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

Contraception is no stroll in the park and men should share the stress

On a side note, all the stock pictures of women and implants are of white women

I have a new piece up on Comment is free. Its about a recent scandal in which contraceptive implants have become lost in women's bodies, and problems with the contraceptive market more generally. And the global pharmaceutical industry. And gender: Contraception is no stroll in the park and men should share the stress

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.