An open letter to all hairdressers

Dear Hairdressers,

Owing to recent bitter personal experience, it would make me really happy if you were to take heed of the following:

* The customer is always right. Sometimes the customer will ask for something ridiculous, in which case you should explain that it's not a good idea. Other than that, your job is to deliver what they want, not to impose your own tastes upon them. If the customer tells you they want to keep the length, do not then chop off 5cm and feel smug that you've "fixed" their hitherto crappy hair and expect them to be all grateful. Suggestions are very welcome. Just going ahead and doing things without asking is NOT.

* Not everybody spends hours in front of the mirror every morning. Just because I don't, doesn't mean I'm some mad bag lady with seventeen cats who hasn't washed since 1984. There is nothing wrong with me, so don't look so fucking disgusted when I tell you that I hardly ever straighten my hair. Curls rock, and burnt hair smells like ass.

* Don't diss my curls. They are not "stubborn", they do not need to be "corrected", they are beautiful and possibly my best feature. I asked you to straighten my hair just for a change and because it takes me ages to do it myself, not because there is anything wrong with the natural state of my hair.

* Blonde highlights? On almost-black hair? You have GOT to be kidding. Quit suggesting it, it ain't gonna happen.

* Don't insult me. I know that the beauty industry works by convincing women that there's something wrong with them that needs fixing. I know that by persuading me that what I really need is a cut that only looks good straight so that I need to fork out £100 for straighteners and blonde highlights that need retouching every few weeks you will make more money out of me. But you are not seriously going to convince me that there's anything wrong with having dark glossy curls halfway down your back.* Quit trying.

* I do not want to look like everybody else. My hair is probably my most distinguishing feature. I'm not amazingly attractive or striking generally, but my hair sets me apart. I know that long curly hair is not in fashion. But I don't want to look like a fashion victim. Besides, I get more compliments on my hair than anything else, so I must be doing something right.

I hope we can get on better in future. If not, you'll have the straightest arse crack in London considering where I'll shove those GHDs of yours.

Luv n hugz!
Samara

*Well, as long as they're not sprouting OUT of your back. Even then, it would be pretty damn rude to say anything about it unless I specifically asked for some waxing

Great comment

I've had a great comment:

A tramp who wanted to fuck a tramp... what a story.

You're a fucking ugly cunt, I've seen you around.

Really? Where?

I can't stand your pathetic blog, you cannot write for shit

Ok, you're entitled to your own opinion n all, but in real life I am a professional writer.

and you come off as an angry vicious cunt.

What, for not accepting patriarchal oppression like a good girl? I have a personality, I'm sorry if that offends you. Actually, no I'm not.

Any wonder the only people that want to fuck you are homeless!

Actually, lots of non-homeless people have recently expressed a desire to fuck me. Some of them were dickwads, most of them were nice guys who I didn't happen to fancy, and one of them was utterly wonderful. And much as it is nice to be considered fuckable, I don't really agree that my worth is defined by it.

Shut your fucking mouth... better yet stick a tramp's cock in it and do what you were born to do you fat slut.

Ooooh, you used the F-word, I'm scared!

You really are a piece of work there sweet tits. I wouldn't fuck you with a ten foot pole.

That's good, I'm not sure I want to be fucked with a ten foot pole.

There are far less crazy skanks out there can take cock and not complain.

Au contraire, I very much like cocks when they're attached to men who I find attractive. And if I were a lesbian, I'd have nothing to do with cocks at all, which is something you really shouldn't have a problem with.

You are absolutely fucking fucked.

Whatever you're going to label me now you slimy fish smelling cunt... remember... I have really seen you around... really... so fucking think. Really think. You cunt.

So...you're allowed to call me a "slimy fish smelling cunt" but I'm not allowed to say anything back to you because you've "seen me around"? Is that a threat? What are you going to do? Fuck me with that ten foot pole of yours? I don't think you have seen me around. Nobody I know would talk to anyone like that even on the internet, and although it's entirely conceivable that someone might find me ugly, I'm definitely not fat. And if you really are so big and clever and not scared of a little cunt like me, why don't you tell me who you are?

I don't know anything about this person. They might not even be a genuine misogynist - it could be someone who for some reason has something personal against me. All I can say about them is that they want me to feel hurt by this, and so I think it's worth examining how they have gone about it, and the material used to achieve their aims.

"You're ugly" is considered a terrible insult

"You're fat" is considered a terrible insult

"I don't want to fuck you" is considered a terrible insult

"You suck cock" is considered a terrible insult

"You can't take cock" is considered a terrible insult

These really are the classic one-size-fits-all female insults. Want to make a woman feel bad about herself? Tell her she's ugly and fat. Want to make her feel humiliated? Attack her sexuality. It's simple really. We live in a society that places a disproportionately massive amount of importance on a woman's appearance, her sexual availability and her chastity (all that virgin/whore schtick, we really can't win however we behave, so just fuck who you want, sisters) and so if you want to insult a woman, just pick on those things and you're sure to hit the target. If anyone ever says anything like this to you, it's worth bearing all this in mind. Insults like this are very unlikely to be an accurate reflection of your personal qualities.

Strangely enough, if this man doesn't want to fuck me, I'm quite happy with that. I sure as hell don't want to fuck him either.

More hate mail!

The F-Word is being attacked again. Yesterday I wrote a post about how the Daily Mail article on how a size 16 Miss England finalist is "dangerously overweight" and a "bad role model" was fucking ridiculous and also included some blatant lies (the "ideal" body mass index is 20, according to them, and this is after they've done loads of articles about how wonderfully "curvy" she is and what a great "role model" - *YAWN*). As a result of this, I've been called fat by someone who presumably has never seen me:

isn't it the norm for feminists to be againstbeauty contests period, why are you now pro-beauty contest just becausea fatty has been included in the line up? Youre also against BMI too.So i'm thinking maybe you're all angry just because you're over BMI 26and rather fat? just a hunch.

This comment isn't going on the site because we moderate comments to avoid flame wars like the one that this would inevitably lead to, but I thought it deserved airing. Of course I'm fat - the only reasonable explanation for me saying that it was unfair dragging someone who is marginally overweight through the mud as a poster girl for heart disease and type 2 diabetes is that I'm fat. If I wasn't fat, I'd be cheering on the Daily Mail and calling for Chloe to be forcibly removed from the competition and recycled as a bouncy castle.

Actually, The readers of the F-Word would totally have lynched me if I'd said anything that appeared either to endorse beauty contests or to comment subjectively on Chloe's appearance, so here's another point that I would have made if I'd felt able to do so: Miss England is a beauty contest, and however you feel about beauty contests, that's what contestants are being judged on, not whether they are "good role models". Few people would deny that Chloe is a beautiful girl even if you do happen to find her a little on the porky side, and thus she is eminently qualified to participate.

As I said in the original post, she is no more overweight than many of her fellow contestants are underweight, so that blows the whole "role model" issue out of the water anyway. Chloe has as much right to compete in this repulsive display of young women as commodities for public consumption competition as anybody else.

I do think she could have chosen a more supportive bikini top though...

Shoes

A couple of years ago I was on a quick lunchtime shoe shopping binge with a colleague. She picked up a pair of high heels, turned them round, and put them back on the shelf with a distasteful, "Eurgh, they've got lesbian heels." Since the heels in question were of a clumpy nature I guess she was buying into the idea that gay women wear ugly shoes and thus are ugly women. Since when did women's shoes become so ridiculously fetishised? How did it come to pass that there is a style of shoe associated with being an unattractive individual? In a way, it's kind of liberating - you can control how attractive people think of you as being by changing your shoes. But it's also just plain weird. And it royally sucks that in order to be considered "attractive" you have to be uncomfortable.

Why must our sexual attractiveness be tied up in being uncomfortable? Why is a woman teetering in stilettos more attractive than a woman walking confidently in trainers? Why is "sexy" underwear made of scratchy lace, "chicken fillets" and what a male friend of mine charmingly refers to as "arse floss"? Why is it so difficult to find nice, pretty underwear that doesn't involve "arse floss"?

In so many cultures throughout history, a woman's attractiveness has been directly related to how uncomfortable, and in extreme cases how disabled, she is. There was foot binding, which rendered the victim unable to hobble more than a few metres, and corsets which rearranged the internal organs. There are some cultures today that feed their girls until they are morbidly obese in order to make them more attractive marriage prospects, some that butcher girls' genitals for similar reasons. These are things that parents (usually mothers) do to girls though, in order to increase their prospects in highly patriarchal societies in which the best a girl can hope for out of life is to be well married. High heels and arse floss are things that women do to themselves in a society in which they have the same legal rights as men. They choose to do it to themselves. But then again, and depending of course on what your profession is, being attractive can massively increase one's success at work. Has anybody ever seen that back page of Glamour magazine, where they take photos of random people on the street and critique their outfits? There was a horrid one a while back, in which they'd photographed a woman wearing a suit with trainers and said that this was a massive no-no. It made me spit with rage - this woman probably had to wear horribly uncomfortable shoes at work, and why the hell shouldn't she wear comfy shoes for the journey and change when she got to the office? Are we to look perfectly sexy 24 hours a day? I wonder if Glamour thinks that it's acceptable for us to take our heels off at night?

There is nothing inherently vile about high heels. I like high heels as much as the next girl. In my wardrobe you will find several stratospheric, spangly, studded creations that would make Carrie Bradshaw weep with envy (although thankfully for my bank balance, none of them are Manolos). However, on an everyday basis you're much more likely to find me in old martial arts trainers. I have worn out several pairs of jodhpur boots in my time, but I have yet to wear out a stiletto heel. Does this mean I'm a minger? Well if it does, at least I'm comfortable. And at least I have a filter for any men who are so ridiculously shallow that their opinion of a woman is coloured by her shoes not being sufficiently sexy.

I get considerably more male attention when I wear high heels than when I wear flat shoes, to quite an amazing extent. I can simply change my shoes and nothing else, and watch the number of neanderthals who try to grope me in the street skyrocket. I can't believe that they actually make me that much more attractive. I just can't believe that being a few inches taller is going to make a significant difference to my attractiveness - I honestly don't think many men are that bothered about the difference between 5ft2 and 5ft6, surely? Likewise, I don't think looking slightly thinner is going to make much of a difference either. There's also the theory that wearing high heels forces the wearer to arch their back and stick out their tits and arse, but I don't buy that either - I happen to have a lot of tits and arse and a very hollow back even without high heels, and the heels still massively affect the amount of male attention I get. I'm sure it's about more than just how you look in the shoes. Because high heels are stereotyped as "sexy", wearing them gives out a "message" that you are hot and ready and up for it. (I may well be hot and ready and up for it, but not with some creep who yells at me to get my tits out just because I am wearing "heterosexual shoes").

Most of the time this attention is just annoying, but it can be terrifying. It takes me ten minutes to walk from the tube station to my house, and last Saturday night, whilst wearing a pair of high-heeled cowboy boots with skinny jeans, I had two rape threats during that ten minutes. One of them was particularly unpleasant, involving two guys in a car cruising past me for a couple of minutes wolf whistling and shouting about how they were going to take me up the arse, and then speeding up and turning into a side street which of course made me think they were lying in wait. Of course they weren't waiting for me in that side street - they had sped away by the time I walked past. They'd just been threatening me for fun.

Because you're more likely to get harrassed when you look "sexy" and because you're more likely to look "sexy" when you're wearing something that in some way restricts your movement, the very time at which you're most likely to be threatened is the time at which you're least likely to be able to physically defend yourself. The main reason I was scared by those naughty men on Saturday night was that I knew I wouldn't be able to run as fast as them, and that a black belt in taekwondo is no good when you're wearing skinny jeans. I wonder if vulnerability = sexiness. Would I have been even more "sexy" if I'd been wearing shoes so uncomfortable I'd been struggling to walk? Is a woman who can't fight back the best kind?

I know that the official feminist party line on this is "it doesn't make a difference what you wear, women get harrassed regardless" but let's face it, women do get harrassed much more when they are dressed in a manner which the patriarchy defines as "sexy". I know damn well that if I had worn that skinny jeans and bomber jacket combo with flat boots, I would not have received anything like the same amount of harrassment, and the harrassment I had received would not have been so unpleasant. I know this because that is exactly the sort of outfit I wear on an everyday basis with little or no trouble - it's only the addition of a pair of high heels that makes men think it's okay to harrass me in such an aggressive manner. This is one of the most annoying things - you know that if you hadn't worn the heels you wouldn't be being harrassed so much, and so you feel some sense of responsibility for it. Or, if you're me, you don't feel that the disgusting behaviour of such lowlifes should affect your wardrobe choices and so you wear the heels regardless and get very angry at the patriarchy.

I was out from 6pm - midnight on Saturday night, and during that time I probably walked past hundreds of men. Only three harrassed me, so it's not as if men in general are a problem here. But those three were enough to make me feel petrified, furious, embarrassed and, as ever, astounded at the effect a pair of heels seems to have on what "sort of girl" people think I am. It's frankly weird that the shoes a woman wears are considered to be so heavily indicative of attractiveness, sexual orientation, sexual availability, so many attributes that really have sod all to do with shoes. How did all this happen? Why are we judged as ugly or "easy", gay or straight, depending on whether or not we happen to have chosen spangly stilettos or DM boots to go with our outfits on any given day? And how the hell can we stop it?

Fight like a girl

Lately I've been thinking about how great it is to be a sporty woman. I think getting seriously involved with a sport is one of the most empowering things a woman can do.

Three and a half years ago now I took up taekwondo, a Korean martial art based on karate. I'd always wanted to do martial arts, but my parents had vetoed it when I was a child on the grounds of my propensity for getting into fights at school (probably a wise decision I have to admit). At 21, I finally got round to donning some "angry white pyjamas" to learn how to kick ass. I'd acquired enough disposable income to join a gym, but it cost about the same to join a taekwondo club instead, and the rest is history. I'm now just about to take my black belt grading. I'm a much more confident person in general than I was at 21 for a variety of reasons, but taekwondo has probably been the biggest influence in terms of having more confidence in my body.

As women we are bombarded with pressure from the media, from our peers, sometimes from men, to see our bodies as wayward things that must be kept in check, that mustn't be fed too much, that exist largely if not solely for aesthetic purposes, and that life will not be worth living if we gain a few pounds. A woman's body exists to be beautiful, not athletic, and beautiful according to pretty strict guidelines at that. How we feel about our bodies, and often consequently our self-esteem, is dictated by a cruel lottery of genetics. And if we have drawn a poor or even a not-quite-perfect set of numbers in the genetics lottery, we are to spend our lives striving to improve our bodies, not allowing ourselves to be truly happy or relaxed until we achieve perfection. It is of course much more important that we are attractive than healthy or fit.

I know that people go to the gym to "keep fit", but for a lot of women, "keeping fit" is synonymous with "keeping thin", and not just because slimness is for most people a by-product of fitness. Virtually every woman I know who has a gym membership sweats it out on a treadmill specifically in order to get or stay thin, and good luck to them for not achieving that just by starving themselves, but it concerns me that women by and large are more concerned with how their body looks than with what it can do.

If you do a sport rather than just going to the gym, you are doing physical activity for a purpose other than just to look good. Being sporty gives you the same physical benefits of going to the gym, but with none of the weight obsession, wall-to-wall mirrors, lycra, posing, sleazy guys and other assorted annoyances that gyms are associated with. You will get fit, and yes, you will get thin if being thin is the state that your body is destined to adopt when it is at the peak of fitness, but you will do so by focusing on having fun and getting good at something instead of on how your body looks. Much more enjoyable and massively more empowering.

When you are training or competing in an actual sport, nobody gives a flying fuck how your body looks. When I'm beating the crap out of a focus pad, demonstrating a pattern for some beginners, kicking a 6ft man in the head, or just sitting around comparing bruises after class, it is the only time I feel that nobody, absolutely nobody, cares about how my body looks.

At my taekwondo club, it is not at all unusual to find men discussing their diets. It's a given that everybody will be watching what they eat to a certain extent, making sure that they have a healthy diet giving them the required energy and nutrients to perform at their best. Being sporty makes it acceptable for men to take an interest in healthy eating. And it makes it acceptable for women to eat proper, substantial food that gives them the energy they need.

A while ago, I can't remember when, I was getting into the shower when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and suddenly realised that I had no cellulite. Before taking up taekwondo I'd had some - not a huge amount, but quite a lot for a 20-year-old. I hadn't been massively distressed about it, but I hadn't liked it either. I'd occasionally succumbed to that masochistic practice of standing in one's underwear in front of a full-length mirror and thinking, Yuk. And now, after a couple of years of regular exercise, it had gone. But it wasn't the fact that it had disappeared that I saw as significant - it was the fact that I hadn't even noticed its disappearance. At some point, I'd stopped caring.

These days, if I find myself in front of a full-length mirror, instead of appraising how my body looks, I throw a few kicks and admire my ninja skillz (fellow martial artists, don't try and tell me you've never done this). If I'd spent the last four years at the gym instead of in the dojang I would be just as fit, but I wouldn't be able to do a pretty mean 540 degree turning kick, I wouldn't have a shelf full of trophies and medals, and I'd still be examining my thighs for cellulite. If I was ever in danger of getting involved with the mad body beautiful culture that plagues young women, taekwondo saved me from it. I am no longer a slave to my body - my body is a slave to me.

Sorry to pontificate but I really think if there's one piece of advice I can offer to every woman it's to find a sport you enjoy and do it. What physical activities did you enjoy as a child? What have you always wanted to try? It's not often that women are encouraged to take up an actual sport as opposed to simply squeezing themselves into pink lycra and going to spinning classes in order to keep their lardy bits in check, and I think that this is a great shame. There is a lot of untapped female sporting talent out there, and a lot of women who are missing out on getting fit in a massively enjoyable manner. There are some who would say that running around like a mad thing and getting sweaty and dishevelled is unfeminine, but to hell with them. Taking up a sport allows you to reclaim your body and to use it to its true potential.

'Tis the season to be hungry

It's that time of year again! Christmas is over, and if you're a walking stereotype you'll have stuffed yourself silly and - horror of horrors! - gone up to a size 12.

Obviously ads for discounted gym memberships are all the rage on the Tube at the moment, and women's magazines are chock full of the latest miracle diets (personally I was always rather a fan of Bridget Jones' patented weight loss method - "Simply replace food with sex"). 'Tis the season to be hungry, not to mention squeezing yourself into a little lycra number and punishing your wayward physique on a treadmill. But that's just advertising n stuff, and there's nothing wrong with it really, especially since a lot of people really could benefit from eating better and getting more exercise.

However, the mania that women seem to get into for losing weight around this time of year seems pretty extreme. I wonder what the average Christmas weight gain actually is. It doesn't seem to justify the dieting hell.

It's pretty difficult to get away from. I work in an office full of boys, but at lunchtime today I went to visit a friend in a girl-dominated department and found that all the talk down there was about diets. They were all on diets, and my friend is determined to drop two dress sizes, a change which I personally think will leave her far too thin, not to mention grumpy from chocolate withdrawal, and I told her as much. I certainly felt rather awkward sitting in there eating two desserts (look, I couldn't decide between them, ok?) whilst everybody else in the room was presumably getting through the day on Ryvita - I don't know, I didn't see anyone eat a thing.

I actually did gain a bit of weight whilst I was on holiday - for someone accustomed to a high level of exercise it's inevitable. But I really don't believe in restricting what I eat. I don't know how girls do it. I just couldn't. When I'm hungry, my concentration goes. I can't focus on my work because I'm too busy daydreaming about sushi, or pasta, or pecan pie, or whatever scrumptious dish I am most craving. I feel light-headed and dizzy. I have to eat. And apart from the risk of passing out, I just refuse on principle to do anything to myself that stops me from functioning properly. I will be strong, alert, quick-witted and good at my job thank you very much, even if it does mean that I am a few pounds heavier.

Dieting at this time of year is almost a girl bonding ritual. You feel left out if you don't join in. You feel awkward for eating anything except salad. You start to wonder if you could stand to lose a few pounds yourself. And, if you're me, you start to feel pretty pissed off about it and say, goddammit, I reserve the right to eat bread. In fact, because I'm just so naughty I'll have butter on it too.

All I can say is, thank goodness for boys. I love my female friends but they drive me bats at this time of year.

Only thin candidates need apply

The lovely Lynne Miles of The F-Word has been blogging recently about the true cost of being fat. Our Lynne is an occasional member of Weight Watchers, and receives emails from them. She was horrified when the following popped into her inbox:

"The worst thing was when I went for a job interview, knowing full well I had all the skills needed. But I never got the job."

Susan believed she was turned down for the job on the basis that she was overweight. Proof of this came six months later when she applied for the same job again - this time much slimmer - and got the job.

"It was embarrassing," she says. "I had the same skills, did the tests in the same way and got the same results. The only difference was I was 3st lighter."

Although the idea of losing weight if one is unhealthily overweight isn't a bad idea, this story is being used as a motivational tool to help fatties lose weight, rather than as a demonstration of how employers discriminate against people who don't look the part. It's pretty fucked up that anybody could read the above and not be outraged.

Lynne thinks that this sort of discrimination affects women more than it affects men and I sort-of agree. I do think that men are almost certainly discriminated against for being fat. However, I suspect that the level of obesity men have to achieve before receiving the same level of discrimination is probably significantly higher.

If an interviewer saw a candidate of either gender who was morbidly obese, I can absolutely understand them being put off by that. Somebody who is so hugely fat they don't walk so much as waddle and get out of breath climbing a flight of stairs is unlikely to be a healthy employee. It's pretty much impossible to be that fat without having either physiological or psychological problems and whilst it's unfair, it's understandable that employers might not be keen for that reason.

Beyond that, it's just mindless discrimination. And as Lynne points out, as physical appearance is considered more important for women than for men, women are bound to be more affected by it. Employing someone who's a size 6 instead of someone who's a size 26 is kind of understandable. Employing someone who's a size 6 over someone who's a size 16 is outrageous. No man who was heavily built and/or slightly overweight would suffer such discrimination unless he was going for a job as a Speedo model, but women live with it constantly. If you don't believe me, take a walk around the City and see if you can spot a female suit who's above a size 12. How "too fat" is defined for women is considerably more exclusive than how it is defined for men, and thus a far greater number of women suffer discrimination. Not that I would think it were any more acceptable if it happened to men too, but if it happened to men too people would probably make a fuss about it.

I actually got chatting about this with someone a while back who told me that he had once employed an enormously fat woman precisely because of her size. She had many great qualities but what really clinched the job for her was that he felt that any woman who could achieve the impressive CV that she had and to go through life in such an image-obsessed society as a functional, confident human being whilst being that fat, had proved herself to be a very strong and determined individual.

I agree. Although the human capacity to endure is far greater than anybody ever imagines until they're actually going through something, I can't envisage going through life as a very fat woman without ending up with rock bottom self esteem. However much you believe that being physically attractive isn't that important and that other people's opinions don't matter, how one is perceived by others is important and does affect one's self image. Even Lynne, who is a bit fat but in no way unattractive, tells me that she receives random abuse from people in the street on average about once a week. I don't even understand why anyone would do that. Why yell abuse at someone who's done nothing wrong other than to be a few pounds heavier than you think they should be? People suck.

Perhaps one of the reasons that "fattism" isn't treated with the outrage it so richly deserves is that the women who suffer from it are too ashamed to speak out. We are taught that fat women are barely deserving of existence. Of course there are notable exceptions in the form of high profile fatties such as Jo Brand and Dawn French, but as a whole, fat women are not exactly flavour of the month. I've said it before and I'll say it again: physical appearance is considered by far the most important trait for a woman, and so if a woman doesn't conform to a certain standard, her worth as a human being is massively diminished. It takes an incredibly self-assured fatty to make a fuss about discrimination, rather than simply to shuffle away and tuck into a low fat yoghurt. Susie Orbach springs to mind.

Most women don't appreciate the extent to which attractiveness-based discrimination happens because most women go through life at pretty much the same level of attractiveness all the time. Susan knows what it's like to be both fat and thin, she knows how much more accepted she is with her slimmer physique, and yet she is using her experience not to speak out about how appalling the treatment of fat people is but to speak out about how you too can be a size 10 to please all of those unmitigated arsewipes who won't employ you if you're carrying a few extra pounds. If you manage to lose weight and keep it off, good for you. But you shouldn't have to do so in order to be valued as a human being. You shouldn't have to do so in order to get a job. Fattism should not be accepted.

Part of the problem is that people think that losing weight is easy and that anybody who's a bit porky just needs to lay off the pies a bit and get some exercise. Usually the people you hear saying that are the sort of people who stay slim no matter how many pies they eat. If it really were that simple, do you think anybody would be overweight? Nobody chooses to be overweight. Hell, if it were easy to control one's size, few women would be above a size 8. It's illegal to discriminate against people on the grounds of race for example, but not on the grounds of fat. If it were possible for black people to bleach their skin white, would people consider it acceptable to shout racial slurs at them in the street because "they could change if they wanted to" or to discriminate against them in the workplace because they "obviously lack self-respect"?

In my not-so-humble opinion, it's time people accepted a few things:

Some people find it easier to stay slim than others

Being slightly overweight isn't likely to affect one's health significantly

Being fat doesn't make a person sub-human

Women don't exist just to look pretty

Being fuckable isn't an important criterion for a job interview candidate

You can't discriminate against discrimination. It all sucks, whether it's to do with a person's gender, sexuality, the colour of their skin or their waist measurement

Love the skin you're in

Dove have produced a new short film in conjunction with the Campaign for Real Beauty:



This is a great film and promotes a really important issue - that the cosmetics industry negatively affects young girls as well as grown women. However, these campaigns that try to persuade us to love our bodies, warts and all, really bug me sometimes. Basically, cosmetics companies seem to be using two types of women in their advertisements these days: Models, and Real Women.

The models, those leggy, perma-tanned, airbrushed gazelle-like creatures, have been around for a while. But the Real Woman is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Real Woman is voluptuous, relatively small-breasted and uses few cosmetics. She loves her body and she revels in her cycles and curves. She holds her head up high despite the fact that she is positively gargantuan by Hollywood standards, because she knows that she is beautiful and she loves her body. Well, I'm a size 6, I have E-cup breasts and I own so many sparkly eyeshadows I wouldn't be surprised if I am single-handedly keeping Barry M in business. Am I less "real" than the women in the Dove adverts? It's just another representation of female beauty to which few of us conform, even if the "message" behind it is rather more positive than that of traditional advertisements despite being just a sugar coating for selling us stuff.

There seems to be this assumption that women hate their bodies because of the constant bombardment of unrealistic images thrust at us by Hollywood and the cosmetics industry, and so we all need to learn to love our bodies in order to compensate for it. Fine. But why should I love my body? It's just a body. Men aren't expected to love their bodies. Loving your body makes as little sense as hating it. What we really need, in my opinion, is just to quit being so obsessed with our bodies in the first place.

The reason that loving your body is considered so important is that women's bodies are considered so disproportionately crucial to their worth as human beings. From childhood, women are taught that their self esteem should be tied up in their looks. There's this idea that you can't walk down the street with your head held high if you don't adore every inch of your body. This is bullshit. You don't have to love your body in order to be confident, because you are much more than just your body. I may have the shortest legs in the known universe, but I also have sharp wit, an optimistic disposition, kindness and intelligence. I may have big jugs, but I am also uptight, pedantic and socially inept. I am more than my physical appearance and I refuse to let my self image revolve solely around it.

There's also the uncomfortable truth that it's much easier for some people to love their bodies than others, whether from genuine attractiveness or the extent to which they fit some sort of media 'ideal'. If I do love my body, it's probably because it happens to be relatively close to the 'ideal' plastered all over billboards rather than because I actually have sky-high self esteem. And I realise that in an image-obsessed society in which women are regarded primarily as decoration with their worth measured by how fuckable they are, this makes me extremely lucky.

This pressure to love your body is just that: more pressure, on top of the pressure that women already feel with regards to the way they look. Loving your lardy arse is just as self-absorbed as punishing it with cellulite cream. You are only truly free of the beauty industry and the airbrushed standards it promotes if your lardy arse is not an issue in the first place.

The Campaign for Real Beauty, whilst coming up with some great films, totally skirts the issue. Although 'Love Your Body' is a big step up from 'You Need Cellulite Cream' the issue that would really be helpful for them to push is, 'Your Body Isn't Actually That Important'. But then, that won't help them sell any body lotion.

Men like women with curves

I cringe every time I hear this. It usually assaults me from the pages of some trashy publication, the latest being the news pages of Cosmopolitan, which advised me that, since nine out of ten men would rather shag a size 10 glamour model than a size 0 supermodel, it was now okay to eat doughnuts.* Thanks for letting me know - I will now allow myself several of those yummy custardy ones with a side order of deep-fried mars bars without feeling guilty. Goodness knows why I still read women's magazines - perhaps I just enjoy defacing them with my red pen. But what really annoys me is when this statement comes from men themselves. Nice, thoughtful men who think they're being really helpful.

"Men like women with curves, so why should you diet to achieve a size zero? Hey, don't worry, eat that chip butty if you want it, because I don't mind if you have a lardy arse. Men like something to grab hold of."

This isn't exactly breaking news, much as it is treated as such every time some dodgy survey corroborates it. We all know that most men have a preference for women with rather more flesh on them than the average Hollywood actress. If women were motivated by wanting to please men, nobody below a size 12 would ever think about dieting. But they do. And it pains me to hear well-meaning men try to solve the problem by telling their female friends that hey, a few extra pounds don't matter to the average bloke.

By suggesting that women should have curves, you are not making an enlightened pro-feminist statement - you are simply perpetuating the idea that women have an ideal to which to conform in order to please men, whatever the nature of that ideal may be. Women's bodies do not exist for male gratification. Women do not shun cake in favour of low-fat low-carb no-taste diet food in order to impress men with their jutting collarbones. The female obsession with weight loss will not be solved by men giving us permission to eat. It's such an arrogant attitude and it really, really annoys me.

An unnaturally (for most women) slim figure is associated with wealth, status, social mobility, stylishness, femininity... There are even crazier factors than that at play - like the fact that skinniness is a trump card for female competitiveness, and that moaning about the size of one's hips facilitates female bonding:

- My hips are so huge!
- Noooo, they're tiny! Mine are enormous!
- Noooo, you're so skinny! I have a jelly belly!
- No you don't! You're tiny! Look at my muffin top!
- Pssshh - if you've got a muffin top I've got an entire wedding cake!

This is repeated ad nauseam, with the slimmer party becoming gradually more and more smug, and the porkier party becoming more and more distressed. But crucially, it gives them something to talk about. There are of course two clear-cut rules: 1 - One must not admit to being happy with any part of one's anatomy; and 2 - One must violently disagree with anything the other party says. Then there's the fact that, since breasts are supposed to be at least medium-sized, any woman who does have a skinny physique can moan about her lack of boobage. See - nobody's left out. It's rather clever really. Of course, there's always the chance that the slimmer woman will attack her peer by saying, "But you've got such a lovely figure! So curvy!" which is as backhanded as compliments get.

Believe me, the body image issue is a frickin' minefield. And if you go in armed only with, "But men like women with curves," don't expect to get out of there alive.

*By the way, this was BLATANTLY an advertorial for Krispy Kremes

Honk if you like my Manolos

Last night I had a bizarre experience. I was on my way to meet up for a drink and gossip session with a friend. As I waited at the bus stop, I was the victim of five (yes, I counted) incidents of men slowing down their cars to take a really long, sleazy look at me. In addition to this, one motorcyclist saw fit to stare and to honk his horn at me, despite the fact that he was doing about 100mph at the time and really ought to have had his eyes on the road.

I don't think this in itself is a massive problem. Obviously it's demeaning and degrading and shouldn't happen, but it's relatively harmless. What really bemuses me is the criteria by which a woman is judged as being deserving of this sort of attention.

Last night I was wearing bootcut jeans and a vest top with a cardigan over the top, with a waterproof jacket. The only manner in which this outfit differed from my normal attire was that I was also wearing stiletto heels and sparkly make-up. I can't believe that the presence of a particular style of shoes and a bit of glitter actually affects one's attractiveness. This isn't about being pretty. It's about what those shoes signify, the message that that bright green eyeshadow radiates. Last night I had obviously made an effort with my appearance and it is that that's rewarded, rather than genuine attractiveness. Perhaps it's because a woman who makes an effort is considered more easy. Perhaps it's because there is an assumption that she wants the attention. I don't know.

Something else I noticed was that as soon as I met up with my male friend, the attention abruptly disappeared. No man even looked at me. Obviously there's a code of honour - a woman on her own is fair game for harassment, but you don't even look at someone else's bird. I wouldn't be surprised if most men were utterly oblivious to the casual harassment experienced by women for this very reason. Firstly, most men are not rude or sleazy enough to harass women in this way themselves, and secondly, they are never going to witness it happening to their friends, because it's just not going to happen if they're there. A woman on her own will be harassed. Women in pairs will be harassed. Women in groups will be harassed. But enter a man into the equation - even if it's a group of twenty eighteen-year-old girls in mini skirts and only one man - and they will all be left alone.

Another thing that I realised when I got thinking about it was that this particular friend that I met up with last night was the only straight male in my life for whom I would make this sort of effort with my appearance if we were just meeting up for a drink. He said he felt rather smug about that, but the reason for it is not because I particularly want to impress him. It's just because I'm a girly girl at heart and really love dressing up, and because this is my oldest, dearest friend who knows me well enough to know that there's nothing more to it than that. I don't have to worry that he thinks I'm trying to seduce him, which I realise is something I might worry slightly about were it another man. Even on a date, I'd be inclined to swap the stilettos for trainers lest the object of my affections get the wrong idea.

Obviously stiletto heels do signify something. I'm aware of it myself, which is why I don't generally wear them despite my love of beautiful shoes. But where does it come from? Why is a pair of vertiginous heels so strongly associated with sexual attractiveness and availability? And why, for the love of God, why are these cretinous excuses for men too bloody cowardly to honk their horns at me when another man is around?

Math is hard!

Today I've been thinking about an acquaintance of mine. This girl has lots of lovely redeeming features, but something that really annoys me about her is her stubborn refusal to admit to any competence in anything traditionally "male".

A while ago, she asked me to show her how to use basic HTML tags (and we really are talking basic here - just line breaks and stuff). She sat at her desk sporting a rabbit-in-headlights expression, repeating phrases such as "Oh no, I really don't understand this" "I'm so useless with computers" rather than actually concentrating and making any real effort to learn how to do it for herself. The same goes for anything maths related, anything computer related, anything vaguely logical, carrying heavy things*... It may come as no surprise that this girl irons her boyfriend's shirts. (Actually, I used to iron my last boyfriend's shirts. But only because I was better at it than him. And he used to make me breakfast whilst I was doing it.)

This is the case for quite a lot of women. They assert their femininity by refusing to become proficient in "male" activities, as if coding their own HTML will magically turn them into a fat ugly cow. Women are not supposed to be good at certain things. There is a long list of skills that women are not allowed to have. This is just what I can think of off the top of my head:

Arithmetic
Computer programming
Parallel parking
Calculus
Wiring plugs
Assembling flat pack furniture
HTML
Reading maps

On average, women are slightly worse at these sorts of activities than men. On average, women are better at language and communication, and have better empathy. But what you never ever get told when bollocks newspapers report on all these bollocks surveys that for some reason scientists manage to get funding for is firstly that these differences between men and women are tiny and probably attributable to differences in upbringing rather than brain chemistry, and secondly that there is massively more variation between people regardless of gender than there is between the genders themselves. Bottom line is, we're all different. Some talents and shortcomings might have a greater bias towards one gender than the other, but if you happen to be good at parallel parking this does not make you any less of a girl. You wouldn't regard a considerate man with a wide vocabulary a poofter. A man has nothing to fear by excelling in anything to which he puts his mind. A woman is regarded as unattractive for being good at the wrong things. I myself was repeatedly accused of being a "lezzer" at school because I took maths and physics A levels. Nobody would have batted an eyelid had it been English and history, but nor would they have batted an eyelid had a boy taken these subjects.

Because women are all too happy to perpetuate this myth that they are incapable of adding up because it makes them feel more "feminine", men are all too happy simply to go along with it, seeing as it asserts their superiority. You don't see men bemoaning their narrow vocabulary for example, making a show of asking women for help in writing letters. Attention is not drawn to male "shortcomings" in the same way. Therefore we have an image of men as competent in everything, including "female" activities, but of women as incompetent in these traditionally "male" fields. We have a general culture of inferiority perpetuated by social conditioning that tells girls that math is hard and that they'd better not grow up to become a computer programmer or else they'll be a greasy-haired freak in NHS glasses playing World of Warcraft at three in the morning and never getting laid, ever.

And then of course, there's the fact that at school, more value is placed on the "male" maths and science subjects - they are regarded as more difficult than "female" arts or humanities. If you subscribe to this theory, then check this out. It's an online version of the entrance exams that Cambridge admissions tutors are using to put potential undergraduates through their paces these days. I don't know about you, but I sailed through the maths/spatial awareness/data analysis type questions to the extent to which I wondered if they were trick questions, whilst really, genuinely struggling with most of the more humanities-biased questions.

Anyway, bottom line is, unless you are genuinely bad at something and genuinely want help with it, do it yourself, because you are just as competent as a man. And if you're so unsure of your gender that you feel the need to bemoan that math is hard, just take a look in your pants.

* Actually, I do think that as a general rule, men should help women carry heavy things. It's good manners. There's no shame in accepting that men have more brute strength than women. I was however none too impressed by the man who once offered to help me (an attractive nineteen-year-old at the time) carry my bags with which I was clearly having no trouble, ignoring the fat old lady next to me who was struggling with hers. That is not chivalry.

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