Woke

by Titania McGrath

  In addition, I would like to see women occupy all major positions of influence: in the media, the judiciary, the arts and politics. It isn’t enough for us to have a female Prime Minister, female First Minister of Scotland and female Head of State. These are just tokenistic appointments intended to give the impression of equality. It’s a trick.

  Women in power rarely make mistakes. Margaret Thatcher does not count, because she was a woman only in a strictly biological sense.

  Think about it. If Tony Blair had been female, we would never have been led into a disastrous illegal war in the Middle East. And, as an added bonus, Cherie would have made a splendid lesbian role model.

  When women are valued more than men, then and only then will we have achieved true equality.

  The Tyranny of Facts

  I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually and semantically correct than about being morally right.

  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

  All knowledge is fleeting. What’s true today won’t be true tomorrow. The sharpest minds in the world once believed that our fates were dictated by the stars, that the earth was flat, and that the tides were somehow influenced by the moon.

  We may scoff at such superstitions now, but in years to come our descendants will laugh heartily when they consider that we blindly accepted the putative link between morbid obesity and poor health, or the idea that black people can’t be born in a white body, or that men can’t get pregnant. After all, there is nothing more satisfying to a child than the breastmilk of a loving father.

  Take chromosomes, for instance. Has anyone ever actually seen one? If you look in scientific textbooks, the best you’ll find are a few fuzzy black and white pictures of what look like pipe cleaners twisted into odd shapes. This is sub-Photoshop bullshit.

  I would go so far as to say that all knowledge is a patriarchal construct, because it has been acquired over centuries of male totalitarianism. Every time a man speaks, therefore, he is contributing to a culture of androcentric hegemony. In order to remedy this problem, we need to ensure that women today are speaking more than men. This is why I never stop talking, even when I have absolutely nothing of value to say.

  Recently the BBC promoted a smartp hone app which would assist women to speak up in meetings. This is a huge step forward. How else could women be expected to take the initiative and make their feelings known? If it really were as straightforward as simply asserting oneself then everyone would be doing it.

  The conservative broadcaster Ben Shapiro (whose opinions are always wrong) bases much of what he believes on facts, which just goes to show how useless they are. ‘Facts don’t care about your feelings,’ he is known to say. The opposite is true. Feelings don’t care about your facts. This is how social justice works. If you feel something to be true, then it is true.

  For those of you who are sceptical on this point, I would simply ask that you defer to my superior wisdom. I have neither the patience nor the inclination to explain myself in full. Let’s just say it has something to do with institutionalised power structures and leave it there.

  Facts are routinely deployed in order to spread hate. If, for example, you were to ask so-called ‘experts’ working for the NHS about their views on childhood obesity, they would say that one in every five children is overweight, and that this can lead to enhanced risk of hypertension, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. This is because, for some inexplicable reason, health professionals in this country are given a free pass to behave like a bunch of fat-phobic browbeaters.

  If all children were obese, then no one would ever be bullied for being fat. So if you are serious about combatting fat-shaming, you have a responsibility to overfeed your kids.

  And what about the recent campaign by Cancer Research UK, a charity that purports to be raising funds to save lives, but is actually spreading hate facts? On a series of posters across the nation, this group made the astonishing claim that obesity is the second most common cause of cancer after smoking. The implication is clear. If you are fat, you deserve to die.

  Telling an obese person to lose weight is like telling a person of colour to bleach their skin. It is not OK to erase someone’s identity like this.

  This isn’t charity. It’s terrorism.

  Comedian and activist Sofie Hagen spoke for all of us when she tweeted Cancer Research UK directly – ‘Thanks for making the world shittier, you filthy cunts’ – a remark which caused quite a stir on social media. This was extremely fortunate, because just later that week Hagen announced that her book on the subject of obesity would soon be available to buy.

  Consider the England football team: each member a slim, athletic cisgender heterosexual male. Sixty-two per cent of adults in the UK are classified as overweight or obese; how is it possible that a team that claims to represent the nation does not include one single person of girth (POG)? This kind of discrimination is precisely why the fat acceptance movement is so essential.

  Football generally lends itself to bigotry. When the England team qualified for the quarter-finals of the 2018 World Cup by beating Colombia, manager Gareth Southgate called it a ‘special night for every Englishman’. Observe his choice of language, specifically that offensive term ‘Englishman’. This is linguistic gender-based genocide; a violent erasure of female identity. This is Bosnia all over again.

  Then there is the pernicious theory known as ‘sexual dimorphism’. Anybody who has ever taken even a rudimentary course in Gender Studies will know that there are literally no biological differences between men and women. Except in the case of trans people, who are born in the wrong body.

  Males will often cite pseudo-scientific fields of study such as ‘biology’, ‘medicine’ or ‘endocrinology’ to prove that men are the physically stronger sex, although you’d be hard pushed to find a respectable feminist who takes any of this seriously. As Jill Bowling and Brian Martin confirmed in their landmark essay ‘Science: a Masculine Disorder?’, the entire discipline is ‘embedded in a set of social, economic and political relations embodied through patriarchy’. They call it a ‘science-patriarchy system’, which is a roundabout way of saying that men invented science in order to justify grabbing women by the tits.

  It can hardly be a coincidence that virtually all of the most famous scientists and doctors throughout history have been male. The names that spring most immediately to mind are Dr Crippen, Dr Jekyll and Dr Harold Shipman. This tells us all we need to know.

  Then there’s Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite – the first mass-produced lethal explosive – which went on to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, including his own brother.

  And they gave this guy a fucking peace prize.

  The theory of sexual dimorphism is perpetuated in the world of sports, where teams are arbitrarily divided into ‘male’ and ‘female’. It has developed out of a genuine gynophobia. Men are simply too scared to compete on an equal footing with women. Like ISIS fighters, who believe that they will be consigned to Hell if they are killed by a female antagonist, men the world over are petrified of a woman beating them at badminton.

  In any case, if it is true that men are superior at sports, why is it that transgender athletes tend to win more medals after they transition to female?

  Let’s be very clear about this. Any form of segregation of the sexes, in sports, in schools, in toilet facilities – anywhere at all – is a reprehensible form of gender apartheid.

  Except when it comes to mosques, in which case it’s empowering.

  I, Victim

  My soul is crucified on your tumescent shaft.

  You are that paper-cut that smiles bleedingly

  Upon a backbroken orphan freshly rinsed.

  A demented piglet wrapped in a leather quilt,

  Roarsquealing into the gash of time.

  My cadaver lies uneaten at the gates of your treachery.

  Pandora’s box heaving over with poisoned bile.

  Yo
u have dined upon my succulent gusset

  Like a ragewanking hobgoblin, belching power.

  Or a Chinese assassin with fat hands.

  But I am woman.

  I rise, like the bewigged toad of probity,

  Spitting matriarchal cannonballs into the open groin of God.

  I shall feed you banjo meat from Satan’s buffet.

  My revenge is gluten-free.

  How to Prod a Shepherd

  ‘Shepherds are feral’

  Says Uncle Asbjørn,

  Grimacing

  In the crepuscular wreath of smoke

  That cyclones wistfully from his ancient pipe.

  I am seven years old, or thereabouts,

  Cross-legged on the rug at my uncle’s pockmarked feet,

  Listening

  And gently massaging the rectum of my pet chinchilla

  Because that is the way we do things here.

  ‘Approach them with caution.’

  Uncle Asbjørn inhales lungly,

  Coughing

  As he picks a flea from his favourite toenail

  And presses the tiny corpse against his wormish lips.

  ‘Shepherds exist only to be prodded,’

  He whispers, teasing the air with a swollen tongue,

  Imagining

  His better days as a priapic young shepherd-prodder,

  Roaming the fields with a lubricated glove.

  The Human Condition

  Rabid dreams cut my lips

  Screamways into silence

  As I tear the spleen from the mulish beekeeper

  To spill hurtly onto a blackblue horizon

  Like a superstitious louse in a whore’s crotch.

  A doublepunch to the coleslaw hips,

  We reel, dirty sucklove,

  Into a yeasty harness of similitude.

  You watch me drown

  In the blood of my brother’s scabrous mind,

  And lurking,

  Underhand overfoot,

  Slice your throat with the frozen piss of Christ.

  As a pigeon at the portcullis,

  Banged up and bunglefunked,

  I give birth to my mother’s corpse.

  A dryhumped slattern whispers blood,

  Reaching into death.

  ‘Somebody forgot to trim the leaves.’

  Hagspeak for aeons of binbag sodomy,

  Where hollowed-out pygmies prong their spuds into silence.

  Suck My Hashtag

  I was a feminist before it was cool.

  Laurie Penny

  In early 2018, I decided to become more industrious on social media. I was inspired by other activists who had made use of their online platforms in order to spread their message and explain to people why they are wrong about everything.

  In the digital age, the internet is the weapon of choice for anyone who is serious about social justice. The successors to the likes of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi are now to be found on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. In many ways these modernday ‘keyboard warriors’ have surpassed the work of King, who in any case was on record as saying that he believed people should ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’. He clearly knew nothing about intersectionality, and was therefore a self-hating racist.

  Thanks to my keen insights and breathtakingly subversive poetry, I rapidly garnered many thousands of followers, or disciples as I prefer to call them. But as a woman online, I soon found myself on the receiving end of relentless abuse. I am often accused of being a shrill, humourless tricoteuse. ‘Show us on the doll where your father touched you,’ said one sarcastic nuisance. The joke’s on him, because in actual fact my father used to touch my doll.

  Most of the online hatred that comes my way takes the form of criticism of my poetry. ‘It doesn’t even rhyme,’ they say, as though their opinion counts for anything. Advice and feedback from a man is about as welcome as an anorectal abscess.

  Fuck them all. I douche with white male tears.

  In any case, men know nothing about poetry. What male poets have ever amounted to anything? Auden, Coleridge, Poe; overrated subliterate twats, the lot of them. Robert Burns is still lauded as Scotland’s national poet in spite of penning such gibberish as: ‘We twa hae run about the braes, / And pu’d the gowans fine.’ You’d have thought with his degree of success he could afford to hire a proofreader.

  James Joyce is another unjustly glorified male writer. He is credited as being one of the most innovative novelists who ever lived, but could barely construct a coherent sentence. In one of his most famous works, Finneg ans Wake, he even left the apostrophe out of the title. This is pretty basic stuff.

  Social media should be a safe space where I can express myself without fear of being insulted, ridiculed or challenged in any way. All this hatred directed towards me simply proves that my work and activism are more urgent than ever. Nazis may mobilise, but they’ll never prevail.

  Twitter in particular is a cesspit of the far right. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t have ‘antifascist’ in their bio, it’s safest to assume that they’re a fascist.

  In a sense, one’s internet presence is one’s true personality. Old-fashioned ‘face-to-face’ conversation is all very well, but the best way to debate serious political issues is surely through an online forum in which you won’t have to deal with the potential intimidation that comes with actual human contact, and thoughts need not be developed beyond a 280-character limit. In addition, it’s important to be able to block people who disagree with you to avoid being triggered by challenging opinions.

  Social media also leaves an electronic trail, which enables activists like myself to gather evidence to discredit our opponents. For instance, it was recently discovered that James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy film series, had tweeted some jokes about paedophilia many years ago. In my humble opinion, joking about paedophilia is even worse than actual paedophilia. Don’t get me wrong; an act of physical molestation is obviously abhorrent, but at least it can’t be retweeted.

  Other celebrities who have been rightly shamed by committing violence through online jokes include the comedian and fascist (i.e. Trump supporter) Roseanne Barr, television and radio presenter Maya Jama, Hitler-loving YouTube celebrity PewDie Pie, and that odious bespectacled minion of the Antichrist who goes by the name of Toby Young.

  Of course, there have been occasions when certain problematic tweets have resurfaced that appear to implicate decent left-wing people. One such example is Sarah Jeong, a brave journalist-cum-activist who works for the New York Times. In July 2018 she was promoted to the publication’s editorial board, and unfortunately some alt-right trolls had posted some of her old tweets in which she made supposedly offensive jokes about white men.

  ‘Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun,’ she asked, ‘thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins?’ For all the conservative establishment’s talk of thin-skinned ‘snowflakes’, I find the real snowflakes, like their namesakes, tend to be white.

  In any case, when Jeong observed that ‘it must be so boring to be white’ she was merely expressing an uncomfortable truth. Be honest with yourself: have you ever met a white person who isn’t bored on some level? White people live conventional lives, they lack imagination, and they can’t rap.

  I do not fall into this category because I have always felt a profound connection with people of colour. Perhaps it’s because when I was growing up most of our staff were Filipinos.

  Thankfully, Silicon Valley tech giants have a commendable record of banning users who have problematic opinions, or engage in ‘satire’. And it’s not as though there has been a lack of transparency. YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have made it explicitly clear which opinions you are allowed to have.

  If you don’t want to be censored, don’t say the wrong things. It really is that simple.

  White Death


  White people are potential humans – they haven’t evolved yet.

  Louis Farrakhan

  The dictionary defines racism as ‘prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior’.

  The dictionary is wrong.

  The true definition of racism is actually an equation. Racism = prejudice + power. We know this because left-wing sociologists and activists have made it clear that the people who compiled the dictionary aren’t best qualified to explain the meaning of words.

  We need to trust the experts. As YouTube personality Franchesca Ramsey puts it: ‘If your car breaks down, you don’t look up “car” in the dictionary to try and fix it. You go to a mechanic.’ And she’s absolutely right. Any mechanic worth their salt will tell you that the dictionary definition of ‘car’ – ‘a road vehicle, typically with four wheels, powered by an internal combustion engine and able to carry a small number of people’ – is absolute horseshit.

  Similarly, the phrase ‘white people’ is often taken to refer to people who are white. But, as Myriam François-Cerrah has pointed out, ‘white people’ as a term ‘doesn’t refer to the colour of people’s skin as much as it refers to people’s identification with the dominant power relations which continue to subjugate people of colour to a second-class status’.

  The sterling work of white feminists such as François-Cerrah has helped us to understand that people of colour (POCs) are invariably persecuted, and that includes those who are wealthy and well-connected. Even Oprah Winfrey is routinely subjected to random searches by police.

  I assume this is the case, anyway. I haven’t really looked into it.

  To be female is difficult enough, but to be black and female is what Frances M. Beal has described as ‘double jeopardy’. White women need to get over their misogynoir and accept that there are structural imbalances that secure their privilege. On this matter, I highly recommend Robin DiA ngelo’s scintillating book White Fragility. If you’ve ever wondered why honkies get so uppity when you call them racist without any apparent justification, this is the book for you.