Mad Max: Fury Road explains perfectly why the patriarchy sucks for men too

*Spoilers for Mad Max: Fury Road ahead, obviously*

I am hoping you clicked on this article because you, like so many people out there, have suddenly been made aware of 'Meninists' - also MRAs, or Mens Rights Activists - because of a Return of Kings article demanding a boycott of Mad Max: Fury Road.  (Guardian article linked, because if you visit the original they'll get ad money).

This is them, patrolling the YouTube comments section.
© 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved

"Men are being tricked by explosions and boobs into watching feminist propaganda!" They cry. "We wanted this film to be just for us (along with all the others this summer, and all other summers)!" Hell, they're even upset at a 'piece of American culture being ruined' (ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the funding, director, lead, writers and locations of the original Max films are all Australian, as is this one).

They also complain that the film is called Mad Max, yet Furiosa seems to do most of the fighting. If we remove gender from the equation, it does admittedly seem a little odd that the titular character takes such a back seat. But in this landscape of reboots, sequels and studios being terrified of taking a chance on new intellectual properties, nobody would have thrown this kind of budget behind Imperator Furiosa: Awesome Robot Arm the movie.

Even though we would all watch the crap out of that movie.
© 2015 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved

If you're upset at a movie being affected by financial concerns, then boy are you writing about the wrong multi-billion dollar industry. Plus, the clue is right there in the subtitle: Fury Road. Greek mythological spirits of vengeance, notably female. The film is almost literally called 'The highway of angry women.' It could only have been clearer if they'd called it The Vagina Monorail (A title which I'm copyrighting and working on as we speak).

Welcome to a Conservative Britain!

From their own 2015 manifesto, here's what you can expect over the next five years:

We can fuck you up the ass, and there's nothing you can do about it!

The number one thing stopping any government getting away with whatever sketchy shit it likes is the European Court of Human Rights. It over-rules our courts, and it's a fucking good thing too. If they didn't, our government would almost literally be unaccountable.

Of course the Tories want rid of it, citing the difficulties getting rid of Abu Quatada and almost certainly EU regulations about Bananas or some shit. Hell, Theresa May still thinks it protects people from being deported if they have a cat (hint; it doesn't, and she's been told off for saying that on the news).

I think they threw her in a wheely-bin. I'm not good at remembering the news. 

So if they're unhindered by a higher authority, what can they do? Pretty much anything they like. But specifically, they can do some pretty terrifying things with the following policies suggested in their manifesto:

• Police-led prosecutions to be 'further extended,'
• 'Semi-custodial' sentencing allowing police to detain offenders in custody for 'extended periods'
• Ability to ban organisations that fall short of meeting the terrorism act's definitions (so anyone they don't like, basically)
• More boundary reforms

The Boundary reforms are probably the most concerning, because they're at the root of why the conservatives are in power right now with only 36.9% of the vote. That's only 6.4% more than Labour. But still the conservatives won 330 seats and Labour only got 232. How can the conservatives win a clear majority? Look at a map of the different voting boundaries and you'll see why:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results

Notice how the blue areas have a lot more small, compact constituencies? They're at the heart of the imbalance. Each constituency gets one vote. So the tories literally get more votes, because they've engineered things so that the regions of the UK that tend to vote Tory are divided up into more constituencies.

Doesn't sound fair? Well, because we've had nothing but Conservative and Labour since about the 1920s, and they both used to benefit from this system, nobody's complained. Unfortunately now that Labour have pissed off the Scots, it's not working for them any more, leaving one, big fat beneficiary who now intends to rewrite the rules to their benefit.

(link to relevant tumblr post)

If we still have a European Court of Human Rights by then, we might be able to stop them, given that the right to fair elections is one of the things that they oversee. I say might, because they could still manipulate the laziness of the general population by implementing photo ID voter registration.

Poorer areas (who are more likely to vote against the Tories) tend to respond very poorly to voter registration, because they're too busy working two jobs to update their photo id, cart it down to the local council office (assuming there's one nearby), stand in a queue and fill out a bunch of forms. Richer and more prosperous areas have the time and the energy to do so (and have generally better maintained public services that are able to keep up with demand).

So you end up with a lot of registered voters in Tory areas, and very few in labour areas. When they redefine the voting boundaries, they'll be redrawn based on the amount of registered voters. Meaning that the situation with all of those extra votes in the Tory heartland and a few vast reds scattered everywhere else is about to get a lot worse.

Of course, even if they fail to get rid of the ECoHR, they'll still be able to do any and all of the following:

Benefit reforms!

• 'Tougher' day one work requirements for job seekers (I'll be interested to see if it's even possible to get tougher without using the word 'workhouse'),
• 18-21 year olds excluded from Jobseekers Allowance and given 6 months 'Youth Allowance', after which they must get a job / training / disappear from the statistics / die (whatever's quickest),
• No housing benefit for 18-21 year olds, so good luck if your parents are abusive, dead or kicking you out!
• More sick / disabled people to be classified fit to work by ATOS,
• Support for Homeless people and mental health care to be hidden behind new and exciting 'bonds' that will doubtless be unadvertised and difficult to access, as with most social care now Jobcentres have strict targets and most of the CAB offices are gone.

Tax Reform!

• Further corporate tax decrease. It's not even veiled behind colourful language, they're proudly boasting they'll decrease corporate tax.

Justice reform!

• EU referendum in 2017. Lets see how much a combined front of the Murdoch press and our own government can scare us by then!
• 'Deport first, appeal later' policy on immigration. Direct quote!
• Police no longer allowed to access journalists phone records (Thanks for the recommendation Ms. Brooks!),
• Police-led prosecutions to be further extended,
• 'Semi-custodial' sentencing allowing police to detain offenders in custody for 'extended periods',
• SCRAP THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT (I'm not sure how UKip managed to get more attention than this),
• 'British Bill of Rights' to be decided by a bunch of old white men, and Sith lord Theresa Palpatine-May (you know, the one who voted against gay rights including marriage, has been found in contempt of court over detaining an Algerian man, and deported Jackie Nanyonjo to Uganda, where her illegal status as a lesbian has forced her into hiding),
• European Court of Human Rights will no longer be able to correct injustice in the UK.

Most worrying of all:

• Ability to ban organisations that fall short of meeting the terrorism act's definitions (so anyone they don't like, basically),
• Ban / disband nonviolent extremists as defined above,
• Stop 'extremist' individuals from using the internet, or teaching at a university.

Now read these again in light of Home Secretary Theresa May's responses over the detention of Journalist David Miranda. If the government want to call anything terrorism, they can; and just in case they can't, they still want the power to act even if it falls short of any approved definition. Russell Brand's a bit shouty and anti-government. Maybe he can be a terrorist...


Education reform!

• Schools that OFSTED likes can basically do what they like and get free money,
• Everyone else gets threats of closure, funding cuts (helpful for schools in poor economic areas!) or being turned into an academy.

Civil reform!

• Continued censorship of the internet, extending from piracy to porn,
• More boundary reforms,
• Proof of id to vote, so less of those objectionable poor people will register, and the number of Tory safe seats can increase,
• Extend the vote to racist ex-pats on the Costa del Sol (and presumably the ghost of Thatcher),
• NIMBY law allowing locals to protest against new housing, developments and basically anything in Oxfordshire,
• Inheritance tax cap effective at £1 million as long as you put it in property (so you can buy a million quid block of flats, fill it with plebs and hand it on to your family safe in the knowledge they will be carrying on your legacy of spiteful manipulation of basic human needs),
• Decrease co-operation with Europe (proven stability & interaccountability) and increase trade links with India and China (shocking human/civil rights records, poverty stricken manual labourer class and - actually now that I think about it, all-round Conservative wet dream).

It's all in there, check for yourself at http://www.conservatives.com/manifesto if you want. I know you won't.

Because let's face it, you were probably part of the third of the British population who didn't even turn up to vote yesterday.

Democracy! 

Where do ideas come from?

Personally, I think Neil Gaiman had one of the best explanations for where ideas come from, namely that he doesn't know and he doesn't really want to know in case it scares them off.

However, I have noticed myself typing out the same couple of idea prompts I learned at university every time I see this question online or on a post-it note stapled to the door of my bunker. So in order to save myself typing them out each time (and sneakily making a paltry scraping of ad money) I type them out here for your browsing perusal.

Enjoy. They only cost me 9 grand and three years of my life.

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1) Carry A Notebook

In the above videos, one of the useful things Gaiman points out is that "Essentially, [ideas] come from daydreaming. And I suspect it's something every human being does. Writers tend to train themselves to notice when they've had an idea. It's not that they have any more ideas or they get inspired more than anyone else, we just notice when it happens a little bit more."

This is fantastic, but I am criminally absent minded. The seven point plan for world peace that occurs to me on the way to Sainsbury's is usually gone by the time I get to the tills, and I'm left later sat in front of the open laptop when I get home scratching my head and trying to remember why guinea pigs were involved in stage 2.

Consequently I carry around a notebook. It's a nice one, it has a little strap around it so it doesn't come open. And I guard it carefully. Not because the contents are valuable, but because if found by someone who doesn't know me, I'm fairly sure its contents could get me committed.

But what it does contain are ideas. I cross them off as I realise them. Ideas for scenes, opening lines, characters, events, snippets of dialogue, and solutions to problems. And shopping lists. But mostly ideas. If you want to fill a book with ideas, you'll need every single one you can get,

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2) Freewrite

Another popular idea generator is free writing. I was pretty sure I'd written about this before, but I can't seem to find the post so here it is again in brief:

Write anything for 5 minutes. Do not stop for punctuation, spelling or logic.

Anything. Even if it results in the following:

Oh god, what am I writing? I don't even know. I have literally no ideas. Like an empty box in the back of a shed covered in dust but there are a load of boxes in the way so you can't quite see properly - is that a leg sticking out of it? it looks too big to be a leg. oh god it's moving. WHY IS IT MOVING AND WHY AM I STILL IN THE METAPHORICAL SHED.

There you go, now you've got the beginnings of a horror story about giant spiders. First scene: a young couple are moving into their new house when they discover an old box at the back of the garage. When his body is discovered nobody believes the plucky young researcher at the local museum, until people start disappearing...

Yes it's Jaws with spiders, but you get the idea. No matter how bad the initial piece of free writing is, there will be an idea or the spark of one in there if you look hard enough.

Freewriting works because it loosens up the creative side of the brain and forces the critical side to take a back seat. If you really, really examine your thought processes when you're stuck, it's not that you're not having ideas: You have ideas all right, but you've trained the critical part of your brain to shoot them all down. The more you let your critical side get away with this, the less in tune with your own creativity you become.

Conversely, the more you give your creative side free reign, the more in tune with it you get. Seriously, the more you do a thing, the easier your brain finds it to do that thing. That's neuroplasticity, Kyle. Science. Let the ideas out, and snip them down when you're finished creatively outpouring.

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3) Automatic writing

Right. This is a bit of an odd, hippy one, so feel free to ignore it and stick to the first two if you like.

To cut a long story short, an artist called Brion Gysin used to lay down newspapers to protect the table while cutting up canvases. He noticed that in cutting up these headlines, sometimes they fell together in funny, tragic, bizarre or poignant phrases. He liked it and called it the cut-up technique. This inspired William Burroughs to write The Naked Lunch, which is pretty much the same thing but with a manuscript he had written. It's a bizarre book, but this also inspired David Bowie (yes, that David Bowie), who created a machine that scanned newspaper articles and spat out rearranged sentences, which he started using as lyrics.

Got it? Accidentally produce the profound from accidents. So how do we apply this?

Find a page of text, photocopy it (please don't go round cutting up people's books, it's mean), and then cut out each sentence. Then cut each sentence in half. Scatter them on the table or the floor. Turn them all right-side up so you can see them. Then start putting together any interesting combinations you see.

It depends on how interesting the source material is really. If it's a page from something by Neil Gaiman, you'll have a lot of dark imagery to work with. If it's a page from a cookbook, less so, but the results might be funny. If you mix Neil Gaiman in with a cookbook, I'm 90% sure the results will be about eating children.

The results will not be great English, but they WILL be great ideas and rich in the kind of imagery you need to tell a great story.

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So there you have it, three ideas to get you started if you're stuck:

- Carry a notebook and write down any cool ideas before they disappear,
- Write anything to get your creativity going, and then edit it into just the good bits,
- Cut up a bunch of text and rearrange it randomly to see what pops out.

I look forward to finding out how useful these are to people.

Free Writing - the player

Imagine a ball, floating in mid air. The ball is red, and it shines with the sheen of rubber and has a small but noticeable seam or casting mark running across the circumference. It’s floating in mid-air because time is paused. A baseball bat floats alongside it, gripped in the hands of a world renowned player I sadly don’t know because (A) I’m not American and (B) I don’t care.

So it’s a stock baseball player. Looks to have some sort of South American heritage from his dark skin and curled hair, the look of concentration on his face briefly eliciting almost of sneer. His eye is on the ball but this reveals something; it’s not a baseball. From this we can deduce that it’s not a league game, and it’s not a practice because they’d want the right ball for the weight, otherwise it’d be pointless.

Back to the ball. It’s red and cheap, so why is it heading towards him? I have all these ideas - he’s in the park and a dog owner threw it at him, but then why would he have the bat? I was also going to say that he was attacked and someone threw the ball as a distraction, relying on his finely-tuned reflexes to automatically swing at the ball while they stab his side, but the problem with that is that they would have had to to attack a baseball player with a baseball bat. Irony? Misdirection to make it look like a disgruntled team-mate?

I get it now. He’s at a friends house and their son recognises him. He’s pretty famous after all, even if I don’t know who he is. The kid throws a ball at him - not a proper one, and not at the right height. The player will miss, clipping the ball and sending it skittering off into next door’s pool. The player will want to slam the bat down and say it’s not a regulation ball, the pitcher was too close, the bat he signed for the kid is not the size he’s used to, any of the excuses the blood rushing to his neck is jamming into his forebrain.

Instead, he’ll smile, shrug in embarrassment, and tell the kid he got him, he’s better than the pros. And the kid will smile at the lie as kids do, and cling to that memory every time he fails, or things don’t work out right.

Any time life tries to beat the childhood out of him he’ll stand proud and remember the day he beat the pros.

Political Musings from a Coffee Shop

What if the tea party, the republican party, Fox News - the staunchest defenders of America with a capital Fuck Yeah - were all part of a conspiracy to destabilise it?

The right wing makes no sense to me, I'll freely admit that. It seems to be selfish and underhanded in the same way that they probably view liberalism as overthinking and naive.

But I can at least see where the part of the right nearest the centre is coming from. They believe that making the rich richer is fair because it's better to reward hard work. From a strictly eugenic point of view, it makes sense, I just disagree with the brute simplicity of it. I'll never really understand racism, but there again the right is usually (with the exception of the EDL and such) pretty quick to try and disassociate themselves from it. And limiting the rights of people is a temptingly simple solution because I do believe that people are all idiots, including me. See, I'm typing in green now. Why am I typing in green. Now Blue. Clearly, I'm an idiot.

But what I don't understand are the Sarah Palins and the Sean Hannitys - the crazy right. The ones who think the female body can magically repel rapist semen, who think that 47% of the country they're trying to win over don't pay taxes. The ones who are currently shutting down the US government to stop free healthcare, despite two thirds of Americans being for it.

I mean, these people have to be funded from somewhere, but the majority are against them. If they're just taking advantage of the revelation that (in the UK at least) an obscenely rich minority have the majority of the money, then clearly we need to take a very close look at the word 'democracy, because the government is being run by a minority acting against the interests of the public.

Put it this way. We mock Americans for their attitudes towards war, their unfair healthcare systems and their megacorporations that make Ebeneezer Scrooge look like Oprah on amphetamines. But when have you actually met an American person who agreed with any of it? I mean I've met four Americans off the top of my head, and one of them was a fan of guns; but she was from Alaska where they do kind of need them. I have found all the individual Americans I've met to be reasonable, rational people.

But the news we hear from America is completely different, and it's promoted and funded and reinforced by the same network of attention grabbers, all acting like idiots. It's hard to believe they're not mentally ill, that nobody's sat them down and explained to them that we don't share or support these opinions. It's hard to see where the impetus comes from to keep putting them on our screens.

But... what if that's the point? What if they're elevated to these positions not to defend the US, but to give it a bad name? To tar it with a label reflecting the worst bigotry of the right wing? After all, we can agree that direct attacks of violence have failed. America does not negotiate with Terrorists. But it does love money. Mmm, delicious money. That's it America, dry roasted money in a delicate oil jus. It's their kryptonite. It's even green.

And given that attacks both direct and indirect have failed (modern espionage becomes pointless in an age where the NSA can tap into everything) the remaining option is to take a leaf out of the USA's own playbook: destabilise the government and turn the people against them. Just like in South America, just like in Vietnam. The Republican party is being led astray by the interests of healthcare organisations, most of whom pay their taxes overseas. Foreign interests paying for the US government. And the whole cycle of destruction is protected from repercussions because it's shielded by the money it accumulates.

We have capitalism actively destroying a democracy, and nobody's doing a damn thing.

I think what worries me most about the politics of this era is that governments are no longer listening to protest, and acting without mandate. Something has changed, and that has let them unleash their worst excesses - even in our country, we have the sale of the NHS, grants to energy companies for fracking and the destruction of the welfare state. And we are powerless to stop any of it.

I don't know. I said in an earlier post that that it's very easy to spot conspiracies emerging where there are none, but I think it comes from an in-built desire in the human mind to find patterns in the chaos. Somehow, it's more reassuring to imagine the secret terrorist bloc from Team America: World Police funding Bill O'Reilly's rants about the mentally ill than to imagine instead that someone genuinely feels those kinds of opinions are acceptable.

We're in one hell of a state when it's easier to believe we're being manipulated than it is to believe that we're choosing to act this way.