“You know what I hate about German men?” I asked my friend the other day.
“Go on,” he said, cheerfully enough.
“You use way too many smileys in your e-mails. It’s unmanly. It’s undignified. Smiley, smiley, smiley. It’s real smarmy. And you never smile that much in real life.”
“You’re so fucked up sometimes, Jacinta. Men have emotions. Even German men have emotions. And so we need emoticons. Anyway, they’re part of normal punctuation now.”
“Ooooh, yeah. Punctuation. You use way too many exclamation marks, too. I’m friends with published authors who send me e-mails with two exclamation marks in a row at the end of a sentence. What pussies. Men should only use exclamation marks when they really have to, and they should never use two of them in a row like that. What are you gonna do next, start using lip balm or something?”
My friend started laughing then. “Jacinta,” he said. “Sometimes I just don’t think you’re emancipated at all.”
But I am. I am, basically, a feminist. I’m just a bit of a crap one.
1) I like women’s football for all the wrong reasons
Okay, so you have to admit, I wouldn’t even watch women’s football in the first place if I wasn’t a bit of a feminist. The trouble is I think I like it for all the wrong reasons.
I actually find it easier to watch than normal football, coz sometimes, when they’re playing normal football, they play so fast you have to really concentrate and one minute they’re down one end of the pitch and the next minute they’re down the other end and then you blink and they’ve scored and you’re not even sure if it was an own goal or not or even if it went in or just went on the top or not.
That doesn’t happen in women’s football. It’s really easy to remember what half they’re playing in. I like it better. I’m just not sure how feministical of me this is. Plus, I have really bad thoughts about Hope Solo.
2) I left Facebook out of feminist solidarity with that chambermaid in the DSK case and ended up using porn three times in one hour just to take the edge off of my cold turkey-type feelings
I’m not saying she isn’t a CIA agent who got paid millions of dollars to suck him off and pretend he’d raped her in the mouth and fuck up his chances of becoming the president of France. All I’m saying is, we don’t know.
If you pretend you do know, then you are saying that every time a poor black woman sees a rich white guy’s penis, she gets down on her knees and opens her mouth as wide as she possibly can and starts sucking.
Since this blatantly cannot be true, what you are really saying is that when rich white men rape poor black women in the mouth they should get away with it. It’s okay if you think that.
But say that’s what you think. It is okay for Dominique Strauss Kahn to rape people in the mouth. Lions also don’t ask beforehand. “It is okay for Dominique Strauss Kahn to rape people in the mouth.” That’s what you should say.
Don’t pretend like you, generally speaking, think rape is a crime but she must’ve been horny as fuck just because chambermaids always get horny as fuck halfway through their shifts and why didn’t she bite his foreskin off if she was THAT scared? Don’t give me that shit. Say: “Rape is okay, it’s part of nature.” You’re then not accepting THE LAW but have the guts to take, if not a moral position, then at least a vaguely logical one.
Still, if I deleted every pussy German who on the one hand spends 20 hours of any given day writing whingey liberal status updates about Stuttgart 21/Guttenberg cheating on his thesis/nuclear power stations, only to spend four hours a day writing vitriolic crap about a woman they don’t know, who thinks, basically, that is INCONCEIVABLE that a chambermaid would ever not feel like giving head right now, or who says stuff like: “For the cost of that hotel room, he could’ve gone to a prostitute….” well, I’d only have, like, seven German friends left on Facebook.
Actually, I’d only have seven friends left in the world, basically. I don’t mean to be judgemental, but fuck, human beings are pricks.
So, out of feminist solidarity with, basically, chambermaids everywhere, I just deleted myself off of Facebook. So far, so feminist. The problem is, I’m totally fucking addicted to the internet and even with the phone-hacking scandal, there’s only so many Guardian video interviews with Nick Davies you can watch in one sitting and thus, on my first Facebook-free day, I ended up wanking over Backroom Casting Couch Auditions three times in one hour, just to take the edge off of my cold turkey-type feelings. I am a bad person. And a terrible feminist.
3) If I had the money I would get Botox and boobs
My poverty forces me to be all like: isn’t it terrible how women are forced to be these empty, plastic, hairless, clean shop window mannequins, when actually we all have 0.0000000001% neanderthal blood in us?
Aaaaargh! Why aren’t women allowed to get old, and fat, and hairy? Why aren’t women allowed to be ugly? What would be wrong with a female Meatloaf? But if I had money, man. Fuck that shit. If I had money. I’d throw my feminist principles OUT the window faster than you can say “Alice Schwarzer would look better in a burka, to be honest.”
I’d get fake tits and fake teeth and fake hair and fake eyelashes and then I’d inject my forehead with so much nerve poison that nobody would ever be able to tell whether I was lying or not, ever. I’d make Jordan look natural. And every day I’d wake up, happy to be alive, and I’d walk around Berlin looking like a cross between a transsexual Barbie doll and those prostitutes on Oranienburger Straße from about 10 years ago, when they used to dress up like alien robots.
4) My boyfriend always pays for me at the cinema
It’s not like I think he should. I’m just too fucking stingy to pay for myself. I’m so stingy, I’ve started saying ‘invite’ like a German. He’s all like: “Do you want to go to the cinema?” I’m like: “Are you gonna ‘invite’ me?” He’s like: “Okay, then.” I’m like: “Excellent! Let’s go!”
5) I love Verona Feldbusch
Or Verona Pooth, as she’s known now. I think she’s really postmodern and stuff, like when she famously swapped the dative case for the accusative case in that Directory Inquiries advert. Like this was a huge act of rebellion in a country like Germany, where people are intellectual cowards, are intellectually petrified, where they’re paralyzed into submission.
It wasn’t like she swapped a dative for a genitive, like everyone does. Nope. She did her own swap. And I think it kind of makes sense. Like the dative case is kind of helpful – “ich gebe dir”, “ich sage dir”, “ich helfe dir“. It’s a girlie case. Actually, no, it’s a mummy case. She swapped it for the accusative, which is more aggressive – “ich töte dich”, “ich hasse dich”, “ich ficke dich”.
The dative is more like, I’m doing this for you, the accusative, I’m doing this to you. She swapped them over and that was really clever, coz the people at Auskunft are fucking us basically at the rates per minute that they’re charging. I think she’s secretly a total genius. Plus, she’s got really great tits.
She’s getting old, though. When I arrived in this country, she was a young girl. And now, whenever I look at her flobby neck I can’t help thinking of that Sylvia Plath poem with the hungry prehistoric sea-monster floating around your mirror, desperate to swallow up a young girl for breakfast. Although, to be honest, that’s probably not incredibly feministical of me, either.
Still. I HAVE eaten my own period. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, bitches.