Keenly attuned to pressing issues of the day, the Guardian’s Matt Seaton tells us we just aren’t agonising about cupcakes enough. And when I say cupcakes, I obviously mean,

Butter-iced snares of self-loathing that sell precisely because they exploit young women’s insecurity about their looks and identity, and offer a completely false and self-defeating solace of temporary gratification, almost certainly followed by remorse and disgust.

It seems our Guardianista is upset by cupcakes being a bit girly. And that somehow, for reasons that aren’t clear, these tiny cakes are exploitative and induce all manner of psychological problems in the womenfolk of the world. It’s a bold claim, I think you’ll agree. According to Mr Seaton,

They’re not just cakes: like any cultural artefact, they have implicit values baked in. And the values I see in cupcakes are of a demeaning, self-trivialising sort of hyper-femininity.

Two more, I think, for our ongoing series. Via Patrick Brown.

Update:

Writing bravely in the Guardian, Icess Fernandez Rojas unearths a new realm of suffering, one hitherto ignored by the unthinking masses:

All I really wanted was a venti, white chocolate mocha without the whip cream.

No, don’t worry, it isn’t that. Ms Fernandez Rojas does get her beverage. The horror comes before that.

I gave the barista, a lovely older woman, my name and she shot me the typical confused look.

It begins.

I spelled it for her like a first-grader would recite her home phone number. “I-c-e-s-s. You know, like the goddess, but spelled like ice,” I explained. “What?” she asked again.

Yes, our latest Declarer of Ostentatious Grievance was trying to order a personalised coffee – or rather, coffee in a disposable cup that has her name scrawled on it before being thrown away – a baffling concept in itself, one made more complicated by the author’s uncommon and phonetically unobvious name. And the confused barista, despite being a lovely older woman, was, albeit unwittingly, grinding our Guardianista’s face beneath her heel.

In fairness to Starbucks, it’s not just baristas who are at fault but any restaurant or eatery requiring a name to add a personal touch to its service.

You see, Ms Fernandez Rojas has endured this poignant political struggle before – “a lifetime of having my name misspelled and mispronounced.” And those tears won’t dry themselves, you know. Which is why you, the public, must be told. What with your dull and obvious names, like Jessica and Angela:

Angela could get coffee at Starbucks with ease while Icess was still spelling her name out. Jessica was a staple at my local Chinese place even though Icess paid. And even Microsoft Word recognised Jenny as a proper pronoun, a proper person, over me; the red squiggle line was a constant reminder.

Spellcheck too? Will this oppression never end? One for our collection of classic sentences. And doubtless Ms Fernandez Rojas is intimately familiar with the spelling and pronunciation of every name of every employee at her local Chinese restaurant.

Sometimes the endless quest for name validation, even in my own Word document, was exhausting.

Poor lamb. Perhaps a coffee would help. Oh wait.

It’s all very tragic. Our Guardian columnist just wants to “celebrate [her] uniqueness” in an “inclusive society” and her spellchecking software, the subtleties of which apparently elude her, is dashing those hopes. She isn’t being “validated” by Microsoft Word. It’s how utopias die. No, you black-hearted scoundrels, stop that smirking at once. Why won’t you feel her pain? Doesn’t its immensity weigh upon your breast? Well, at least Ms Fernandez Rojas isn’t suffering alone.

Update:

Sniggering at the spelling errors of Starbucks baristas is now a thing among Guardian readers, who seem to imagine a ten-second interaction with someone whose own name they don’t know, and don’t care to know, is equivalent to a relationship with a long-standing colleague or close family member. (Next week in the Guardian: laughing at dyslexics and people for whom English is a second language.) Though I did quite like this dissenting comment: “This is a bit of a pot-and-kettle situation. A few weeks ago this newspaper ran, on its front page, the headline marquee ‘Plane carrying Bolivian president, Eva Morales, rerouted to Austria.’ There was no mention of when Bolivian president Evo Morales had announced a sex change.”

A phrase I borrow from a remarkably sane Guardian reader, responding to this article by Mike Power, a man apparently determined to atone for having such a patriarchal name. First, picture the scene:

All across Britain, the whiff of charred, low-quality sausage meat is hanging in the summer haze. And with it, floating almost indistinguishably in the grease-filled air across the garden fences, is blokey barbecue chat.

And then, this being the Guardian,

If there is anything less compelling but more oppressively penetrating than the conversation of four suburban men discussing how to light and then operate a barbecue, I have yet to hear it.

You heard him, it’s oppressively penetrating. Why so, you ask?

What really drains the joy from the summer breeze is the assumption, and the practice, that this is Man’s Work. All over the UK, probably the world, the barbecue is now one of the last places where even normal blokes become sexist.

Yes, I know. Two for our archive of classic sentences. Mr Power is upset, as all right-thinking people should be, that some heinous “biological determinism” holds sway in the warm weather custom of cooking outdoors. A cultural phenomenon that, we learn, “sees women as salad-spinners and men as the keepers of the grill, the tenders of the flame, lords and masters of the meat.” “It’s a sausage-fest out there,” says Mr Power. “And it’s getting ugly.” Because there’s nothing uglier than the sight of menfolk indulging, often knowingly, in a clichéd male behaviour – cooking for friends and family, and making sure that everyone is having a good time. None of which impedes our slayer of the patriarchy. He has credentials to display and boilerplate to churn:

The mythology of meat is well marbled with machismo.

I’ll just leave that one there, shall I?

I’d like to see every citizen receive a basic income of AUD$30,000 per year. No exceptions, no means testing. This is why.

Godfrey Moase, “activist and union organiser,” writing in the Guardian:

I once worked in a call centre where a few of the interviewers would be regularly rostered to do phone surveys about female incontinence products. Asking strangers whether they lost a teaspoon, a tablespoon or more in volume per occasion is a tough gig. Then again, the horror of the role was somewhat less visceral than that experienced by a worker I’d once represented who had to manually slit the throats of chickens at a poultry factory. At Centrelink, he had listed his occupation as “killer.” What strikes me about a dirty job isn’t that it needs doing – it’s that someone has to do it to get by. There’s no other choice for them.

A state of affairs that prompts a radical solution:

Imagine the creativity, innovation and enterprise that would be unleashed if every citizen were guaranteed a living. Universal income provides the material basis for a fuller development of human potential. Social enterprises, cooperatives and small businesses could be started without participants worrying where the next pay cheque would come from. Artists and musicians could focus on their work.

One for our series of classic sentences, perhaps. But imagine the creative avalanche that would be unleashed by Mr Moase alone. 30,000 Australian dollars a year, extracted from others and given to him, could result in even more Guardian articles telling us that artists and musicians shouldn’t be expected to earn a living. Because, well, obviously, they’re artists and musicians. Or indeed “activists.” It’s a bold ambition, the goal of which, as one commenter conceives it, is to “distribute drudgery fairly” via some massive rota system, with dirty jobs – say, abattoir work and drain maintenance – being done, intermittently, by doctors, hair stylists and other random individuals with no relevant expertise. I can’t help thinking that’s been tried somewhere, not too long ago, with – how shall I put this – very mixed results. Though presumably artists and musicians would be exempt from this too.

In the comments Tim Worstall tries to shake some sense into Mr Moase’s skull.

Update:

Elsewhere in the Guardian thread, a fan of Mr Moase says with a hint of triumph, “This universal income… makes employment optional.” For him (and no doubt others), that’s the goal. The sweet, sweet cherry of state-sanctioned slackerdom, all in the name of emancipation and virtue. “Submission to a corporation,” we’re told, “will not be mandatory for your survival on Earth.” Though leeching indefinitely on the
skills and effort of others – who will be forced to submit to him – will be perfectly okay, apparently. And as regular readers will know, this is not an uncommon sentiment among our self-declared moral betters.

Yes, Giving It To The Man™ by taking it from others.

In today’s Guardian, George Monbiot is stressing a pressing need. Specifically,

The need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores.

And without which,

Racism, nationalism and war are only three of the many hazards to which society is exposed.

For George, these superior intellects must be free of dirty commerce, even corporate donations for new buildings and scholarships, in order to denounce – and thereby correct – the public’s general preference for free markets and lower taxes. The state may spend more of our earnings and regulate more of our affairs than at any time in living memory, but it still isn’t big enough for George. And so someone must save the lower orders from “neoliberal economists,” “imperialist historians” and “war-mongering philosophers,” all of whom would otherwise warp our tiny, undeveloped minds.

An arrangement of the kind Mr Monbiot envisions, presumably funded by the taxpayer and in which our self-anointed betters denounce “economic growth and the forces that drive it,” is a disinterested one, see, and thus pure of motive. Just like socialism. Plus, this enlightened “class of intellectuals” – which is to say, people very much like George – is all that will save us from racism, nationalism and even war.

Like his ideological peers in the world of art, Mr Monbiot regards money from companies, given freely, as a distilled wickedness that corrupts all it touches; while money extracted from taxpayers, forcibly, is morally hygienic and apparently without limit. All very humble and egalitarian. Not at all like the fantasy of yet another would-be socialist overlord.

George, after all, is known for his immense modesty, as when he expressed his contempt for those who dare to disagree with him, all of whom were waved aside as dullard conservatives struggling with racial phobias. “The other side,” he announced, is “on average more stupid than our own.” Guardian readers – known far and wide as The Great Thinkers Of Our Era™ – were told in no uncertain terms that “conservatism thrives on low intelligence” and “appeals to stupidity.” “Conservative ideology,” said George, “is the critical pathway from low intelligence to racism.” And all of this in contrast with liberals such as himself, who are apparently “self-deprecating” and “too liberal for their own good.”

Readers who wish to sup more wisdom from Mr Monbiot’s milky teats can do so here, here and here.