Forget Marilyn

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves.

They didn't bother to find out who and what I was.

Instead they would invent a character for me. 
I wouldn't argue with them.

They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.

― Marilyn Monroe.

On August 5th of 2012, it will be fifty years since the death of Norma Jeane Baker, also known at various points throughout her life as Norma Jeane Mortenson, Norma Jeane Dougherty, Norma Jeane DiMaggio and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe.

Norma Jeane (pictured above) died in 1962 - the death of an older woman, alone in her bed with a stomach full of barbiturates. Yet, it would seem that, even today, Marilyn Monroe remains very much alive and well. Actually, she's everywhere.

Her face adorns a huge array of consumer products, including clothing, handbags, leather furniture, cigarette lighters, homewares, and even vodka bottles. According to Forbes Magazine, Monroe's name, voice and likeness continue to earn approximately $8 million every year, with no sign of profits declining any time soon.

The cultural (or should that be, pop-cultural?) fascination with Marilyn Monroe is further evidenced by the steady sales of over 600 books written about her life. She has been the subject of over a dozen film and television biographies, portrayed by actresses including Mira Sorvino, Michelle Williams, and in one upcoming tribute, Naomi Watts. She is regularly listed as having one of the most recognisable faces in the world.

And, despite her luscious figure, it is always her face, framed by its platinum halo, which is the most articulated in these images. The problem is, whatever image of Marilyn Monroe you encounter, in whatever format and emblazoned on whatever piece of mechandise, she's apt to be smiling.

Call it ironic, anachronistic, or even downright ghoulish, but the insistent fetishization of Monroe's beautiful face, and particularly of her smile, belies a few uncomfortable facts. Firstly, that this was the face of a deeply disturbed and unhappy woman who apparently took her own life. Secondly, that Marilyn Monroe simply does not exist. And she never did.

In the manner of many a mythological being, Marilyn Monroe emerged fully-formed from the void at some point during 1945, around the beginning of the time that the world began to forget Norma Jeane, if she had ever been known at all. Many volumes have detailed the procedures involved in the metamorphosis; the acting, singing and deportment lessons, the meticulous attention to makeup, lighting, and camera angles, the cosmetic surgeries and hormone creams, and the drawn-out search for the "right" shade of blonde, to name but a few. Studio executives determined that Norma Jeane should take her mother's maiden name of Monroe, and being the types of guys who prefer to market an alliterative package, proposed the first name of Marilyn - a name that Norma Jeane is said to have both despised and initially protested.

The resultant package was only too marketable. At the height of her fame, Norman Mailer dubbed Monroe to represent "every man's love affair with America". The ultimate blonde bombshell, Monroe captivated women and men alike with her breathless lisp and coy glances. Rubbing shoulders (and sometimes more) with actors, politicians and sports-stars, the intelligentsia and the gutter-press, paupers and Presidents, Marilyn played the part of the perfect sex symbol. Not that she cared that much for the role. "Being a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry," she commented, "especially when one is tired, hurt and bewildered". 


Tired? Hurt? Bewildered? These adjectives are almost irreconcilable with the lingering and saturating images of Marilyn Monroe at her flirty, voluptuous best. Yet, she frequently commented on her deep discomfort with the image she was forced to present. When travelling alone, she made notable attempts to shed the cumbersome image and name of Marilyn Monroe, checking into hotels under pseudonyms and wearing scarves to cover her famous, platinum curls. "A sex symbol becomes a thing", she said, "And I hate being a thing".


But we have made her a thing. The images that we see now of Marilyn Monroe represent a commodity, not a person. Even in death, Norma Jeane was unable to shed the image of Marilyn. Shortly after her premature death, Hugh Hefner made a public display of buying the burial plot next to hers, ostensibly so that he could spend eternity lying next to the most beautiful woman in the world. Over forty years later, he sold this plot at a substantial profit. Norma Jeane found no escape from Marily in death: she is still a fetishized sex symbol, even in her grave.

Andy Warhol also was quick to cash in on Norma Jeane's demise, glibly recounting that he had started experimenting with silkscreen printing during August 1962, and that "When Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face." One of these prints now resides on permanent display in New York's Museum of Modern Art.

In 1973, Elton John released "Candle in the Wind", further glamorizing (and cashing in on) Marilyn Monroe's life and tragic death. At first glance, Sir Elton could be credited for his sensitivity, for his inclusion of the lines, 

They put you on the treadmill/ And they made you change your name, 

and his acknowledgement that,

Even when you died/ The press still hounded you/ All the papers had to say / Was that Marilyn was found in the nude. 

Yet, the song becomes uncomfortable for its fetishization of female vulnerability. Illustrating Marilyn as a fragile candle, "never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in" clearly invites the listener to insert themselves as savior into an abortive rescue fantasy where Marilyn might just be alive today if only some special person would have treated her better.  A certain hypocrisy also emanates from Elton's castigation of the media for feasting on Monroe, while he himself profits from picking the carcass of her suicide.   

In any event, Elton John snatched back his tribute to Monroe in 1997 and slapped it onto the proceedings of Princess Diana's funeral, re-branded as "Goodbye English Rose". Now we have a choice of vulnerable, blonde, females for our rescue fantasy. 

A worthy question in all this is, why Marilyn? Certainly she is seen to epitomise beauty and glamour but, both in her day and later, no more so than other screen sirens such as Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner or Kim Novak, whose beautiful visages have faded into a relative obscurity with the passage of time. Likewise, Marilyn's popularity can't be put down to her talent, or Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and Vivien Leigh would be similarly feted. 

The jarring and inescapable truth is that our fascination with Marilyn is inextricable from the manner and timing of her death. She died at her peak and left an image that cannot be tarnished, of eternal youth, glamour and beauty. We will never see her aged mugshot in the manner of Zsa Zsa Gabor, or her eventual, octogenarian demise, like Elizabeth Taylor. When she picked up that bottle of pills in 1962, she escaped all temporal considerations and became ephemeral. 

Certainly, it is no news that Hollywood loves a premature death because it contributes to a perpetually youthful star whose image is always saleable; one need only look to the examples of James Dean, Jean Harlow, or Natalie Wood for evidence of that fact. But there is no equivalence between these icons and Monroe, either in the manner of their deaths or the magnitude of their posthumous fame. Dean died in a car accident, Harlow of kidney failure, and Wood in mysterious circumstances suggesting foul play - Monroe is the only one suspected of dying by her own hand. And, crucially, only in the case of Monroe may we reasonably suspect that inability to cope with the incredible pressures placed on her by her fame and promoted public image were instrumental in her death. 

And Marilyn is the only one worth $8 million per year, 5o years later.

Doubtless, a candle-lit vigil, or other expression of misguided public grief, will mark the anniversary of her death in August of this year. And doubtless, it will be accompanied by these very same images of Marilyn Monroe, worn on T-shirts or held up on placards, plastered on thermoses and wristwatches and cosmetic cases, even tattooed on bodies.

But in the context of her death, such iconography surpasses the inappropriate and borders upon the grotesque. We do her a disservice in remembering her under a name that she hated and which was not hers, and by glorifying in the manufactured images that burdened her so much. Trapped on a pedestal, Norma Jeane has been dehumanised by the glowing, golden Marilyn. Reduced to a buzzword, a sex symbol, a two-dimensional marketing strategy, this iconography freezes her forever as the very "thing" that she did not want to be. And it is these images, these conjured abstractions, that we forever associate with her, worshiping the construct that crushed Norma Jeane.

Moreover, what do we teach young women, focusing as we do on such glamorized depictions of Marilyn Monroe, if not that the safest path to fame and adulation is to look sexy, die young and leave a beautiful corpse? Even if beauty and fame cost you your happiness. Even if they cost your very life.

The only way to truly honour her life, or respect her death, is to do away with Marilyn Monroe. 

We need to forget Marilyn, and start remembering Norma Jeane.

RIP Norma Jeane Baker 

June 1, 1926 - August 5, 1962

Apocalypse, Soon

"You mark my words," says Spike, ex-army from the top of his buzz-cut to the tip of his heavy leather boots. "It's all going to shit, and you've got less than five years to make it out."

Spike takes a long, contemplative swig of his scotch and growls, ominously, "You mark my words."

From the verandah of his comfortable house, nestled into a few thousand acres of pristine bushland, the world doesn't look at all like it's going to shit, but perhaps that's just a function of the tricks that the sunlight plays in the eucalypts on clear days. On the hillside, the rustling treetops resemble showgirls in spangled skirts - the effect is one of glitter. Below the treeline, Spike gestures proudly to several brand-new water tanks, augmenting a battered original.

"There'll be enough for over a year of drought," he says. "And of course we're good for power with the solar grid. A hundred percent self-sufficient, in three years, that's the goal. We're at eighty percent, now. And that's not to mention the vegetables..."

As he shows me the beds of tomatoes, eggplant and pumpkin, and seed potatoes and the chili bushes, there's a flinty edge to his eyes and his voice belying the facade of merely an enthusiastic gardener. In a sense, nothing has changed for Spike in the twenty years since he was a Special Ops sniper in Bosnia - he is still a man on a mission for survival.

Spike says, "If it's not the oil crash, it'll be water. Either way, things can't go on much longer. Everybody smart is getting the hell out of the cities..."

Back in the city, Spike was my neighbour. Then, as now, he was an hospitable host with the ability to charm and unnerve his guests in equal measure.

"...The cities are doomed," he says, oddly cheerfully. "They'll be dying like flies."

I realise that "they", includes me.

"There'll be nothing," he shakes his head, "no water, no food, violence, it'll be like Mogadishu, but worse. The end of society, the end of fucking everything. But we'll be set, out here. It'll only be the farmers that survive. And if anybody comes to try and steal my water, my power, the food for my daughter, I'll be waiting for them."

There is a long pause. "I've got over ten thousand rounds."

And a gun-safe, well stocked. And that decade of Special Ops training. I suppress a shiver as the possibility occurs to me that, far from dreading an apocalypse, Spike's looking forward to it.

"I've a daughter to protect. A family. I'm not taking any fucking risks. From the house, I can take a person out from the top of the driveway." The driveway starts nearly a kilometre from the house, but Spike reels off the specs of several semi-automatic rifles he owns that could easily make the shot. He asks me if I have ever seen a gunshot wound.

"It's not like in the movies, where a bullet goes in and there's a neat little hole," scoffs Spike. "Shoot a person with something like this," he gestures to his shotgun, "and there's nothing left of them. It's like a bag full of guts, exploding. Cut you right through the middle." He rubs his hands together and his voice is grim with overtones of glee. "I won't be taking any chances. You mark my words."

I try to reconcile the competing images of Spike offering me a drink, and Spike blowing out my midsection with a semi-automatic rifle. Even I'm surprised by how easily the two seem to follow. Men like Spike are made of hard corners, which social niceties will only ever barely obscure. There is no doubt in my mind that, given the slightest threat to his family, Spike's tenuous civilian mindset would give way to the warrior sensibilities in which his character was forged. Something about the edge to Spike's voice assured me that, old friend or not, he'd blow me to pieces without a shred of dissonance should circumstances require. This is a man who has taken lives, before.

Some old soldiers, if you ask them in a quiet moment, admit an unfashionable truth. Some of them say that, despite the pain and futility and waste of it all, the things they saw and did, and the things that were done to them, war was still the best time of their lives. Some talk of the excitement of it, or of the camaraderie, or even just the sense of fighting for a "right" cause in a wrong world. Still others, for whom the war represented only the extremes of fear and horror, see peace and safety as bafflingly unrealistic concepts, flimsy as stage props and bound inevitably to crumble under the weight of reality.

For one reason or another, many men live with rifles tucked just behind their eyes. Whether they fear the return to savagery, or whether they long for it, they always expect it. And soon.

From inside the house comes the sound of Spike's little daughter, laughing and babbling after her bath. Spike's face lights up as he goes to embrace her. The evening passes pleasantly but my eyes are drawn back at times to the gun-safe, guarding the tools with which Spike will protect his tiny kingdom when the apocalypse comes.

The next morning, on my way home to my doomed city, I drive past the marker at the top of the driveway. As it recedes into the distance, I feel a palpable but inexplicable sense of relief.

Are the kids alright?

You might not guess this at a glance, but somewhere underneath the Hollywood styling, designer accessories and buoyant coiffing is a little girl of ten years old.

... And if that's not scary enough, this photo was actually taken when she was nine. Her name is Willow Smith, and she's widely touted as the Next Big Thing on the pop music scene after the success of her first single, Whip My Hair. She's not the first child in her family to hit the entertainment scene in a big way before she even hits her teens;

Recognise him? That's Jaden Smith, as he appeared opposite Jackie Chan in the remake of The Karate Kid. If the parental penny hasn't dropped yet, here's a family portrait to jog your memory:

Yep, Will Smith's kids are looking to end up as famous and successful as their Mum and Dad. And not everyone's happy about it.

Author Terry McMillan recently tweeted that:

The Smith children already act like child stars. There's an arrogance in their demeanor and behavior. I find it incredibly sad. It feels like the Smith children are being pimped and exploited. Or, they're hungry for fame. What about 4th grade?

She further hit out against the gushing descriptions of the children in public media - often from the children's parents - describing their prodigal talent and enthusiasm:

These kids don't already know what they "love". Total bullshit. They're not prodigies. They think Hollywood is real.

And it was in this comment that she tapped the vein of the issue. The coverage of the Smith children has always been carried out with a considered, kid-glove professionalism that ensures a message of their empowerment and stomps upon the merest suggestion of exploitation. The army of managers, choreographers, songwriters, agents, stylists and make-up artists behind the scenes are played down as far as possible, and the resulting efforts touted merely as each child's "individual style", as though it was arrived at in the usual course of nine year-old experimentation, during an afternoon with Mum's pilfered makeup and jewellery.

Not pictured: realistic styling by a 9 year old.

In September 2009, then aged 9, Willow Smith told radio host Ryan Seacrest, "just be an individual, you can't be afraid to be yourself... and you can't let anybody tell you that's wrong". Neat, both in the sense that it would seem to both prove the child's utter commitment to their public image, and absolve any adult stakeholders in Willow's career should things go down the proverbial shitter. Listen to the child, people! She's not being exploited or marketed, she's a talented child, expressing her individuality!

Now, naturally the world is full of little girls and boys who would love to be actors, singers, rappers or the like. In fact, this trend is so common that in a recent survey of British schoolchildren, the most frequent answer to "what do you want to be when you grow up?" was simply; "Famous". Many of us remember our abortive childhood fantasies of rock stardom or Oscar acceptance speeches, and dreamed feverishly of "real" parents who would pick us up one day and turn out to be rich and famous, paving our way to the red carpets and superdomes of the glamorous people.

No doubt, offered the deal that the Smith children have been born into (mega-star parents, unlimited access to the gears of fame creation) we would have jumped at the chance as well. We would have recorded the singles, we would have starred in the movies. We would probably have loved it - and we probably would have said so just as enthusiastically as Willow and Jaden.

We probably would have thought pretty highly of ourselves, too. Not in our scene, the busboy actors and taxi-driving musicians looking for a break in an industry where it's always been about who you know. Not for us, the cattle-call auditions where children are seen and dismissed in their hundreds per hour. Not for us, the agony of forging a new brand in an industry already splitting at the seams; the talented rubbing elbows with the mediocre, the beautiful frantically exercising their advantage over the ordinary, the rejects by their thousands lining the exit corridor, bitterly stroking the fantasy of a big break that never came.

I can imagine any of us, styled to perfection and adopting our image as our individual style, sitting on a couch with Jay Leno, saying how we were "born to do this", speaking of our love and passion for our work. I can imagine us believing in the adoration, in the money, in the fame, perhaps even until it became integral to who we were. Would we ever be able to be happy without the flash of the cameras and screams of the fans? Would we ever know another desire for our future lives?

So is this exploitation? Or, as McMillan would have it, pimping? Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith didn't respond publicly to McMillan's tweet, but it's clear that their intention is to give their children the best possible foothold in the slippery Hollywood market. Talented though the children undoubtedly are, it is understandable to criticize the way that coveted movie roles and recording contracts have fallen to them as a birthright, and at an age where they will be more likely to internalise their success as the deserved recognition of serious talent than to recognise it as a lucky side effect of their parentage.

But yet, the sheer volume of tickets and albums sold seems to speak for itself in that, for now, the Smith children are at the top of their games, and we are happily spending plenty of money to see them play. Perhaps someone is being exploited, and perhaps it is us.

What do you think?

Terrifying Search Terms

Sometimes the details dished out and presumed necessary to our lives can be far, far too much. For example, despite the media's insistence that I find this out, I never needed to know that Prince Charles murmured to Camilla that he wished to be her tampon. I have no idea what possessed my grandmother furnish me with a detailed description of the premature rupture of her hymen. I never needed to see Tara Reid's botched breast and stomach surgery. Or to hear that John Mayer waxes his pubic hair into the shape of a lightning rod, Lindsay Lohan is a "fire crotch", or that Lady Gaga thinks her creativity can be stolen through her vagina. I could have happily lived my life without any of this information.

But the very apex of my list of things I didn't need to know were some of the search terms that lead the net-surfing public to my humble little blog. With occasional blog titles such as Jew Skin Lampshade, In case you ever wondered what humans taste like and An Historical Compendium of Dick Jokes, some may argue that I brought this upon myself, but the fact remains that I was much, much happier before I logged on to Google Analytics.

The first few entries are misleadingly vanilla. For example, Jim and the Indians comes in with a healthy 121 searches this year. Variations of What not to name your kids and Vengeance is Mine Inc. total up to several hundred each. And then it starts getting more abstract.

Bitches

People must love us bitches cause over 300 individual search terms featured the word. Most were prosaically along the lines of bitch girl names, clever bitches or hot bitches take it up the (name your orifice) but some solo-handed surfers out there managed to go one better.

My favorite, terrifying search terms including the word bitch were fortunately limited to one search each, and include;

- Can you name your kid 'bitch'?

My response: "no".

- LBJ was a jew bitch

I wanted to put this in the next section but the "bitch" part seemed rather more operative than the "Jew" part.

- Zeus was a bitch

Totally agreed.

AND THE WINNER:

- 5pm is bitch raping time

Actually, this came up four times. I'm terrified.

Porn

Most readers will not be surprised to hear that this simple concept was elaborated in nearly 500 different search terms, most also including the words bitch, secret or nasty. And then there were some other somewhat inexplicable keywords, including:

- clever porn

This came up almost 50 times. Can someone please explain what makes porn clever?

- vengeance is mine porn

Did Roald Dahl sign off on this script?

AND THE WINNER:

- Admit it bitch, you were porn

I have no idea what this is meant to mean.

Tattoos and Jews

It seems that, despite my mother's horrified reaction to the idea, there are many sick individuals out there who have also toyed with the idea of preserving their tattoos after death, as I discussed in my first-ever post Jew Skin Lampshade. Over 50 searches were based on variations of "preserve tattoo after death", but the true horror only becomes evident when you scroll down and discover that variations of Jewskin, and Jewskin lampshade were searched OVER 100 TIMES. In addition, some charming individuals searched terms including:

- Where can I buy Jew skin?

I wouldn't have guessed you could, except...

- Jew skin for sale

Now I'm officially horrified.

AND THE WINNER:

- How to skin a Jew

Honestly - is there somewhere you can report this sort of thing?

Historical sex

On a lighter note, some people just can't get enough of Zeus' sexual shenanigans. The exact term Zeus rape appeared 17 times, but variations on the phrase pushed searches into the hundreds. Some stunners on the topic included:

- Did Zeus rape Danae?

- Did Zeus rape Europa?

- Did Zeus rape his mother?

Yes, yes, and - sadly, yes.

- Ron Jeremy as Zeus?

I can't scrub my brain clean enough, I tell you.

AND THE WINNER:

- Beatrice's tits in Dante's inferno

Searched twice to lead to this blog, despite no references anywhere here to Beatrice's tits.

The taste of humans

Sounds like the grand taboo is no longer that taboo. 12 searches were run using humans taste like pork? as keywords, an equal number for pork taste like human, and dozens more referenced cannibalism, pork, crackling, firemen, William Seabrook and "long pigs".

AND THE WINNER:

- Rump girl meat cannibal

This was searched up to A DOZEN times - by someone sick, no doubt.

Tony Abbott

Dozens of people came across this site whilst searching for Tony at election time, mostly with keywords including misogynist, abortion, adoption, shocking and hypocrite. Yet it seems that Tony is never without his fans, and thus;

THE WINNER:

- Tony Abbott sexiest ioning board (sic)

As I previously pointed out, his abs would look great at Mardi Gras.

And then...

There are those keywords that defy any decent categorisation - or even an explanation of how they lead to this site, such as:

- Clever masturbation

Is there a "smart" or "dumb" way to rub your dick until jizz comes out, dude?

- receding hairline beer belly sexy

And then finally...

THE WINNER:

- live donkey show

Somewhere on this blog I must have mentioned one, or this search term wouldn't have lead you here. I'm sorry... really.

Is "Sorry" Ever Good Enough?

"Zoe" furrowed her brows as if in physical pain while she told me the story, and asked me, almost imploringly;

"What could I say to her? I was supposed to disagree - to take control of the situation, somehow - but everything she said was true."

Zoe is finishing up her training as a psychologist, working in a psychiatric clinic where she is responsible for running group therapy. There are a range of personalities, backgrounds, and clinical presentations amongst her clients - many have mood disorders such as anxiety and depression, some have addictions, whilst others suffer from post-traumatic stress. All are on shaky ground in many respects. There's a lot of pain in the little room from which she runs the afternoon groups. And a raw nerve was touched last week.

One group member, "Rachel" told the group about how she had been a bully as a teenager. She related in detail how she had emotionally, and occasionally physically brutalised a particular girl she disliked, isolating her socially and effectively running her out of the school. Zoe sighed as she told me this part of the story, because, in her words, "She said she felt sorry, but Rachel sounded a lot sorrier for herself than for the things she did to that other girl. She was trying to relate it back to how troubled a teenager she, herself, had been. She had a point, but... well, I can see why it triggered what happened next."

What happened next was that another group member, "Jane", threw a chair at Rachel. As Zoe frantically tried to calm the situation, Jane screamed that bullies like Rachel had ruined her life, and that she didn't want to sit here listening to a sob story about how hard it had been for them to do it. And it was right then that Zoe faced her worst professional dilemma so far. She was obliged to defend Rachel - but she secretly agreed with Jane.

I can understand how torn Zoe must have felt. She, I, and many millions of other people around the world can remember only too well what it was like to be on the wrong end of a high school bully. When I was 15, the new Queen Bee pulled a Rachel-style attack on me, and it's painful to admit that, a decade later, I still have occasional nightmares about that time. Within a few short weeks, she had orchestrated a coup that permanently cost me the girls who had previously been my best friends. Of course, she didn't stop there. In typical Queen Bee Bully style, there were my secrets to disseminate, nasty rumours to be spread, and boycotts to be organised. To this day, I'm still not sure why I was the particular object of her wrath - but then, the motives of bullies are generally mysterious to their victims. All I know is that she was wrathful, ruthless, and extremely efficient in her stated aim of destroying my confidence and shrinking me into a miserable wreck for the remainder of my high school years.

Two years after I was shredded by the bullies, my old best friend, who had not spoken to me since, decided to try to apologise. I was at an end-of-school party when she approached and asked rather nervously for "a moment to talk". For a moment, I was so happy I nearly choked on my beer. Maybe, after all this time, she was going to say she was sorry for how she had treated me, and maybe try to patch up our friendship which, despite everything, I still missed. Maybe she was going to admit that Queen Bee had been wrong.

She did apologise, in a sense. Once we got out of earshot of the other partygoers, she told me that she felt "pretty bad about everything". She hoped I could forgive her, she said.

I was caught somewhere between happiness and indignation. I tried to keep my voice steady.

"After all this...? Well, I mean, if you want to sort of make an... effort to --"

That's as far as I got. Her eyes flickered nervously as she stammered;

"Oh no! I mean, not like that... like, make an effort or anything...", she trailed off lamely, and suddenly there was almost a nakedness between us of perfect understanding.

"You don't actually care what you did to me, do you? You just want me to forgive you so you don't have to feel bad, right?" My voice shook a little and a tear dripped down my nose during the long pause before she shook her head, sadly, and walked off. We never spoke again.

Would sorry have been good enough if it had come with reparations?

I can't say. All I know is that it felt empty to hear her ask for forgiveness without ever needing to suffer, or acknowledge the suffering she caused me. Jane must have felt the same way, listening to Rachel talk about her past and ask the group to acknowledge her experience. Jane's life had been scarred by people like Rachel, and now Rachel was asking for forgiveness, sympathy - all the things she had not shown her victims. To Jane, these were the crocodile tears of an unrepentant predator.

In the end, Zoe had managed to defuse the situation, calm Jane down, and get the group back on track. But she was shaken, having realised a weakness she hadn't known would affect her professionally. Part of her had wanted to stand up with Jane and yell at Rachel that Sorry wasn't good enough, and that No, she was not understood. She was Not Forgiven. Of course, she didn't. Her years of training served her well, and she ran through her usual spiel about how the group was a space where we had to show respect for others and allow them to express themselves and how criticism should be brought up in a respectful way and yada yada yada.

"But the whole time," she said to me later, "the whole time, I felt so wrong inside."

In case you ever wondered what humans taste like...

Admit it, you've probably wondered about this ever since Hannibal Lecter sneered about eating an auditor's liver "with fava beans and a nice Chianti". But, let's face it, there are a paucity of people to ask, and those in the know tend to be close-lipped on the subject. In the modern age of broken taboos, the last one left intact might be the frank admission that you chowed down on a person.

So what do we taste like? Game? Chicken? If we use Lecter's choice of wine as a barometer, we might taste like beef, which matches well with a hearty Italian red. Or perhaps, if we listen to Fat Bastard from The Spy Who Shagged Me, we taste like pork (the other other white meat). Actually, the pork hypothesis is a strong one - Christopher Hitchens elaborates on the similarities between humans and pigs in God Is Not Great, in an attempt to explain why so many religions eschew pork products. Basically, he surmises, we aren't supposed to eat pork because pigs are much, much too like people.

It makes some sense that we would avoid eating an animal so much like ourselves - pigs are balder than most stock, and a lot more intelligent. Their organs are so much like ours that pig insulin was given to diabetic patients until a synthetic type was developed. Pigs are said to cry tears of grief, and to scream in a very human manner when trussed up for slaughter. The slang term for roasted human amongst Papua New Guinean tribes that practice cannibalism is "long pig", and Hitchens notes that firefighters tend to dislike pork, and especially pork crackling. Apparently, once you've smelt a burned human carcass... well, I'm sure I don't need to finish that sentence.

So we taste like pork, right?

Wrong, according to a New Yorker called William Seabrook, who decided to break the last taboo and try human flesh whilst travelling in West Africa in the 1930s. Finding that it was not uncommon for the locals to munch on roasted people from time to time, Seabrook approached the village chief and asked if humans really did, as he had heard, taste like pork. The chief was puzzled by this question, stating than that he had eaten pork many times and that human flesh was nothing like it, nothing at all. (We can suspect that he must have followed this up with "you dumb-ass whitey", or similar). Seabrook bided his time and waited for the opportunity to find out for himself.

Soon afterwards, he found that opportunity, in the form of a freshly killed 30 year old man whom the locals assured Seabrook was "not murdered". Seabrook never bothered to ascertain the man's cause of death, but instead set to work in cooking a small rib roast and a "sizeable rump steak". "I proposed", he wrote, "to make a meal of it as one would any other meat, with rice and a bottle of wine". And make a meal of it he did, as well as taking meticulous and detailed notes on the texture, colour, smell and taste of the raw and cooked portions.

If you're still with us, then here is the crux of what he had to say:

"I took a big swallow of wine, a helping of rice, and thoughtfully ate half the steak. And as I ate, I knew with increasing conviction and certainty exactly what it was like. It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef...

"The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in colour, texture, smell, as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable... as to the 'long pig' legend... it was totally, completely false".

Seabrook, the man who referred to himself "thoughtfully" chewing on a dead man's cooked buttock, wrote that he felt "a sense of pride in having carried something through to its finish", and congratulated himself upon "a long-standing personal curiosity satisfied at last". At the time of writing his memoirs, he noted that "Neither then, or at any time since have I had any serious personal qualms, either of digestion or conscience". That said, he became known as The White Cannibal of New York, and eventually committed suicide in 1945 amid speculation that he was going insane. (It took people that long to notice something was wrong here?)

But one man's pork is another man's veal... and another man's tuna, if we listen to Issei Sagawa, the "Cannibal of the Bois de Boulogne", who famously murdered and ate his unrequited love in 1981 in Paris. Sagawa related that her flesh was "soft" and "odorless", "like tuna". However I think we can assume that any dickhead who considers tuna to be "odorless" (not to mention, any dickhead who thinks he can emulate the health and beauty of a woman by ingesting her) can be safely written off as complete whack-job with too much time on his hands.

So to return to Lecter - take a bow! According to Seabrook, our most credible source on the subject, his wine choice (a nice Chianti) is a stylish match with the regional Italian speciality of tender veal.
Or person.

Purgatorio

Throughout the drawn-out process of moving house, it seems that almost everyone I know has sympathetically opined that "it's the second most stressful thing you'll go through in your life", with the first being divorce. I'm not sure where everyone has apparently sourced this piece of information, but it's become a modern axiom - at least in well-fed Western countries where the fear of war, starvation, extreme poverty or genocide has receded into a comfortable background. In any event, I disagree. Moving house was far more stressful than my divorce.

"It's like the fifth circle of Hell", Clever Colleague suggested helpfully.

"What gets punished in the fifth circle?" I asked, warily.

CC furrowed her brows. "Actually, I don't know. It just seemed like a good, mid-level sort of Hell. Would you prefer the seventh circle?"

Unknowingly, CC was right on the money. The fifth circle of Dante's Inferno is where the wrathful and slothful are sent for punishment. (I'm a prime candidate in both departments, alternating my spare afternoon hours between road rage and siestas.) Of course, that's not the only place that us lazy bums can end up. The other is Purgatorio.

Dante envisioned purgatory as an island of concentric terraces rising upwards out of the Southern Oceans. Each sin gets its own terrace, where the wicked endure various degrees of tortuous suffering in the name of spiritual growth. The punishments, ironically, fit the crimes, and therefore we find the Proud struggling to hold their shoulders up under the weight of huge boulders, the Gluttonous abstaining from food and drink... and the slothful, running in perpetuity to atone for their laziness on Earth.

I was struck by the comparison. Rather than being Hell, moving house is basically a form of Purgatory on Earth, where we are forced to confront our months or years of slothful housekeeping and haphazard storage. Thus, for over a month, Clever Partner and I were constantly running to atone for our sins. We marvelled with the hindsight of a soul in Purgatory - didn't we know that the oven should have been cleaned every six months? Could we not have forseen the problems inherent in simply shoving unwanted items out of the way to the top of bookshelves or underneath tables? Should we not have realised that our failure to properly clean out five years' worth of accumulated junk from various expat flatmates would result in a mountain of detritus that would take the council three collections to dispose of?

Well, apparently not. We didn't, and, considering the degree to which comparisons between moving house and Hell are readily accepted, nobody else does, either. And now that we have worked out way through Purgatory to the Paradise of the New House, let us bow our heads and pray:

"May we always remember to scrub the grout,
Have the wisdom to unblock the downspout.
Free us from rising damp and insect hordes,
From leaking taps and rotten old floorboards.
May we never seek to store things overhead
Atop shelves and cupboards, or below our bed.
Deliver us from black-spot mould
And, please, before this house is sold
Shall we ever strive to clean, and then
Roll up our sleeves and clean again."

Amen.

Being Right When Nobody Will Listen

Modern history is strewn with the carcasses of women who died for their cause.

This is not their story.

This is the story of a man whose life was also laid down to advance the lot of women. His name was Ignaz Semmelweis, and his name should be better known than it is, because women out there, everywhere, owe him big time.

Incidentally, "strewn with carcasses" is a good way to start this story, because Semmelweis was a doctor in a time when medicine wasn't too advanced. In the 1830s, a time before antisepsis, anaesthetics, germ-theory, or any of today's medical trimmings and trappings, Ignaz made his way from his native Hungary to study medicine in Vienna. By 1846, he was the head of Vienna's General Obstetric Hospital, where, incidentally, maternal deaths averaged at about 10% of admissions. They all seemed to display the same symptoms; a high fever, abdominal swelling, and skin pustules. Semmelweis wrote that he was perplexed by the death rate - even women delivering in the streets were dying less often than women in the clinic. But by 1847, he had discovered something brilliant - and unprecedented.

A colleague of old Ignaz had cut his hand whilst conducting an autopsy, and within a few days died with the same presenting symptoms as the mothers in the clinic. So Ignaz Semmelweis concluded that "cadaverous particles" carried on the hands might actually be causing the deaths. He instituted a policy which was to see him hounded out of the medical profession: compulsory hand-washing in a chlorine solution.

Within a few months of his policy's implementation, two things had occurred in a noticeable fashion. Firstly, women were dying at radically lower rates - the death rate had dropped from 10% to less than 2%. Secondly, Ignaz's popularity and credibility had plummeted. Many doctors considered the idea that they carried disease-causing particles on their hands to be both nonsensical and the highest form of insult. Semmelweis was dismissed from his post at the hospital in 1848 on the spurious accusation of political activism, and openly ridiculed by the medical profession to the point where he returned to Budapest.

As his credibility wore through, so did his sanity. Semmelweis began writing angry letters to anyone who would read them, and eventually published in 1961 a book of "Open Letters" lambasting the entire medical profession as well as many famous individuals. In the last decades of his life, he became a man obsessed. All conversations were turned to childbed fever. He began stopping unknown couples in the street and tearfully begging them to ensure, should they ever have children, that the doctor washed his hands. He began drinking heavily and visiting prostitutes. Some believed that his brain may have been succumbing to syphilis.

Eventually, in 1865, he was sold out. A colleague persuaded his wife to allow Semmelweis to be committed to a mental institution, where he was subjected to beatings, placed in a straitjacket, and administered laxatives and enemas in the customary style of the day. A slight wound sustained in a beating from the guards turned gangrenous, and in an ironic twist which would be glorious were it not so terrible, Semmelweis died from precisely the disease he had spent his lifetime attempting to beat; septicaemia.

Had he only lived a little longer, Semmelweis would have seem himself vindicated by history. With the work of Pasteur and Lister, germ-theory became accepted and the sensible policy of handwashing made compulsory practice. Semmelweis' name now graces a university, a museum, and several medical facilities, whilst his visage has graced European coins and postage stamps. In Hungary he is known as "the saviour of mothers". Oddly enough, the psychological catchphrase "the Semmelweis Reflex" is sometimes used to denote the kind of knee-jerk reaction people take to things that fall outside their accepted frame of reference.

I guess the take home lesson here is that it's hard to be right when nobody will listen. Ignaz Semmelweis was by no means the first person to find that out (just ask Socrates), but his story is particularly ironic and painful because he wasn't actually asking that much. The man lost his life and his sanity because people didn't want to wash their hands.

So, like I said, we owe him big time.

The Sad Stories of Hoover and Lotto

Ten years ago, a young man of my acquaintance made an interesting decision. Well, two interesting decisions. The first was to experimentally apply a vacuum cleaner for the purposes of sexual release. The second was to tell all his high school buddies about it.

It must have come as a big surprise to this young man that his friends didn't think his idea to be as clever and revolutionary as he did. Rather than congratulating his creativity, they merely pissed themselves laughing, dubbed him "Hoover", and continued to call him that until the end of high school.

My Very Clever Polyamorous Friend notes a similar situation which arose in his single-sex boarding school. Apparently a young man was overheard telling an unknown party on his mobile phone that; "I've had a look around, and I'm pretty sure I've got the biggest one in year 9". The unfortunate youth was evermore known as "Lotto" (The Big One).

High school was riddled with bizarre and cruel nomenclature, which prompts me to wonder; what would you do if the world at large knew your high school nickname? Could Hoover, an attorney nowadays, still hold up his head at the office if his colleagues knew?

Here are a few other examples which might be difficult to explain:

- Clever Sister's friend "Babs" (thus named for looking "like he works in a kebab shop")

- Clever Bitch's ex-boyfriend "Scrotum" (so named, ironically, by a peer support leader who looked down on the shivering year 7 and guffawed; "Hey, this kid looks like a scrotum!").

- Clever Bitch's friend "Bald Eagle" (a word to the wise - never let your friends see your junk until there's some grass on the pitch).

Luckily, Babs had a shave and Eagle grew some pubes. Scrotum still looks a little like one, but is a financial adviser nowadays. Still, I wonder if any of them live in vague unrest, fearing the day that someone finds out their high-school nicknames. Those things stuck for five years - if you let them back in now, they could be for life.

What are the worst nicknames you recall from your high school?

"Straight Preferred"

The advertisement hanging at my local cafe was one of those handmade types with little tear-off phone number tabs at the bottom. Someone was looking for a new flatmate, and specified some important information for potential applicants; price, location, and "preferred criteria" for the new roomie. He or she should speak English, hold a professional job, have no pets, and only smoke outside. And then, my mouth fell open. Did that really say "straight"?

It did. Someone had, apparently without shame, publicly stated their unwillingness to consider a gay person as a flatmate. Not content with simply meeting some applicants and having a chat, the advertiser was so uncomfortable with or afraid of homosexuality that he felt the need to deter gay applicants at the first opportunity.

To some minds, this is fair enough, as the advertiser has a right to choose their new flatmate, and that they might as well get their prejudices out in the open in order to spare any potential gay applicants the time and trouble.* To me, it feels like plain old discrimination. Let's not forget that we have laws against this type of thing; if the advertiser had have been looking for an employee rather than a flatmate, his eligibility criteria would have gotten him into a lot of trouble. However it appears that whilst his prejudice would not be tolerated in a professional context, it is entirely acceptable in his personal life. And the fact that he didn't hesitate to post a discriminatory advertisement in an inner-city coffee shop speaks volumes about the attitudes towards homosexuality in our society.

The elephant in the room here is that discrimination against homosexuals has in recent years become far more socially acceptable than the old-school bastions of racism or sexism. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Opinion pages of the broadsheet newspapers. Whereas no respectable paper would dream of publishing a radical treatise on why women are inferior to men, or white people smarter than black people, it is all too common to flick the papers open and find a long-winded article or letter defining homosexuality as a sin, linking it to paedophilia, or declaring it a mental illness. Despite our legislation, it seems that gays are an easy target, particularly when you invoke your religion as an excuse for your prejudice.

Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about the kind of person who has a blanket opposition to gays, or any other minority group other than tolerate them in the way that they refuse to tolerate others.
Or maybe just scribble "Hate Criminal!" at the bottom of their advertisement.

* The situation is similar at my university, where international students commonly advertise for flatmates, specifying "Asian preferred" on the posters. If this is defensible, it is so on the basis that people may feel more comfortable living with people who are from culturally similar backgrounds, however I somehow doubt that this argument would save me from being called racist if I had posted an advertisement stating "white preferred".

Is it reasonable to specify your preference for a particular racial group or sexual orientation when advertising for flatmates, or is it just discrimination?

Wax On, Wax Off

Clever Bitch had a nasty cold the last few days, and spent some time recuperating in front of re-runs of Sex and the City. Leaving aside the question of what a feminist is doing watching that particular show, there's a moment in the second season where Samantha, having recently trimmed her hedges, wonders aloud just what is so appealing to men about women with no hair "down there". Miranda, ever the cynic, responds acidly; "Because they want little girls."

I've never had a Brazilian, less on moral grounds than due to the triple deterrents of pain, expense, and humiliation (think getting down on all fours so that a stranger can rip hairs out of your arse-crack - then paying for the privilege). However, a girl I know (let's called her "Christine") marches into the beauty salon every fourth Tuesday and parts with forty-five dollars to have her pubic hair ripped out with hot wax. I've met Christine a few times after emerging from her ordeal - wiping her eyes, muttering in a horrified tone of the expense and wincing in recollection of the pain. Yet, Christine insists, she has the Brazilian for herself. I've never been brave enough to point out to her that she never used to wax "for herself", until she started dating Angry Restauranteur.

So, why precisely do both women and men want to wipe Tassie off the map? It's not a modern phenomenon- ancient Greek women depilated their entire bodies, including pubic hair, and various cultures have been doing the same ever since. It's as popular in high art as low-grade porn, with solicitors and strippers, with mothers and maidens. The artist John Ruskin never consummated his marriage with his first wife due to a general disgust with her body, and in particular her pubic hair. In all his years examining art, he had never seen such a thing depicted in a statue or painting and found it repulsive on his wedding-night. From these fascinations spring an entire industry to groom women's pubes into submission - but why?

Desmond Morris, the author of The Naked Ape and The Naked Woman amongst others, writes that women's bodies have evolved to be more neotonous - that is, resembling their childlike forms - than men's. Women's bodies are softer and rounder, our body hair finer, sparser, and paler in colour. Because males are instinctively protective towards children, they are suckers for women who look like children. Most women and men have even played this card consciously - women love men's clothes both for the comfort and also because they point out to the man just how little we are in comparison to them - just how vulnerable and cute - the little woman drowning in the giant track-pants.

So what about pubic hair? Morris also dispels the myth that pubic hair serves a protective or hygienic function. In fact, he states that pubic hair is entirely useless to a woman - it is there solely as a "flag" to indicate sexual maturity to males, much as the man's beard indicates maturity to females.

So, here we find ourselves at an impasse - men love women who look like children, but use pubic hair as a marker that they're not in fact children and can be approached in a sexual manner. Women want to look neotonous, so they shave their legs and underarms, and wax off their maturity flag. Bringing us back to Miranda's question - is the net result of all the pain, effort and trouble anything other than to look like a little girl?

Ladies and gentlemen - what do you think about Brazilians? What are your reasons for getting one or not getting one?

Year Of The Bimbo

The Year of the Ox is upon us again, and the women's magazines are once again packed with glossy star-charts depicting our fortunes for the year ahead.

Horoscopes, and other such pseudo-scientific chicanery, have somehow wormed their way into our most respectable newspapers, as well as our most flimsy tabloids and glossy magazines. I don't remember a time when one could pick up a publication and not be faced with shrew-faced con-women with pseudo-mystical names such as Athena Starwoman posturing their "talent" through writing "predictions" so nebulous as to be applicable to virtually everyone. That is, unless one was leafing through a publication which is aimed exclusively at men. It seems to the publishers that the exclusive consumers of this brain-rotting diet must be women.

It doesn't even seem to matter what type of woman you are. Everything from the celebrity rags (e.g. New Idea, Woman's Day, Who) to the fasion-and-sex glossies (Cosmopolitan and Cleo) to the brick-heavy mixes of journalism and haute-couture (Marie-Claire, Madison, Vogue) contain pseudo-scientific content as regular features. Whether women are bored housewives, teenage schoolgirls, high-powered executives, or anything in between, the horoscopes are provided.

Now, I can't really blame the celebrity rags - even their "factual" content is a heady mix of lies, conjecture, and inside information from anonymous "pals", "insiders" and "neighbours". Cosmo and Cleo can't be blamed either - they would be unreadable even without the inclusion of astrology (well - that's unless you want to know about 58 babe-a-licious ways to make him climax using only a feather, an ice cube and your elbow). The real villains are the top-shelf women's mags, that target young professionals, and apparently credit women with independent incomes as well as independent thought. They present dense, well-written articles on important issues - but expect that after you've read about the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war in the Congo, or female circumcision in Somalia, signed their tear-off petition and sent it to Amnesty International - well, what else would you desire but to read your horoscope?

Flipping through equivalent men's magazines such as GQ one finds no such equivalent patronisation of their readership (unless it's the pages of advertisements for sex toys - but you'll find those in women's magazines too). And, I can't help but wonder, are millions of young women around the world developing interests (and often expending precious time, money and energy) in pseudo-science just because it continues to be shoved down their throats? In a bizarre twist of usual economic principles, it looks like demand is actually being driven by supply. In effect, we read - and believe - our horoscopes, just because they are there.

Naomi Wolf, in her incredible, seminal work The Beauty Myth, points out that as women have become more independent and gained more rights, new ways have to be found by patriarchal structures in which to keep women subjugated. She argues that the focus upon physical beauty, which requires massive expenditure of time, money, physical effort and psychological energy, effectively allows women to subjugate themselves more effectively than men have done for centuries.

Would it be too much of a stretch to apply this argument to the presentation of pseudo-science in women's magazines? Perhaps horoscopes, moon-calendars, feng-shui charts, numerology and so-called clairvoyants are yet another insidious way of keeping women's minds from the important issues at hand, or misplacing our energies in fixing them. Who cares if you're not earning as much as your male colleagues at work, when moving a pot-plant into your Money Corner will see you rolling in the bucks? Why end a relationship with an abusive or inattentive partner, when Venus is on the rise, bringing with it a mystical new age of love and mutual respect?

At best, the magazines are patronising us with facile explanations for the complexities of our lives.
At worst, they're deliberately dumbing us down.

Do you read your horoscope? Does it annoy you that publications targeted at intelligent women still expect us to be interested?
Or is the Bitch just being a Bitch this week?

What Not To Name Your Kids

I'm getting to that age where my friends are beginning to breed en masse. Fortunately, I like children. I'm happy to babysit, change nappies, visit hospitals with armfuls of flowers, and to smile and nod at the interminable explanations of feeding patterns, sleepless nights and developmental milestones. In fact, the only thing that makes me want to scream and tear my hair out is what my friends are naming their children.

Ridiculous child-naming practices are de rigueur nowadays, apparently in every social sphere from billionaire celebrities to dole-queuing teenage mothers.
Below, I've attempted to list some of the most egregious trends in child nomenclature.

1- The Boy's Name For Girls
Step 1: Find a boy's name that you like, such as James, William, or Charles.
Step 2: Give birth to a girl instead.
Step 3: Call her Jamie, Billie or Charlie and congratulate yourself upon your individuality.

2 - The Surname
Hands up who has recently met a child named "Mackenzie"? What about "Taylor"? If I had ten hands, they would all be up. In celebrity-land, Brooke Shields and Nicole Ritchie have jumped on this bandwagon as well, naming their daughters (respectively) Grier and Harlow.

3- The Name You Spell Yourself
Tay-lah, Tayla, Tailagh, Taylhar... oh, excuse me but I think your bourgeois pretensions might be showing...

4 - The Mis-spelled Foreign Name
A girl I know named her daughter "Channelle". Yes, that's right. Like Chanel, but with some extra letters thrown in so that the child can feel individual despite her obvious namesake. (In fact - this one breaks the surname rule as well - but I guess it's preferable to calling a child Coco. Are you reading this, Courtney Cox and David Arquette?). Another friend of mine, apparently shying away from all the boring normality implied by Chantelle introduced me to her daughter Shontel. I weep for the future.

5 - The Name You Invent Yourself
Mnemonics are bad enough (think "Taome" - The Apple Of My Eye), but the worst of the worst must be the laughable attempt of those bastions of elegance and understatement, Peter Andre and Katie Price (AKA Jordan) to create a name for their daughter. Princess Tiaamii, the poor brat's name, is a merging of the names of Andre's mother (Thea) and Price's mother (Amy), with "Princess" whacked in front for good measure. In the words of Price herself; "we added some extra letters to make it unique, and some accents to make it look interesting". A class act all the way.
Apologies - My computer does not seem to have the functional capacity to include the various accents over vowels in Tiaamii.

6 - The Common Noun
Apart from the names of flowers and jewels, common nouns as names are, thank goodness, largely restricted to celebrities (who could forget baby Apple Martin?). However, we will know that common nouns-as-names have crossed over to the common domain when we eventually meet a child named Wingnut or Ashtray.

7 - The Celebrity Tribute Name
Apart from the aforementioned Harlow, dishonourable mentions go to Geri Halliwell for naming her daughter Bluebell Madonna (extra demerit points for Bluebell), and to the US couple who couldn't get a birthday cake inscribed to their son Adolf Hitler Campbell.

8 - The Celebrity-Offspring Tribute Name
Until Lleyton and Bec Hewitt named their daughter Mia, it wasn't a name you heard very often. Now it's in the top 5 most popular baby names in Australia, and overused to the point of sticking in your throat. Ditto Bindi (Irwin). Ditto Matilda (Ledger). But not, strangely enough, Sunday Rose...

9 - The Reminiscent-of-Conception Name
Whenever my friend Airlie tells someone her name, it's as likely as not that they will make the same joke I did; "What, were you conceived at Airlie Beach?". The answer is yes. The New Zealand registry of Births revealed that in recent years, it has barred parents from naming their newborns such epithets as "Midnight Chardonnay" and "Number 16 Bus Shelter". Please. We don't need to know the details of the conception. The baby's enough proof that you had sex. Ok?

10 - The Joke Name
Those New Zealanders are at it again! A few months ago, a judge allowed 13-year old Tallulah Does The Hula From Hawaii (last name suppressed) to change her given name, ruling that her parents were irresponsible to give it to her in the first place. In France, a court refused to allow Mr and Mrs DeFrance to name their daughter Marie-Antoinette Reine, which would have rendered her (in English) "Marie Antoinette, Queen of France".
I've been assured that Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz's baby, Bronx Mowgli, is not a joke. However, I remain to be convinced.

Anything to add to the list? Anything you would remove?
What's the worst name you've heard someone give a child?

The Princess Litmus Test

I'm by no means the first person to note the problems with what fairy-tales could be teaching kids. Veritably, fairy-tales are rife with infanticide (Hansel and Gretel), incest (Many Furs), cannibalism (Hansel and Gretel again), genetic determinism based on birth order (anything featuring a Seventh-Son or -Daughter) and maleficent or outright murderous step-family (Cinderella, Snow White, etc.). Some of the more unpalatable devices have been omitted from public consumption in recent years; for instance, it's difficult to find a current copy of Cinderella, which depicts the public torture of the evil-stepmother and -stepsisters which featured at the end of original versions. In another act of housekeeping by Disney, Ariel the Little Mermaid traded her voice for legs, whilst Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid endured legs which were paid for in agonising pain - every step she took on them was enchanted to feel that she was walking on upturned knives.

What the modern fairy-tales don't omit, however, is what I consider to be the most dangerous device of all - the notion of innate royalty. And, more frighteningly, how royalty is operationalised to children to, socialised by ideas of tiaras, pretty dresses, castles and white horses, are taught to aspire to it.

The Princess and the Pea instructs young readers that a Princess can easily be identified from a "commoner" through the application of a simple test - a Princess Litmus Test - where she is put to bed on a boiled pea beneath twenty mattresses and twenty feathered-eiderdowns. The take-home points from this engaging story, regarding the properties of a Princess (that is, as repeatedly emphasised, a true Princess), are as follows:

a) She will be beautiful (with tiny hands and feet, flaxen hair, and skin as white as milk, in most translations), mild-mannered, and pliable enough to allow herself to be subjected to bizarre experiments designed to determine her lineage.
b) She will be "delicate" - to the point where she is unable to sleep on a boiled pea, even when this pea is underneath twenty mattresses and twenty eiderdowns.
c) She will suffer from a bizarre skin condition which will cause her to break out in bruises after spending a sleepless night in said pea/mattress/eiderdown arrangement.
d) She will complain heartily of her mental and physical stress from the event, in front of the people who did her a favour by putting her up for the night.
ERGO: This will hook her a royal wedding and "happily ever after", as only a true Princess could exhibit such delicacy and fragility.

Take-home points for little girls (who are taught to idolise Princesses) include:

a) Princesses really are a whole different species to you and me.
b) Princesses are, without question, beautiful (and blonde, and thin, and white).
c) Princesses should not be able to cope with anything.
ERGO: The ultimate aspiration presented to little girls is to be pretty, wear a nice dress, and marry a prince after demonstrating the ultimate in physical inferiority and self-indulgent hysteria over creature comforts.

Recently, when I asked some little girls I was taking care of for the afternoon what they wanted to play. The answer was, of course, "Princesses!", and was the same when I asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. I caught myself, for one moment, trying to explain to a five-year old in a pink tulle dress-up skirt that Princesses are just like you and me, but with more expensive outfits.

"They're not," I explained,"really any different to other people. You're just the same as them."

The little girl didn't believe me. Why would she, when everyday, imagined princesses are presented to her in their rosy, golden glory, complete with storybook Prince. I suddenly had a sneaky idea. I pulled out a glossy magazine from another room, and flicked through until I found a royal; Princess Beatrice, looking pallid and unattractive at a London event.

The little girls were unanimous in declaring that she didn't look like a Princess at all. Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, playing with her children in a parka on a beach, was judged the same way. In fact, the only person that the little girls agreed did look like a Princess was Hilary Duff, in a pink dress on a red carpet.

Even real Princesses were failing the Litmus Test.

In the end, I don't think I managed to rid those little girls of their illusions about royalty. In their hearts, they know quite well that Princesses are beautiful, pink-clad, and better than real people. Instead, I think that the only take-home point I provided to the little girls that day was that they wanted to be Hilary Duff. OK by me, so long as it doesn't imply skin trauma from sleeping on a boiled legume.

Working Girls - and being mistaken for one

I live in a certain part of a certain city that is commonly described as "notorious". It has all the hallmarks that polite society attempts to avoid - such as dark, syringe-littered alleyways, spaced-out locals begging outside the train station, and a certain baked, dead look about the few patches of trees and grass clinging to the concrete. If this place has seen better days, it hasn't been for a long, long time.

I've seen my share of shit around here. I have a lot of stories. The young, crying girl with the ripped shirt and methadone-smeared eyes who took refuge in my house for a few hours after turning her first trick is one. The guy who tried to sell me heroin which he pulled out of his three-year old son's pocket is another. Then, there's nearly getting pole-axed by an umbrella-wielding teenager after she ripped me off for weed. There's watching a married couple in their fifties fight in the street until a heavy blow split her face open like a plum. There's finding the little girl outside the pub, begging me to get her mother off the pokies for her. And, of course, there's my occasional porch-sleeper, but that's another blog.

You might call my neighborhood "colourful". In a strange way, I fit right in here.

So it's not surprising that I started to occasionally patronise the clusters of pushers up on the corner. They sell bad pot at high prices in small quantities, but at least they're close. And they're there when you stumble home drunk, at midnight.

The summer drought always bodes badly for the weed supply, and times have been tight recently around here. The cops landed a huge raid a couple of weeks ago, which didn't improve the lot of the local dealers much. So, a few nights ago, I found myself waiting in the most dangerous part of town for my "fella" to show back up and slip me a gram. A young guy, unusual only for having white skin in this part of town, gestures me over with a standard;

"Hey! Sista!"

I sidle over and smile. Maybe he's holding. He immediately disabuses me of that belief.

"Are you holding, sista?"

I apologise. I'm not holding.

"Do you use?" he asks.

I look down at his face. He has a junkie complexion - greyish skin, sheened with sour sweat and dotted all over with greasy pimples. Mostly it's the hollows under the eyes, and the twisted, bitten lips which betray how much pain this guy is in. He's suffering.

"No mate," I reply. "Not anymore, anyway. Dodged that bullet." I shrug.

He looks at me more intently, searching.

"I know you from somewhere," he says.

"I'm local. You've probably seen me around."

"No... somewhere else." He pauses and stares at me, grasping for recognition. Suddenly he seems to work it out.

"Did you work?" he asks. "Ever work ... at all?"

It takes me a moment to process the peculiar emphasis on the word "work". Then I get it.

"No, mate. Not in that industry, anyway."

"I'm sure that's how I know you," he nods to himself, apparently sure that he has known me in the Biblical sense. And for cash.

I'm not offended at being taken for a prostitute. It's not even the first time. So many people here operate on a completely different plane around here, and ethics hardly come into it. It's a matter of survival.

The guy's head drops back and he stops talking to me. I'm not in a position to fuck him or score for him, so our conversation is over. He doesn't look older than twenty-five. I look around at the milieu of pushers, pimps and users lining the alleyway, waiting for a score. This scene can be intense - maybe too intense to justify going through it just to score a gram of weed. I think about how close I was to being a fixture in it, a few years ago. But for the grace of God, they say.

But maybe I am a fixture. At least, apparently I look like one.

I head back home empty-handed, thinking about all the bullets I've dodged.

Jew-Skin Lampshade

For ten years, since the death of the first Family Dog, Family Dog's collar has been lying gently in a place of honour on my parents' mantlepiece. It's much harder, I realised, to create that sort of touching monument to a person. People don't wear collars.

At a recent funeral for a dearly-loved friend, I couldn't help but grieve for his tattoos as well as the body they were about to cremate. He had some fantastic ink, and, I caught myself wondering somewhat perversely whether they might not be worth keeping. It seemed like such a waste. My friend's tattoos were the only parts of him which he had created himself, and chosen to present to the world. It seemed like we were going to burn a piece of his mind along with his body.

Perhaps it was the grief, or perhaps it was mainly the booze we had thickly laid on as a salve to that grief, but a few days later, I found myself slurring some particularly politically-incorrect sentiments at a family gathering.

"I want you to preserve my tattoo after I die."

The silence was tangible. My mother snorted and attempted to pass off my comment as a joke.

"No, I'm serious. When I die, I want you to cut it off my back, have it stretched and preserved like leather. You could mount it and hang it."

"Can you do that to human skin?" Clever Little Sister asked, her gore-hound glands pricking.

"Course you can. The Nazis did it heaps. Made collectibles. Couches, books, lampshades. That sort of thing. Apparently it was quite a thing to show your guest a Jew-skin lampshade."

This was probably a cruel topic to bring up. One side of my family were refugees from the Holocaust. I can see my mother's face growing whiter as she realises I'm serious. Wine-fuelled, I garble on, providing my own momentum.

"Come on Mum. I'm a Jew. Sort of. You could show all your friends your Jew-Skin artwork."

I don't know why, but I was being deliberately cruel. Maybe it comes down to being in grief and shock. I was the only person at the gathering who knew the deceased. It can be self-indulgently fun to act the part of the ennui-ridden nihilist at a time like that. But, at the same time, I actually believed what I was saying. I believe in organ donation - based on the logic that I won't need my organs after death. I don't believe in an afterlife, so I won't be needing my tattoos there. Wouldn't my family want to keep the best part of my skin, indelibly printed with something that came from my heart and mind?

My mother's face answers that one for me. She looks shocked, and more than a little nauseated. Her lips have twisted around as though she sucked something sour. I can see her picturing a patch of my dead, dried leather mounted in a little frame between her prints of cherubs and French maisons. Skin that she carried around inside of her for months. A piece of her, on the wall.

The idea of saving my ink still appeals to me, but I'll keep it to myself next time.

Would you preserve your tattoos (or someone else's) after death?