Princesses and Peas
In which we share the unending woes of three Guardian columnists. First, Nell Frizzell conjures a grand tale of sorrow and social injustice from her own unremarkable sleeping patterns and tells us that “going to bed early is our last great social taboo.” You heard her. Going to bed “before midnight” is a great social taboo. The last one. Such waywardness is, we learn, “a one-way ticket to condescension… and pariahdom.” “You will be ridiculed,” says Ms Frizzell. “If not shunned.” She is, nevertheless, being very, very brave. “It won’t stop me.”
Meanwhile, Bella Mackie, a Guardian comment moderator and daughter of the paper’s editor Alan Rusbridger, recounts her own fearless, indeed Herculean struggle with an addiction to… Diet Coke: “Giving up my favourite drink was as difficult as I had feared. I set about it with a determination to go cold turkey, knowing that even one can would make me slip back into old habits.” There followed a dark downward spiral. “For the first month, I felt exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open at my desk. Then came the nerves, the feeling that something was missing.” Yes, dear reader. Feel her pain and weep.
And finally, the chronically unhappy professional lesbian Julie Bindel bemoans the evils of marriage, including same-sex marriage, and is sternly disapproving of the fact that “there seems to be an almost total acceptance of [marriage] by lesbians today.” Specifically, what troubles her is that so many gay people, an overwhelming majority, “have a desire for ‘ordinariness’ and do not want to be seen as living ‘alternative’ lifestyles.” Given Ms Bindel’s niche career as a quarrelsome misfit and radical ‘activist’, this desire for bourgeois normativity simply will not do. And so she invokes the wisdom of feminist lecturer Nicola Barker, who tells us, flatly, that, “Same-sex marriage fits comfortably within the conservative ideology of the self-sufficient family and contributes to the politics of state austerity.”
Of course Ms Bindel goes further, as she must, and in doing so coughs up a contender for our series of classic Guardian sentences: “Isn’t marriage merely a clever ploy to keep us quiet about the trickier issues such as the deportation of lesbian asylum seekers?”
A question foremost on everyone’s lips.
Bella Mackie, a Guardian comment moderator
But she’ll need all that sugar and caffeine to meet her comment deleting quotas.
chronically unhappy professional lesbian Julie Bindel
That should be her byline.
That should be her byline.
Well, I can’t offhand think of an article by Ms Bindel in which she’s anything other than sullen, indignant or captious. And she is a professional lesbian, in that she seems to think lesbianism is a job. In fact, she thinks it ought to be every woman’s job. Because desire, she insists, is simply a matter of choice. Or decree.
“For the first month, I felt exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open at my desk.”
Lucky you work for the Guardian then.
“Isn’t marriage merely a clever ploy to keep us quiet about the trickier issues such as the deportation of lesbian asylum seekers?”
Curses! She’s on to us. Prepare the escape pods!
Judging by their work I was under the impression Guardian comment moderators were addicted to sniffing marker pens.
the conservative ideology of the self-sufficient family
We can’t have gay people being self-sufficient and ordinary.
Is ‘professional lesbian’ a degree or a trade?
These people. Gah. And they presume to tell us what to do.
Maybe Moonbat was onto something with his vision of Ethiopian fields crackling with laughter – a less affluent society than 21st century Britain is presumably spared the neurotic drivel of wankers like Nell Frizzell.
But she’ll need all that sugar and caffeine to meet her comment deleting quotas.
It’s even more pathetic than that: no sugar in Diet Coke.
Drink it or don’t, Nell. You’re going to die one day whatever you do.
Greg – “Is ‘professional lesbian’ a degree or a trade?”
It’s a degree. You have to pass a number of courses, including:
* The Proclaimers – Icons of Style
* Managing your Emotions – everything from angry to FURIOUS
* Men – Bastards, Pigs, or Pigsters?
* Great Lesbians of HERstory – A review of noteworthy sapphic ladies, covering Willow from “Buffy” to the present day
* The Vagina Monologues 2: Vag Mon With A Vengeance
* Subaltern Studies, or The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
“Is ‘professional lesbian’ a degree or a trade?”
Well, I suppose if you’re god at it, it becomes a craft….
Give Julie Bindel credit, she’s managed to upset everyone on the political spectrum.
Peter Tatchell is also concerned.
https://twitter.com/PT_Foundation/status/478855905824739328
Give Julie Bindel credit, she’s managed to upset everyone on the political spectrum.
Her clash with Laurie Penny, about unreliable journalism and making things up for effect, was also quite amusing.
Her clash with Laurie Penny, about unreliable journalism and making things up for effect, was also quite amusing.
Quite, she’s also upset progressives who think concern about FGM is a smokescreen for racism, people who dislike Julie Burchill and the entire transgendered community. After all it’s totally insane to argue, as she did, that a rape victim might object to a man in drag at the rape support centre. Who could be so insensitive?
The readers’ comments are also fairly entertaining. One reader notes Ms Bindel’s “genuine confusion as to… why gay people want to be normal,” meaning bourgeois, and how that relates to Bindel’s insistence that “sexuality is a choice, a political act.” Another adds, “She seems to have no understanding that… the vast majority of gay people… just want to get on with a nice normal life.” It’s also pointed out that, “she doesn’t seem able to explain… how two women marrying reinforces the patriarchy.”
Others, however, grumble about how “marriage is and always will be a conservative construct,” which seems a rather loaded, even quaint, way of looking at it.
So, I suppose the married lesbians who drink bottled water and retire at 10:00 PM will cause a rift in the space time continuum?
You know the end of “Return Of The Jedi”, where the rebels are having a proper old knees-up, having destroyed the renascent death star?
Well, if you look closely, you’ll spot a really grumpy female Ewok sulking in a corner. Having grown up bitter and twisted because refusing to shave your armpits doesn’t amount to much of a protest when you’re entirely covered in coarse wiry hair as a matter of course, even having just played a key role in handing the evil oppressor his arse is just not good enough for this one. She has to be really pissed off at something, all the time- anything. Anything at all.
That’s Julie Bindel, that is.
a really grumpy female Ewok sulking in a corner
Nah!. She’s upset that she signed up to be a Wookie and ended up a child’s toy.
http://www.virginmedia.com/movies/features/top-ten-jedi-facts.php?page=2
Interesting. The rush to proclaim one’s quasi-religiously moral bona fides most recently extended to plastering those little pink equal signs all over the planet. Because, you know, there’s no finer way to proclaim proud antiestablishmentarianism than to demand the sucker absolutely homogenize yours too.
Then I’m not sure what Bindel wants, or more pointedly, what protest du jour she’s all on about. Is it the cloistered sanctity of the quiet lesbian couple or is it the loud contrariness of the alternative couple that demands everybody pay to see them Proudly™ lapping up the collective benefit in order to accept that they’re exactly like everybody else.
Maybe I’ve hit on the paradox. Or maybe Bindel is also a blind squirrel. Because frankly I bemoan the growing fraud of statified 21st century marriage – including same-sex marriage – and disapprove that there seems to be an almost total acceptance of it by gays today.
David,
Bella Mackie is a true hero, and should not be mocked. Diet Coke addiction is no laughing matter. I, myself, am currently fighting my own demon addiction – Honey Nut Cheerios. Thank god I have alcohol to help quench my morning cravings.
Oh, and to add to my remark, it seems a foundational aspect of Progressivism is the notion that if a Progg can gin up a protest – say, the right to free beans for all pensioners – it naturally reflects an entire establishment determined to maintain an oppressive, anti-pensioner status quo.
Maybe Bindel hasn’t bothered to investigate if there is an Opponent whose zeal rises to the level of her own. I’m fairly certain there isn’t one who understands what that could be.
I am simply stunned by the implications of her writing, and not in a good way. How does this get published anywhere?
How does this get published anywhere?
And here I used to think foul rock lyrics were like foul film dialog: artistic interpretations used to highlight social concerns. Turns out they were all first person professions of depravity.
I would read The Guardian far more if it cleverly wove all three woes into one big comment on professional lesbian asylum seekers going to bed early while fighting an addiction to a ‘diet’ fizzy drink. Oh, I’d love to see that headline in fewer than eight words.
This is real issue:
This matter caused a row on a Face Book discussion that Richard Seymour of Lenin’s Tomb and guru of the International Socialist Network had with a number of comrades who took exception to his seemingly “liberal” views on the whole question of whether “Race Play” was racist.
TDK – And I thought chimping was unusual.
Would it make things better or worse if the white guy in the race play dressed up as Lenin?
I am simply stunned by the implications of her writing, and not in a good way. How does this get published anywhere?
Not to disparage you, but there actually is a very simple reason why any such objection isn’t going to get anywhere . . . Some guy named Gutenberg got that vehement objection from all sorts of people in the 1400s, and all the way back through the classical Egyptians we see all sorts of history of censoring this pharaoh, that pharaoh, all references to that other god, Etc.—have a look at the history of the god Set over the millennia for just one example . . . .
We can’t have gay people being self-sufficient and ordinary.
That.
Damn those conservative constructs.
Oh, I’d love to see that headline in fewer than eight words.
Professional Lesbian Refugees Addicted To Diet Drink.
“Isn’t marriage merely a clever ploy to keep us quiet about the trickier issues such as the deportation of lesbian asylum seekers?”
Having the right to marry is really a conspiracy to keep gay people oppressed? There’s no pleasing some people.
There’s no pleasing some people.
It’s actually quite difficult to imagine what might please Julie Bindel. Even picnics upset her.
Professional Lesbian Refugees Addicted To Diet Drink.
Nah, you mean:
Professional Lesbian Sleepyheads Addicted To Diet Drink
Gotta get in Ms Frizzell’s soporifics.
SLEEPY SAPPHOID ASYLUM SEEKERS SHUN SUGARWATER – see page 3
“Marriage is a great institution – if you like living in institutions.” Interesting, too, that at the end of her drivel, Bindel quotes this approvingly, as though humans or at least radfems could thrive outside of any social institutions. All humans – indeed all social animals – require institutions to flourish. It’s in our biological nature.
Now they’re just having us on, I think…
That picnic link is, well, something else:
Picnic fiends prepare food they would normally find repellent, such as pasta bows mixed with green peppers and tinned sweetcorn, home-made hummus with the consistency of Polyfilla, and cocktail sausages that resemble a shrivelled, severed penis by the time they are unpacked. Fruit is bruised, and cake is mush, not to mention the fact that someone has forgotten the salt, so the little cherry tomatoes that are barely holding together taste of fuck all.
So Julie’s a tad fussy about what she eats…..
By the time the picnic is finished your arse feels like it’s been kicked by a frightened horse, because no matter how nice a spot you pick, and how thick your blanket is, the ground is full of bumps and hard stubble. Bending over to slice yourself a supermarket baguette can put your back out and bruise both knees. Such joy.
……and it seems is so hideously unfit that she cannot sit or move normally………..
Ah, but what is this, do I detect a whiff of patriarchally imposed domination – Julie’s objections become a tad more clear:
Men and children love picnics, but the women usually hate it because, let’s face it, making a picnic is seen as women’s work.
(Heaven forfend she ever reads about David’s “plastic spatula of oppression”, formerly described on this blog). Anyhoo, back to Julie and her what passes for her friendships:
For my birthday one year I was taken to Kenwood on Hampstead Heath to hear an outdoor opera. I love Tosca, but by the end of the evening I could quite happily have perched myself on a high wall and hurled myself over the edge to my death, shouting, ‘Perché non potevamo abbiamo ascoltato Tosca a casa e cena mangiato in comodità?’ It rained. I was desperate to go to the loo, having drunk a bucketful of warm white wine (someone forgot the ice). And I could hardly hear the opera over the sound of tossers playing frisbee.
Moral of the story: Don’t plan a happy sociable afternoon with Julie, and don’t treat her for her birthday.
It’s actually quite difficult to imagine what might please Julie Bindel. Even picnics upset her.
Happy holidaying children in her vicinity, during school holidays, also gets her going. So much so that she ‘gets even’ by harrassing them, insulting them, and exploiting her sexuality in a way calculated (she hopes) to offend them. If you have time read the comments, including hers – it is unbelievable:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/aug/21/julie-bindel-tuscany-holiday
For those with better things to do than give further contemplation to this appallingly miserable killjoy, this comments gives a flavour of the responses:
Lets assume that Julie’s entirely in the right here, and that, far from her just being a miserable lemon-sucking old bat who takes offence at children enjoying themselves, the neighbouring kids are actually running wild and being obnoxious with the connivance of their negligent parents, and it really is unbearable.
Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it?
“SLEEPY SAPPHOID ASYLUM SEEKERS SHUN SUGARWATER – see page 3”
I think I may have ruptured something reading that. Not to mention convinced my neighbour I have adopted a hyena.
I don’t know how, but your link to “classic sentences” goes back to this post.
Hmmm. Apparently we are informed by Julie Bindel that all must be absolutely updated to reflect recent occurrences.
Got it, we can indeed understand and act accordingly.
Previously, we would have noted; Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
We will now instead note: Chronically unhappy professional lesbians: Those with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
—Situational note, all the rather a few lesbians _I_ know seem to regularly be quite cheerful and matter of fact about all sorts of things, actually. Must be the chronic and unhappy bit for Julie . . .
I don’t know how, but your link to “classic sentences” goes back to this post.
It goes to an archive of 40 or so posts, the most recent of which is this one.
Must be the chronic and unhappy bit for Julie
My guess would be that Ms Bindel’s politics and sour disposition are not entirely unrelated. The question, I think, is which came first.
The thing with Julie (and others of her graunista ilk), is that they have such a terrible problem with other people being happy.
It doesn’t matter that their happiness arises out of things they choose to do, or people they choose to be with, and in neither case doing any harm to Julie. Nope – if their happiness is a result of something she disapproves of, it must be castigated. How dare they choose to enjoy their lives and those they love!
Fuckbeans. Just realised several hours too late that I got my miserable Grauniad wenches mixed up. Oh well.
Kudos to ‘fingsaint’ in the CIF comments for “the completely satisfied sector.”
She hates panettone as well, apparently:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/24/panettone-festive-delicacy-italian-monstrosity
And also loathes stollen:
“If panettone is full of hot air, you have to be a fruit cake to like stollen, the German cake that may take over from panettone soon as the latest food craze. It is heavy, dense, and full of medicinal-tasting dried fruit, plastic almond paste, and enough icing sugar to…” etc.
Hal’s right about Puritanism – I think Ms Bindel would feel completely at home in AD 1657.
“She hates panettone as well”
WTF is WRONG with this person?!
My guess would be that Ms Bindel’s politics and sour disposition are not entirely unrelated. The question, I think, is which came first.
She’s a spiteful misanthrope so radical feminism suits her to a tee.
Going to bed “before midnight” is a great social taboo.
And sleeping in isn’t?
Those dratted morning larks who get up at 5am to greet the dawn with yoga and oat-grass smoothies are more than happy to heap guilt aplenty on the rest of us for being such loathsome slug-a-beds, not to mention subjecting us to Morning Chirpiness, one of the most annoying attitudes possible.
We night owls give morning larks a hard time when they want to retire early in retaliation for their smug, self-righteous morning celebrations. Going to bed early is just another way to announce your superior circadian morality.
There’s no cultural formulation that associates staying up late with virtue, but getting up early?
That’s godliness personified.
As someone notes in the Guardian comments, “The problem with getting what you want is that you can’t fight for it anymore.” And for some people – say, someone whose career, status and public persona are based on being, as it were, professionally angry – the activism can be more important than the cause. In some cases, the cause seems little more than a pretext for indulging an unhappy disposition.