humour

In Praise of Valentine’s Day

~ biggirlpants ~ 2 Comments

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It’s a partly cloudy Sunday in February, and I’m enjoying the kind of gentle hangover that will ensure I cry when watching Call the Midwife later. It is also Valentine’s Day, AKA: The Best Day of the Year.

Valentine’s Day is underrated; a holiday that convinces people they need to spend money and / or wear crotchless pants as a demonstration of love: what could be better?! It’s like Christmas, with a boner.

In this post, I will henceforth refer to Valentine’s Day as ‘VD’, that this is also the acronym for Venereal Disease has not gone unnoticed.

Here are some great things that happen coz VD:

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  1. Adult humans give each other cuddly toys

The precedent is set at 13 years old, when boyfriends and girlfriends gift one another Forever Friends merchandise and “horny devil’ teddy bears.

As a prepubescent teenager, an infantile toy with horns is an appropriate expression of affection: I like you. You make my groin feel weird.

As a fully grown adult, if you find yourself in the 7th circle of hell (AKA the Build-a-Bear Workshop) making a stuffed bunny that can whisper sweet nothings to your loved one so you don’t have to, then you have taken a wrong turn in life.

 

  1. Missing the Mark

If you are in a new relationship, VD represents a minefield of insecurity and potential disaster. There is no way of knowing how grand your romantic gesture should be. You are aiming for a fraction less intensity than your partner, something that says, “I give a shit about you, but my gifting really says more about me and how creative, fun and intuitive I am. Also, I promise I’m not needy. Please love me.”

A friend of mine once exchanged cards with a new BF.

Her message:

I Love you, you’re amazing x

His message:

Wreey!!! Happy Valentine’s day m8

 

  1. Special Occasion Sex

Look, I don’t want to judge anyone else’s sex life. But I will.

Special occasion sex is depressing. From a Birthday Blowie, to a round of Crimbo Cunnilingus, if you only do these things out of a sense of annual duty, then maybe don’t do them. Unless you like doing them, in which case just do them as much as possible you repressed idiot.

I was first made aware of special occasion sex when I was 15. I worked Saturdays as a till girl in a local garden centre. During a cigarette break, my tabard-clad colleague asked me what I was getting my boyfriend for VD: “A Thursday T-Shirt” I replied (for those who don’t know, Thursday were an emo band, whose slow jamz include “Understanding in a Car Crash” and “War all the Time”).

What was she getting her paramour?

“I’ve got a candy thong, and I’ve wrapped up a bottle of lube. Gonna let him do my ass”

I asked if she’d ever had anal sex before, “Once, with my ex. It’s fucking painful mate”.

Firstly, if something causes you pain in a non-fun BDSM way, maybe don’t do it? Secondly, a candy thong is a one-way ticket to thrush and a crime against confectionary.

 

  1. Making fucking weird gifts

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There is a certain despicable breed of person who becomes Kirstie Allsop in the run up to VD. They seem to think that if they craft something (and ideally something with a sense of humour), that they are not lowering themselves to the dirge of VD celebrations, and are being totes ironic. In fact, they are engaging with the holiday in a more earnest way than even the Build-a-Bear set.

I am one of those people.

For my first February 14th with my current partner, I made a functional Zoetrope complete with two animated strips. One was an erection growing and dying in a loop, and the other was boobs jiggling. Both were in watercolour.

A friend of mine once made her boyfriend a bouquet of bacon roses for VD. She was (and still remains) a vegetarian.

WTF

 

  1. Being Single

For most, VD is not a cause to celebrate ironically or otherwise. No matter how rational and level-headed you are, even if you don’t give a shit about being single and have no inclination to find someone to spoon on the regs, somehow, VD will find a way to make you feel shit.

One year I went out with a friend and we snogged truly rank, lonely men.

One year I had four wanks in a row, and then watched Jonathan Creek.

Last year, my friend ate a microwaveable macaroni cheese, and drank a mini bottle of Prosecco.

All of these activities any other day of the year would represent a wonderful way to pass the time, but on February the 14th, they acquire the tone of a protracted sigh.

I will leave you with the news that it is now possible for you to experience true magic on VD, with a beautifully prepared meal at the Harry Potter™ Warner Bros Studio Tour. At only £495 for a pair of tickets inclusive of a ride on the shuttle bus from Watford Junction, what could be more romantic?

I know where I’ll be directing my Engorgio charm tonight, amiright?!  😉

#Dumblewhore

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Is That Male Privilege in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

~ biggirlpants ~ 2 Comments

I don’t know any woman who hasn’t at one time or another experienced unwanted sexual attention. Whilst this takes many more serious forms, I’m going to focus on the cringe-rich world of chat up lines and come ons.

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From the bizarre to the predatory, here’s a selection of heterosexual man’s greatest achievements in making atmospheres uncomfortable the world over.

  1. Hot Hot Hot

It’s a Sunday afternoon. I have just said goodbye to a friend, and on my way to the nearest Tube station, I decide I’m going to get some yin to my hung-over yang in the form of a smoothie. I head into one of those shops full of brown paper bags, chia seeds and jojoba face cream that Isla from Primrose Hill makes in small batches in her ground floor flat.

I’m weighing up the options: Chard + Lemon will up the smug factor, but Mango + Banana will actually taste nice, when I notice a man in an unnecessarily zipped and buckled leather jacket standing next to me. I move a little to the side and gesture, as if to say “soz for hogging the best vantage point for the juice range”. To my surprise, he is staring straight at me, and says:

“I saw you walking outside and thought you looked really pretty. So I followed you in here”

“Oh, right.” I say, turning immediately back to the bottled fruits.

“So what are you doing now? What are your plans this afternoon?”

“Just going home, bye!” I say as I grab something and rush towards the counter.

Not content with having been summarily rejected, he then shouts across to my receding back:

“YOU LOOK REALLY WARM!!!”

  1. Cheeky Nando’s

My friend is getting her bag from a gym locker, as she closes the metal door, she is confronted with the figure of an enormous man, grinning at her.

“You like chicken?”

“Um. Yes?”

“I like chicken. Let’s get some chicken”.

Real smooth bro, real smooth.

  1. It’s a Numbers Game

I recently went away with five female friends. As Brits are wont to do where there is warmth and sea, we set up camp for the day on a beach furnished with sun loungers. I’d decided that my week off was the perfect time for that uplifting holiday read: 1984, and was thus on the edge of emotional and physical discomfort in the burning sun. The man who owned said loungers approached and walked around us a few times, obviously scoping out the talent. After telling us more than once what a good deal he was giving us on the chairs, asking us if we thought he had a pretty face, and then ruminating on how strange it was that we were all reading books (?!), he then asked:

“So, who are you here with? Your boyfriends?”

“Nope, we’re just here together”

“Aren’t you lonely?”

“…Well, no. There are six of us”

“Are you lonely… in general…?” This last he said accompanied with the kind of slow blink that gives you the sensation of swallowing a lump of under-ripe banana.

Points for subtlety, and for a best-not-put-all-my-eggs-in-one-basket approach.

Of course, women can be predatory too. My best friend was famed in our university years for pulling men + women by pointing and staring at them until they returned eye-contact, and consequently turning her pointing finger upwards with a ‘come hither’ motion. She had a surprisingly good hit rate for such an absurd technique.

But it is different for a man to be predatory.

Until recently, I would dismiss comes ons as laughable. They’d make me feel uncomfortable, sure, but not threatened.

And then I was assaulted by a colleague at a staff Christmas party. I won’t go into detail, but for the first time in my life I had the heartbreaking realisation that I was physically powerless to stop what was happening to me. It was not a prolonged or serious assault – another colleague soon saw and intervened. But I have never felt more vulnerable and angry in my life. I know women who have encountered far worse, but on this subject I can only speak to my own experience.

This is why come ons now incite a twinge of fury in me. When you go up to someone proudly proclaiming the sole purpose of wanting to bone them, you remove any space for them to turn that encounter around. You take away from them any say in what they might want that encounter to be, or if they want it to happen at all. And when you are physically stronger, you should think before tipping the power dynamic even further in your favour. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t approach someone who intrigues you, but how about starting a conversation first?

Not least because, fuck it, what if they vote UKIP?

Dream, Believe: Achieve – The First Rung of the Career Ladder

~ biggirlpants ~ Leave a comment

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As a child, I was a precocious jebend. Between snogging my poster of Lee from 911 so much that he no longer had a mouth, and moulding myself enormous tits and a beard out of Matey bubble bath, I found time to cultivate an adult friendly persona of myself as ‘clever’. Aged 9, this was not some subtle Machiavellian plot, it was pretty straightforward: I started telling everyone that when I grew up, I was going to be a brain surgeon (spoiler alert: I’m not).

The reaction I got was pretty much a universal “that’s great! If you work hard enough, you can do anything!” Don’t get me wrong; I recognise the extreme privilege of an upbringing laced with Ashley Banjo style aphorisms, but it comes at a price.

Shortly after graduating, I went to house party with the depressingly appropriate fancy dress theme “when I grow up, I want to be a…” Dressed in surgical scrubs, wired, drunk, and redecorating my friend’s bedroom with Red Stripe, I noted with a flicker of painful lucidity the contrast of how I was dressed, with what I had actually become: a production runner.

For those who don’t know anything about production, the runner is essentially everyone’s bitch. This often means emptying bins, doing lunch runs, dropping hard drives from one side of London to another. It’s hard, low-paid work done with the understanding that in moments of ‘downtime’ you will get training from your superiors, and everything else you will surely learn by osmosis. It can be fun, stressful and mind-numbingly boring, and like any job that offers ‘training’, certain employers will exploit you to fuck.

Here’s a list of fantastic tasks my friends, colleagues and I had the pleasure of completing as runners:

  1. Princess Leia and the Gold Bellend.

“Hey, you, can you pop out and get me and my wife fancy dress costumes for that party that you’re not invited to tonight? It’s Star Wars themed, here’s our sizes” handed a post it “Nothing shit or cheap, want nice stuff, proper stitching, and it needs to fit well obviously. Take £200 from petty cash. Need them by 4pm.”

“…”

“Well on you go! It’s already 2. Oh, and on your way back, can you pick up 30 beers for the office? Has to be bottles, no tins. And limes.”

  1. Violet Beauregarde II

“Can I get you guys a drink at all?”

“A blueberry smoothie please”

“Sure, so like bananas, blueberries and apple or something?”

Stony, unsmiling face.

“No. A blueberry smoothie. Just blueberries”

I went out and sourced a pint of blueberry pulp. It cost about a tenner, and was the texture of wallpaper paste.

  1. Hula-Hell do you think you are?

“Hey, can you pop out and get me some ready salted Hula Hoops and some cheddar?”

“Sure, no problem”

“And then can you use the Hula Hoops to cut cylinders of cheese that fit perfectly within the potato rings?”

“…Sure. No. Problem”

4&5            The worst man I have heard of IRL

It’s 6pm, and my friend who was at that point 11 hours into her ? hour shift, gets called into an edit suite by an older male client.

I will pause here to tell you that this friend is extremely attractive, and was at that point, only 21 years old.

She walks into the room, and with a smile asks how she can help. The client leans back luxuriously into the sofa, and replies:

“I want a toffee apple”

“Oh, okay. I’ll see what I can do”

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Dutifully, she spends an hour exploring all supermarkets, sweet shops and newsagents within a 1.5 mile radius of Soho.

She returns to the client empty handed, apologising profusely. Is there anything else she can get his Highness?

“The thing is. I really want a toffee apple. Improvise”

She cuts an apple into slices, drizzles it with honey, and brings it to the fucking Roman Emperor. He laughs, waves her away, and eats it.

The next day, this same misogynistic thumb of gristle summons my friend to his aid.

Having pictured him experiencing all manner violent deaths in order to get to sleep the preceding night, my friend then had to take a deep breath, put on a big smile, and ask once again:

“What can I do for you?”

“I’d like ten Mojitos, please”.

“Ten Mojitos?”

“Yes please”.

“Just want to be sure: you want ten whole Mojitos” (He is alone in the room, baring the editor who is busy working, feeling uncomfortable at the exchange, but also unable to contradict the client)

“Yep”

She goes out, purchases the wherewithal to complete the task, and comes up with a tray of refreshing minty cocktails. She sets them down in front of him, and he LAUGHS IN HER FUCKING FACE.

The Editor told her some time later, that before mission Toffee Apple, the client had eyed up my friend and said:

“I want to see how far I can push this runner”

Did you just shiver? Thinking about it shrinks my vagina.

In your first steps to forging a career in any given industry, you should expect to have to work hard, and start at the bottom.

But what you shouldn’t expect, is to be routinely performing skilled labour at minimum wage and on zero hours contracts. What you shouldn’t have to take on the chin, are comments like “you should be grateful you’ve got this opportunity” from people on 10 times your salary. And you certainly should never have to endure humiliation at the hands of people in a position of power over you.

I am optimistic that this monstrous breed of fuckwit is dying out in my industry: my current employers do not enable the kind of behaviour listed above, and I can’t ever imagine any of my contemporaries being such fucking cunts. But the culture of employees being exploited by their employers doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.

So, if I am lucky enough to one day grow a human, sure I’ll tell them ‘”dream, believe, achieve”, but I will caveat that with “organise, strike, resist”.

Times Simple Transactions Have Become Unnecessarily Painful

~ biggirlpants ~ Leave a comment

condomsPicture the scene: it’s 9am the morning after a night that consisted of 7 pints of Guinness, overambitious ‘sexy’ dancing, and a falafel. With bloodshot eyes, you shuffle to the toilet, careful not to step too enthusiastically lest your head fall from its shoulders. Shame and bile creep up your throat, and your brain takes you through a grotesque slide show of the behaviour that led you to this moment: here you are, standing next to the DJ booth being ignored as you shout “Sean-a-Paul and Blu Cantrell” in a way that at the time seemed at once friendly and coquettish. Awww… And that’s you there, telling your colleague that when you first met them, you thought they were a cunt! Isn’t that nice? Oh! And here you are, chuckling at a stream of your own piss as you squat between two cars and your friend dry heaves over a bin. Happy days.

Oh fuck.

There’s no toilet roll.

Knowing that this morning’s bowel movements will be akin to a thousand blackbirds escaping a shoebox, you steel yourself for a regrettably essential trip to Tesco. Your only items on the motion-sickness inducing conveyor belt are a 12 pack of Andrex, and single can of Fanta Fruit Twist. And then some twat that you forgot about because you’ve hidden the fuck out of them on Facebook, bounds up to you with a trolley full of quinoa, kale and opinions, and after telling you about the promotion they got at their yoga iron man vintage post grad festival, gives you a pitying smile, gestures to your purchases and says “big night last night then?”

Here are some other occasions that buying stuff has resulted in being waterboarded by embarrassment.

Condoms

Hey, I’m a grown woman who has sexy sex. And do you know what’s sexy? Safety! Safety is sexy.

I am in one of those smaller supermarkets, and after wandering the limited aisles for the 5th time, I resign myself to the fact that the prophylactics are behind the kiosk with all the bad things (hard liquor, cigarettes, and inexplicably: tampons).

No matter: I’m confident! I’m empowered! If you like it then you shudda put a bag on it… am I right?!

The only option on display is an enormous box of 24. Knowing that making such a purchase would almost certainly doom me to a year of accidental celibacy and permanently mummified fingers, I ask the young man behind the desk “Is that multipack of condoms all you have?”

“I think we’ve got some ribbed ones out back, hang on. Dave! DAVE! Mate, would you mind checking the store room to see if we’ve got any ribbed jonnies left?” By which point a considerable queue of giggling customers has formed behind me. I wait, the queue expanding, trying to avoid eye contact with the grinning checkout boy. Dave returns from his epic journey to shout, “None left, only the 24 packs and some tropical lube” across the store.

I mumble that I’ll take the multipack, and leave.

Cystitis Medicine

I have, of course, already run through the myriad reasons why cystitis is so fantastic, but here’s another one. A friend of mine went on holiday to Morocco with her mother, and was hit with a visit from the vaginal devil.

Together, they found a local pharmacy. Unfortunately, my friend cannot speak Arabic, and the pharmacist could not speak English, so what ensued was a nightmare game of charades in which her heroic mum kept pointing to her crotch, and then acting out ‘Fire’. All the while, repeating “HOT VAGINA. BURNING VAGINA”, to the amusement of tourists stocking up on sun cream.

Pregnancy Test

Buying a pregnancy test when you really don’t want to be pregnant is at best a nervy affair. An insecure 19-year-old, I scanned the selection, made my choice, and went up to the counter. The woman behind the till had kind eyes and a helpful smile. She scanned the test, looked up, and said in a tone that should really be reserved for telling someone they’ve won the lottery, ‘Ohhh! They’re buy one get one free today!”. Conscious of the people waiting behind me, and terrified that someone I know might be in their number, I garbled “that’s fine, I only need the one”. Her helpful smile grew even more helpful, as she started to step out from behind the till saying “Nonsense! You can’t turn down a bargain like that! These things are expensive!”

She nipped over to the relevant shelf, and then yelled across to me “Looks like that was the last one!”

“No worries”, I say as she makes her way back, but instead of resuming her place at the counter, she raises a finger “Now, I’ll just check out the storeroom for you”. Oh god. Her helpful, helpful smile was lighting up the room and demanding the attention of my fellow customers. Returning approximately 3 minutes later with a different make of pregnancy test, winking at me as she popped it into the bag, she asked:

“Do you have an advantage card?”

“No”

“Isn’t that one, there?” she points to my open purse from which I am removing a ten pound note.

“Oh right, yes. It is”

And with every bite of the ‘meal deal’ I purchased using said points some months later, I thought of my shame, and of that woman’s helpful smile.