. On Mother's Day, anyone whose mother is still alive is expected to fork out for flowers, chocolates and, bizarrely, anti-wrinkle cream (since when was that "the ideal gift"?) and then they don't have to even acknowledge their mother for the rest of the year, even though she might be a complete saint. "Here Mum, happy Mother's Day, here's somthing for your "deep set wrinkles". Have you ironed my shirt?" Luckily, my boy is every bit as unenamoured of Valentine's Day as I am, so we didn't do anything. We weren't even in the same country that day. In fact, I don't even think we texted one another. I am nothing if not unromantic. My mother however has expressed no interest in opting out of Mother's Day, so I couldn't avoid that one.

The problem is, if you don't get on with your mother, hardly ever see her and are not close to her at all, acknowledging Mother's Day is rather like sending a Valentine's card to your ex-boyfriend, who you sort-of stay in touch with and don't bear any ill will, but who makes you want to slap him round the face with a large fish after five minutes in his company. And don't get me started on Father's Day. If sending a Mother's Day card to my mum is like sending a Valentine to an ex-boyfriend, then acknowledging Father's Day is like sending a Valentine to my abusive ex-husband because of whom I've had to move to another country and assume a new identity.

When I was growing up, my mother was the Bad Mother who chain smoked, swore like a sailor, had crazy hair, wore DMs and didn't come to my concerts. However, despite the fact that she's had just about the most disastrous love life of anyone I know, she did, when I was a child, come out with some really good advice about sex and relationships. You have to imagine the following lines delivered by a woman with mad hair, puffing on a Gauloise, and somehow managing not to look a day over 35 despite the fact that she is in her late fifties and has smoked like a chimney since she was a teenager:

Don't ever get married because you want to get married. Get married because you want to be married.

Don't ever rely on a man for anything. If he leaves you, you're screwed

It is not fair to rely on a man financially. You have the right to work, so work

If a man doesn't want you to contribute financially, either he's just being too chivalrous, in which case you shouldn't take advantage, or he wants to control you

Money means power, and that is never truer than in relationships

Don't ever commit to a man who only appreciates you for your looks - he'll trade you in for a younger model at the first wrinkle

Don't EVER have children (erm, thanks...)

It's okay, as long as you wash your hands afterwards (can be applied to any number of situations, but yes, she was referring to what you're thinking)

So basically: Be independent, don't get involved with dickwads, and wank yourself silly. Which is as deserving of a Mother's Day outing to one of North London's finest tea establishments as anything.

Spot the difference

The bottom one has been photoshopped. The photographer used something called a "spot healing brush" (yes, really) to smooth out the chickenpox scars on my forehead, to get rid of a blemish I didn't know I had just to the right of my mouth, and to remove some errant mascara from just below my right eye. He also used some sort of clever soft-focus tool to make my skin look "better".

No, I have not turned into an oboist. I have merely had to take up the wretched instrument in order to write a series of articles about the experience of being a beginner again. I am playing Bach, Schumann and Ligeti on the cello, but honking away at Grade 5 pieces on the oboe. It is a humbling experience, not least for anybody who has to listen. This photo will shortly be appearing in Music Teacher magazine. Very rock n roll.

LOLClits...not so funny akshully

I love b3ta, and sitting down with a cup of tea, or possibly something stronger, to read the weekly newsletter when I get in on a Friday night is an enjoyable ritual. This week, the chaps and chapesses at b3ta linked to LOLClits (NSFW!).

Now, at first, I thought LOLClits was pretty funny. Then I saw this. Not funny. SOOOOOO not funny. So not fucking funny that I have complained to b3ta, informed the New York Times, which is where the pictures came from, and worried about whether I ought to be giving LOLClits the publicity that this post might generate.

As well as thinking that female genital mutilation is hilarious, LOLClits also seems to indulge in childish cyberbullying tactics like linking to people who've blogged unfavourably about them, presumably hoping that they'll get flamed, whilst not advertising their own email address on the website. This is kinda like a small child firing at you with a slingshot from the safety of a treehouse. Cowardly, annoying, but not in the least bit scary. They can link to me all they like - I would consider it an honour to be regarded as a threat to anyone who allows shit like that to be published.

Privilege

I really hate the way that the word "privilege" is bandied about in feminist and general lefty circles. "Privileged" is the ultimate insult. Now, I happen to think that there are much worse things you can be than white, male and middle class. You could be mean, feckless, arrogant, unkind, sadistic or willfully stupid. But no - "privileged" is the trait to avoid at all costs.

The atmosphere in lefty circles is often that of extreme hostility towards anyone who displays any hint of a "privileged" background. On the opposite side of the coin, there's the "oppression olympics", in which people try to trounce one another for whose opinion counts for more on account of their oppression ("I'm a one-armed black lesbian in a wheelchair, what do you know?")

Strangely enough, when I consider male privilege, for instance, in the vast majority of cases, I simply think, "Good for you". Most of the "privileges" that men enjoy are not things that they don't deserve themselves, but things that women should benefit from too. Things such as being able to walk alone at night without fear, not being blamed for being raped, being respected in the workplace, not being mercilessly judged on one's appearance, etc etc. If men were suddenly stripped of these "privileges" and subjected to the same shit that women have to deal with, I would NOT be happy that we had finally achieved equality.

There are good things I benefit from and bad things I don't have to deal with because I am white, middle class (well, not really, but I pass for it), able-bodied, slim, heterosexual, of above average intelligence and probably a shit load of other things I haven't even thought of. But I refuse to believe that I shouldn't have these benefits. I won't apologise for them. It's not that I shouldn't have these things, it's that they shouldn't be "privileges" in the first place.

Equally, there are bad things I have to deal with as a direct result of being female, Jewish, mentally ill, state-educated (in the field in which I work, this makes me a complete peasant) and probably a few other things, but I don't begrudge any privately-educated male WASP the benefits his background give him, nor will I use his "privileged" background as an excuse to dismiss anything he has to say.

I know that a lot of the time, this is not what individuals actually mean when they rant about "privilege", but this is how it comes across. As a homogenous entity, it seems that the people who spit "privileged" as an insult would like to see everyone dragged down to the level of the one-armed black lesbian, rather than helping the one-armed black lesbian to achieve the same rights as everybody else. I know that most of the time this is not the case, but this is how it comes across. Perhaps instead of using the word "privilege" we need to start saying "unfair advantage".

I've been waffling, but what I really want to say is, using someone's background as a stick with which to beat them and dismiss what they have to say is unacceptable. And instead of saying, "You shouldn't have this", how about instead saying, "I deserve it too".

The only major, MAJOR exception I can think of is the idea that rape isn't really rape if the woman was out after dark, drunk, wearing a short skirt, dating the man in question, etc etc. That's a privilege I'd very much like to see men stripped of.

Anorexia Porn

I've always known I have it in me to write books, and that writing feminist books would not be an unrealistic goal. Something I've always thought about is writing a middlebrow self-help manual on how women can get on with their lives in a patriarchal world (because I'll admit it, I often think that people who spend a huge amount of time writing long tracts of feminist ranting need to get a life - sometimes the most rebellious and empowering thing you can do is to stick two fingers up at the patriarchy and simply get on with your life), and it's still something I might do one day, but lately I've been thinking about something else: the possibility of writing a book about something that I find sinister, creepy and disturbing in the extreme: anorexia porn.

No, not porn sites featuring anorexia sufferers (although these of course do exist). I'm talking about the grim obsession that the media seems to have with anorexia. Last fortnight's issue of Private Eye:

FAT TEENAGER WHO DIES TRAGICALLY DOESN'T GET HER PICTURE IN EVERY NEWSPAPER

There was no shock whatsoever today after a fat teenager who died suddenly this week didn't get her picture in any newspaper.

"If only this poor overweight girl had died of a slimming disease, then we'd have felt duty-bound by the scale of the tragedy to run loads of photos of her in skimpy tops to salivate over," said all newspaper editors.

- Private Eye, issue 1229, p22

Gawd, I love Private Eye. Ian and his team have brought into the open something that's bugged me for years: why this complete obsession with anorexia?

It's a rare women's magazine that doesn't carry an anorexia feature. The "I thought THIS *insert lurid picture of protruding ribs* was FAT" coverline is almost as ubiquitous as "How to please a man in bed", "How to have the best orgasms", "How to lose 10lbs" and "SHOES! We have pictures of SHOES YOU CAN'T AFFORD!"

Here are the rules for an anorexia story:

Photos. There must be photos.

There must also be statistics: height and weight at heaviest and lowest points, and preferably in between too.*

The disease (and I remind you that this is a severe mental illness with a higher death toll than any other) is presented as vanity gone too far.

The victim suffers or claims to suffer** from severe dysmorphia, believing she is fat.

The whole thing is presented as simply an extreme form of the dieting and self-hating rituals that a lot of young women go through and that these magazines actively encourage.

At some point during her recovery, the victim must get a man who will help her on the road to health and make her realise that she is beautiful and not at all fat.

Susie Orbach argues quite convincingly that compulsive eating is the opposite side of the same coin as anorexia, so why are women's magazines not lavishly illustrated with photos of women who have eaten themselves into morbid obesity? Or whose bingeing has led them to die of gastric rupture from constant vomiting? Compulsive eating and bulimia (basically the same horribly distressing and dangerous illness but for one minor detail, the presence or absence of self-induced vomiting) just aren't seen as glamorous.

Having suffered from anorexia is seen almost as a badge of honour. Watch a woman tell another woman she's suffered from anorexia in the past: 50% of the time you'll get either sympathy or a "whoah, you're mental" look, but the other 50% of the time her eyes will glaze over in barely-concealed admiration. Those are the women who devour these stories. Why do they devour them? Why the demand?

The problems as a direct result of such media coverage are as follows:

People thinking that anorexia is a diet gone too far which can be solved by telling the victim that they are not fat

Because anorexia is presented as a mere extension of "normal" body hatred, it's seen as something that affects only young women and adolescent girls. Tell that to male sufferers, older female sufferers or the parents of children struggling with the problem.

People thinking that anorexia sufferers' bodies, much like fat people's and conventionally-attractive women's, are fair game for public consumption, that it's okay to stare as much as you like and say whatever you want. Essentially, anorexics are presented as freak show acts that exist for public amusement. Hooray - now I have an excuse to link to The Boy With An Arse for a Face

People thinking that unless you look as if you're about to drop dead, you can't be anorexic. This one is particularly dangerous: most anorexics refuse treatment, and so intervention by friends and family is paramount. Experts unanimously agree that the later treatment is started, the grimmer the sufferer's chances of recovery. If the friends and family of an anorexic wait until she "looks anorexic" before dragging her to a doctor, it may be too late to avoid permanent physical and mental damage.

Essentially, it's completely voyeuristic, offering freak shows of these women whilst glossing over their actual problems.

So yes, I want to write a book on anorexia porn, exploring the phenomenon of this public obsession with the illness. It reveals so much of the creepy way that a lot of women tend to view other womens' bodies.

*Websites that help people recover from eating disorders generally have a complete ban on users posting information about their height/weight/BMI because some sufferers find it "triggering"
**FACT: If you've got an obvious problem, the quickest way of stopping people from asking awkward questions is to tell them what they want to hear