From playful and fun, to politically correct: Censoring Roald Dahl

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Roald Dahl books, nationally revered and loved by kids everywhere, are having lots of alterations made to them by woke, politically correct editors who want to appease snowflake adults.  Roald Dahl, nationally revered and loved by kids (lots of whom are also adults now), is also dead and unable to speak out against the censorship being placed on his books.

I am against censorship in books and I am against banning books; sanitising them isn’t too far off. There are books and authors whose writing I despise – but I don’t believe in rewriting or banning them. Even if it is Salman Rushdie.

It seems to me that people would rather pull the wool over their children’s eyes than use ‘offensive’ language as an opportunity to explain the real world to them; the real world which, might I add, is a lot worse than how Dahl portrayed it. And let’s be very honest, the reason we love those books so much is because that language is all around us; it’s playful and it’s descriptive and it’s something we understand. I’m sorry you don’t like the words ‘ugly’ and ‘attractive’, but they are adjectives that exist nonetheless. It makes no sense to censure the use of the word ‘ugly’ when it is being used to describe characters whose entire story is based on the fact that they are ugly (both inside and out). How do you rewrite that? Not to go all Hopkins-Clarkson-Morgan, but I don’t understand why we need gender-neutral terms in the books either. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why ‘Cloud-men’ is more offensive than ‘Cloud-people’. Why is the word ‘man’ offensive? Men and women, boys and girls, exist; this fact shouldn’t offend anyone, regardless of their own beliefs about gender. Are we going to rewrite every character in every book as gender-neutral? Must we rewrite Harry Potter as the person who lived? Read more

PSA: Social media is f*cking you up. Again.

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A while ago (almost a year and a half ago, actually. I’m weeping at the passage of time as I write this), I wrote a post about social media and how it largely irks me, though I have yet to find a way to escape these shackles with which I am bound.

I’m happy to admit that my sentiments haven’t changed and I’m still a bitter old lady waving her cane around. I guess the youth I complain about also includes my own generation to an extent (though my smile lines and diminishing metabolism would like to disagree) because we pretty much still also shape what the future will be like.

Social media is a little different, though.

I think it’s always influenced by the youngest. I’m slowly withering away and there’s a reason I have no idea how to do Tik Tok dances; I still mourn the loss of “buffting” and I like thin eyebrows. The problem with the youngest ducklings, those spring chickens, is that they’re a group of conflicted people who don’t really know what they stand for – through no real fault of their own. Growing up in the age of social media means you’re constantly ingesting new information at rapid speed every day; you never had time to form your own opinions before thousands of others were thrust upon you (in Freudian terms, you kissed goodbye to the id at birth). Even before you made a Twitter account, the opinions you heard from others were shaped by recycled opinions they read online; there’s little authenticity in anything and validation is the goal. You melt at the touch of any sort of offence (see: snowflake), and simultaneously like to compensate for this fragility by going a thousand steps too far and making disgusting jokes under the guise of ‘I just have a dark sense of humour’. No, you don’t. You’re confused.

I’ve revisited my old post in celebration of Social Media day, and I’ve decided to give my two penneth again now that I’m a little older, not much wiser, and a bit less angry – but lockdowns forced me to spend an obscene amount of time online so I’m now obviously an expert in the field. 

Let’s discuss. Read more

(Anti) Feminism, part 3 – The Phenomenon of the ‘Pick-Me’

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Ah yes. We have reached the end of this angry rant with my favourite topic.

Not least because I am, by the standards of Twitter’s feminists, a big fat, giant, massive pick-me.

I don’t believe pick-me exists in the Oxford dictionary, but by and large it refers to a woman who doesn’t hate men (and vice-versa, but I can only speak from the perspective of a straight woman).

You defend men, believe they have feelings and should be looked after the way women are? Pick me! You want to look after your man; you want to show him love, cook for him, and do nice things for him? Absolutely a pick me, disgusting! For shame! You like men for their personality and their character, rather than their money, clothes, possessions etc? Ew, I hope he picks you sis. You don’t want all men to die? On God, we gon’ get someone to pick you.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? That’s because it is.

The only anti-pick-me narrative I agree with is that of a woman actively bashing other women for the approval of men. Being snide, bitchy, and unnecessarily rude just to get a few laughs out of men; laughing when a man hurts a woman who has done nothing wrong; supporting an abuser just because you think he’s sexy. Purposely putting other women down and trying to make yourself look better. That’s a real ‘please pick me, I’m different to the other basic bitches. I’m so much cooler and better than them, please pick me, they’re all ugly ogres and I’m so different to the rest; you’ll never find another girl like me, I promise you that. You’ll be thinking about me when you’re with her lol I’m so different, I leave a mark on people.’

But obviously, people have watered this down to suit their own agenda, and now pick-me generally refers to a woman who apparently does and says things as a mating call, because we obviously don’t have our own brains, and everything we do in life is solely in the quest to attain male approval. Which is very telling for the people who use the phrase. What a phenomenon.

I want to dissect it and destroy it.

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(Anti) Feminism, part 2 – The OnlyFans Debacle

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Today I want to talk about sex.

Disgusting, no shame, no modesty, horrible, burn me at the stake, send me straight to hell.

No, I want to talk about how sex sells; I want to talk about the objectification of women as perpetuated by… women.

Here we go, a bit of real controversy. Time to talk about 2020 feminism.

I’m gonna come out and say it. 

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(Anti) Feminism, part 1 – Not me

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Before I start this three-part shitshow, I want to clarify that I am concerned with Western feminism in this post. Being a brown woman who lives in the UK, I am not a feminist, and I will never be one amongst feminists today. Your struggles are not something that concerns me or my people (in fact, I have no business associating with a group of people who enjoy calling my people ‘oppressed’), and quite frankly I find you ridiculous. I think there are more important things to fight for than having your nipples out on show.

Yes, I am a woman who doesn’t identify as a feminist as we know it. Shock horror, this must mean I hate women, I am self-loathing and I should just die – but only two of those things are true. I believe the last time I ever entertained the idea of supporting feminism was many years ago, when I was much younger, much more naive, and innocently thought all women simply wanted equality with men in every aspect, especially respect. This was before I was spending almost every waking minute on social media, back when all I knew about feminism was through books, novels, and generally studying the plight of women through academia and otherwise. 

But this was also before women were sexually objectifying themselves the way they are now. Before anybody starts to use their favourite twitter term ‘internalised misogyny’, please be aware I do not have any. I am still very aware that men are trash (more on that later). I have no internalised misogyny; I do have a very real, very clear hatred for all idiocy. I don’t care what your gender is, I don’t care what your pronouns are, I don’t care what you have down below. If you’re stupid, you’re stupid. I will call out stupidity, regardless of your gender, the colour of your skin, your sexual orientation, your age, or any other factors that you want to get offended about. None of that is relevant if you’re an idiot, and your stupidity is highlighted by the fact that you wish to find solace in a scapegoat rather than taking accountability for the fact that you’re an idiot because you don’t know how to defend your own idiot points. Idiots. 

But I digress. Read more

Is your man a sociopath? 9 signs he probably is.

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“Hate is the complement of fear and narcissists like being feared. It imbues them with an intoxicating sensation of omnipotence.”
― Sam Vaknin, Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited

 

narcissism 

noun

selfishness, involving a sense of entitlement, a lack of empathy, and a need for admiration, as characterizing a personality type.

 

This post has been sitting in my drafts for about a month and I no longer care about it, which is why I haven’t posted it… but I think I’m the guinea pig of the dating world.  Apparently having ‘I am your mother’ plastered on my forehead, I somehow always found myself associating with the worst of the worst, so it’s only right that I use that for the greater good and teach you what I’ve learnt. And what I have learnt since then is the difference between a bitch boy and a man. I know the gender-is-a-social-construct brigade will get at me for that, but what can I say? There are men and there are men. We’re always categorising women, it’s only fair to do the same. When you’ve gone from dealing with boys who throw their toys out the pram for not buying them food to men who actually have their shit together and act like men, it’s hard not to talk about it.

But this post isn’t about the men, it’s about the bitch boys. I include the definition of narcissism because all sociopaths are narcissists. But not all narcissists are sociopaths.

The difference? Intention.

Both have extreme adoration for themselves, both will always put themselves first, both feel no genuine sense of guilt. Both are undeniably and unhealthily in love with themselves. Both are practically the same, bar one major difference.

A narcissist loves himself and will accidentally hurt you in the process because he’ll always put himself first. He cares about you, but he cares about himself more.

A sociopath loves himself and will at points intend to hurt you because he wants you to be hurt, and he’ll do anything to achieve that.

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