In Defense of Walt...

It's Only Some Stolen Valor

In a post that would shock and surprise many of my former military comrades if anybody actually read my fucking blog, I am now going to compose an article in defense of that most mocked of creatures, the Walt.

 The term is most popular in the UK, but I believe it is becoming increasingly common in the United States. Although over here, in a typically American manner, the much more direct and grammatically correct term "Stolen Valor" is more commonly used to refer to the actions of those who claim to be soldiers but are anything but. I believe the term Walt derives from the story of Walter Mitty a meek friendless man in reality, who lives a vivid and boisterous fantasy life inside his own head.

"We were running Black Ops out of Saigon.. Dave was out of ammo and Mikey was bleeding out, so I pulled down a tree, swung it.. musta killed me 50 or 60 of the muthafukkas."

  The term is sometimes incorrectly used for people that serve but inflate their achievements. If anybody is interested, the term Bloater is usually reserved for these people. There was a famous instance of a Royal Marine being charged for claiming the rank of Sergeant, and also an American soldier adding unearned Ranger patches to his uniform for a homecoming meeting at his local airport.

 Anyway, as someone who had to grit his teeth and drag his fat, stumpy frame around every inch of Dartmoor in pursuit of the coveted green beret and went to Afghanistan twice (it was much nicer than North-east England) Iraq twice (Afghanistan with running water) Northern Ireland (Afghanistan with drunks) and Sierra Leone (African Afghanistan) many people may find it strange I would stick up for Walt and his consistently mocked kind. Indeed, even patriotic civilians love to pour scorn on poor old Walt, and barely a day goes by without some "viral" video of some possibly mentally ill, usually obese fellow, standing next to a war memorial or attending a parade, with several upside down medals pinned upon his chest, or "Kung-Fu Battalion" patches sewn upon his shoulders.

In Fallujah we called these fermented vegetable drinks "combat cocktails"

 But I confess I find the ire servicemen have for them to be most perplexing. I am comfortable enough with my own life and achievements in general that I care very little about whether or not some desperate loner is attempting to ride on my coattails, it seems like a small sin indeed in the grand scheme of things. Do one guys lies wipe clean a real soldiers impeccable service?

 So lets get to it. Like Atticus Finch (who is apparently much worse a person than Kim Kardashian nowadays, do me a fucking favor) I shall stand in defense of a man (men) that everybody just loves to hate, Walt.

Why? Well, that's pretty easy. I can do it in 3. 


1. Freedom, bitches

Everybody in the military loves to talk about freedom, especially in America. As a true libertarian who believes that anything is kosher as long as it doesn't harm anybody else, I think that free citizens should always have the right to be lying bastards. I might not like it, but there you go, people tell lies, we might as well accept it.

 How many people tell lies on a daily basis? Is telling small lies illegal? When you meet someone for the very first time at the office and they tell you their favorite TV show is Glee, or they show you a family picture and point at their "beautiful" wife and she happens to have a face like a smacked arse, do you answer honestly and say "You watch shit TV" or "Your wife looks like a woodpecker tried to make a nest in her face."

 Of course you don't. 

 We might not like it, but free people have the right to tell lies. If they wear the uniform to defraud someone, or perhaps engage in some kind of elaborate fraud (dressing as a serviceman to elicit charitable donations and pocket the cash for example) I am all for throwing those assholes in the brig, but for trying to get laid?

"I've got trials with Manchester United next week luv... Alex... ff..f.. Ferguson said I'm gonna be the next Ronaldo"

Men tell lies to women all of the time, and serving soldiers do it too. Plenty of times I've sat in pubs and listened to Army Signalers and Vehicle Mechanics tell women "I was clearing the caves in Afghanistan with a shotgun, it was hard, close quarter fighting baby." How many soldiers lie about having their wings, how many sailors tell girls they are Marines?

 It seems terribly hypocritical to get hugely outraged about men telling lies, when men tell lies in all kinds of other ways, they just don't involve uniforms. If we locked people up for telling lies when trying to get laid, then every man in America would be in prison, and I would never have got married. 

 I wasn't going to tell her it was only 2 inches long on the first fucking date was I? 

2. Publicity 

Many people might not have noticed, but we have a serious recruitment problem. For some inexplicable reason, modern western kids just aren't interested in sitting in a trench surrounded by flesh eating flies while bearded desert-dwelling fanatics throw grenades at them. 

 Walts provide great publicity. No news is bad news when you want publicity, just ask Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and anybody else who essentially became famous by shagging in front of a camera.

 Shit, if I was guaranteed to get a few million bucks out of it I would probably suck an ice hockey player off on television as well.

"Well, I suppose if its going to help those kids walk again......."

Videos featuring Walts regularly go viral, generating an enormous amount of publicity and filling young men with an urge to quickly head to the nearest recruiting office and show those pansies how its really done. 

 Well, second stop after they drive around to the Walts house and kick his head in, obviously.

3. Free Manpower

Obviously not free manpower in the strictest sense, because frankly I would rather stand in-front of the Taliban than in-front of a pasty, deranged fantasist in an eBayed uniform with an automatic rifle he has never been trained to fire.

 No, I mean free manpower for all of the really lame things, like standing outside a school to deter another pasty deranged fantasist in an eBayed uniform with an automatic rifle he has never been trained to fire. Or free manpower for attending one of those memorial parades where the Ministry of Defence charges for sending real soldiers, so they rely on the old, the lonely, and the Walt to make up the numbers. 

 I'm presuming that fake soldiers are better than no soldiers at all if you want to march down Halifax high-street in the rain on a Sunday morning and salute the grizzled wheelchair-bound veteran who thought nobody was going to show up. 

 Indeed, once you get past 90 your vision is so bad you are probably utterly incapable of registering the fact that everyone has their medals on upside down and one of the teenagers sports an Iron Cross and something from the Boer War. 

"I got this one for shooting, this one for surfing, and this one for coming top at seal clubbing school in 'Nam" 

 In such a case, I make the argument that seeing a decent turn-out for a parade in their honor is a good thing, and it will make their heart swell with pride. They expected nobody to show up, and are instead greeted by legions of fine, upstanding young men who have not forgotten their sacrifices.

 Lets face it, most young people fucking have.

  If I get to 90 I would love to be greeted by a group of earnest young men who assure me that the efforts of my brothers and I were not in vain and many of them died for a reason. The Walts might make the difference between an acceptable turn-out and no turn-out at all. 

 So lets not be too harsh on Walt. If I get to a parade and I am lucky enough to see it well-staffed, I wont be looking too harshly at everbody's uniforms, like most cynical old soldiers Ill simply be happy that somebody showed up at all. 

Conclusion

 So, there we have it. My premise is simply this, mock Walt by all means, send your friends the videos, hit "share" on Facebook and have a chuckle. But let it end there. Public shaming has already gotten out of hand,  and prison?Considering we are running out of space for terrorists, pedophiles, pushers, and pimps, I consider the humble lying bastard to be beneath my notice. 

 Do you disagree? Do Walts grind your gears/curl your commando flashes/peel your patches? I'm happy to engage in spirited debate, leave a comment and I shall happily tell you to fuck off and leave me alone. 

 Unless of course you served during Operation Flaming Fists of Fury, at which point I might be too scared to enter into debate with such a badass.*


*It was actually called Operation Flying Fists of Fury, fuck off Walt.

7 Reasons not to Vote for Donald Trump

Donald Trump. He's a character isn't he eh? Loud, arrogant, talks a bit like Rosie O'Donnell if she gargled with whisky and razor-blades every morning. He is so easy to mock he reminds me of Sarah Palin. Well, an ugly, balding Sarah Palin with a disgusting, ginger penis*. I could probably talk you out of voting for him by just going off how he looks and sounds, but there is much more to him than an intensely irritating voice and shit hair. 

 Anybody wondering why I would rather spend a week trapped in an elevator with two televangelists than brush past Donald in the street, can find 7 very good reasons below.   


1. He Tweets Like a Teenager

Everybody knows that Donald is a bit touchy. There have been numerous stories about his ridiculous personal attacks on people in the media that he takes disliking to, but I think this one "Trumps" all others. 

That's called logic, suck on it America! LMFAO!

Rather than attacking their politics, he throws personal attacks at fellow politicians. Unfunny, mean personal attacks that you would expect to hear spat from the mouth of a bulimic cheerleader. Its not a stretch to imagine a President Trump invading somewhere due to some minor disagreement, or dropping 200 tons of napalm onto Mecca because someone who happens to be a Muslim scratched his car.

2. He is overtly racist.

The most amusing quote from his ridiculous press conference was without doubt "Mexicans... they're rapists!"

The man has all the charm of a pissed off rattlesnake.

Clearly it is not that difficult to say something sensible about the immigration issues that America has without throwing his rape hat into the ring. I also loved his other quote on a similar topic, which surely deserves its own spot on the list...

3. "I have a great relationship with the blacks"

Donald appears to think that "the blacks" are like some sort of, small family of magical midgets that he lets live in his pool-house. The very fact that he just refers to (I'm presuming he means American people of voting age that happen to be black) a wide and diverse group of tens of millions of people as "the blacks" is statement in and of itself. As if all of "the blacks" are pretty much identical really, a bit like Dwarves from The Lord of the Rings.

 Basically, he comes across as a condescending idiot. Unfortunately for Donald, coming across as a narrow-minded idiot while speaking in public is not generally considered a personality trait that voters like to see from a prospective president, unless they vote for Rick Santorum of course. If they vote for Rick, they think that forcing the kids to pose for photographs with a dead baby is totally normal, at which point, they have much bigger problems to worry about than merely being condescending.

4. Everything he said in his announcement speech was factually incorrect

If this wasn't obvious from the whole rape thing, you may be more gullible than you thought. Donald said that current Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States was currently "below zero" (it isn't) he said that "there are no jobs available" despite the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting on June 9th that there were over 5 million job openings in the continental United States, the highest since December 2000. Basically if I sat and typed all of his lies out I would be here until November, and I can type pretty fast. Other gems include "There are no Chevrolets in Japan" (there are a shit-ton of Chevrolet's in Japan) and "Obama's website cost 2 billion dollars" (it cost less than half that.) 

 All politicians tell lies, you don't get to be a famous politician if you aren't willing to tell a few lies, but I wouldn't believe Donald Trumps radio.

5. He's a "Birther"

Donald was constantly harping on about this ridiculous story long after everybody else had finally given up. When even Bill O'Reilly has finally stopped going on about something tasteless and you are still plugging away, you have to accept the fact you may well be a walking toilet.

This is a quote from Don three weeks before President Obama released his birth certificate to the public. 

"If he wasn't born in this country, which is a real possibility, then he has pulled one of the greatest cons in the history of politics!"

Worse than this, he is a conspiracy theorist in all kinds of other ways too. He also said..

"Global warming was invented by the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive" 

When the evolution-denying, young earth creationist Mike Huckabee is much smarter than you are, sorry, but you aren't smart enough to be president.

6. He brags incessantly

I almost vomited typing these Donald quotes out, but they are absolute corkers.

"My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well been documented, are various other parts of my body."

"All of the women on 'The Apprentice' flirted with me,  consciously or unconsciously. That's to be expected."

"Let me tell you, I'm a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country."

And on, and on, and on it goes.

I started cutting and pasting quotes on here and after ten minutes I had about 40, obviously nobody wants to read 100 lines of complete insanity, so I cut it down to 3 quotes that show....


7. He is absolutely off his fucking tits

He is.. to use a Briticism, completely fucking bonkers. Actually, I think "off his fucking tits" is a Briticism as well. 

 He pays people to cheer for him at his speeches. He made a TV show about firing people. He is bright fucking orange. He walks around in a toupee that makes him look like he has special needs. He is definitely a narcissist and quite possibly a sociopath. He might not have gone as far as flying around Alaska shooting bears from a helicopter, but that is surely on the cards. They say that the King who essentially caused the American Revolution was completely insane thanks to the presence of mercury in his wigs, and I can only assume that Donald uses the same tailor. 

 Or whatever it is you call someone who makes your wigs for you.

* I have never actually seen Donald Trumps flaccid, unpleasant member. 

Why So Serious?

I dont often do serious, but I thought I would try and be a little bit serious this week. After all, even the most talented comedian finds it difficult to throw some funnies in when the topic is rape.

Last week I had a Twitter discussion with a prospective Liberal Democrat MP. Well, more of a brief chat really, its hard to have a discussion in under 140 characters unless you resort to text speak and teenage acronyms that nobody over the age of 30 can understand.

In brief, a LibDem campaigner named Daisy Cooper insisted that this poster was offensive and sexist.

Vile and offensive pleasant advice..

And insisted it should be replaced with this one. 

Drinking Fosters actually is a crime however...

Now, I don't usually take issue with this kind of thing because it seems a bit crass for a man to wade into the discussion. Sort of like a Saudi Arabian bloke telling an American that gender pay inequality in the United States is an outrageous affront, while simultaneously beating his third wife with a stick because she reverse parked the car.

I took umbrage with this though, because just like almost everything to do with politics,  I find it all terribly shortsighted.

Daisy seems like a nice lady, but I think misguided and shortsighted activism often does more harm than good, so lets explore the big picture and I shall attempt to make my case in more coherent sentences.

If 100 of each poster go up in Sussex, we can presume that lots of women will see the first poster and say "I best be more careful, its a harsh world we live in and you never know when a weirdo is going to try something" 

Sure, plenty with a very aggressively feminist worldview may take offense, but they will probably still heed the advice, a seed has been planted. Be careful, some men are arseholes with the moral fiber of heroin-addled televangelist with a gambling problem.

The ones that see the second poster are pleased it directs itself at men, obviously the instigators of rape, but it affects the ladies actions not at all. Indeed, it might make them think "Yes, rape is rape and if I want to get so smashed I eat a pizza out of a recycling bin that's my business"

Thus you could fairly argue that the second poster only directly attacks the issue from the one angle, it tells men that when a woman says no, she means no.

This is also a somewhat toothless argument. I don't want to burst any bubbles here girls, but the majority of men are fully aware that no means no. There are not many men out there that would happily drag a woman into an alley, tear her clothing off her limp body, and jump her bones convinced he was a bastion of morality.  Does anybody actually think that the members of grooming gangs and serial rapists would have their hand stayed by a strongly worded letter?

Add to the fact that in places like Glasgow and Middlesbrough the men cant actually read, while the women take the time to learn such valuable skills.

Why not have both if stopping rape is really first thing on the agenda? Launch a withering two-pronged assault. Remind (the vanishingly tiny percentage of utterly idiotic rapists) that consent cannot be given by an unconscious "partner" who is face down in the gutter after four bottles of Lambrini, and also remind women to be careful, because some men have no shame. 

Is that really so hard to understand? 

Obviously thanks to the aforementioned short-sightedness that pervades modern politics Daisy Cooper and her equally short-sighted supporters have won the day, and the poster has been removed.

But I really want to know... am I being a fool here? As a happily married agnostic fellow, I certainly consider myself a feminist. I think women should be paid the same, and because I have always had terrible dress sense I think Im probably less judgmental of a woman's appearance than most women are. My wife never wears make up and rarely dons a dress, she naturally looks better than the hairy dwarf she stupidly agreed to marry. I don't presume to even remotely influence what a women says, wears or does.

Yet here I am, wondering "Am I sexist then? Do I tacitly endorse FGM and polygamy just because I think removing sound advice does more harm than good?"

The "victim blaming" culture is definitely a terrible thing, but we have come a long way since 1960. I don't for a second believe that anybody with half a brain cell really thinks that a woman somehow "deserves" to get raped for almost any reason at all. In fact, I only know one person who thinks that, and he is currently leading the Taliban.

I have to mention, Emily Cooper also used the "slippery slope" argument, perhaps the worst logical fallacy ever. "Allow euthanasia, and the next thing you know everyone will be executing their family members" (visit Belgium and the Netherlands) "Allow gay marriage and the next thing people will be marrying vacuum cleaners and donkeys" (Denmark saw no rise in marriages to household devices or wild animals after legally recognizing same sex unions in 1989) "Give women the vote and the next thing you know they will be chopping men's dicks off while they are sleeping"

Ok well, forget that last one. 

So please ladies especially, let me know. Am I in the wrong in this? Is the first poster genuinely offensive to the majority of women? Considering most rapists are unlikely to heed the advice of strongly worded posters, but most victims are likely to think twice after seeing one advising caution, I firmly believe removing it is basically playing into the hands of predatory men. 

Women are always the victims of rape regardless of the circumstances. The problem is, most men already know it.

Anyway, to end on a positive note, I have decided to design a poster that both tells women to be careful, and also lays the blame squarely at the feet of men. I shall of course make this masterwork of digital manipulation available to all of the Police Forces in England and Wales free of charge, as a public service to women everywhere.

You are very welcome ladies. ;)

Feedback is much appreciated. I welcome insults and derogatory remarks about myself and my family (especially my big fat brother) please do not hesitate to call me a sexist prick or post dogshit to my house. If you put it in an Amazon Prime box with an iPad or an expensive laptop, I probably wont even notice until it is all over the kitchen or something.  

Light in Tone

I recently had a few short monologues (3) accepted by a publisher for a comedy book. Obviously I not a professional comedian of legendary repute so I had several rejected as well, apparently because they were not "light enough in tone."

It seems bad manners to publish the accepted ones, but I shall happily reprint the rejects here.

Personally, I figure they were not too obscene, merely not very funny, but I shall let the very small group of people that bother to read the shite that I write make your own minds up. 

Here is the first and shortest one I wrote, entitled: 

Don't Visit Japan Son, Bomb it.

When I was a kid a friend of mine was threw off the school team just because he had a beer despite the fact he was nearly 17 years old.

Lets face it, if a teenager can get drafted and shipped off to Iraq or Syria or wherever else we happen to be bombing the shit out of that week, its a bit fucking harsh denying the lad a pint if he makes it home with both of his bollocks still attached.

Modern parents and governmental organizations alike seem to think that young guys in their late teens shouldn't have any leeway at all to drink or smoke, despite the fact both practices are legal and young people have done such things for centuries. Fucking hell, they used to make children work in coal mines and fight in wars, I doubt they would deny anyone a beer who was shoveling fucking coal 18 hours a day either.

Parents are short-sighted too, they love talking about "the good old days" when their dad would scrub himself in ice cold water in a rusty tin bath after a 12 hour shift in a corned beef factory, and anyone listening is well aware that the good old days sound pretty fucking awful. Usually parents can't type more than ten words a minute either, but they like going on Facebook to spy on their offspring and "like" all of those shit MEMEs that poke fun at the younger generation. They always say things like "In my day we used to drink from the hose and we turned out fine" or "I shared my drink with 8 kids and a stray dog and nobody died" and it's total fucking nonsense. Are we sure Osama Bin Laden never drank from a garden hose? My granddad used to do the same, he would endlessly complain that kids were visiting Japan or learning German in school, as if flying over Japan to drop an atom bomb on it was a more productive way to spend your time than going on a fucking field trip.

I don’t for a second believe all of the conservatives who complain about anything and everything the millennial generation enjoys buy any of their own nonsense either. In Victorian Britain they were all a bunch of perverts and junkies behind closed doors, but everything was all prim and proper in the streets. I think it's probably the same in America today. If some pastor or preacher constantly whines about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, it stands to reason he spends his evenings snorting coke off a prostitutes tits while listening to Slayer.

It is pure hypocrisy, kids have always been the same, and some old crusty who complains about teenagers being "soft" because they dont want to share a bottle of Pepsi with six friends probably turned his nose up exactly the same. And if they didn't, well they probably didnt live long enough to sire children because they caught hepatitis.

Maybe they like to complain about the small things because it stops us talking about the big things. Like if your grandpa says "Oh yeah I was a rebel when I was your age, I never used to bother wearing a helmet when I was out on my bike" then he doesn't have to say "Oh yeah I was a rebel when I was your age, I pushed a disabled lesbian down four flights of stairs."

UPS (Unnecessary Parcel Slaughter)

I was motivated to update my often ignored blog today after a hilarious (infuriating) experience with those cheery chaps at UPS. And by cheery chaps, I do of course mean, the fucking mafia in brown shorts. 

I sent a few boxes of junk over from England a month back, and it cost me $500 to do so. Fairly steep, but it very slightly cheaper than FED-Ex, and It was "Express" shipping, so I thought why not. 

 When UPS say, and charge you for, express shipping, what they really mean is "Unlikely to beat you home, even if you go on the piss in Manchester and Copenhagen for a week, then use a fucking kayak to cross the Atlantic Ocean"

The shipment was not here when I arrived in California ten days later, which puzzled me, so I gave them a call. After several lengthy delays, I was told that I had to "provide more information" so they would release my stuff. I asked them what this was, and they said "paperwork confirming the contents of the boxes"

 I then explained that I had handed it all to a bespectacled and very confused looking young driver when I shipped everything. When I told them I handed said paperwork over to the UPS driver upon shipping my stuff and he stopped to called his boss right in front of me because he was (in his own words) "new and didn't really know what was going on" they said "I am sure it is fine then, I will let them know and have your things sent out" 

 Ten days later, so a good three weeks late, my things arrived, and the previously immaculate boxes looked like this. 

Yes that's right, the brand-new three walled box looked like it had been thrown out of the plane at 30,000 feet, landed in a swamp, and then been savaged by tigers. UPS obviously rescued it at some point, then attached a tow-rope and dragged it across 800 miles of tarmac to my house. 

 Needless to say, everything inside was beyond fucked, but the fun wasn't over yet. 

 A week later, I received a bill for $184.42 for warehouse charges. 

 Which is peculiar, because judging by the boxes, they didn't go anywhere near a fucking warehouse, at best they were kept underneath a tree in particularly damp part of the United States, and at worst they tipped all of my belongings out, filled it with sheep entrails, and let a pack of wolves try and tear their way into lunch.

 I attempted to call and argue the point, and after explaining why I was somewhat perturbed by the fee, was put on hold for a very lengthy period of time. Finally I spoke to another woman, who gave me two other numbers to call, one to dispute the charge, and one to complain about lateness, damage, and tigers/wolves.

Attempting to call 6 times over a period of about 5 days, all I ever got was an answering machine. Numerous messages were left, nobody called back. Finally, concerned about the "late payment fees" I thought "Fuck it, I'll pay them or the fee will increase/Fat Tony will come round and nail my hands to the kitchen fucking table."

When I called the same number as before, but hit the key for "payments" rather than "complaints" instead of a 30 minute hold/answering machine, I was instantly greeted by a chirpy young lady, and after merely giving her the invoice number, I had paid the bill in full in less than a minute. 

 After being fucked around so incessantly for weeks, I was stunned into total subordination. I even thanked her for taking all of my money, and said "wasn't she nice dear?" as I hung up the phone.

Only later did it dawn on me that she was basically fisting me. 

Clearly the technique is a good one. Hold your packages for several weeks for no discernible reason (I did not need to fill in any extra paperwork) so you are so relieved when they finally arrive (you thought your belongings were lost at sea) you do not bother to complain about the fact it looks as if your belongings were subjected to a prison rape. 

Then, a week later, send you a bill, saying that because your stuff was "warehoused" you owe them $200. 

 Its genius. And frankly, why $200!? I do not believe they were in a warehouse, everything was wet and fucked, but even if they were, inanimate objects do not require fucking feeding. Did they get breakfast? Did they use the electricity? Why the fuck does it cost 200 bucks to leave some boxes inside a building?

So there we have it. Staggering incompetence, casual destruction of fragile items, 3 weeks late, and extra charges to boot. The only time that UPS did show some competence, was when they were taking more money off me, and to be fair, then they were polite, diligent, and ultra quick to answer the phone. They could only have been more helpful if a guy had shown up to help me count the money in person seconds after I made the call, then mowed the fucking lawn on his way back down the driveway.



  

The bizarrely popular erotic fiction novel Fifty Shades of Grey is due for release on Valentine's Day 2014. Announced via the medium of a trailer that depicts a woman infinitely less plain than the book suggested being whipped and shagged senseless by a bloke in a suit.

 The movie, and indeed the book, has polarized opinion and caused plenty of heated debate, primarily between women. Ladies that professed a love for the book and announced they were looking forward to seeing the movie, suddenly found themselves under attack on Facebook and Twitter feeds across the country, and judging by their comments, many of these women seem to have always thought of themselves as feminists too. So what is going on? Can a woman be a feminist and still take pleasure from a somewhat dark erotic fiction novel like Fifty Shades? With nothing else to do this morning and a moderate interest in modern feminism, I decided that I would spend an hour to try and explain why I believe that a woman can enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, and still feel strongly about true equality between the sexes.

Before I begin I must point out that I read some of the first Fifty Shades novel out of morbid curiosity, and as a result I would rather spend 90 minutes trapped in a lift with a decomposing skunk than watching the film, but that doesn’t mean I can't understand the appeal. In a nutshell, I believe that many educated women can indeed take some pleasure from a book that romanticizes the relationship between an arrogant sociopathic sex-pest who sexually dominates an impressionable young woman, and it is very easy to explain why. Anyone that read the fascinating piece about Victoria Pendleton's sessions with psychologist Dr Steve Peters can probably understand it too.

Basically, Peters told Victoria that she needed to "let the chimp out" if she wanted success. She admitted to him at this point that she had been feeling down, and she really wanted to get her hair done. So she had her hair done, and promptly won her next race. This story helps to elegantly explain my point.

Feminism has taught modern women that they matter. I, and any man with a brain (or a mother) should always agree on this point. It has taught them that they should never submit to a man, unless they really really want to. And during sex women sometimes want to. Not because they hate themselves, not because they do not value their gender, and not because they feel they have to. And they want to, because of good old fashioned science (evolutionary biology if you are stickler for details.) Our species spent a long time evolving. Sex and desire are as natural to human beings as eating and drinking. Modern feminism has (quite rightly) taught women from a very young age that they matter. Unfortunately, the inner chimp often has a real problem with being attracted to a man that is a total pansy.

And therein lies the problem.

The modern, trained part of any educated woman's brain says "I want a man that is gentle, kind, sensitive, warm, generous, and giving" while the inner chimp says "Look at Brad Pitts abs and biceps in Fight Club, PHWOAR! Why am I looking at this pasty skinny guy with terrible taste in underwear?" This is perfectly natural, no shame is required. And modern men have spent years being told that women hate chauvinistic and masculine men, because they are likely to be oppressive and arrogant. In everyday life, of course a woman wants a man that is sensitive and kind, but during sex, the natural differences between the sexes are much more important, because it is a primal activity that has been going on since our ancestors first crawled from the oceans. Put simply, if apes never screwed, our species would be screwed. So in the bedroom, opposites really do attract. And when the differences between both of our sexes are not as obvious, arousal is much more difficult for a regular heterosexual chimp. I mean.. woman.

This is also why the best serial philanders, (just read any of those annoying pick-up artist blogs) fake it. They are arrogant, and masculine, and confident, and attractive, but they pretend they are also sensitive, and kind, and giving, and they are, right up to the point they roll off you in bed and say "sod this, I'm off to the pub."

The feminization of men is a good thing generally. Any man with a daughter, or sister can see the logic of that. Women now live in a culture where they can take care of themselves, they can study whatever they want, they can become a metalworker if they want, they can join the army, be a mother, become a logger. They matter, and that is a great thing. But the feminization of men is a bad thing in the bedroom because the chimp often likes those masculine traits, and we are all slaves to the chimp. Just like a genuinely good man who has never cheated on his wife but occasionally spends a second glaring at an attractive woman's ass when she bends over to tie her shoe in the street, so too can a modern, sensible, feminist woman, want to lose herself in an hour of good old fashioned primal shagging.

Well, unless they are married to me. Let's call it twenty minutes.

So when modern women start to think their sex life with their giving, sensitive, kind partner is a little dull, of course they are going to have a moment when they get excited about the thought of being dominated by a powerful, confident, and attractive male figure. Many aspects of FSOG are alarming, and indeed, very sexist. And most men know it, because if it was a factual biography alongside the likes of The Wolf of Wall Street, none of us would read it and go "I would like Mr. Grey to meet my mother" or "My sister has just recently divorced, I shall invite Mr. Grey round tomorrow night so he can bang her up against the refrigerator." But it does not mean that a sensible woman cannot simply enjoy it for what it is, some fictional entertainment. Our culture has taught women that they must never bow down to a man, but the inner chimp often has a yearning for a little bowing down. Just because some part of a woman's psyche desires some masculine behavior in the sack, it does not mean that they want women to retreat from politics and stay in the kitchen, and any sensible woman with a brain will concede the point, not knee me in the testicles and mace me.

Anyway, I believe that walking the line between the chimp and modern sophistication is difficult for men too, but I believe I am getting close to becoming the perfect man via the medium of lifting weights, being sexually aggressive, and tenderly stroking my wife's face while sobbing and listening to Lady Gaga.