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

"Intersectionality", let me Google that for you

So great? 

It's all kicked off on twitter over the last two days since The V Spot's problematic blog "In defence of Caitlin Moran and populist feminism".

In response, I've written a piece over at New Statesman.

It's called "'Intersectionality', let me Google that for you." It's on the issue of who feminism is for: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/10/intersectionality-let-me-google-you


Here are some great pieces by others on the same debate:

Dear Vagenda editors: http://blackfeminists.org/2012/10/23/dear-vagenda-editors/

You don't need an MA in Gender Studies to know that race matters to feminism: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/race-matters-to-feminism

How to be better: on intersectionality, privilege and silencing: http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/how-to-be-better-on-intersectionality-privilege-and-silencing/

Feminist slam poetry for National Poetry Day

To celebrate National Poetry Day, here are some of my favourite feminist slam poems. They are clever, moving, amazing, and about as far from the GCSE poetry anthology as you can get, thankfully. Some are long but they are totally worth the investment. Enjoy bubbelehs, enjoy.

*trigger warning*

Staceyann Chin - My first period. Also features a haiku about George Bush.

"Even Jesus had to pass through a punani
Angels and messengers aside
Mary had to lend passage to god
Or them Christians might still be Jews 
Waiting for a christ that was stuck up the ass of some man
Who thought he could do what little girls do
Every day against our wishes" 

Andrea Gibson - Letter to a playground bully from Andrea (age 8)

"I am not 'always crying', 

I am just thawing outside the lines."

Sonya Renee - What women deserve

"Women do deserve better, 
Women deserve choice"

I think I have linked to this on the blog before, but it is just so great.




Alix Olson - Subtle sister 

"So I take back the whispers, the cute, mute act and the high pitched giggles, 
Yeah I take them back 
I won't avoid your stare evade your step 
Nothing of that kind, 
I won't help you help me victimise the only space that's mine." 



(Unfortunately this video is cut with other footage - but its the only reasonable version I can find on Youtube).


And finally:

Mindi Nettifee - For young women who don't consider themselves feminists (the last nerve)





Who have I missed out? Please share your favourite feminist poems below!



More:

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/03/27/future-of-feminism-telling-our-stories-out-loud/

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!