How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?

So the YesAllWomen hashtag has gathered speed again. After Emma Watson’s amazing speech at the UN last weekend, she’s been bombarded with threats in an attempt to intimidate her into shutting the fuck up. The threats were a hoax. OK. But rather than highlighting a dodgy issue, here (and it is seriously dodgy), it rather reinforced the stereotype. Woman speaks out – gets threatened with nude picture leaks / rape / death. It was expected, or at least it should have been expected, that Ms Watson would receive these kinds of threats. That says rather a lot about today’s society, and none of what it says is good.

Sexism & misogyny: alive & well in 2014

Unless you’ve been hiding yourself away for the past week, you can’t possibly have missed the news of Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in Santa Barbara last Friday, and if you’re on social media, it will have been all but impossible not to notice the backlash from women who have simply had enough. Rodger’s manifesto was that he was going to slaughter all the ‘sluts’ who wouldn’t (read ‘didn’t want to’) have sex with him. So he showed them that he was the ‘supreme gentleman’ by murdering some people. Then he (apparently – just legally covering my arse, here) killed himself.

A new year and a new mindset

What you are reading now are the words of a more determined, more disciplined me. As 2012 came to a close, I was in Brighton with my honey, and I welcomed in 2013 with my folks. It was a calm, quiet holiday, and it was lovely.