He Won It

The Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore. Now is he going to run for president?

Dove Hurts

Dove Update Alert: Dove "real beauty" manufacturers Unilever have been spreading this advert for their Sunsilk shampoo. Forget the campaign for real beauty, where is the campaign for more women being tortured in advertising?

By The Way...

...if you're a fan of Cru-blog (and if not you'll be needing your back button shortly!) you can vote for me in the blogger's choice awards. The categories I'm in are: Best Blog of All Time, Best Blog About Stuff, Best Political Blog and Best Religion Blog - which is cool, since the secular voice does seem to be missing from these lists sometimes.

Should we ignore 32,000 abused children?

According to this report from the Guardian, the FGM "at-risk" population in the UK is now 21,000. And there are a likely 11,000 existing victims. Is the government's policy of funding more faith schools including Muslim ones going to help? I don't see why we don't just provide annual health screenings to all children which include checking for evidence of FGM as standard. But if protecting the health of our children is too much to ask, why not just screen those from at-risk communities. It's a shame to have to single people out, but not as much of a shame as going away on holiday only to discover Granny's going to have your clitoris removed.

This Would Be Funny If...

...it wasn't so frightening. Some idiot called Stewart Dimmock has decided schools can't show An Inconvenient Truth to kids because it doesn't present "both sides of the argument". What argument? Anybody with half a brain can see human activity is heating the planet up. The humour though is in this BBC story on the subject, titled "Gore Climate Film's 'Nine Errors'". Scroll down to the bottom and there's a link to another story "Flood Legacy: the devastating effects of this summer's flooding"

The Guerrilla News Network has done the leg-work on this one. What I can't seem to find out though are which of the mega-polluters are paying for his campaign. Anyone got any idea? Both funding groups - Scientific Alliance and Straight Teaching say they accept corporate donations but they don't list major donors. I'd like to know who exactly is paying to set the agenda our kids are taught, and I bet we'd be horrified if we knew.

Speaking of Al Gore though I really hope he gets the Nobel Prize and then decides he will run for US president after all. I suspect the world may genuinely end quite soon if he doesn't...

It Must Be Dove, Dove, Dove...

I'm sure the marketing team at Dove think they're on the brink of saving the world. They're not. The latest advert shows a (very pretty) young girl with wide "innocent" eyes, then a stream of "negative" media images and messages - thin models, dodgy diet pills, cosmetic surgery - then has the slogan "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does". And then the link to the Dove "campaign for real beauty" website.

Now I suppose you could argue we should be grateful that they haven't just gone for Lily Cole lying in a puddle with an axe in her head, which as we all know is what really sells moisturiser. "Treat your corpse to softer, suppler, younger-looking skin ... before rigor mortis sets in." Media recruitment agencies need not call.

But I just refuse to participate in the "campaign for real beauty". I'm rather preoccupied with the campaign-for-women-not-to-be
-judged-on-their-appearances-in-the-first-place. The campaign
-for-the-public-unimportance-of-unattractiveness-in-women. The campaign-for -appreciation-of -women's-intellect,-strength
-of-character,-compassion,-enthusiasm-and-sense-of-humour.

Secondly the whole "talk to your daughter" - and tell her what? "Listen sweetie, there is a massive multi-billion pound global industry out there trying to tell you that you're unattractive and trying to sell you products on that basis, but you don't need to buy face cream cos Mummy loves you anyway..." That'll make all the difference. Wouldn't we be better off if Mummy didn't have to tell her kids that, if instead the beauty industry just backed off a bit, now it's impact is starting to be so frighteningly obvious? And how is a quick chat with (uncool) Mum going to balance against the hundreds of negative images kids see every day?

Anyhow their images of "real" beauty might include a nominal amount of slightly larger, slightly older and (shock-horror) non-caucasian women but actually they show mostly really very attractive women. OK, they're not models but they're not over 300lbs, there's no-one with a disfiguring disability, and I don't see anyone who looks over about 60. They're a lot better looking than if you went out in the street and just stopped the first women you saw.

The website itself doesn't seem to be much help. On the kids (girls, of course) page it suggests inviting your friends round and holding a fashion show - because only your best friends will tell you those white boots might be "mod" but they're just not "you". Yes have your friends come round and criticise your dress sense! Then you get to print out the self-esteem certificate... Seriously!

A beauty product company - and one which in the past has offered such "confidence boosting" products as “Intensive Firming Gel-Cream: for specific problem areas like thighs" - simply isn't the one to be telling us all how to manage our self-esteem issues. If they believe a word of what they say they would close down and re-open as a women-only go-karting and dry-slope skiing centre. In any case Dove is simply one of hundreds of products made by Unilever. How many of the following Unilever-owned brands have signed up for the "campaign for real beauty":

Slim Fast (yes, the fast-diet milkshake crap)
Lynx (spray more, get more nubile semi-naked bikini-clad models chasing after you)
Sunsilk (website quote: Want hair like Paris Hilton, Nicole Kidman or Posh Spice? )
Pond's (website quote: If you're worried that your face isn't as firm as it used to be, then you don't have to just grin and bear it)
Timotei (advertised by gorgeous super-thin young-looking models in white dresses wandering about a meadow)
Sure (advertised by super-athletic muscular semi-naked models)
Lux (website quote: We all like to look gorgeous and enjoy that confidence which makes us feel like anything’s possible)
Axe (Men's body spray, website boast: Our award-winning ads and marketing are equally adventurous. In Colombia, for instance, a female Axe Patrol visits bars and clubs, frisking guys and applying body spray ... How good will I feel about my "real beauty" while my boyfriend is being frisked by glamorous models in a Columbian nightclub?)

And Unilever are so keen for you to celebrate your naturally beautiful body that here's what they want you to rub on it (this is the Extra-Sensitive Cream Bar):

Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate, Stearic Acid, Sodium Isethionate, Aqua (that's water btw), Coconut Acid, Sodium Stearate, Cocamidopropyl Betaine, Sodium Palm Kernelate, Glycerin, Sodium Chloride, Zinc Oxide, Tetrasodium EDTA, Tetrasodium Etidronate, CI 77891.

Mmmm, mmmm, just reading that's making me feel beautiful already huh? Some of those are just posh words for products derived from palm oil and coconut, others are a little more sinister like: Tetrasodium EDTA - Synthetic preservative - can be irritating to the eyes/mucous membranes. And Cocamidopropyl Betaine which has been claimed to cause allergic reactions in some users.

The truth is advertisers don't give a stuff about little girl's self-esteem or older women's real beauty. They care about getting products off the shelf. Here's what Unilever's website says about Dove:

Paragraph one: "Dove is committed to widening the definition of beauty for women because we believe real beauty comes in all ages, shapes and sizes. To help you enjoy your own brand of beauty, Dove provides an extensive range of cleansing and personal care products that make a genuine difference to the condition and feel of your skin and hair."

Paragraph two: "Dove is now the UK’s top cleansing brand with an amazing 35% of the population having bought a Dove product in 2004. And it doesn’t end there: 7.2 million women use Dove every week in the UK."

Are we all really THAT stupid?

(The image up top by the way is not the Dove advert - it's a copy-cat by Bigmoves - a larger dance troupe appearing near you - if that's New York, Boston, Montreal or San Francisco - soon...)

Why Are We Sending the VICTIMS of Crime to Prison?

Another horror story about the UK immigration system's treatment of trafficked women. The story itself is disgusting:

"She tells of a time early on in her abuse when she was with one customer who had asked for two girls.

The other girl was showing her what to do but Anna started to cry when she saw the customer lying on the bed - it was the first time she had seen a naked man."

So a man went in to visit a brothel and one of the girls started crying, and yet evidently he didn't go to the police or report the incident, or if he did the police did nothing. Is that the kind of society we live in now? Of course the treatment from the pimps themselves is the most horrific:

"she was forced to have sex and faced ice-cold baths, starvation and beatings if she did not do as she was told"

So when at long long last she was rescued from this horrific life, from a life of being raped by different men up 15 to 20 times a day (oh and up to 30 around Christmas - cos all those devoutly religious people know the best way to celebrate the birth of the Lord is with a trip to a cheap brothel...), and frequent violent abuse too, how does Britain respond? We lock her up in Yarl's Wood detention centre.

She was 12 when she was trafficked out of Albania. She's 20 years old now. She fears she'll be forced back in to prostitution if she goes back to Albania. So we're deporting her straight back there.

Moo To Virgin Trains

I had a great night in Manchester last night performing at the Laughing Cows Comedy night. So hello to everyone from there.

Trying to arrange travel and accommodation was a little less fun. I may well post later on the horrors of National Express and Hotels.com, I'll wait until they reply (if they do) to my complaints. In the meantime I discovered yet another reason why privatising the rail service was an unforgivable error.

The two most popular flight destinations from London are Manchester and Paris. It should be easy to cut CO2 emissions by converting those flights into train journeys. With airports being out of town and the time required to check in, it is easier to do either of those journeys city centre to city centre by rail in 2hrs (Manchester) and 3hrs (Paris).

Except on a Sunday when the Virgin-run trains to Manchester don't take two hours - they take 4 hours. That's because they send all the trains via Birmingham, not direct, to pick up extra passengers and make them more profitable. Really. So people who want to save the planet have to waste an extra two hours of their lives. And of course the tickets aren't any cheaper for the extra two hours of inconvenience. Isn't it obvious we should tax airline fuel and make it a condition of the rail contract that full-speed trains run every day?

Apocalypse Now!

Imagine this - people who aren't really doctors are going round the country performing unnecessary intrusive surgical procedures, ones requiring anaesthetic, cutting people open. The media, instead of being outraged, conspires with these people to promote the procedures to people who have no interest in them. Stories about how these procedures enhanced peoples lives fill the media both as features and as advertisements. Little or no mention is made of the risks. The government does nothing even when children are being operated on. Sound ridiculous? Welcome to the post-apocalyptic future world of your nightmares... Correction: Welcome to now.

Role Models

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. It's an ad for an Italian clothing brand. They claim at least that they're trying to combat the problem of fashion industries promoting an anorexic look, by showing the true horrors of anorexia. It's pretty grim. And certainly if I think back to when I was anorexic (almost 15 years ago now) it's a realistic portrayal (although the model pictured is much thinner than I ever got - apparently she's 4st12lbs - 76lbs, I never really went below 7st - 112lbs).

The thing is - I'm not sure that frightening women is going to prevent anorexia. I mean it now seems that the message is - don't be fat but don't be too thin either. I think women already have more than enough messages about what they shouldn't look like and what they should find disgusting about themselves. I think the approach that would really help is if fashion houses showed a real range of women, old, young, fat, thin, etc. And I mean a REAL range - not one token super-photogenic black woman and one stick-thin white 40-year-old alongside half a dozen Kate Moss-alikes.

Actually I have a theory on this. I think if your advert is going to use the term "all" or "everyone" - like the GAP ads - "everyone in khaki" or even the "we all love clover" adverts for that, err, butter-style spread (? mmmm...) then for every two models put forward by the advertiser an independent board (me) will provide a third model. And I'm REALLY going to push the envelope. So if you say "everyone in khaki" and your size range only goes up to a 16, I'll be sending a size 28 model along and then we'll see if your products look good on everyone.

The other advantage to my plan is that it will provide an extra source of income for that weird relative you always try to avoid inviting to parties. Creepy Uncle Neville? No he won't be able to come to Jenny's wedding - he's off on a £1000-a-day modeling contract for butter-style spread in the south of France.

Lunchbreak Boob Jobs?

For some reason The London Paper (one of the free-bees that litter our buses and trains, no internet links though) is rerunning an old story about women being able to have a boob job "in their lunch hour". It was in the Metro a couple of months ago so I don't see how it's news. Still.

Now one thing that bugs me about the story is - why would you want to have surgery in your lunch hour. I know modern women are supposed to be busy. Hence the need for all that "juggling" but how busy do you need to be that you can't have a little lie down after surgery. It's all a part of the on-going push to make women forget that this is an operation, not a suitable gift for a mate's birthday... As usual there is no mention that surgery can reduce the sensitivity of your breasts (in some cases to zero), that the operation can go wrong, that it can affect your ability to breast-feed your children, or that anaesthetic can kill you.

On top of this they quote John Tebbetts, the surgeon behind this particularly vile publicity drive as saying "Women have got to get out of the mindset that they are going to be ill after this procedure". Yes, that's a direct quote. How patronising is that? Silly, silly women, eh? Getting all worked up thinking that being knifed in the tits might sting a bit.

If there's a mindset women need to get out of it's putting up with patronising twats like Tebbetts. Bear in mind this man wants to be allowed near your naked unconscious body with a range of sharp instruments. Shudder.

Excuse Me While I Bang My Head Against This Handy Wall

In all seriousness, I've just seen Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour Party conference. He didn't mention Iraq. At all. But he did quote the bible. Oh great.

Calling All Top Bloggers

Just updating the blog-roll, let me know if you'd like to be included. Criteria for inclusion include being very fucking cool. Trolls need not apply.

Also please please post the Cru-blog link on your site, this will schmooze me no end...

Don't Get Older Girls!

How is this "news"? Apparently women are "unaware" that getting older is a risk factor for breast cancer... Now I'm sure I'm aware that as you get older your risk of pretty much anything going wrong with your body increases. I can understand encouraging women to quit smoking and drinking and eat healthily. What are we supposed to do to combat this risk factor? Cease aging at once?

Surely the experts will know "Experts said many young women can worry unnecessarily while older women do not realise they are at risk." So are they saying older women SHOULD worry about breast cancer? And their concern that women over 70 don't demand screening as often as they could? How many of those women are unable to get to the doctors? If doctors standardly offered screening - preferably via a less unpleasant method than the mammogram that I certainly avoid (ultra-sound would actually be a safer way to check breasts, but more expensive) then take-up might be a bit better.

And maybe older women have enough else to worry about with pathetic pension provisions, unheated housing, loneliness and isolation all big issues.

Stopping at Red Lights

An article on the BBC website reports that a decent chunk of Amsterdam's red light district is being closed down. Which very much begs the question: Do legalised "red light districts" work?

The argument for legalising prostitution is generally that it's going to happen anyway and by legalising it you bring it out into the open and thus make it possible to regulate it and to protect the women involved. That may be true at one level - as the union De Rode Draad points out "If the windows close down, women who are being exploited will be hidden somewhere else where union representatives and health workers can't make contact with them"

But re-read that again - they're talking about health workers being unable to reach women who are being exploited - they're not talking about women who are not being exploited. And while prostitution is legal it must also be harder to get hold of and prosecute those who are exploiting women. At the same time one would hope that legalising prostitution broke the ties between sex work and other criminal activities - human trafficking, drugs and money laundering. Clearly not - Job Cohen, mayor of Amsterdam says "the trade involved exploitation and trafficking of women, and other kinds of criminal activity".

The other problem with legalising prostitution is that when you announce to the world that prostitution is legal in your city, you invite sexual tourists to visit your city seeking prostitutes, increasing the demand for sex workers and thus drawing pimps and human-traffickers to your city. This earlier run of basically the same story says that De Rode Draad (The Red Thread in English), the Amsterdam sex workers union, has 20,000 members. Now Amsterdam's population is only 743,027 (needlessly precise data from Wikipedia!) so 2.7% of the population is involved in sex work - and that's just the ones who are in the union.*

I'm sure that illegalising prostitution in a way that punishes the women participating is pretty ineffective, since the kind of people who are comfortable trafficking people into the UK and forcing them into prostitution are hardly going to worry about their subsequent well-being. In the UK it is effectively legal to be a prostitute. Running a brothel, soliciting on the streets and kerb-crawling are illegal. I'm not saying the UK has got it right, far from it, and I particularly think the way we throw trafficked women out of the country without so much as a cursory health check is disgusting.

Where I think both here and Amsterdam miss the point though is in taking the problem seriously - and that applies to a range of sex crimes, not just prostitution. It takes me only a few minutes on the internet to find evidence of illegal sexual behaviour. But the enthusiasm for pursuing these criminals - rapists, kerb-crawlers, pimps and human traffickers - is sorely lacking.

*Further note - assuming a prostitute needs an average of five clients, five nights a week to survive, that would require the men of Amsterdam - all of them, including children - to visit once to twice per week. Clearly that isn't happening - proof that the industry is being supported by sexual tourism.

Hello Bunny

It may not have escaped everyone's attention that Playboy is opening a store on Oxford Street. Not just any old store either - the biggest Playboy store ever. I worry that Britain is getting to be known as a pro-porn society. Now I know the store itself is mostly going to sell clothes and gifts, but I think we're all familiar with the brand and what it stands for. If not here's a little quiz for you (click to enlarge), from the lovely people at Bin The Bunny.

Spitting for Allah...

So this afternoon I'm sat on the sofa in the front room engaging in my very own sacred sabbath ritual - watching low-quality television and eating cheese on toast - when a big old people carrier pulls up in the parking space outside my house. Out of the front gets a boy of about twelve or thirteen and he walks over to the edge of the pavement, less than a metre from where I'm sat, and spits on the edge of the pavement. Now bear in mind the curtains are open, the TV is flickering, he can clearly see me, I have a really close-up view on the action, I'm a bit disgusted by it.

There are a lot of kids who hang about in my street and I'm pretty used to shoeing them off climbing on my fence, playing knock-down ginger (ringing doorbells and running away), hassling cats and fighting with each other. So I fling open the front door and shout "Oi! Don't spit in the street! That's disgusting!", to which he replies "I'm fasting, I'm not allowed to swallow anything".

"I don't care, carry a bag with you and spit in that if you must, don't spit in the street"

Then his Dad gets out of the car and shouts at me, "It's not your street, he didn't spit in your garden"

"It's everybody's street, no-one wants to walk in his spit"

"Exactly it's everybody's street, he can do what he likes"

At this point I thought about asking for his address so I could go and defecate in the end of his driveway, but I thought better of it and was about to try to explain something about communal responsibility when a total stranger to the whole situation came across the street to join in, announcing "Yeah exactly, it's everybody's street, spit where you like mate."

By this stage Mum and, ten to eleven year-old, sister, both dressed in full headscarves and floor-length robes, heads bowed, had climbed out of the back of the car. Everybody headed off in their separate directions and I went back indoors feeling a bit like I'd become the new Mary Whitehouse of the anti-gobbing-in-the-street movement.

And the thing is, it's still bugging me. For a number of reasons:

1) Normally the kids I see being a nuisance in the street know they're doing something wrong. Usually when I stick my head out the door they apologise and skulk off, or at very least look guilty and run away. This kid actually believed he was being "righteous" spitting in the street. He had his Dad backing him up, encouraging him to behave that way.

2) Is it really fair to insist that your young teenage children fast, just when they're really growing? Is that a healthy thing for a boy around puberty to do? While we're on the subject is it fair to insist that your daughter and wife sit in the back seat, dress like ghosts and don't speak in public?

3) Is it safe to drive a car when you haven't eaten anything, nor even drunk so much as a sip of water since sunrise? Which affects your concentration more - two pints of lager or ten hours without any food or liquid? It's against the law to drive after two pints of lager.

This brings me back to an old point really. Religious tolerance is often lumped in with tolerance for people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, women, gay people and disabled people. It's not the same. Human beings, all of us, have rights, human rights. One of those rights is not the right to gob on the pavement because your imaginary friend told you to.

In Your Face-Book

I'm not even sure why I started reading this article - about people who decided to close their Facebook accounts - but what a weird find when I did. I can well understand people deciding they spend too much time online, that social networking sites, online games and blogging can be highly addictive. Whether they distract you from your work or leave you with too little time to do other things, fair enough. The author however has quit Facebook for a totally different reason - her jealous partner!

"it ... made my boyfriend Danny ... incredibly insecure. As one of my friends, he could view my profile page, my friends’ list and my ‘wall’"

"Reading my ex’s flirty messages, however innocent, made him insanely jealous. He hated the fact that I was in touch with men I’d once slept with and that some of them had posted up old pictures of us together which I had no power to remove."

Hold on - that's not internet addiction - that's having an unreasonable, controlling partner. How insecure is this guy that he can't bear to look at a picture of his girlfriend with an old flame? And of course he doesn't HAVE to look at these pictures if he doesn't want to - he only looks at them because he's snooping through her site, digging for dirt. And it's quite frightening that the article totally glosses over that, acting as though that sort of behaviour is normal.

Makes you realise how lucky you are - at the end of last year Mr Cru and I went away to a music festival with an old flame of mine and his new partner and, err, we all got along great. In fact I know she reads this blog, Hi Abi!

Will Shag For Laundry?

Feministing has picked up on this rather worrisome article on CBS apparently the author is advising men that doing more housework will get them laid more often.

Over on Feministing there's lots of discussion of what share of the housework is a fair share. I'm sure that 50% is the obvious answer assuming that both partners have a balanced relationship in other areas. And also on whether men should get extra praise for doing housework since it constitutes a break-out from traditional gender roles. Well I'm happy to give them extra praise but I want it right back for me when I get a job, wind up as primary breadwinner and manage to unscrew tight jar lids on my own.

What bugs me more though is the other end of the deal... the idea that women will (sub-consciously mind) trade sex for housework. This rather assumes:

1) The woman doesn't actually want sex.

2) The woman, despite not wanting sex, is prepared (sub-consciously anyway) to do it in return for other things.

3) The man wants sex all the time.

4) The man wants sex with the woman even if the woman doesn't want sex and presumably therefore even if the woman isn't enjoying it.

5) The man is comfortable (consciously to his mind) trading other things for sex.

If any one of those things was true of my relationship, I would be seriously worried.

Bully For You

Homophobic bullying is rife in Britain's schools. The government response is non-existent and the expansion of the faith school system is exacerbating the problem - presumably because religious teachers aren't doing anything about it. Johann Hari, as usual, is bang on the money.

I only knew one gay student at my school (although there may of course have been others who weren't "out" - either because they were afraid of the response or because they weren't yet sure about their sexuality). We were good friends - I'll call him Jim, not his real name, in case he doesn't want to be identified whatever he's doing now. Jim was definitely on the receiving end of some homophobic nastiness. And I think his parents more or less threw him out too, certainly I remember he lived with an aunt or granny, who I believe had taken him in sympathetically.

I suppose I was bullied at school too. Though I find it hard to really see what was and wasn't bullying when I was at school. I was being bullied and abused so aggressively at home that whatever happened at school paled into insignificance. I was certainly called a lot of names (various people), kicked a lot (Tim), punched a lot (Julia) and pushed into dog muck once (Bradley) but all I ever thought about was how much trouble I would get into if/when Dad found out (usually a couple of hours of being shouted at for having "handled the situation wrongly" - apparently I was expected to fight off my bigger, stronger assailants with some weird martial-art-style super-powers and of course I shouldn't have brought it upon myself by being so horrible/weak/lacking in confidence)!

Now I know not everyone has parents as horrid as myself and Jim but then I know some people whose parents were much worse. Here's my point - when we see bullying in schools we are rightly horrified, we insist on intervening. If bullying from our peers is so unacceptable how much worse for a child to be bullied by their own parents - who they look up to, trust and hope to be protected by. Yet we almost never intervene in families home lives. We don't even go in to observe the scale of the problem, we assume it would never happen.

Yesterday Mr Cru and I went for a walk along the New River in Islington. Along came a guy with his (presumably) young daughter. He was teaching her to ride a bike. His teaching method was to be angry and exasperated. The girl appeared to be trying her best, her fingers almost too small to reach the brakes, clearly terrified of him more than of crashing her bike into the road. "Hold the brakes", he screeched, "The brakes, yes hold the brakes. Come on now, HOLD THE BRAKES." And then he concluded, disgusted, "You're just like your mother."

If I saw kids treating each other that way in a school I'd be straight in to the headmaster/mistresses office making sure the situation was tackled. But who do I report this guy to? As Mr Cru pointed out, unless you saw him hit her, you can't really call the police. Parents in our society report to no-one, but they are themselves the worst abusers of our children. I have discussed before what I think could be done. I also think if we give kids the supportive home-life they deserve, we reduce the impact that bullying has on them, and also the likelihood of them becoming bullies themselves.