Sunday 14 August 2016
Thursday 28 July 2016
Homeless Work Scheme Inspired by Tom & Jerry
New Conservative plans to get homeless people into work are being put into action this week. Anyone seen to have the audacity to sleep outside is being offered work in the local community or will face financial penalties.
New roles include, but are not limited to, holding up road signs, lying in the road to save wear on newly laid speed bumps, and placing their clothes over puddles to stop MPs getting wet feet. Barry Hurgenburger MP says, ‘What happened to the kind of chivalry you used to see in Tom & Jerry cartoons? Modern women find chivalry offensive, so why not direct it at people who appreciate it? I sure am grateful when that young man outside my tube stop always gives up his coat so I’m not spending all morning stepping around puddles. That’s time I could be spending working on parliamentary matters.’
Shadow Minister Louise Trustington asked how much the new scheme pays its homeless workers and was met with laughter and accusations of being a ‘mad radical’. The plans do not include payment as ‘rewarding homelessness with financial benefits is likely to incentivise street living. The more money homeless people are given, the more likely they are to stay on the streets.’
Gary Two Beards, 42, said under the scheme he will be expected to spend 40 hours a week offering his leg to passing dogs to protect public lampposts. ‘I get that the community love these lampposts and that they need to be kept clean, but they could at least give me some long rubber boots or something. I try to look on the bright side - at least the piss warms my leg up. For a little while, anyway. I used to warm up by sitting in the bus station, but the council have started fining homeless people for being in there. And if I can’t pay, I have to spend the week at work with my trouser leg rolled up.’
Saturday 3 October 2015
'Why is it acceptable, let alone aspirational, for fathers to become the gatekeepers for their daughters’ sexuality?'
If you've been on any social media lately, you've probably seen this picture. It's been shared and viewed countless times, often under titles such as ‘parenting goals’.
Why is it acceptable, let alone aspirational, for fathers to become the gatekeepers for their daughters’ sexuality? By trying to ensure that no boy or man will threaten his little girl’s innocence, or view her as a sexual object, they themselves are doing just that.
What do these fathers tell their daughters when they inevitably start asking questions?
‘Why are you telling boys to stay away from me?’
‘Because you're my little princess and I said so.’
‘What do you think they'll do if they do come near me?’
‘They might take advantage of you.’
Just like he is taking advantage of you now. He is making your decisions, dictating your sexuality, and treating you as a possession that currently belongs to him, and will be given away on your wedding day to a man he has decided you are allowed to love at an age he has decided is appropriate.
He does not trust your judgement. He doesn't believe you will be able to stand up for yourself if any boys make you uncomfortable. He believes he owns you. He believes that you are a delicate, inadequate being that he must control. He is assuming you are straight, which could cause you anxiety and fear if one day you have to tell him that isn't the case. He believes that you don't understand your own body, your own feelings, or your own desires. He believes that when you are old enough, he will hand you over to a man who can be trusted to take over his control of your body, your feelings, and your own desires.
The girl in this photograph is young so it may well make you uncomfortable when I talk about her body, feelings, and desires. In that case, I hope the shirt her father gave her made you equally as uncomfortable because it is saying all the same things, just worded in a way that makes people proud of him rather than unsettled by him.
When the father in this picture was asked how he will cope when she does start to date, he answered "She's not going out. She's going to be like Rapunzel - up in the tower." Your daughter is not a princess. She is not a fairytale character who lives her life waiting for a man to save and protect her. She is her own person. Let her make her own decisions and her own mistakes. If she makes a mistake, she can turn to her family for comfort. If you make the mistake for her, where will she go?
My parenting goals are not to forbid any children I may have from expressing themselves, but to bring up children who are educated and confident enough to make informed decisions that they are comfortable with, to have children who feel like they can come to me with questions and concerns that they might be embarrassed about asking anybody else, and who know I will give them honest advice and not a repeated, barked response that there's absolutely no way they can even consider talking about such things until they're thirty. Which would you rather?
Sunday 27 September 2015
Why are doctors so quick to dismiss young women in pain?
I have been in some level of pain constantly for the last eleven years. My hands, feet, arms, legs, and back always ache. It can anywhere from discomfort to severe pain that leaves me bedbound. At its worst, even lightly brushing my skin can be agonising. When I first started going to my GP to find out why, I was told to ‘get used to it’ because ‘you're a teenage girl and teenage girls get growing pains, you're no different from anyone else’. With no other explanation offered, I accepted it.
But I didn't grow out of it and the pain continued to get worse. Over the following few years, I continued to go back to GPs and was given no diagnosis, advice, or support. It took dropping out of a degree and losing a job because of my pain at the age of 20 to finally be listened to, given tests and a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, a chronic pain and fatigue condition.
Getting an explanation for my suffering was not the end of dismissal from doctors. The GP who gave me the diagnosis told me to keep it to myself because a lack of understanding of the condition would mean ‘people will think it’s all in your head’.
Over the next few years, I kept wondering why I had to fight so hard for my pain to be taken seriously. I appealed for instances when other people felt like their pain had been ignored. Responses came exclusively from young women. For example, my friend at university was suffering with terrible back pain following a basketball injury some years before. She had constantly been ignored, misunderstood, and sent away with nothing more than a couple of paracetamol. When a doctor finally agreed to give her an X-ray, years after the first complaint of pain, it was discovered she had a broken disc in her back.
There was also the woman whose scoliosis was ignored between the ages of 18 and 24. And the woman who first visited a doctor when she was 22 and was sent away with a diagnosis of a water infection and irritable bowel syndrome, because ‘The doctors did not believe me when I said about my pain as I have a high pain threshold’. It turned out she had borderline ovarian tumours and serous ovarian carcinoma which, due to the misdiagnosis, developed until she was at the point where she needed a total hysterectomy at the age of 27. She said ‘[It] broke my heart knowing that it could have been stopped a long time ago. I did want more children but now I can't.’
There are countless instances of young women being sent away from a doctor’s office in pain, feeling embarrassed, alone, and ignored. Why? Is this because women today are still seen as not having full autonomy of their bodies, and that other people know best? Is there lack of education covering the conditions affecting young women in medical schools? Is it due to the fact that men are almost twice as likely as women to have not seen a doctor in the last year, leading doctors to assume women are hypochondriacs just because they are being seen more often?
Personally, I think all of these factors contribute. The only thing that has worked for me and the women I spoke to is persistence. If you know something is wrong and you are living in pain, please don't give up. Keep going back to your doctor until you are given the tests and treatment you need. If a young woman mentions to you that she is in pain, please believe her, because chances are there are already plenty of people who don't.
But I didn't grow out of it and the pain continued to get worse. Over the following few years, I continued to go back to GPs and was given no diagnosis, advice, or support. It took dropping out of a degree and losing a job because of my pain at the age of 20 to finally be listened to, given tests and a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, a chronic pain and fatigue condition.
Getting an explanation for my suffering was not the end of dismissal from doctors. The GP who gave me the diagnosis told me to keep it to myself because a lack of understanding of the condition would mean ‘people will think it’s all in your head’.
Over the next few years, I kept wondering why I had to fight so hard for my pain to be taken seriously. I appealed for instances when other people felt like their pain had been ignored. Responses came exclusively from young women. For example, my friend at university was suffering with terrible back pain following a basketball injury some years before. She had constantly been ignored, misunderstood, and sent away with nothing more than a couple of paracetamol. When a doctor finally agreed to give her an X-ray, years after the first complaint of pain, it was discovered she had a broken disc in her back.
There was also the woman whose scoliosis was ignored between the ages of 18 and 24. And the woman who first visited a doctor when she was 22 and was sent away with a diagnosis of a water infection and irritable bowel syndrome, because ‘The doctors did not believe me when I said about my pain as I have a high pain threshold’. It turned out she had borderline ovarian tumours and serous ovarian carcinoma which, due to the misdiagnosis, developed until she was at the point where she needed a total hysterectomy at the age of 27. She said ‘[It] broke my heart knowing that it could have been stopped a long time ago. I did want more children but now I can't.’
There are countless instances of young women being sent away from a doctor’s office in pain, feeling embarrassed, alone, and ignored. Why? Is this because women today are still seen as not having full autonomy of their bodies, and that other people know best? Is there lack of education covering the conditions affecting young women in medical schools? Is it due to the fact that men are almost twice as likely as women to have not seen a doctor in the last year, leading doctors to assume women are hypochondriacs just because they are being seen more often?
Personally, I think all of these factors contribute. The only thing that has worked for me and the women I spoke to is persistence. If you know something is wrong and you are living in pain, please don't give up. Keep going back to your doctor until you are given the tests and treatment you need. If a young woman mentions to you that she is in pain, please believe her, because chances are there are already plenty of people who don't.
Monday 21 September 2015
Snoutrage as David Cameron’s unpignified initiation to elite dining society revealed
This story is the gift that keeps on giving. There's been everything from punny wordplay to new captions on old pictures of the PM holding pigs. And in the same week that it was announced that the UK has closed a deal with China on pig semen too. All Christmases have come at once for satirists.
Number ten are currently refusing to comment, understandably, and the reported photo of David Cameron caught in the act of putting ‘a private part of his anatomy’ inside the mouth of a dead pig has not been materialised, for which I imagine many people are hugely grateful. Who wants to see a dead-eyed, shiny chunk of ham putting his knob inside a dead pig?
Of course, due to the lack of evidence, there is currently no proof to support the claim. Making the rounds on social media this morning is the Hunter S. Thompson story of Lyndon Johnson telling his campaign manager to publicise that his opposition enjoyed regular relations with his pigs. His manager replied that no one would believe it and that it wasn't true, and Johnson said ‘Of course it’s not but let's make the bastard deny it’.
The two possible realities of this story are that David Cameron either did put his penis inside the mouth of a dead pig resting on his friend’s lap, or Lord Ashcroft and the press are wilfully releasing lies to discredit the prime minister. Neither of these options are favourable. We either live in a country ruled by a man who was already so wealthy and privileged that he was in one of the most elite establishments in the country and yet was still so desperate to join an even more exclusive, separatist society that he would willingly commit both beastiality and necrophilia at the same time; or a peer of the House of Lords (an unfair and undemocratic institution as it is) and the national press are willing to release untrue, scandalous claims in order to discredit the PM in a story that people are desperate to believe, simply because it is so outrageous. There is no going back from having to stand in front of a country you have been elected to lead, saying ‘I did not sexually assault a dead pig’.
The Daily Mail, the first newspaper to release the story, are historically supportive of the Conservative Party, and Lord Ashcroft who made the claims, has reportedly donated more than £5million to the Tories. Either I've watched too much of The Thick of It, or there is no way that either of these would have released such allegations unless it was favourable to another potential story being released to the press and was printed as a distraction. It’s not hard to believe from a government whose decisions and policies have already received horrendous stories in the press, such as the 2,380 people who have died after being declared fit for work after benefit system reforms. I dread to think what could be worse than pig fucking, so I hope Armando Iannucci has led me to an incorrect conclusion.
Whatever turns out to be the truth, all possibilities are so utterly beyond contempt that we should carry on taking the piss and having a laugh about it while we still can.
Number ten are currently refusing to comment, understandably, and the reported photo of David Cameron caught in the act of putting ‘a private part of his anatomy’ inside the mouth of a dead pig has not been materialised, for which I imagine many people are hugely grateful. Who wants to see a dead-eyed, shiny chunk of ham putting his knob inside a dead pig?
Of course, due to the lack of evidence, there is currently no proof to support the claim. Making the rounds on social media this morning is the Hunter S. Thompson story of Lyndon Johnson telling his campaign manager to publicise that his opposition enjoyed regular relations with his pigs. His manager replied that no one would believe it and that it wasn't true, and Johnson said ‘Of course it’s not but let's make the bastard deny it’.
The two possible realities of this story are that David Cameron either did put his penis inside the mouth of a dead pig resting on his friend’s lap, or Lord Ashcroft and the press are wilfully releasing lies to discredit the prime minister. Neither of these options are favourable. We either live in a country ruled by a man who was already so wealthy and privileged that he was in one of the most elite establishments in the country and yet was still so desperate to join an even more exclusive, separatist society that he would willingly commit both beastiality and necrophilia at the same time; or a peer of the House of Lords (an unfair and undemocratic institution as it is) and the national press are willing to release untrue, scandalous claims in order to discredit the PM in a story that people are desperate to believe, simply because it is so outrageous. There is no going back from having to stand in front of a country you have been elected to lead, saying ‘I did not sexually assault a dead pig’.
The Daily Mail, the first newspaper to release the story, are historically supportive of the Conservative Party, and Lord Ashcroft who made the claims, has reportedly donated more than £5million to the Tories. Either I've watched too much of The Thick of It, or there is no way that either of these would have released such allegations unless it was favourable to another potential story being released to the press and was printed as a distraction. It’s not hard to believe from a government whose decisions and policies have already received horrendous stories in the press, such as the 2,380 people who have died after being declared fit for work after benefit system reforms. I dread to think what could be worse than pig fucking, so I hope Armando Iannucci has led me to an incorrect conclusion.
Whatever turns out to be the truth, all possibilities are so utterly beyond contempt that we should carry on taking the piss and having a laugh about it while we still can.
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