I'm giving up New Year's resolutions for 2013

Grace Jones doesn't care about how you want to be a better person.

No-one has ever stuck to a New Year's resolution. Nobody. Let's face it, even the supposed resolution-keepers profiled here (warning: The Sun) have probably been given fat cheques for their lies. They're doing it to make you feel bad. The idea is that you will make resolutions and tell other people about your resolutions, making them feel as if they should also make resolutions. The only people that profit from this are gym owners and life coaches.

Think about this. A year's membership at Fitness First costs about £400. For that you could have:
-52 packets of 20 Marlboro Gold (King Size)
-268 packets of Mr. Kipling Bramley Apple Pies (or 1608 individual pies)
-A return flight to Barcelona, leaving London on New Year's Day (with enough money left over for a hotel and some tapas)

In any case, we all know that New Year's resolutions are really about shared guilt. It's capitalism's way of getting the population back under control. Ok, Ms. Smith, you've had your Christmas turkey. Now back in the office. It's time for another eleven months and twenty three days of data input. Don't complain, the holidays are over.

Responding to neo-liberal aspiration culture, the resolutions we make are grotesquely self-centred. For everybody who resolves to spend their time volunteering somewhere worthy, another hundred* simply want to look better. We're caught in an endless annual cycle of dead-end working, relief binging and resolving not to do it again. Next year I will be better. Next year I will stop being me. Next year I will be somebody else.

"I should really lose this paunch", we think. I should quit biting my nails, drinking and sitting around making it look as if my belly button can speak.We fantasize about becoming the person of our dreams: a quadrilingual, zitar-playing, pilates appreciating, flat-abbed work fanatic. Imagine how boring 2013 would be if everybody became this person. Sales of zitars would rocket in inverse proportion to the amount of fun people would have.

Every New Year for six years, I resolved to quit smoking. This resulted in two months of smokeless smugness, followed by the occasional guilty fag, followed by a return to full smoking by April. For several years I resolved to quit by never buying fags. Not buying was an easier resolution to keep, but it didn't stop me smoking. Instead, I alienated friends and lovers by constantly sponging off them.

New Year's resolutions are made to be broken. Secretly, we know this. We also know that you can let yourself off the guilty hook by February (at the latest) if you haven't stuck to your resolutions.

Anyway, the only thing more tiresome than bettering oneself is telling other people about it. As Grace Jones once famously said, "Save your breath".

For 2013, my New Year's resolution is not to have a resolution. I had been thinking of valuing my friends and family, ending procrastination and finally writing an insane polemical novel. But fuck self-improvement for 2013. Instead, I'm going to revel in being resolution-free. Gloriously, wantonly and lazily. Only another 1603 apple pies to get through.



*This is scientifically proven

UK: the power of the women’s vote

Y. Cooper you are so great please be my Prime Minister

I have a top story up on openDemocracy today. It's about how the "women" half of the electorate holds the cards in the 2015 General Election. But will any of the so-called political parties be brave enough to do something about it? Click here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ray-filar/uk-power-of-women’s-vote

Five top tips for getting a job

You've finally graduated, with a good combined degree in Humanities and Other Useless Studies. You spent your university years relatively well. You played sport for a team, you joined an orchestra. You had a social life. You're reasonably well rounded, and entirely sure that you can a: answer the telephone, b: send an "email" and c: talk to people without accidentally saying "cunt". Ready to take on the adult world of employment.

But the glorious, hopeful summer has now turned to October, and you're sitting in your parents' kitchen in yesterday's pants with a mysterious crust on your face (this bears no relation to my own life, I'm totally fine. Having a great time, actually). You're on your fifth cup of instant coffee and its only ten in the morning. You're flicking through the same unpromising job ads that you've seen every day this week. Most of them tell you neither what the job is nor who it would be for, but they do use plenty of fun, meaningless phrases like "self starter".

The fortnightly trips to the job centre take on a nightmarish air. The night before sign-on day you wake up in your sleep, soaked in sweat. Will you be able to convince the sceptical woman behind the desk that you are worthy of this week's £56.25? Difficult to say, when passing the test to keep your benefits depends on you accepting individual blame for the failings of the political system.

Of course, there's always an opening in recruitment consulting, bribing other people into becoming recruitment consultants. If you don't think about it hard enough, maybe you won't notice that its an empty, self-perpetuating job cycle created to give desperate graduates something to do. Sometimes these consultants even call you up, deliberately ignoring whatever sector it is you marked as desirable on your CV:

Consultant: "Would you like a mind-numbingly boring job that you have absolutely no interest in?"

You: "No, thank you kindly"

Consultant: "You are clearly a benefits scrounging loser. I read about your kind in the Telegraph."


I've never had a conversation like that, but it's only a matter of time.


In any case, from one work-shy feckless job-seeker to another, here are my five top tips for getting a job. They have served me admirably well in the past:


1. Start your cover letter thus:

"Dear Company,

I have no idea who you are or what you do, but frankly the position advertised is an insult to someone of my abilities. Obviously I am capable of filing, answering the telephone, and making tea. During my degree I had to write essays about dialectical materialism, for fuck's sake. Please, please, please give me this job, I really need the money."


2. Apply for unpaid internships. When they offer them to you ask if they'll pay you. If not, turn them down in an outraged email railing against slave labour, linking them to the wikipedia page for the principle of "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work". Repeat.


3. Turn down any job offers you receive. If they're offering you a job, it can't be that great a job. What's wrong with them? (See: Groucho Marx)


4. Write intimidating speculative applications to companies who don't have job openings. Threaten to leave the country if they don't create a job for you. Why should multi-billion pound businesses receive favorable treatment?


5. Whenever friends, parents, partners or bloggers try to give you well-meant job advice, laugh long and loudly. You have no need of their advice! Have you not sent five thousand applications this very week! Do you not have as much chance as anyone else of landing the BBC Director-General job (as and when George Entwistle vacates it)? Shout all these things aggressively, then cry and run out of the room.


Good luck! You'll need it! 

Feminism is not just about choice

Um, this is awesome, and a T-shirt.

All of a sudden we're talking about 'a woman's right to choose' again. Threatening tactics more associated with the American anti-choice movement are steadily creeping across the pond, whilst in the States, the debate has spiralled even further downwards. On April 1st the '40 Days for Life' anti-choice campaign ends - 40 days during which abortion clinics worldwide were picketed, with abortion providers and women seeking abortions harassed, filmed, and intimidated. Recent exposes by the British Humanist Association and Feminist Action Cambridge show that anti-choice group the "Society for the Protection of Unborn Children" (SPUC) tell an incredible pack of lies during talks in schools - including the facepalm-inducing claim that abortion causes breast cancer. It's an increasingly terrifying time to be a fertile woman. 

'Choice' is invaluable when framing the fight for continued reproductive rights. However much Nadine Dorries' anti-choice minions might disingenously proclaim themselves to be 'pro-woman', the fact remains that the only real pro-woman approach is one that admits of a woman's right to choose what to do with her body. The US anti-choice slogan 'women deserve better' can be seen for what it is - a blinding bit of double-think - if you can see that the implicit end of the sentence is '...than to have the right to decide whether or not to carry a preganancy to term' (of course that full slogan would be neither catchy nor persuasive). As Sonya Renee concludes in this amazing video, "women do deserve better, women deserve choice". 

But feminism has more to say than, 'Great, you've chosen! Awesome! We can go home now!'  Feminism as a whole is about more than enabling women to choose, even if the right to choose is a good start. The idea that feminism's end aim is just to enable women to make the choices that are right for them is almost meaningless if it isn't combined with opposition to systematic oppressions. Paid work or unpaid household labour, leaving or staying with an abusive partner, choosing underwear, opting for either Team Edward or Jacob; all of these choices are relevant for feminists (and are situated against areas of feminist thought and criticism), but not all of the options are equal. 

Recently I've been hearing more and more about 'agency' - another important area for feminists which can sometimes become little more than a misused buzzword. Women's agency and women's choices aren't the same thing, but distinctions are rarely made. Choices reflect agency - but agency can be and is always constrained by more than just the choices that are available. 

We need to admit both that women's agency differentiates depending on position and privilege, and that women's agency is disproportionately constrained compared to men's. The existence of some women who are more privileged than some men in no way undermines patriarchy, anymore than the existence of the wonderful Borgen undermines the awfulness that is TV (not strictly a logical analogy). 

There are problems when 'agency' or 'choice' is used to block strands of feminist criticism. This debate is most often representational: the constant compulsions to be feminine, or beautiful, to wear make-up and heels, to 'perform' sexuality rather than experience it, are justified as agency-based choices which are therefore untouchable. We've got so caught up in saying 'of course you can be a feminist and wear make up and be pretty!' that we've stopped analysing the gendered institutions that create these pressures on women. Recognising that these things are gendered pressures doesn't mean you have to immediately throw your lipstick away to be a feminist, but its equally dishonest to refuse to analyze something that you happen to like. 

There are some fair criticisms of feminist positions that a: suggest that women who make 'anti-feminist choices' are either devoid of agency or anti-feminist themselves, or b: speak from some sort of unquestionable position of privileged 'total agency'.  It's very easy for me to point the angry-n-militant finger at the decision for breast enlargement, for example, as someone who basically lives in a library surrounded by weighty tomes and other people who mostly haven't had breast enlargement surgery. My life wouldn't improve if I modified my body in line with dominant cultural expectations. That's a massive privilege. I'm sure that cosmetic surgery might be a reasonable choice within a set of available options; this doesn't necessarily represent lack of agency, or greater false consciousness, or any of those other feminist bugbears. 

When porn director Anna Arrowsmith describes pornography as a 'dream job' that 'we consent' to, though,  she's really missing the point. The key to it is not to load choices with values: my choice is feminist and yours is not ("erotica is what I like, pornography is what you like"). Nor is it about decrying women who make certain choices as anti-feminist - I reckon feminists are defined by self-definition, within reason. It is past time, way past time, though, that we stopped being persuaded by attempts to paint oppressive institutions as 'feminist' through the rhetoric of 'choice' or 'you are denying my agency'. 

Just because some women choose to do it, it doesn't make it ok. It doesn't make it ok for feminists to attack other (less privileged) feminists, but critique shouldn't be stifled. The undeniable agency of the woman involved is not the last feminist word on the subject. Choice is important, but it means little without criticism, and even less without change.