If you want to skip this, I’ll understand. There’s a lot of me that wants to just move past this week, even though I’m only going to dance around the edges of it.<\/p>\n
But at least I can start with this. Just now I was cooking in our kitchen and I decided to listen to music simply to stop me thinking. Let me be lost for a moment, with the only things in my head being songs and piecing the lid in several places.<\/p>\n
If you have an Apple Music subscription, you can say simply “Siri, play something I’ll like,” so I did that.<\/p>\n
The first thing, the very first thing, it decided to play was Kim Wilde and “Kids in America.”<\/p>\n
Honestly, it was triggering. I couldn’t take it and I stabbed at the skip button.<\/p>\n
So instead it jumped to Captain Sensible and “Glad It’s All Over”.<\/p>\n
Stab.<\/p>\n
Culture Club. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”<\/p>\n
Apparently yes.<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
Before all of this, I wanted to write to you about what I thought — and still think — was a particularly fine piece of writing. As it turns out, as well done as it was, it achieved fuck all. But solely as a piece of writing, it was smart and I admired it and if I were wrong that I thought it would help, well, two out of three.<\/p>\n
It was in “Saturday Night Live” last weekend. It was to do with the insanity, the absolute insanity that there are men — and now apparently also women — who believe that husbands can, should, must, do, dictate how their wives vote.<\/p>\n
Of all the things. So many things. That fact was just a bowling ball in my head, blocking out anything else and leaving me walking down the street raging in silent conversation with the men of America. Sorry, I misspoke: the tossers of America.<\/p>\n
I routinely have dialogue in my head and I often write it down to get it out of me, and in this case all that stopped me was that I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to write the ferocious anger in any way that was useful. In any way that was healthy. Sod healthy, I’d just want to be useful, I just needed to do something. And I failed at that.<\/p>\n
But SNL didn’t. Or so I thought.<\/p>\n
There I was realising that everything I could do, every single thing I could even try to write, would be as crap as mansplaining. It was all such surface-level obvious, it was so obvious that it was impossible I would say anything that everyone didn’t already know. Certainly every single American I’ve ever met would know. Every woman, everywhere. Okay, so as it turns out, a profoundly terrifying number of other Americans don’t. But then I could’ve written brilliantly and those people would not listen.<\/p>\n
It’s not like I really thought I could do anything, even as I was so sure that I didn’t need to, that we would get the right result. But the amount of energy I expended on this would power a village.<\/p>\n
And yet SNL conveyed it all, I thought, with one single word. The right word, which I would never have thought of.<\/p>\n
It was during the sketch where the real Kamela Harris made what now seems to be her last public appearance, but don’t let me think about that. Let me think about how with everything I thought about this topic and of women putting up with it, SNL just said this:<\/p>\n
“Girl.”<\/p>\n
Maya Rudolph, in character as Harris, just looked at the camera and said “Girl.”<\/p>\n
And you got it. You got it all. What are you doing being with this tosser, girl? Are you going to let men do this to you? Everything. In a single word. Single syllable, although dragged out a little for emphasis.<\/p>\n
The right word by SNL’s writers, delivered right by Rudolph, it was all just right.<\/p>\n
And then that’s the direction America went in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you want to skip this, I’ll understand. There’s a lot of me that wants to just move past this … Continue reading