Seriously.

Most every aspect of the sociocultural trade in [giant scare quote] Advice on Love and Sex [giant scare quote] is repellent, dredged like sticky turkish delight with arsenic instead of powdered sugar and just as poisonous, laced with the vicious metaphorical opacity of the language of hunting, subterfuge, camouflage, entrapment, espionage, political double-speak; everything silently, brutally, casually pinned to The Obvious Truth that no two people coming at one another with candour and a smile could ever end up in bed. Or in love. Or whatever.

This is a filthy lie, natch, with all sorts of stupendously shit gender and heteronormative consequences, but I am going to break every moral guideline in Xtin's List of Shit Not To Mess With (OK no I don't really have that list. But I should) by saying that there is one bit of the excruciating vernacular which I endorse, even though it will all become illegal under hate-speech legislation when I become Queen.

The Bit is:

He's just not that into you.

... where 'he', of course, is 'whomsoever you have your eye on right now'. This line is typically directed at women for the assclown gender and heteronormative reasons aforealluded. Also, like most of the Advice out there, along with the rest of its tasty toxicity, it is often invoked as a part of Some Theory of precisely how certain men or women do, will or ought to behave based on what happened when we were Cro-Magnon, which day of the week you call and whether or not he/she matches whatever story Advisor is peddling about the Right Kind of man and/or woman.

Forget this whackaloon baggage. The Bit works for the most idiosyncratic of views about what you want and what people are like, and in a pleasingly democratic manner. Pleasing for the neutral observer, that is. For the rest of us participant observers it sucks rocks, but, people: write that shit down. Because I'm over it, for real. I am over watching smart, superbly desirable people let themselves be pissed on from great heights by charismatic narcissistic sadists addicted to their role as star of the movie of their own lives. I am tired of all the emotional wastage poured into the yawning pit of people who suddenly (but consistently, because that's their fucking schtick right there) appear so that Someone Who's Patiently Waiting can be their fucktoy/manly chest/motherly shoulder/drama audience/arm-candy/literary-academic-high-cultural ego-boost.

No but no but there was this time when you made pasta together/had hot monkey sex/watched DVDs until 3AM! Uh huh. Sure. Are you waiting around for something else? You know what I'm talking about. Hot sex that you haven't had? A romantic smooch instead of the hot sex you always have? Holding hands walking down the street? A shared tub of popcorn at the movies? Telephone calls and text messages and quirky newsy emails that, you know, ask about you? Wild partying with slightly seedy making out in dark corners? Dinner with friends? Out in public for once? Not out in public for once?

Maybe patience is a virtue and the right person is worth waiting around for. Maybe that time you laughed a whole hell of a lot in the Tate Modern actually does justify the seemingly endless wait for the fabulous sex you just know you'd have. Or that crazy night with the twenty-five positions and mind-blowing orgasms really does mean that if you play your cards right, you can go out to the pub together sometime.

Or maybe you get into someone else. Or you're into the masochistic thrill of the constantly rejected emotionally anorexic. Or, if you're the historical me, you indulge in a self-flagellating orgy involving knowing that you should do the first thing and rejecting the idea that you're the second thing. Whatever floats your boat.

Today in unrelated

One
Today I am in love with Tom Robbins, for a gleeful glut of reasons among which is that he recklessly peppers his text with the brazen simile sign-post LIKE, like this like that like whatever the hell I want, clunkiness be damned, repetition kiss my ass, who fucking cares if you stretch the analogy so tight over the face of the world that reality's cheekbones are about to breach its skin.

Two
I have a little Australian flag pin on the lapel of my coat. I like seeing it there. Stamped smallishly on myself. A drop of water on the magic egg of the world's warmth toward Australians, the English-speaking not-English, Western not-American, globe-trotting, back-slapping, hey-mating, irony-getting, allies-allying Australians. I peep out from under my few German syllables with one hand on a eucalypt and one ear cocked to the only people in the world allowed to address me as "darl" because where I come from they make it sound like "ma'am". It would never have crossed my mind to wear my flag in England. Too colonial, parochial, apologist, passive-aggressive? Or maybe my big broad-vowelled mouth didn't need any help.

Three
I'm watching the pilot of FlashForward, to which I suspect I will soon nurse a mild-slash-rabid addiction. It is a superbly Xtin-suckering cocktail of psychodramatic sci-fi laid trauma-sexily on the shoulders of buff, worried-looking men and women with sidearms and bulletproof vests. With subplots in hospital. In short, you can expect me to mainline this particular KoolAid. One thing though. One of Our Heroes has an AA sponsor who lost a daughter in Afghanistan. He's talking about it in A Meeting. Witness small pause while show congratulates itself upon dramatic-arc motivating grief being rooted in military daughter. She was "5'5, 118 pounds".

First of all, TF? Who the hell describes their dead kid this way? Nominally he does it to set up the tragic fact that he only got back 37 pounds of her, so, OK. I won't draw the parallels with newspaper openers like "Senator Jones, 47 and mother-of-two ..." More specifically, really? Those are the stats this show chooses to utter as plausible for a military woman? I'm not even going to get my gameface on for using them as pausible for a woman, period. That is at the Dude, Skinny end of the scale on pretty much whatever parameter you care to use, and even though I honestly don't know shit about what the military requires, and we don't know shit at this point about what Dead Daughter was doing for whatever branch of the DoD she worked for, come on, people. She'd surely have been ripped. I mean a very fit, muscled woman with serious standards of endurance. In which case, newsflash. She did not weigh 118 pounds. No she did not. Maybe there are Desperate Housewives starlets with ripped shoulders and quadriceps who linger around the please-god-have-a-fucking-sandwich end of the BMI, but, please. They are not equipped to run several clicks in the desert in fatigues with like half a gross of kit strapped to themselves. I have this vision of groups of army women laughing their gleaming muscly glutes off at the thought of weighing 118.

So um, yeah. Thank you for military women in your story, FlashForward. Also I hear that there is a gay policewoman in your show, so kudos, right. But please to oblige us with some Actual Woman Stats, mkay. I mean it's not like you had to actually show her.

In which Xtin drops in the ocean

Well, crap. It seems like gender-political rage is biting me on the ass every time I dare to turn around and think of something else, like polar bears. Or whether the terminal amateurishness with which English-language bars in Berlin are infected is a mannered we're-English-so-we're-adorably-shit thing, or just ... amateurishness.

Yesterday afternoon a guy with a pair of red-handled gardening shears trimmed the green roof of the Altbau-sized garden shed in the Hof opposite. ~shnick shnick shnick~ All by hand. This morning I drank my coffee out of the hilarious mug and watched the rain fall onto the bleary, winter-bleached, wiry shorn green stuff and you know, that is when you're supposed to have idle thoughts about ... well god, I don't know. Idle weekend thoughts about random stuff that is no doubt lousy with gender political dubiousness (eg: the laundry) and disgustingly informed by the Industrial Capitalist Complex (eg: I think I'd like a new cushion for the armchair) but it's the weekend, heaven help us. Let us pretend that there is nothing to be said about the fact that the world has conditioned me to plan absent-mindedly to shave my legs on Sunday night. And maybe my armpits, although this is Germany and ZOMG they have different standards for hotness in women's hairlessness and oh noes! *head explodes*

Yes, well. I wondered what was with the constant feminist chokehold. The awful banality. The repetitiveness. The fact that you know that brilliant, superbly educated and nuanced people have expressed your rage, subtly and punctiliously detailed the ethical and empirical atrocities again and again and again, and it doesn't matter, except insofar as it means that sexist pricks get to claim you're boring by saying it again.

So today, ladies and germs, the YES, AGAIN target is "that's for girls". As in, multi-purpose rationale for dude not doing/owning/valuing something-or-other. Here's my tip.

Don't say that. Don't. Say. That.

Don't say that as though it might have humour or irony value or demonstrates that you have a wittily retro take on gender. Don't talk as if you define your masculinity by being nothing that women are. Don't speak as if you own badassery, a love of duct tape and powertools, cars, technology, big dogs, risk-taking, extremes-seeking, firearms, co-ax cable, millions of orgasms, emotional repression and shame about tears. Don't engage the nauseating pseudo-backpedals about how women are too sensible or level-headed to fetishize any of that, yet again planting the over-entitled flag marked Y-CHROMOSOMES on stuff that isn't yours to claim.

Don't speak as if it is natural for you to aim for a broad and flinty-minded competence but quite unusual for anyone who has a vagina to do so -- because they don't care about that stuff, don't you know. Women care about the stuff that is for girls, which you just noted is whatever you couldn't possibly aspire to. Just spend a single second thinking about that. Ignore the head-desking vacuity of asserting someting about an entire gender. If it's the kind of thing that I, a woman, would do, then it is a thing that you, a man, not just would not, but ought not. You should --- my god, the butt-clenching paranoia! --- concentrate hard on making sure you never do. Because your masculinity depends on it! No kidding, take a minute to imagine someone systematically invoking your identity to explain why something isn't worth countenancing. Are you feeling it? Are you bathing in the overpowering woman-hating steam rising from this? Do you hear the rhetoric making sure that the only way a man might dare to aspire to something a woman does is if she is doing something which by repellent white-male lights is already something a man does? Are you really excited about what it's like to be a woman yet? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Watch your speech implicitly informed by a respectful understanding that there are many men out there who kick your butt in their mastery of both the everyday and the specialist, but heaven fucking forfend that there might be women who do so. And not just the vaunted "some" women ("Oh, yes! There are some truly exceptional women BASE-jumpers!") but thousands and thousands of the damn things. God, how embarrassing. How humiliating. Let us all speak as if that isn't really a possibility, while carefully burnishing our bullshit politico-social skills on such a point if ever challenged explicitly on the existence of Women Who Kick Your Sorry Sexist Ass into Next Bloody Tuesday. ("Oh yes! There are some amazing ...") Of course, no barrier on me aspiring to do the things that are for boys, since anything that boys aspire to is ex hypothesis a good thing for anyone to aspire to. Bonus points if I do it in a cute jumpsuit and/or with adorable incompetence.

And, continuting my stellar, sledge-hammer-inspired Saturday-morning attempts at grappling massive and complex issues with a few ungrammatical words: Everything I just said, ditto-goes-double for "that's gay".

I'm kind of appalled at myself that I'm not overly concerned whether or not anyone buys this or the planet-sized corpus of vastly more perspicuous expressions of same. Just everyone please fucking learn not to say these things. Please. I'm being interrupted in my imagining that I cannot live a fulfilled life while my four different kinds of glassware are in storage.

It's my party

Last night on the phone to The Green-Eyed Doctor I fell apart, semi-predictably. As in didn't see it coming, 20-20 hindsight. Wandering my alien city cushioned by the weather-smoothed grooves of long friendship and the heartbreaking unseen relief of facility with language I felt ordinary and me-ish. As it turns out, I hadn't felt that way for some time. Which is both duh-worthy and meta-duh-worthy, because duh that I'm not in an emotional place where the Bleeding Fucking Obvious even approaches ... well, bleeding fucking obviousness.

So I'm lying there in the dark with the phone between the pillow and my ear believing that half-truth that it makes a difference to the person listening whether you cry quietly but unmistakably or give in and bawl your eyes out. According to the cracked-out logic attending this theory, quietly-but-unmistakably wins you partial Keeping It Together points; bawling 0 points.

Plus, no doubt, the fact that there's something farcically ego-bruising about the person who is the raison d'étre for your collection of joyously unutilitarian underthings listening to your nose fill with mucus. Which thought is also a gender-political nightmare and just another thing to punish yourself with while you worry vaguely about the phone shorting out because the earpiece is filling with tears. Saline-liquefied mascara climbs under my eyelids and burns gently there while I pretend like Completely Emotionally Together is a line on my CV under "Other Accomplishments".

I can hear The Doctor containing his withering opinion of my lachrimal token economy, incredulous that I thwart him in our mutual desire that my brokenness be unbroke. With hard-won and superbly neurotic mastery I butter on another gratuitous layer of irony by being able simultaneously to endorse his scorn and be humiliated that he is silent about it because I'm crying like a goddamn girl.

After I've dried the phone I read David Foster Wallace on lobsters and the adult movie industry until envious writerly desires take over my damp, dog-eared shame and I fall asleep to blackbirds greeting the dawn with German accents.

Blood transgression

For complicated and banal reasons I'm not getting into, I am all up in a righteous gender-political rage today. I am also (possibly as a result, possibly not) indulging in one of my drugs of choice: police procedurals aka Cops on Telly. They must be a drug at least in part because holy heaven on a triscuit, only legit mind-altering properties account for the fact that I am addicted to these things which are Truly Special in their systematic pornulation and hatred of women and reification of the righteousness, power and dignity of all things male. But you know, it's fine, because women are usually in charge. Whatever. I have a bug much more satisfyingly trivial up my butt.

Being the kind of process-obsessed dork that I am, my particular favourite is CSI: Original Flavour. Shows that are into Evidence (Empiricism LIVES, dudes) have a serious hard-on for BLOOD. They have awesome sprays and test-tubes with niftily incorporated Q-tips and little pregnancy-test-looking things with which they set up dramatic lines such as:

Yep.

flinty pause

We have blood.

Tiny bits of it, often. And of course, don't you know, the only way traces of blood are around, especially if it's cleaned up, is if someone got dead. Bled everywhere and DIED! I mean, the only alternative is that the Obvious Criminal is telling the truth when he says he must have cut himself, and dude, we all know that is just the lamest and most embarrassingly post-hoc story ever.

Every time this little Dying People Bleed trope gets trotted out my mind is vaguely blown by the fact that 50% of the world's sexually mature population bleeds. Quite a lot, sometimes. When they're not dying, yo. And sometimes at very inopportune moments, like in the kitchen or while sleeping. Millions of women are right now, today, saying Goddammit! and breaking out their cleaning agent of choice. And not because there is someone lying on the floor with blunt-force trauma leading to contusion of the brain and dramatically important trace evidence under their fingernails.

Best of all is when our forensics team get into spraying the Luminol in the bathroom. Bwahahahaha! Guys, you wanna do that in my bathroom?

Sarah Sidle: My god, something happened in here.

Of course, I'm sure the real cops have a perfectly straightforward way of ruling this out in the real world. Or even if they don't, in plausible cases, which must be really quite a few, they raise the possibility that blood-trace is from a perfectly healthy woman. They do, right?

But not our telly CSIs. Their viewers are busy being titillated by serial killers/rape/autopsies of naked hotties/graphic CGI representations of bullets destroying human hearts! Don't upset them. Menstruation is gross.

Bite me, 2

About an hour ago, I got an unsolicited message from a stranger on facebook. It's your basic bar pick-up line, adapted for the youtube age. It's premised on one of the group memberships I have listed in my super-super-restricted profile. As pick-ups go, it could be much thinner -- the group is an expression of a certain pretty arcane kind of fandom for a cultish but not overly well-known American author, so the fact that this guy likes this author and knows I do too is a much more sophisticated basis for e-chatting me up than most.

However.

His profile is unrestricted, and under Interests, he lists Women.

As a matter of gender-political hopelessness, this is not actually the most egregious thing on this guy's profile, which is precisely why I'm going to spin a little vitriol in its direction. Because really? It's not that unusual. And I'd like to have a moment of explaining, Gender Politics for Idiots style, why it makes me want to snap pencils. Or pencilnecks.

A side issue in this discussion that I'm not going to get into is that part of what's in play here is not just what people will say, but what they think it's acceptable to say. Your user profile on a social networking site is not just some things about you -- it's the things which you think are the things you'd want other people to know. If you're not trying to come off clever and witty and generally nonchalant about it, you're probably trying to come off ironic for not doing so. Part of what gets my knickers in a bunch is the remembrance that this is the context in which Mr E-Pickup lists Women as one of his interests. (Along with concrete and classic cars. Uh-huh. But I digress).

OK. Perhaps you're saying that you like having sex. If this is what is meant by having women as an interest, then it's a very lame euphemism and I take a fair amount of exception to the use of the word "women" as a euphemism for anything at all, much less your getting your end in. But actually, that's the milder and much less offensive reading of what I think is going on here. If I challenged you with this, your eyebrows are going to pucker with hurt consternation and you'll claim that sex has nothing to do with it -- it's women. They're so fascinating. So mysterious. So amazing and changeable and endlessly intuitive and passionate and gentle.

You might even add something like not like men at all. I don't even care about this idiotic and vacuous last part, which exercises a whole lot of other people. No-one has a clear idea of what ought reasonably to count as a difference between men and women and which ought to be vilified as a horrifying example of gender discrimination, and frankly I don't really think that discussion is going anywhere.

The point is that you're talking about 50% of the goddamn world population. Saying that you are interested in them has literally no meaning except as a function of your simplistic, unreconstructed, utterly, utterly uninterrogated vision of what counts as a woman. And, so help me, if you claim in response that you are interested in their very variety, realise that that only means something relative to fixing the notion of "them".

God, this makes me feel so, so lonely.

Hell. Handbasket.

Crap.

Why ...

... in the name of all that is holy, is every single pair of women's trainers at my local sports superstore resplendent in shades of pastel pink, blue, and silver? Is there a giant market of off-duty Barbie princesses who long to give their itty bitty princess tootsies with the silver-glitter pedicure a rest from the glass slippers, but still need something to match their eye-watering pink wonderland outfit?

The men's department is wall-to-wall Big Bad Coolness. Everything is designed to look like the kind of thing you'd wear if you were an urban superhero who needed to serve Justice, fast, down wet alleys, in the dark. I want these shoes.

WTF?

The current Nike Women advertisement, which makes my eyes slitty with resigned aggravation, involves women being very athletic in one way or another with a voiceover that explains how little kudos they get, and closes up with a defensive challenge to "try to tell them that they're not athletes".

The point of the advertisement is evidently supposed to be that the women involved clearly are very athletic, QED. Fie on this supposed end. The assumption is that that real athletes have stadiums of people cheering for them and earn bucketloads of cash, and notably are men, thus, most egregiously of all, women need to defend their status as athletes in the first place.

I'm not an athlete. But I'd swallow Nike's shrill equality message without choking so much if the damn shoes weren't telling me that I'm supposed to be a Barbie princess.