Divas

In the (unisex) hairdressers the other day I decided to leaf through a cheesy men's magazine for a change. Among the usual motorbike and celebrity features was an interesting interview with 'diva's' - high maintenance young women who gleefully admitted driving their boyfriends crazy by taking half the night to get ready when going out, constantly changing their minds about things and ultimately demanding everything their own way and on their own terms or they would stomp and sulk until he gave in.

Some even admitted to being deliberately emotionally abusive by faking anger outbursts to frighten their partner and then sweetening him up by being nice to him or granting him favours in bed so he eventually assumed there was something wrong with HIM. Some didn't even stop at that, they physically threatened or slapped him, even over minor misdemeanours.

It was, essentially, a control thing, though one used PMT as an excuse.

They seemed to think that their over-processed looks and enhanced breasts commanded such entitlement and he should be grateful that he was with them.

'Girl power' to them clearly meant it was all about them. They seemed to have no concept of there being two people in the relationship and equality didn't come into it - they looked down on their men and criticised and belittled them on a regular basis which they saw as 'keeping him on his toes' and found highly amusing between themselves.

I was amazed by their candour, and how they thought they would ever keep a man with this attitude, but then I remembered how every pink and girly shop encourages girls to be 'divas' these days with Little Princess t-shirts available from baby grow size up, the cultural celebration of the 'Jewish Princess' and TV programme Bridezillas, to name a few. Perhaps the greatest influence has been the rise of a celebrity culture encouraging every young girl to think she can be a celebrity and 'high maintenance' is how their heroines behave. Be selfish. Take selfies. Celebrate yourself, 'cos you're worth it and get everyone else running around after you and treading on eggshells around you.

I recalled a trio of twentysomething former colleagues who each pined for a man, and then when they found one, quickly found fault with him, giving him nought but a hard time with their demands and insecurities until eventually they had driven him away, a factor which never seemed to cross their minds as they sifted through and analysed every word and gesture of his throughout the relationship for signs of a clue that he was going to be such a b***ard, in their post-work pub support group. Then there was the married colleague who insisted on taking her husband's entire salary for the family pot and leaving him with only £5 a week 'pocket money'. When she rang him on the phone as she did several times a day she sounded like she was instructing a servant, not her husband, to do this, do that and do the other, since he was on nightshift and could therefore do his share of the housework during the day. Admittedly she was a very good housekeeper and bargain spotter, but I still wondered how long he was going to put up with that situation before he called time on his emasculation, particularly since she never mentioned a gambling or alcohol problem on his part to justify such an iron fist on the family purse strings. She also didn't like his friends or let him see them more than once a year at Christmas, regarding them as 'a bad influence' as if he were some wayward teenager, rather than a 43 year old man with a mind of his own.

How many 'diva' women would see such behaviour as acceptable if applied in reverse though? I mean, wasn't that the whole point of feminism? To bring about equal power and opportunity in relationships where there was once a great imbalance generally (although that obviously sadly remains the case for some).

Now I note a new term has been coined for it; 'intimate terrorism', made famous by Nigella Lawson's quote regarding her former husband Charles Saatchi and how she believed he treated her during their marriage. It is therefore not a gender-exclusive term (men can be guilty too), but it seems that women are the growing majority according to a recent study from the University of Cumbria, who will employ verbal and physical aggression including shoving, hitting, threats and ultimatums and spying on their man with mobile phone or vehicle trackers.

But ultimately whichever gender is terrorising or attempting to control the other, that does not a happy relationship make.

I would go as far as to say that any relationship where there is a lack of mutual respect is almost certainly doomed, as without this essential element there can be no genuine friendship, trust and empathy, let alone equality and love.

It's Nuts!

On the left is lad's mag Nuts.



















On the right is women's magazine Pick Me Up.

One panders to the red-blooded young male's need for a sexy outlet of bags of silicone covered in skin. One panders to the female's recently discovered (and rather disturbing) need for red blood. Stories about rape, murder, incest and cannibalism among other salacious horrors are apparently what women want as a 'Pick Me Up'

And yet guess which one of this toxic twosome the Co-Operative supermarket have co-operated in removing from its shelves...?

Yes, that's right, the one featuring mock mammaries, come hither looks and articles about which Go Faster stripes boy racers should affix to their cars.

Although not a paid-up feminist by any means, I have long noticed women's magazines becoming increasingly abusive to women, as even if they don't focus on more human horror stories than True Detective magazine, they are encouraging women to believe that they are too fat, too old and not getting enough sex and of the right quality and variety with 'The One'. They seem deliberately designed to undermine the female self-esteem rather than build it as women's magazines of yesteryear believed was their benevolent duty to their readers. They have become one long fest of victimhood and not being good enough. I often wonder what kind of misogynists run these rags, and then, what kind of idiots buy them, but then that might be eroding the idiots', er, sisters' fragile sense of self-esteem, so I'd better not go there...

A male poet friend has even summed up this phenomenon in a frenzied comic poem called 'Fat Sex' which always brings the house down when he performs it.

It's a topsy turvy world we live in and no mistake. But let's not forget that perversion comes in many forms. As does the hypocrisy that invariably accompanies it. So if Nuts is covered up or suffers from premature ejection then the same should apply to other lurid publications unwholesome to the human soul.

On the plus side, Women's Realm seems to have weathered the fashion and has even been known to still give away the odd free knitting pattern. I believe a few Reader's Digest readers are still alive too, gawd bless 'em.

The British Government Endorses Polygamy

Once upon a time in the post-war era an entire family could live and pay their mortgage on a husband's salary - which was just as well since the wife was expected to leave work the moment she married and the husband also expected and wished to support his wife to stay at home and iron his newspapers/children - it being a pride thing.

This state of affairs endured until the early 1970s when feminism came along.
A good concept in many respects as chaps had definitely had it all their own way for far too long, an unexpected side-effect of greater female earning power was a sudden lurch upwards in house prices.

With the countrys' women taking to the workplace in their droves, more and more families started to benefit from the additional income to enjoy their first wondrous luxuries such as their own family car on the driveway and straw donkeys on the mantelpiece from their first package foreign holidays to Benidorm.

However someone somewhere noticed all this going on and thought, hmm, we'll soon put a stop to this extra income lark!

Suddenly houses began to shoot up in price until within a decade it became necessary for not one, but two, full-time salaries coming into a household to cover most mortgages.

Since then things have gone from bad to worse and however much a woman may want to stay at home to raise children, unless her husband/partner is wealthy these days, she will often have no choice but to return to work full-time, often without even the luxury of being able to remain at home until her youngsters start school (and feminism was supposed to be about having a choice of choices, right?).

But house prices didn't stop there. Oh no! People started finding they were being priced out of property altogether, particularly in certain areas of the country. For a while ingenious 100% + mortgages, terrifying 'interest-only' mortgages and cheap loans papered over the cracks by offering first-time buyers the chance of an unsustainable-if-rates-ever-rose home ownership opportunity.

However at least it was an opportunity and many grabbed it, even going so far as to tell whoppers on income self-disclosure forms to secure ever more perilous piles of finance to afford their 'house of cards'

Increasing numbers are today facing repossession or having to radically-downsize in a sinking market now that rates have shot up and the fixed-rate mortgage bonanza is coming to an end. Meantime the banks responsible for the credit crunch through their short-term speculating/reckless lending to the feckless/feck'd continue to award their CEO's obscene annual bonuses, rather than the Order of the Boot for their gross failure, and penalise the poor householder through increasing interest rates on the one hand while that same poor householder is bailing those selfsame banks out through the Government raiding their taxes to prop up them up on the other, thereby hammering the poor householder twice over.

But w***er banks aside, if we are to return to the sensible days of a sustainable 3 and a half x salary calculation for a mortgage and most houses are still around £200k, I calculate I will need at least 2.5 similarly income-endowed husbands to afford a modest two up, two down in a reasonable area of Oxford - 3.5 if they want a bigger house with a room each! Hence I might just have to opt for blogmate Mrs G's unthinkable solution! As for children, I might just be able to afford to rent a couple at weekends tho' they'd have to get a Saturday job once they hit 5 years old.

To be reduced to polygamy though - what is our government thinking of? ;-)

On a more serious note, 70% of UK citizens not yet on the property ladder are now 'poopers' (priced out of property) - ie; earning too much to qualify for social housing, but not enough to acquire a mortgage. As a co-operatively minded individual who believes in citizens getting together to fight back against an overly-greedy system I have joined my local Community Land Trust, who seek to provide a community-led solution to genuinely affordable housing.