Pretty Princesses.

First of all I just need the record to show that as a woman in my early twenties it's beyond ridiculous how much the Horned King terrifies me still to this day, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, but seriously, it's a film made primarily for children, is there any need for this...

...honestly?

Anyway the task at hand, Disney Princesses; now I have no strong opinion on Disney Princesses, I think as a group they're all kind of bad role models for young women, yeah Belle reads, but then again she also commits occasional acts of bestiality, and yes Snow White teaches the dwarves how to clean the house and look after themselves properly, but then she cleans the house for them and looks after them anyway, she's essentially a housewife to seven men, bloody Ariel gives up her entire life, family, friends, voice, and for what? A man that dumps her like a sack of hot shit the second a pretty girl walks past, Cinderella looks after orphaned mice, and has a break through moment where she escapes the clutches of the child abusing, child labour law breaking Lady Tremaine, just to go back to the castle and wait for Prince friggin' Charming to rescue her. Which really is something they're all guilty of. And do not even get me started on Jasmine, she has absolutely no redeeming features, she is rude, she is disrespectful to

almost everyone, like fair enough Jaz the men in your life shouldn't be trying to marry you off, they don't own you, but at least use your manners, she sneaks out of her room at night with a complete stranger and doesn't tell anyone where she's going, FUCKING STRANGER DANGER JASMINE, fucks sake, she uses her sexuality to seduce Jafar into doing her bidding, which isn't that bad, but come on Jasmine, you're a strong woman, use your words, you are more than your body, plus you are a fucking child and he is at least 50. Which brings me onto my next point, why do all the Disney Princesses end up with men that are years older than them, I'm not one to judge an age gap but when the younger of the couple is still a child I'm calling 'hell no' on that one. (Side note: Mulan rocks).

I digress because my original point was my favourite Disney Princess is, drumroll please.....Princess Eilonwy. Who the fuck is that I hear you ask? Princess Eilonwy, is the kick arse, no bullshit princess from Disney's The Black Cauldron (which explains my Horned King based terror at the beginning). Why is she so much superior to her fellow Princess? I'm glad you asked...

 1. She is sassy as fuck.

2. She is kind to everyone

3. She boosts moral.

4. Finding a man is not top on her list of priorities and she does not let any man boss her around. 

5. And when she does end up with a fella, it's not love at first sight, they've gone through several traumas which have brought them closer together, there is no talk of immediate nuptials AND he is age appropriate.

6. She does not hesitate to knock Taran down a peg or two when he starts with his 'we wouldn't have got out the castle if it wasn't for me' thing, she quickly informs him that he found a magic sword and the sword got them out and that if it wasn't for her breaking him out of the dungeon he'd he lying there still.

and last but not least...

7. In a film filled with peril she does the rescuing just as much as she is rescued.

Also shout out to Gurgi...

Flash-mobs, aka I'm leaving you.

I have spent the last few hours doing something that I'm pretty sure we all do, but none of us talk about, well a lot of women will anyway,not all women though, but a lot, and please do not take from this that I am like a large portion of the female population who are, for right or for wrong, dying to be married, (another debate for another time) but I have spent the last few hours watching wedding proposals on Youtube.
Let the record show that I am only admitting to this guiltiest of guilty pleasures so I can share with you what I've learned. And you know what I've learned? That flash-mobs are the devil's work, and if anyone ever tries to propose to me via flash-mob not only will I say no, we are breaking up forever.

1.They are cheesy, 2. They are awful, 3. Anyone that draws that much unwanted attention to ME in a crowded area is obviously an arsehole, 4. Anyone that draws that much unwanted attention to THEMSELVES in a crowded area is obviously a crazy person and I just don't need that sort of behaviour in my life, 5. They always last too long. Fucking flash-mobs. Like I mean seriously what's wrong with 'Hey dude I love you and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna love you for the rest of my life, wanna have a party so we can tell all the other people we love? Yeah? Awesome let's get married.' IN THE COMFORT AND PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME. Oh and 6, that's right I've thought of a number six, 6. Everyone else present has to be subjected to this display as well.

I don't need to be a victim of your flash-mobbery. What if I'm just trying to enjoying my life in peace and some fool has organised a fucking flash-mob to propose to their significant other? What if I don't like this song? I fucking hate Bruno Mars' Marry You, and god knows it is used for around 80% of flash-mob proposals. What if I just wanted a quiet meal, or a nice walk in the park and YOU FUCKING RUINED IT WITH YOUR FLASH-MOB? And why do these flash-mob bandits never use real dancers it's always the target's loved one's friends, and family, and colleagues, in other words: people who can not dance for shit.

Another thing I always think when watch these displays of lunacy is this: the person being proposed to, for the sake of argument we'll say Betty, knows what's happening within the first 30 seconds of the whole charade, Betty knows she is being flash-mobbed, now in the three or four minutes that follow one of two things could happen, either Betty thinks 'Wow I'm so excited to get married' in which she has to wait there awkwardly while the shit dancers finish their routine, where the level of skill is matched only by the choreography, so she can be put out of her misery, OR in that four minutes or less Betty has time to think this over, and I mean REALLY think it over, and she says no, WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENS NOW? I think Betty's significant other should just play it safe and stick with my 'Hey dude I love you etc.' thing. 


And I swear, hand to a god I don't believe in, if you propose to me in front of a crowd of people, be it strangers, or loved ones, hell even my Mother makes this list, I will leave you. I will walk out and never come back, I do not care how much I thought I loved you.

Real men fight, and other kids games.

Tonight my Mam took me out for me and a couple of my nieces out for tea, and a few tables along is this family of four, standard boring nuclear family, two parents, one girl and one boy, who is in the same class as my nine year old niece, and a we can hear the family telling him off, and there was so much wrong with this conversation that I can only give you highlights, but the long and short of it was that when people pick on him he can't get upset, and he needs to take up a sport, and stop eating so much, 'From now on you can only eat breakfast, dinner and tea, and not grown up portions' like dude, what the fuck, he's a child, and not a tall child, I'd be surprised if he can ever reach the worktops, if he's eating grown up portions it's because that's what you're feeding him.

I was just getting over this incredulous lapse of logic, when the 'man' of the family starts saying, 'you need to take up a man's sport, a real man's sport like boxing, shut up telling him to pay football, football's a man's sport, but it's not a man's man sport, boxing is a sport for real men', and that 'men watch football but they're not real men, real men box and play rugby and knock each other about', at this point his mother chips in 'yeah if you played rugby you'd be able to plough right through him', somewhere in the middle of this speech I sent my nieces to the play area while they waited for our food to come, being nine and ten I didn't want them to hear this bullshit.

'Real men knock each other about', now I know you can't judge how other people drag up bring up their kids, and that it's their own business, but who the fuck tells a little boy and girl that basically the real measure of a man is how hard he can punch something?

Now I consider myself a good Northern working class girl, granted I have a blog and a university education (almost), but I also have a 'top for best', I indulge in the occasional Snakebite, and I consider any Christmas without a bust up a dull affair, I know, in my heart, that I am a working class lady, and from my experience and from the accounts of others and through things I've learned, I know that upper class misogyny and working class misogyny are two different things, the misogynistic upper classes consider their wives to be sweet pure little things that belong to them and that can't possibly have been seen naked by another man, regardless of how many women have had his cock in their mouth, (*cough* Madonna/Whore complex *cough cough*), working class misogyny is 'real men don't hit women', women are to be protected, we need looked after, because heaven forbid a women can take care of herself.

Tonight I witnessed the newest little generation of damsels in distress looking for their hero, and big strong men looking to 'knock each other about'. Ain't life grand?

Grieving for a jar, also known as, my visit to the morgue.

'He danced and probably 
walked barefoot on the beach.
 This foot, had a favourite pair of shoes.'

 Being a glamorous artiste isn't all about fancy studios and bowls of fruit, sometimes it's just you and a few classmates taking a train...to the morgue. I recently took a mandatory Life Drawing class that barely anyone turned up to, and irony of the relatively high level of attendance for the optional Morgue visit was not lost on me (there was limited places and all of them were taken).

So we're sitting there no more than 8 of us in total, just drawing pieces of dead body, heads, feet, hands, hoping to god that the eyes don't magically open...well maybe that was just me, anyway we're all sitting there when our tutor goes 'Jesus, just think, this guy spoke and laughed and kissed' and we'd been voicing similar thoughts all day, so it might have just been the use of the word 'kiss' that silenced us for a few minutes, because it doesn't take anyone else to laugh, or talk, but the thought of the head in a jar kissing someone meant he had a someone to kiss, that someone loved him, that someone thought about him, and although we knew he'd been alive at some point, for me, for the first time, he wasn't just a head in a jar any more.

    

Foetal Skeleton at 6 months

Also at the morgue, was a room for cutting bodies up and stuff, and in this room, on shelves against the wall was a display of dead babies, there was really no way to ease into that so I thought I'd just say it, dead fucking babies on the shelves like fucking ornaments. It maddened me slightly (well more than slightly) that these children hadn't signed consent forms for their new accommodation, like the people in the other room. When I asked the embalmer about how and why these babies got there, she told me they were taken without permission from their Mothers, and the reason they were taken without permission was that they didn't need any, they were taken before the laws changed to protect them, which happened in 1961, I know this because I looked it up. So by that logic some of these children could have been taken 51 years ago, so if a Mother of one of these babies was 20 years old during pregnancy, that would only make her 71 now, so it's a very really possibility that there are women out there grieving for what these people keep in fucking jars.

Foetus with malformations, kept in a jar.

Rape. Actions speak louder than words, or do they?

A while back I was listening to the radio when a song said a woman was raped, and it wasn't a crude rap song being all 'I'm gonna rape everyone you love' and yet it blanked out the word 'rape', rape is very real, and it happens to women and men everyday and maybe we should be doing more to prevent it and get convictions when it does happen, instead of ignoring it and blanking it out. How are we supposed to talk about it, how are we supposed to teach our children about it if we can't even say it? Rape. It's not Beetlejuice. If you say it three times it's not going to appear out of nowhere. We all need to be educated on rape and how to prevent it, and also, what sort of behaviour is, if not rape, is sexually threatening and unacceptable. No means no, and an absence of a no, is definitely not a yes. Also if someone is wasted, that's not a yes either. I leave you in the capable hands of Laci Green to find out more:

Stay safe. Make good choices,

Casual racism and why I'd rather be gay than black. (It sounds worse than it is)

I love calling out racists (especially on Facebook, where everyone can see and they can't get out of it or pretend they didn't say it because it's there in black and white for us all to witness), because a lot of them would cringe if you called them that, because that's not how they see themselves, because that's how easy our society and culture has made it to be casually racist, remarks roll off the tongue and are all over Facebook. Most people would say 'I'm not a racist' or even 'I have black friends', but guess what assuming you are better than someone because you are a colour they aren't, or making assumptions about people based on skin colour is fucking racist. In the same way as saying something is 'so gay' is still a homophobic statement even if you 'love the gays'. Another quick comparison between homophobia and racism, and it starts bad so let me get to the end before anyone goes off on one. I, Abby Jane Pearson, being a young woman living in the UK, would rather be gay than black, and I'll tell you for why right now, because, being gay and black are similar in the sense that, there's nothing wrong with either,neither can, nor should be, helped, they're just facts of life, people are just born that way and it's our differences that make us beautiful and they should be celebrated, but you'll always get some bigot fucking it up for the rest of us, and here comes the reasoning behind why I'd rather be gay than black, as a gay women I can chose when and where, and to whom I come out, when I feel safe and comfortable, sure as shit nobody in the entire world has to come out as black. I've got this friend, she's both black and beautiful, and people think it's okay to shout 'nigger' at her in the street. If a racist approaches her in the street, she cannot deny the beautiful chocolatey tone of her skin, she cannot CHOOSE to be safe. And that my friends, is why I'd rather be gay than black.