Woke

by Titania McGrath

  For my part, I have decided to thwart Brexit through a trilogy of poems (reproduced on the following pages). One is called ‘A Little Boy’s Brexit’, a powerful and poignant piece that beautifully expresses the horrors of leaving the EU from the perspective of a nine-year-old child. Feel free to photocopy the poem and send it to your local MP.

  As a further gesture of defiance, I recently changed my pet cat’s name to ‘Stop Brexit’ and, when the vet called for her in the waiting room, all the other animals applauded.

  A Little Boy’s Brexit

  Why are we leaving Europe, Mummy?

  Mrs Wilson says I’m doing really well at my French lessons,

  And Maisie wants to learn Irish dancing,

  And we all love to eat pizza on Friday nights.

  Why does Theresa May hate us so much?

  Why are we leaving Europe, Mummy?

  Is it because our bananas aren’t bendy enough?

  Is it because of that nasty old Mr Farage?

  Is it because of Dr Patel who took my tonsils out?

  Or is it because those fishermen had a row with Bob Geldof?

  Why are we leaving Europe, Mummy?

  Daddy says everybody will lose their jobs,

  And hospitals and schools will shut down,

  And mummies and daddies will start eating their own babies,

  And I’ll have to go back on the game again.

  Why are we leaving Europe, Mummy?

  It seems like such a lovely place,

  With all those cute old buildings and pointy towers

  And mountains and rivers and sunny beaches

  And access to a single market with lucrative free-trade arrangements.

  23 June 2016

  Recoiling from the continent unmoored,

  This ark of xenophobic firing squads,

  As cattled clowns are tossed off overboard

  Beyond an empire’s grave of foamy clods.

  Emerging from the prick of Churchill’s ghost,

  Abandoned spectres trussed by their mistrust

  And bluepassported gremlins coast to coast.

  A widowed nation lured by lemming-lust,

  Deceived and semi-felched we blindly plunge

  To racist bubblebaths of broken dreams.

  A kingdom drowned and dropkicked in the clunge,

  Democracy now stuffed with hateful schemes.

  Our hopes are flailing, hurtled in the air

  Abruptly from the cliffs of Fuckknowswhere.

  Brexit: A Haiku

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  Pussy Power

  I was a lady, not like that cunt Bette Davis.

  Joan Crawford

  As a sororal collective, feminists have worked hard to let women know that they should be able to live their lives however they please, so long as their decisions are empowering. For any women who are in doubt, reading books by activists such as myself will enable them to make the correct choices and achieve true independence.

  This is most important when it comes to one’s career. Every single woman has a moral obligation to step up and do their bit to redress the imbalance that we see in so many areas of the job market. In the USA, women make up 97.7 per cent of preschool and kindergarten teachers but only 1.1 per cent of mining machine operators. We need to rectify such appalling inequality through more effective socialisation. Let’s start by throwing our daughters into pits with pneumatic drills from time to time.

  A real woman is one who is able to turn her oppression to her own advantage, and who does not deviate from the proscribed feminist ideals. We were all horrified to learn that 53 per cent of American women had voted for Donald Trump. This statistic inevitably leads us to ask how they could be so complicit in elevating this self-confessed ‘pussy-grabber’ to the White House. But, as Suzanne Moore explained in the Guardian, ‘misogyny is not a male-only attribute’. After all, which is more likely: that there are millions of women who do not share Moore’s political opinions, or that there are millions of women who hate themselves? I think the answer is obvious.

  Internalised misogyny is out of control. If you’re not a feminist, you’re not really a woman. Intersectional trailblazer Linda Sarsour caused some controversy when she said of conservative writer Brigitte Gabriel and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali: ‘I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don’t deserve to be women.’ When her statement was challenged by a Dartmouth College student during one of her lectures, Sarsour simply refused to answer on the grounds that he was a ‘white man’. That’s the wonderful thing about identity politics; you never have to explain yourself, or even develop your thoughts into what right-wingers call a ‘coherent argument’.

  For the sake of expedience, I would like you to remember this simple rule of thumb:

  Men who disagree with feminists = misogynists

  Women who disagree with feminists = internalised misogynists

  In either case they are to be ignored, not debated.

  Some of these self-hating women have become frighteningly influential. I am thinking in particular of Christina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia and Ella Whelan, a trio of gorgons of the most oleaginous kind who should never, in any civilised society, be offered a platform to air their dangerous views. Here are some examples:

  Women are not children. We are not fragile little birds who can’t cope with jokes, works of art, or controversial speakers. Trigger warnings and safe spaces are an infantilizing setback for feminism – and for women.

  Christina Hoff Sommers

  The problem with too much current feminism, in my opinion, is that even when it strikes progressive poses, it emanates from an entitled, upper-middle-class point of view. It demands the intrusion and protection of paternalistic authority figures to project a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offense and hurt.

  Camille Paglia

  Perpetually portraying women as weak and vulnerable, at every turn, contemporary feminism undermines women’s autonomy.

  Ella Whelan

  What a bunch of hateful bitches.

  All three of these internalised misogynists have openly disputed the idea of the gender pay gap. It is a scandal that women in the UK are paid 76p for every £1 a man earns, even though pay discrimination between the sexes has been illegal since 1970. Ryanair, for instance, has a gender pay gap of 72 per cent. How are the CEOs not behind bars?

  The company has tried to weasel its way out of its responsibilities by pointing out that most of their pilots are male and most of their cabin crew are female. But the question one must ask is: why are the pilots paid more than the people who serve the drinks? I’ve seen Top Gun. Flying a plane looks like a piece of piss compared to carting around a tray of pork scratchings and mini bottles of gin for the benefit of ungrateful package-holiday gyppos.

  If it really was the case that women could simply work towards the necessary qualifications to apply for the better-paid jobs, there’d be no reason to prevent them from doing so. Personally, I wouldn’t even bother applying for a course in aviation because I know that some paunchy male executive would probably just spunk onto my curriculum vitae and throw it in the bin.

  Recently the BBC were caught paying their US news editor Jon Sopel considerably more than their China news editor Carrie Gracie, simply on the grounds that stories relating to the USA are far more frequently reported. It’s sickening to know that our beloved national broadcaster would pay a woman less money for less work.

  And in the entertainment industry the disparity is even more extreme. Tom Cruise’s estimated net worth is somewhere in the region of 550 million dollars. Su Pollard, on the other hand, is worth a measly 2 million. It should go without saying that male and female actors should be paid equally.

  The day my intersectional feminist poetry earns me as much as a male banker is the day the gender pay gap can be declared a myth.

  Wedlocked<
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  Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.

  Dante

  Marriage is a patriarchal oubliette of doom; a heterosexist institution that has been incarcerating women for centuries. The word ‘marriage’ comes from the Old French ‘marier’, which means ‘to marry’, so there’s no getting around its meaning.

  The philosophical principle behind marriage is, quite simply, the commodification of women. We are yoked like bulls at a market and sold off as chattel. There is no such thing as a happily married woman, only those who are suffering from an acute form of Stockhol m Syndrome.

  The sight of a couple at a wedding – him in a black suit, her in the obligatory billowing white taffeta garb of slavery – is one of the most violent images that could possibly be conjured. It connotes the height of heteronormativity, that invisible matrix of oppression that has enmeshed the globe from the very beginning of civilisation. Until marriage is abolished we shall be less than beasts. There is a very good reason why you will never see a married cat.

  But why do women do it? I share Laurie Penny’s view that women should ‘reject marriage and partnership en masse’, and I sincerely hope that the dozen or so people who’ve read her book will start spreading this important message.

  It all comes down to education. Most girls are taught from an early age that their ultimate destiny is to find a ‘prince’ or a ‘knight in shining armour’. The fairy tales are full of it. Disney films, for instance, invariably pair off the pretty female lead with a broad-chested hero with a chiselled profile and searing blue eyes. Take, for instance, Disney’s version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which the young gypsy girl Esmerelda eventually marries Captain Phoebus. Personally, I’d rather fuck the hunchback.

  This damsel-in-distress narrative is bolstered every time a member of the royal family decides to get hitched, which inevitably sparks the kind of drawn-out spectacle of unctuous nationwide fawning that really boils my menses. When Prince William got married, the British citizens were granted a public holiday. Let them eat cake, indeed.

  As a form of protest, I spent the entire day working on a new poem, taking breaks only to spit at the news coverage on the television screen. The one thing that made the day bearable was the gratifying sight of streaks of phlegm dribbling down the smug digitised face of Nicholas Witchell.

  In any case, as an intersectional social justice activist the very core of my being is rooted in the tenet of anti-monarchism. The fact that Prince George has yet to come out as non-binary tells us all we need to know about the bigotry inherent in the royal family.

  And the less said about Meghan Markle the better; the self-identified feminist who nonetheless degraded herself by marrying that bumptious, decadent, champagne-swilling, swastika-clad, ginger runt.

  Incidentally, I have nothing against gingers. They should of course be treated in exactly the same way as normal people. But Prince Harry is just the latest manifestation of a corrupt and outmoded class system. I should know. I met him at one of Daddy’s soirées in Capri.

  Markle is an opportunistic witch. Marrying a prince is just about the least feminist thing you can do. If she was genuinely committed to the cause of female emancipation, she’d throw herself under a horse or something.

  Besides, the so-called ‘special day’ is a humiliating affair. Most traditional ceremonies are presided over by a priest; a male so supercilious that he declares to be channelling the power of an omniscient being. If that wasn’t debasing enough, the ritual commences with the priest checking to see if the bride’s hymen is intact. If she fails this test, she is declared a whore and the congregation are invited to tear the dress from her sullied body to repeated cries of ‘shame’.

  I should admit that I’ve never actually been to a wedding, but I’ve got no reason to assume that this isn’t how it works.

  Some women are tricked into the state of housewifery by a delusion known commonly as ‘love’. But there is no such thing as love. It is a bourgeois invention intended to justify the psychosexual urges of males.

  The most famous ‘love story’ of all time is about a paedophile called Romeo who successfully seduces a thirteen-year-old child called Juliet. Modern adaptations tend to cast older actors to play Juliet in order to disguise the inherent perversion that the play seeks to normalise. When I was at university, I cast my little sister Sophie in the role of Juliet against a burly Romeo in his late fifties. Sophie was three years old at the time. She couldn’t deliver the lines particularly well, but at least the truly depraved nature of the text came across loud and clear.

  But what really sets my teeth on edge is that many believe this playwright to be one of the most influential literary figures of all time. He wasn’t. He was a knob.

  Of course there are financial advantages to marriage, particularly in the case of a lesbian wedding where there are two dowries. But tax benefits and gifts are no compensation for a lifetime of subjugation. The notion of becoming ‘one flesh’ with a male is a form of corporeal pollution. In order to preserve one’s female power, one must reject any kind of connubial vassalage.

  I should point out that I write this in the knowledge that my sister is soon to be married and that she intends to ask me to be her ‘Maid of Honour’.

  I’ll do it. But I’ll be free bleeding in a white dress.

  Towards an Intersectional Socialist Utopia

  The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

  Judith Butler

  Although class has never been one of my priorities as an activist, I do understand what it feels like to endure economic hardship. I’m still making payments on my second wine fridge. And I know plenty of working-class people. Kate Middleton, for instance.

  My parents have always voted Tory. Mummy has to really; she’s one of the party’s key benefactors, so it might send mixed signals if she suddenly decided to support Labour. In spite of this, I’ve ended up as a steadfast socialist, which just goes to show what a nonconformist free-thinker I am.

  Also, it really pisses off my parents, which is hugely satisfying.

  It is ironic that the only two female prime ministers in the history of British politics have hailed from the Tory party, given that the laissez-faire economic system is traditionally favoured by males. Capitalism, after all, is a singularly male phenomenon. The ultimate symbol of capitalism, the skyscraper, is nothing more than a giant cock on the horizon, fucking the heavens.

  It is no exaggeration to say that I would rather be living in a Soviet gulag than a capitalist country.

  Socialism is the principle that everyone deserves to be equal, even the poor. Critics point to the fact that socialist governments in the past have failed to eliminate poverty. But this is a misunderstanding of our aims. If there were no poor people, then there would be no point in socialism, which would make us all capitalists by default. And why would anyone want that?

  That conceded, it is the duty of all stalwart socialists to do everything in our power to give succour to the destitute. Only the other day a homeless girl asked me for change. Instead of giving her money, I performed some improvised slam poetry about the evils of economic inequality.

  She was literally speechless.

  On the whole, class is something of a distraction from the real issues. If the social justice movement has taught us anything, it’s that sexuality, gender and race are far more likely to affect your potential for social mobility than economic circumstances, education or nepotism. This is why it was so important fo
r Barack Obama to become president of the United States, because even though the lives of poor black people didn’t improve during his tenure, they could at least console themselves with the fact that, for eight years at least, there wasn’t some dumbass cracker in the Oval Office.

  For me, any political outlook that fails to engage with intersectionality is ideologically moribund. Identity politics has never been a great vote-winner, but there’s more to running a country than having the support of the populace.

  Just look at Hillary Clinton. Close analysis of the election results shows that she would have become president had she won a lot more votes. But this would have entailed broadening her appeal to those who aren’t interested in social justice. In fact, so determined was she to put off potential voters, she referred to Trump supporters as ‘deplorables’. If any of them were wavering, she certainly didn’t wish to be tainted with their endorsement at the ballot box.

  Clinton’s plan worked beautifully. She lost the election and thereby retained the moral high ground.

  You can’t be woke unless you embrace intersectionality. It’s a long word, so some of you might find it difficult to comprehend at first, particularly if you were educated in a state school. Or if you’re Welsh.

  Let me explain. Intersectionality works like a net, with marginalised groups crosshatching at various junctures on the matrices of persecution. Think of it as a hierarchy. So, for instance, a woman is an oppressed figure because we live in a patriarchy, but not so oppressed as a Hispanic woman, who in turn is not so oppressed as a Hispanic lesbian, who in turn is not so oppressed as a Hispanic translesbian with shingles, and so on.

  Consider the 2017 ‘Women’s March’. Across the globe hordes of angry activists joined forces to protest about a great many things – nobody was quite sure what in particular – but all of the various groups in attendance were united by their desire to rebuke the millions of citizens who had voted for the wrong candidate in the US election. For a misogynist such as Donald Trump, the sight of scores of women wearing pink ‘pussy-hats’ – many attired in full-body vagina costumes – must have been terrifying. I’m genuinely surprised that he didn’t resign then and there. I’m assuming he didn’t hear Ashley Judd reading that epic ‘Nasty Woman’ poem, because if he had it would have been the end of his presidency for sure.