Tuesday 24 April 2012

Body Image and Sex: guest blog for LYYB

Becoming a woman is a bit like becoming celebrity, only more traumatic. This is either a celebrity in the sense of Kate Middleton (desirable and constantly imitated), or a celebrity a la Rupert Murdoch (loathed and constantly criticised), depending on what you look like and how popular you are. You go from being an uninteresting skinny child, more or less left to your own devices, to suddenly being incredibly fascinating to everyone the moment your tits and hips start to appear.

Wednesday 4 April 2012

The real cost of capitalism

I've been thinking about capitalism. I'm not an economist or an expert in politics. However I never let lack of knowledge about the subject stop me from forming an opinion, so I have come to the following conclusions:

Tuesday 3 April 2012

On having a vagina


Today I read an excellent blog piece (which you can read here if you want to) on Samantha Brick-gate, the column by Grazia and Daily Mail "writer", where her self delusion reaches previously unattained levels when she claims she is just too beautiful for any women to want to be friends with her. Sob sob, ahem, yes we're all sure that's why women don't like you, love. The author of the blog explains just why this is so hilarious far better than I could, but something she says in the final paragraph particularly stuck with me.

Monday 2 April 2012

Book Review: The Hunger Games

When I was little I didn't want to be a ballerina, or a princess, or a train driver when I grew up. (Ok I wanted to be a train driver a bit.) Instead I wanted, as I solemnly told my parents at the age of five, to be an author. I still do. I read voraciously everything I could get my hands on, Edith Nesbitt, Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, CS Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Tolkein. I loved fantasy, adventure, peril and heroism, and I spent much of my childhood living half in the real world and half in the world of dragons and battles and princesses and rebellions and epic journeys. And for as long as I can remember I wrote stories and poems and songs. I dreamed of adventures and put them on paper.