Checkmate, motherfuckers.
‘What about gay rights?’ the Islamophobes scream, completely ignorant of the multitude of queer Muslims out there. Admittedly there are many who are still in the closet, such as the radical hook-handed cleric Abu Hamza, but that is to be expected given the homophobia that still pervades modern British society. Even in territories dominated by ISIS, gay people are known to happily shout it from the rooftops.
There is no genuine inconsistency between gay rights and Islam. Yes, the majority of British Muslims believe that homosexuality should be illegal, but if gay people simply abstain from sex during Ramadan this strikes me as a workable compromise.
‘What about free speech?’ the bigots bellow in rage, often quoting Muslims out of context to imply that they oppose individual liberty. Take the case of Pakistani pop star Rabi Peerzada, who caused outrage when she apparently called for the execution of French cartoonists who had drawn the Prophet Muhammad. ‘Freedom of expression can never justify blasphemy,’ she tweeted. ‘Making blasphemy cartoon of Prophet is the worst act of terrorism. The Sketch makers must be hanged immediately.’
Some people (i.e. racists) petitioned Twitter to have Peerzada banned. Of course, they hadn’t taken into account the postscript to her tweet – – which I think is Urdu for ‘LOL, only kidding, that would be mental’.
Westerners have to understand that there is a civil war raging within Islam, and moderates are trying to reform the more problematic beliefs. We could see evidence of this when Islam was rebranded as The Religion Of Peace™, which I think we can all agree is much catchier. This also helps to remind everyone that when somebody drives a truck into a group of pedestrians, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, it has absolutely nothing to do with Islam.
Then there is the question of the veil, opposition to which is surely one of the most blatant forms of Islamophobia imaginable. For instance, many have complained about Marks and Spencer’s range of hijabs for schoolgirls as young as three, but surely the last thing we’d want to see is small children dressed as raging whores.
Even better, these tiny hijabs are very reasonably priced at only £6 each, and are available in a variety of colours from black to very black.
There has been much made in the press recently of women in Iran who are risking arrest by dancing in public and refusing to cover their hair as a form of protest. One woman was sentenced to two years in prison when footage of her removing her hijab was shared widely on social media. But as Western feminists such as Linda Sarsour will tell you, the hijab is a symbol of empowerment. Sharia law, Sarsour informs us, is ‘reasonable’ and ‘makes a lot of sense’.
So just what do these Iranian protesters think they are doing? Do they have any idea how difficult they are making it for Western feminists to smash the patriarchy? Just cover your fucking hair, bitches.
I’m not saying that women who refuse to wear the veil deserve to be imprisoned, but they don’t not deserve it either.
Thankfully, some brave Muslim women are fighting back, and are donning the hijab, the burka and the niqab as feminist symbols. Recently, beauty queen Sara Iftekhar broke new ground by wearing a hijab in the final of the Miss England competition. She had already been voted the most attractive woman in Huddersfield, which admittedly is a bit like winning an arm wrestle in a hospice. Nevertheless, the fact that Iftekhar didn’t feel able to wear the full burka in the final reveals just how Islamophobic these ‘beauty contests’ really are.
It is up to our politicians to take charge of this desperate situation and make any criticism of Islam a hate crime punishable in accordance with Sharia law. It is perfectly possible to be a liberal who supports censorship and anti-blasphemy legislation.
Theresa May, for all her faults, has shown her support by quoting from the Koran at the Conservative Party conference because, although she isn’t a Muslim herself, she is an amateur imam in her spare time.
But the former Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, inflamed interfaith relations when he compared Muslim women in burkas to letterboxes. Only the very next day I saw our postman delivering letters to our local mosque, which I presume was meant as some kind of sick joke. Words have consequences.
Johnson’s offensive analogy inspired hordes of youths across the country to terrorise Muslims with envelopes. One Twitter user, Amanda Fleiss, wrote: ‘I’ve just seen a Burka wearing Muslim lady with her kids being abused outside the medical centre, youths were shoving envelopes in her face, and her kids were crying. Police had to be called. This is your doing Boris Johnson.’
I am sickened that there are people out there who think this anecdote might be made up. And even if it is, it tells us more about modern British society than a thousand ‘true’ stories ever could.
The World Must Not Be Peopled
Inter faeces et urinam nascimur.
St Augustine of Hippo
We need to talk about unpaid labour.
There are literally thousands of married women who spend a good deal of their finite lives on this planet attending to their offspring. This is, to put it bluntly, a waste of fucking time. But more to the point, they are not being remunerated in any way for this most arduous of responsibilities.
If women choose to sacrifice the prospect of a career in order to breed, that is of course up to them. By doing so, however, they are embodying all that is rotten in patriarchal society. They have internalised their misogyny to such a degree that they genuinely believe that raising a child is more important and rewarding than earning money.
They hate women. They hate themselves. They are worse than men.
For the sake of balance, I should concede that some women are instinctively attracted to the idea of propagation. This isn’t something that I’ve ever fully understood, but I am far too tolerant by nature to rush to any judgement.
Some of my friends tell me that being a parent is one of life’s most fulfilling tasks, and that childbirth itself is a beautiful miracle. So, by all means, if you wish to have some freeloading homunculus gestating inside you for nine months, only to tear its way free in the kind of gory spectacle that wouldn’t look out of place in an Alien movie, be my guest.
Children are needy, they lack basic social skills and are unable to assist with any kind of serious manual labour. I have little to no patience with those who are not my intellectual equivalents, and so the only time I can ever bring myself to associate with children is when I am educating them in social justice. I consider this a moral duty, albeit a wearisome one. Twice a week I spend an hour at my local primary school, teaching the kids about period poverty or the evils of corporate capitalism, or explaining to them why gender is a destructive fiction.
Sometimes I run workshops for the younger pupils in which I help them to develop their skills in the realm of political slam poetry. My work genuinely seems to resonate with the more intelligent among them, particularly ‘Humpty Dumpty was a Racist Fuck’, ‘Ozymandias Part 2’, ‘Cher’s Spare Exoskeleton’, ‘Butternut Squash is Sexist’ and ‘Peppa Pig’s Second Favourite Dildo’.
All heterosexual intercourse is rape. Ergo, all fathers are rapists. There is nothing remotely woke about having children. It is a grotesque and entirely unnecessary biological function. If the Darwinists are right, and flawed traits are eventually eliminated through a process of natural selection, it won’t be long before the human species has evolved beyond the undignified urge to reproduce. Our sexual organs are really no different from our appendix; just a hangover from a primitive time when we lived in caves and ate grass.
In a sense, I sometimes think that King Herod had the right idea. Babies are overrated and eminently disposable. I am not, of course, inciting anyone to commit acts of murder (this I must emphasise for legal reasons), I am simply noting that many of society’s problems could be alleviated if we relaxed the laws on infanticide.
Those who argue for the so-called ‘continuation of the human race’ are missing two key points. Firstly, why are women overwhelmingly shou
ldering this grave existential burden? Secondly, given the fact that we live in an irrepressibly misogynistic society, is the human race really worth preserving?
But if some women are to insist on taking responsibility for their own children, the least that the government can do is to pay them properly for their work. Why should a woman be expected to clean, clothe and feed their own child if there’s no cash incentive? Particularly if that child is male.
My friend Tabitha has recently given birth to a baby boy. We both had our fingers crossed for non-binary, but an early ultrasound revealed the ghastly truth. After the birth, one of the very first things this organism did was cry to be fed. That’s the kind of male entitlement we’re dealing with here. Straight out the womb, and it’s all ‘me, me, me’. Tabitha’s son really is a nauseating piece of shit.
But of course giving birth to a daughter presents its own particular set of difficulties. As Simone de Beauvoir famously remarked, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’. The truth of this is indubitable. Nobody’s ever given birth to an adult woman, for fuck’s sake. It seems odd that it needed to be pointed out in the first place.
Then there are the societal pressures to consider. Babies are not immune to everyday sexism. When my niece was born, my brother and his wife sent me a card which read: ‘Baby Alison arrived on 2nd July 2017, 8 pounds 4 ounces’. The girl had only been alive for a few days and already her parents were fat-shaming her.
I return to my point about the morality of procreation in a misogynistic world. To those women who feel broody, I say this. Every sperm is an invader. It seeks to wriggle its way into your body, to penetrate your very soul, to filch all your potential for the sake of a bawling sprog who will only grow up to resent you. If the sperm is the bullet, then the phallus is the machine gun.
Live for yourself, not for an unborn parasite.
Toxic Masculinity
‘It’s a boy!’
Cries the doctor,
His tombstone tongue clacking
Like a forked phallus
In a dead donkey’s quim.
My baby has bollocks for eyes.
Its body a slippery, bloodshot thicket of male flesh,
Wriggling, retching, screwing itself into my psyche.
This cuckoo brewed within my sacred space,
Only to rip-rape its way out into the world.
‘Fuck you, bitch,’ the notgirl whispers
Through a predatory milkman smile,
Sniggerburning my skin with its toxicity,
As it fashions a patriarchal noose
From the pubic hair of a thousand weeping midwives.
Every baby boy is an abomination,
A savage nugget of pus scooped from an open wound
And dumped into sullied uteri.
Mothers are cuckstumped cradlers of newborn men,
Spitsticked petticoats drenched in broiling cum.
Menstruators
We bleed
Like florets of pity, deadened into burly clams
Twice solely gobbletossed by a scrumping leper
As beefcurtained strap-on dreams of selfhood
Wrench the damaged crablouse
from its hairy home.
Happyfat in fuck-me plimsolls I roll
Gardencentred by a spermatozoon called Fate
The singsong dingdong of a monthly rendezvous as
We bleed
With unfurled treason dripdripdrip red.
Wrinkled and twatsauced
We bleed
Brazen like leaking sirens,
Finflapping on an unknown shore,
Calling to cocksure sailors with throbbing thumbs.
A rayon bullet soaked in power,
An orgy of dying sprats inside a makeshift scrotum.
Gorging ourselves on oestrogen dreams
We bleed
Like a slapped niece earmuffed by retarded camels
And slutwalking into the timid jaws of death.
A Vegan’s Lament
In the abattoir of eternity
Goats cluster, corpsehooved
Into blood-sluiced tessellations
Of the incessantly milked.
I ruminate on ruminants,
A generation of innocent boycows
Lost to the porkbeefing folly
Of slackjawed mammal-noshers.
Hotdogs are coffins
Wherein pigs are sausaged into
Genocidal pipettes of futility,
Delivering oblivion to savage mouths.
What of the noble egg,
Ovoid locket of the unchickened,
Scrambled and desecrated
On a toasty deathbed?
And what of the stately ewe,
Primped and fluffy on a hillock,
Her destiny to be shredded
And strewn amidst a disappointing goulash?
In my dreams I hear them still,
The cud-chewers with halal haloes.
A thousand boltgunned heifers
Moo for vengeance.
Freeze Peach
Free speech is a fundamental foundation of a free and fair democracy. But let’s be honest and have the guts to unpick who gets to speak, where, and why.
Reni Eddo-Lodge
I magine thinking that free speech meant that people can say whatever they want, whenever they want. That’s exactly how Nazi Germany started.
As Guardian columnist Owen Jones has pointed out, the phrase ‘free speech’ is ‘nothing more than a political ploy, a ruse, a term the far right wilfully abuse to spread hatred’. And it isn’t just left-wing journalists such as Jones who have reached this conclusion. Many intelligent and charismatic people feel this way too.
To live in a truly free society, there must be limits on individual forms of verbal expression. My guiding principle, which has served me very well for all my twenty-four years on this grubby male-ridden planet, is that those who to try to defend free speech are invariably crypto-fascists. These are the kind of people who miss the racist ‘good old days’ and like to say the word ‘mongoloid’, which is incredibly offensive to the spastic community.
Besides, free speech is selective. When I performed my poem ‘God and Other Pederasts’ at my local library’s over-sixties reading club, I was asked to leave. Apparently they found my miming ‘obscene and distressing’.
That was the whole fucking point. Philistines.
Free speech extremists are forever complaining about ‘PC culture’ or that they are constantly ‘treading on eggshells’. As I’ve pointed out many times before, this figure of speech is a microaggression towards vegans and should not be tolerated.
Nobody is going to prevent anyone from saying the right things, so it stands to reason that the only people who require free speech are those who are planning on saying the wrong things. If it weren’t for free speech, Pol Pot wouldn’t have been able to order the death of a single Cambodian.
The best take on this issue has come, inevitably, from that celebrated scholar Laurie Penny:
I am done pretending that the good intentions of white patriarchy are more important than the consequences enacted on the bodies of others. Good intentions aren’t the issue here. Feel free to be as racist as you like in the privacy of your own heart, if you can live with yourself, but not – and this is very important – in the privacy of your own house.
The question Penny leaves unanswered is how this policy is to be enforced. Agents of the GDR found a solution after the Second World War, which was to bug the houses of citizens. There is no doubt that we should follow suit.
Think about it. People are far more likely to say offensive things if they think nobody’s listening.
Censorship is an important tool of any government in order to guarantee our freedoms. The data would seem to suggest that we are moving steadily in the right direction, caught in the soothing tractor beam of wokeness. According to the P ew Research Center, 40 per cent of young people in the USA would support gove
rnment censorship of ‘statements that are offensive to minority groups’. And in the UK, hate speech laws are being enacted with greater regularity in order to clamp down on problematic opinions and distasteful comedy. Markus Meechan was convicted in a court of law for uploading a video to the internet in which he is seen teaching a pug to give a Hitler salute. He claimed that this was a joke, but of course there is nothing remotely amusing about a Nazi pug.
The video was viewed three million times, and I shudder to think how many impressionable dogs were radicalised by this spectacle before YouTube eventually took it down.
Recently, police in the UK have been petitioning the general public to ‘report non-crime hate incidents’, which would incorporate ‘offensive or insulting comments, online, in person or in writing’. In this new woke era, our law enforcement agencies are not content to police crime, but also non-crime. This is a huge relief, because for a long while now too many citizens have been not breaking the law and getting away with it.
Postmodernists have explained time and time again that language is the basis of reality. Nothing is authentically true beyond the discourse through which it is conveyed. This is why there were no homosexuals before the word was coined in 1868, no alcoholics before the first diagnosis in 1849, no G alápagos tortoises before they were discovered in 1535, and no electricity before it was invented in 1879.
With this in mind, it seems obvious that in order to defeat bigotry, we only need to eradicate the words required to express bigoted views.
Let’s try a quick thought experiment. Picture, if you will, a homophobic man. There is some hate speech brewing inside his mind, ready to erupt. Perhaps he wishes to express the sentiment, ‘I disagree with same-sex marriage.’ But the words do not exist. They were outlawed decades ago and are no longer in currency. What would our man do then?
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