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

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! 

There's more to the UK riots than class vs. criminality

Protesters at Tahrir Square

When they were first released, images of women participants in the Arab Spring, particularly in Tahrir Square, were eagerly seized upon in the UK. We wanted to hold onto the idea that Middle Eastern feminisms were beginning to sow results recognizable in the language of Western democracy. We wanted to identify the uprisings with the values of the so-called liberal West - democracy, freedom of speech, and the right for women to participate.

But to participate only, and when the cameras were turned away from the Middle East, it was clear that those who had quickly heralded feminist revolution had delivered little more than overblown rhetoric. The rapes and virginity tests that shortly followed - designed to put women back in their place - were an unwelcome reminder that it takes more than a few women's faces on the streets to signify anything more than incremental progress.

Where riots are, mostly, women are. Yet when women riot, it is something that is focused on. It has been pointed out that women, as well as men, have been participating in the looting and rioting of the last few days. As I went to sleep in San Francisco last night, the most watched item on BBC news was this video: Riot Girls Brag About Violence. Women's participation in the public sphere, such as it is, is much greater in Britain than Egypt, and still it is notable, surprising even, when women take to the streets.

The empty pronouncements of our political leaders about 'criminality' are so devoid of critical engagement as to be self-parodies. But neither are these riots just about an underprivileged class reacting violently to deprivation, or even alienation. Nor is it just today's youth taking a culture of conspicuous acquisition to its logical conclusion. It is that, but that's not enough to explain it.

Aside from everything else, the UK riots are also what happens when a form of masculinity reacts when its sense of entitlement is confounded. I'm not 'blaming' masculinity. I don't think attributing blame willy-nilly is helpful here. I think, also, that it's a rightful sense of entitlement; we should all have access to jobs and housing (at the very least). It is, however, a particular cultural masculinity that allows for structureless violent disorder as a tenable response. This needs to be spoken about.

That men are allowed to react violently when threatened is a message taught and then reinforced. The cultural message that boys will be boys, that boys can't verbalise feelings, that an intimidating physical presence is sexually desirable, and so on, is everywhere to the point of nausea. Just yesterday on the bus, I listened in on the conversation of three teenagers; two boys and a girl. One boy was annoying the other boy, who quickly responded with, 'how about I smack you in the face?' The girl just laughed appreciatively.

Which is not to say that women aren't violent. Masculinity is not only (or always) found in men. But when we see women displaying the wanton violence that we associate with masculinity we find it shocking, and the exceptionalising and patronising media coverage often reflects this sense of shock. Violent women rioters are acting outside of their prescribed gender role. 'What are these girls doing on the streets rioting? Can we get a shot of some girls gone wild at the riots to symbolise the utter degeneration of our society's youth? You know, instead of tit-flashing we can have looting and destruction? Great.'

Even this, however, is better than its reinforcing counter-narrative, in which women and girls are represented as pretty, lovely peace-keepers. Remember this image from the student protests? Yawn. Tell me more about the looting yobettes.

A wolf in sheep's clothing (just a little rant)

"Peer pressure is a key contributor to early sexual activity in our country. Society is focused on sex. Teaching a child at the age of seven to apply a condom on a banana is almost saying: 'Now go and try this for yourself'. Girls are taught to have safe sex, but not how to say no to a boyfriend who insists on sexual relations."

- Nadine Dorries MP

Deceptions. Fictions. Dogmatic idiocy. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries is certainly a controversial figure. Tonight, Political Correctness Goes Mad takes an undercover* look into the sexual politics of the woman some call 'a psychotic, sexist lunatic' to find out - what the fuck is she thinking?

Hey, if we don't teach them about sex then maybe they will just never do it until they get married to nice vanilla heterosexual male-bodied people?

Last week Nadine Dorries MP managed to slime through a 'Ten Minute Rule Bill' on abstinence sex education. For girls only. I'm aware that there is not a hope in hell that this bill will become law, but still, the fact that it passed (67 to 61) is staggering.

Nadine Dorries MP's method is a little bit backhanded. She doesn't go directly for what she believes, having come to the rational conclusion that anybody with a brain cell will oppose the infliction of her prejudices onto wider society.

In this vein, the above quotation is strange. If not for the absurd and evidentially incorrect idea that teaching children how to put condoms on bananas will lead to an uncontrollable spate of young banana-rubbering hobbyists, one might even agree with it. Peer pressure does contribute to 'early', whatever this may mean, sexual activity. Girls are not taught how to say no to a boyfriend that insists.

Sure, we are taught that saying no is an option, but we aren't taught how to do it. We aren't taught how to say no when you're attracted to the other person and you want to fuck them but you don't have any means of getting protection. We aren't taught how to say no when you sort of want to, but you sort of don't want to, and you sort of think maybe another time might be better but you don't want to reject the other person completely and you don't want them to get angry. Dorries is also right insofar as we aren't taught to say no when the other person wants to and you totally don't. That's still a problem, and a serious one.

But we also aren't taught how to say yes, and this should be equally important. There are no lessons on saying yes when you want to have sex so badly and blood is pumping around your body and your cunt is a more pH neutral version of the Thames but you don't know how to convey to your (willing) partner that you also want to. Its difficult to know how to say yes when you're scared of being rejected, or called a slut, or that they might tell their friends at school.

Perhaps its different now, but in my day sex education focused solely on the conveniently erect penis going in the mysteriously self-lubricating vagina. ('When the penis goes in the vagina, the vagina becomes aroused and moistens') Really, sex education in 2001? What if your vagina prefers vagina, or what if you don't like penetration that much, or what if you need a bit more than that to get you off? Where in god's name is the discussion of the clitoris? What if you like to be tied down and spanked with a portrait of George Elliot whilst free jazz plays in the background? (this has nothing to do with my sex life, by the way)

Ok, so Nadine Dorries MP's conclusion from all these difficulties with navigating sexual exploration, is not that children need to be more comprehensively educated, but that we should attempt to stifle their burgeoning sexualities by TEACHING ABSTINENCE.

Sorry Nadine Dorries MP, but being taught to say no when you mean no, and yes when you mean yes, and how to do it differently when you need it to be done differently, has nothing to do with abstinence. Being taught abstinence suggests that sex is dirty, or wrong, or evil. This kind of 'education' has a counterproductive effect, heightening occurrences of rape, unwanted pregnancy, STD transmission, and generally unsatisfying sex because you haven't been taught how to do it at all, let alone how to do it well. This kind of ideology can't even really be described as education. It is the opposite to everything education should stand for: regressive, dogmatic, and ultimately, very very sexist.

That Dorries tries to wrap up her odious beliefs in slightly palatable seeming policy is all the more reason to oppose her. It is staggering that there are 67 people in Parliament who thought her ideas were reasonable rather than self-evidently GROTESQUE. We need to be constantly aware that these people still exist.


*Please note, by 'undercover' I mean that I'm writing this in bed. Now, back to practicing condom application on this bunch of phallic fruits.

If 'doms, why not dams?

It's about twenty to four on a Sunday afternoon. Having spent an hour in Boots frantically but unsuccessfully searching for what I need, I am now in my local pharmacy. This pharmacy stocks literally every product under the sun and is open seven days a week till ten p.m. Do you have a minor skin ailment on the underside of your left knee-cap at certain times during the month? This pharmacy has a multitude of creams and lotions for it. Do you find that your child resolutely only speaks German whenever your second cousin comes round? The person behind the counter will prescribe you something, trust me. I'm taking my time, sidling around the shop, looking extremely casually through every shelf. Then I find what I'm looking for. The contraception section has, very cunningly, or so I think, been shelved next to the oral hygiene section. 'Aha!' I say to myself (silently)'. Someone here has a warped sense of humour, and has slid the dental dams in next to the condoms, but on the oral shelf. Brilliant.

But no such luck. Condoms and lube give way to dental floss and toothbrushes. Not a sneakily placed packet of dental dams in sight. After looking intently at hairbrushes for at least five minutes to placate the multitude of people in the shop judging me during my contraception contemplation, I finally pluck up the courage to talk to the lady behind the counter.

'Excuse me', I shout awkwardly, 'do you stock dental dams?' Unfortunately the operative 'dental dams' bit of the sentence comes out in a strangled whisper so I have to repeat it several times, like, 'what?', 'dental dams', 'what?', 'dental dams?', what??' DENTAL DAMS??!'. It's a bit like that scene in every sketch show where the protagonist of the sketch deliberately doesn't hear what someone is quite obviously saying in order to embarrass and frustrate them. The woman stares at me like I'm a bleeding idiot and gets another chemist out from behind the medicines section to deal with me.

So I have to ask again: 'do you stock any dental dams?'
'Dental floss?' he asks, pointing to the dental floss in case I am unclear on what it is.
'No, dental dams,' I reiterate.
'What is it for?' he asks me, and at this point the feminist conviction that I should be completely comfortable talking to anyone and everyone about sex and sexuality is starting to lose out in my mind against the instinct to run away and forget this ever happened.
Like an immature thirteen year old, I mutter, 'for contraception'. (Even though strictly speaking they are not contraceptive but prophylactic, I know. Maybe this is where I went wrong.)

'Contraceptive pill?' he asks.
'No, dental dam.'

Hey baby, I've got us a little something for later

Firstly, I'm not exaggerating this conversation. It genuinely took place without recourse to verbs or adjectives. Also, my simple request has now caused enough consternation that the chemist gets another chemist out from the medicines section, and together they start debating the merits of dental floss as contraception in a low whisper that somehow manages to highlight to me the flashing 'DOC MARTINS WEARING DYKE REQUESTS PERVERSE ORAL SEX PROTECTION MECHANISM' sign above my head. As if I hadn't noticed it the minute I started talking about dental dams in public. The chemists go back behind the counter and beckon me to follow them to a computer upon which they are presumably looking up what a dental dam is. They're looking at the computer and I'm on the other side. The kinds of websites that might be coming up are running through my mind and I'm trying desperately to keep a straight face as if this is completely routine and normal.

After about five minutes the first chemist looks up and says, 'dental...can you spell it?'

'D, E, N, T, A, L, you know, like dental, that well known thing that you stock many products for, D, A, M. Like a dam. D for dog, A for apple, M for Mother. For contraception.' An eternity seems to go by as the chemists stare at the screen. I can't tell whether I'm making it up but the one on the left seems to be trying not to laugh. I imagine them looking at pornographic pictures of straight-man's-lesbians using dental dams in various ways upon each other. I'm trying not to laugh/cry in sheer horror at a situation in which asking for what should be a pretty routine prophylactic turns into the equivalent of me walking into a shop full of people and shouting 'I AM A LESBIAN! SHOULD I GET INTO A SEXUAL SITUATION I WOULD LIKE TO PROTECT MYSELF AND OTHERS FROM ORALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES! PLEASE ENABLE ME TO DO THIS! OH BY THE WAY I AM A LESBIAN!'

Anyway in the end the first chemist looks up, and says in a faux-conspiratorial tone, 'I think I can get the thing you want. Call us tomorrow.' As if we're in a B-movie drugs heist. So I leave the shop with as much dignity and grace as I can muster. I'm not going back.

But the point of this piece is, apart from to detail both the acute embarrassment I felt in asking for dental dams and the unbelievable level of ignorance that my request was met with, actually surely it isn't just lesbians who need to use them? Presumably anybody who is buying condoms needs also to buy dams, or customize their condoms and then put them back in the little packets for future reference, in order to up the old safety levels? Why aren't people using them, and given that my internet research tells me that increasingly people are, why aren't they stocked in chemists? I'm pretty sure that this shouldn't be as fringe a thing as it seems to be, and despite the fact that covering your partner's genitalia with a latex rectangle is probably quite unsexy for most non-fetishists, the equally vile condoms seem to have caught on. So why not dams? Answers on a bit of plastic, please.

In propria persona: a guide to philosophical excellence, qua the Cambridge philosophy tripos

Devoid of any remaining critical capacity to create some sort of opinion piece, I've been thinking rather of what the last three years ostensibly undergoing a philosophy degree has taught me. I thought I'd share some key moves, some baton deploy*, some shapes, if you like, to whack out when faced, as you inexorably will be one day, with the need to write some words on something philosophical. I speak particularly with reference to what I have learnt from the Cambridge Philosophy Tripos.

A GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHICAL EXCELLENCE:
Its so easy. There's one step you can follow, one fail safe key rule that if you use from the beginning to the end of a degree, will result in lifelong happiness. Are you ready? Here it is: Get up early in the morning. Go to the library. Spend at least eight hours there working (i.e. not staring into space/browsing the internet). Come home, get an early night. Repeat.

On the other hand, that's a bit like hard work, and if, like me, you would rather sit in your room eating and watching D.Housewives than doing hard work, below are ten alternative steps to excellence:

They just published a particularly successful paper on Kant, probably following the below guide.

1. Throw in some latin. 'Wollheim seems to be positing something SUI GENERIS' sounds much more impressive than it would if you hadn't said 'sui generis'. It doesn't really matter if the latin is accurate, nobody speaks it anymore.

2. Repeat the same irrelevant point over and over again without expanding on it. Good in exams.

3. Make a spurious distinction. Drive a contrived theoretical wedge between what clearly could easily be one concept and another aspect of the same concept. Stating that one concept is two concepts is almost like making an argument that one concept is two concepts.

4. Talk about all the different ways you might respond to a particular argument. Don't commit to any of them. This is what is technically known as treating them mean to keep them keen (the arguments, not the examiners. But also maybe the examiners).

5. Write obscene and/or misleading remarks in textbooks - that will distract other people trying to read the same thing after you, and you'll get a better mark than them.

6. Spend loads and loads of time making up funny songs about philosophers. This is a much better way to engage with the text than reading it.

7. Be dismissive. So Wittgenstein was able to tell his own PhD examiners that they would never understand his work because he was a massive genius? Big deal. I can refute him in one sentence. Like this, 'Wittgenstein has clearly not thought this point through.' Next paragraph.

8. Give only the reasons 'this is intuitive' or 'this is plausible', and no further explanation in favour of any conclusion. Examiners don't like to be spoiled.

9. Allow each of your essays to rest on an unexplained assumption, like that the radical feminist perspective on things could logically be the only correct one. Allow this perspective to permeate everything you say, without ever justifying it. For example, 'surrogate pregnancy is clearly derogatory and bad'. End of argument, next paragraph.

10. When in doubt, come across as slightly bigoted - 'Multiculturalism gives too much power to ethnic minorities, liberals should use interventionalist policies to stop all and any minority cultural practices'. End of argument, next paragraph.

Hope this helps!


*Due credit for 'baton deploy' is given to its creator, Josh Ebsworth