Gender Museum...somewhere!

Can anyone tell me where this Gender Museum is? I desperately want to go, but I don't have a clue where it is, and the website is in some strange Cryllic language, help! Answers on a postcard to 'Posie's Abroad Dilemma', the first person to tell me gets a return Ryanair ticket to whichever country it is and a pack of 70p local Marlies on landing.

ALAS!

For all the girls who are hitting the town tonight, don't spend TOO long getting ready, for you may find that your morne-like christall countenances shall be netted over and (Masker-like) cawbe-visarded, with crawling venomous wormes. Why do ye embellish and adorne your flesh with such port and grace, which within some few dayes wormes will devoure in the grave? Why pamperest thou that carren fleshe so high, whiche sometyme doeth stinke and rot on the earth as thou goest?

Also, Max Factor is bloody expensive. Alas!

And Finally...

Two great reasons to remind me why I'm leaving the country and leaving the lot of you in this sink hole...

Melanie Phillips of the Daily Male in "The collapse of sexual norms has destroyed the bulwarks around marriage. And the gay rights agenda is very much part of that process." scandal! The Harpie thinks:

A liberal society should be tolerant of gay people. It is good that social attitudes are now far more relaxed. People's sexuality should be an entirely private matter and should not be the cause of prejudice or, worse still, aggression towards homosexuals.

But is the gay rights agenda really about tolerance, or is it about trying to stop heterosexuality being the behavioural norm?

Posie Rider slits her wrists in newspaper bigotry depression scandal. Read the full article at their website if you, like me, no longer want to live in this country.

Also, Emma Morton of The Sun warns that chaps are doomed because boffings have managed to culture little spermies in petri dishes for baby-grabbing women to harvest instead of putting up with years of tedious, soul-snatching 'bonding' with a man (aka sperm in a stick) before you can convince him to impregnate you.

Morton warns that this sort of madcap science could soon make men 'redundant'. Ha ha! I say sod off boys! I never liked them anyway.

Holidays!

Hey Girlies,

Melody's now officially a Buddhist so I'm going to join her for a week on Holy Isle to finish my latest historical endeavour: Put that Woman Down: The Amazing Adventures of Meredith Lynchfield. No technology allowed so you'll have to do without my witty observations on vaginas and other such things for a time.

PS I'm also in talks with Women's Parliamentary Radio about publishing some of my work, it seems that news of a political maestro with an incredible talent for poignant postulations about stuff that really no one much cares about travels fast online.

HUGS & PUGS

We shall met again,

Posie xx

Fuck off Fedora! I cocking love Venus and Serana Williams

Look, I find Wimbledon incredibly boring, but even I could put aside my frightful memories of school girls tennis (where I first experienced the joy of menstrual blood soaking through a white skirt) to enjoy this weekend's Ladies Finals, and the incredible display of skill, dedication, and downright female bloody brilliance exhibited by the Williams sisters.

Let's put reigning champion Serena against Fedora next year and see who wins, eh? My money's on Serena. And how about not making the Ladies Final the penultimate Saturday spectacle, followed by the terrible climax of the Men's on Sunday? Why not give these athletic stars the triumph they deserve, rather than upstaging them with 'men'? Oh, because you're a chauvinist, Wimbledon. I see.

Hoo-bloody-rah!!

I wrote a poem about a fucking river (for Tom Chivers)

(my new poem)

woman on the pebbles will kill or be killed

asphalt river hear ye

though I have sat where torrents recall no slush

I am drawn by your ceramic explosions

your waves snapped underneath and smoothed over

with clothes laid in respect.

there are beads of patience in this fell river

not where ants carry ants, but where between bites

enamelled flesh can be tapped

to purge freezing oils

where the cuff lavender is brought alive to claw to earth

where we are buried to stay cool and grow white hands

to reach and tuber

and come to fruition and bask without a song.

so be drowned or drown over exposed leaves shaking

restless lover, who’s keeping their feet wet

carved sweat

& toes resplendent knife upwards through satin

to coil imprints around the upright stones

& mark an embrace before evaporation

I am repeating on you.

this body is a factory,

this room, a weaker shade of tea.

molluscs have been sun dried and clasp to the billowing wood

margined by choke

unchinked and unshafted

flecking tremulous

& I had rather root without

than soot in synthetic barbered grass

and smiles of parcelled glue

when there are births of teased and tortured glimpse

to be tweezed or cuticled from the corpse of morn.

I will not dive unless I know the pebbles are not rasped

nor fill a cup with oil

or clothe a gasp in brick

or seek respite in lists and chat

or segway to a revolution, while

my love has gone amongst the flids

to fashion me a yearning -

he was half buried

in tarmac when we met

to make himself chaste.

with his lute fricking he charms scimitars!

he is a silver fish in the backwash!

& how am I to explain

this beetle on my breast?

go easy on the glory hole

cracked forest!

its arc is in tatters

boats full of stones

are held and sunk by knotted necks, green swans

nappies round catkins

the soft rabbit’s fingers of the weeping willow shorn at the wrist

shredded by pikies

spike dog shit three times thus.

this creased and sweated life we live beneath pages, in surfaces

we air condition panic and

would rather waste ink than miss a chance to bite.

(this volume is dirty)

skirts can only rustle now

peel winter off in cracks,

& wrinkling hours, jellied, impoverished

spoilt milk and spilt sleep.

better the life in the bubble of privilege, between pages,

basking fingers in slipped through sun

in the crease in the wall from the half cut window.

better the cack femme manages fate

than banal judges grid us to oblivion.

De Ridier Battle Helmet!

THE British Musuem have sent me this image of the Ridier Battle Hat atop a willing intern, complete with dried entrails of a Turk from circa the disasterous Fourth Crusade. Pwoar! I just can't wait to take that bad boy out with me to Truckles tonight! Feministe fashions bar rumba!

Comtesse de Saint-Ridier

I found the strangest thing when I arrived home the other day - a letter from the British Museum informing me of an archaeological artifact uncovered near my ancient ancestral home in Hampshire.

Being a fervent feminist-Marxist-occasional Maoist (as a teen), I naturally shy away from my patrician roots. However owing to the exciting content of the letter in question I feel obliged to equip you with a short her-story of my great ancestoress the Comtesse de Saint-Ridier, aka the Amazonian of Hampshire.

The Comtesse was a bold woman who lived between 1638-1684 - that's right - during the English Civil War. Her husband the Comte de Ridier (of French origin) was sent into battle and perished in the ballads of dead men's cries on the field of battle (N.B. great creative description - use in prose). Naturally the two had been Republicans who strictly adhered to the codes of the Bible, so that each time they whipped, pillaged or ate a servant they would instantly to the priest confess their sins and be most joyously accepted back into the fold of sheep.

When the Irish launched an unprecedented attack upon the family castle in 1642 the Comtesse defended the fortress for at least two days. She became know as the Amazonian of Hampshire and called upon her maids to take to arms. They wore bright bronze helmets and nothing but bloomers, boots and facepaint (painting to the right is an artist's impression).

The Irish surrounded the mighty Ridier battlement and resolved to starve her out, but following reports from her chambermaid of a secret tunnel running between the grand ball room and a nearby dairy farm the Comtesse proceeded to defy the enemy by tipping the castle's entire supply of potatoes over their lepricorn heads. However, after celebrating their clever coup the Comtesse asked to be shown the tunnel in question and was most agitated to discover that she had misheard: the maid had actually said 'fairy charm'. It turned out the young gal was having her period at the time and had turned quite quite mad. The Comtesse swore never to trust in the sisterhood again.

Needless to say the poor maid was whipped and exchanged with the Irish for five potatoes that were soon consumed and twelve hours later the Comtesse most willingly surrendered to the brutes. She later retired to Herefordshire, where her legend preceded her, never again to trust women. How very different the Riders are today indeed.

And now the most exciting news! The British Museum have unearthed the original feather-plumed hemet in which she fought the Irish. Of course I was most flattered by the prospect of seeing my great ancestress' head regalia stand alongside the Rosetta stone, however the museum seem to consider it "of relatively little histroical value" and so have offered it to moi!

This is fantastic news, although it has come somewhat late: I must now wait an entire year for Ascot. Can a lady still wear a giant girl-skull hat of pure bronze and ruby ostrich pearl to such events? No, maybe a mere woman could not but a feminist can!

So glad to be home. Toodles xx

PS must have a matching one made for Emmeline Pankhurst - she gets awful frock envy ...

Go Jeff Koons, but then...

So I was most impressed when reading on the Guardian website that that the artist Jeff Koons and I share a common vaginal passion:

'Koons is fascinated by sex - it keeps coming into our conversation, in a conversation about beauty for instance. "If I think of the word beauty, I think of a vagina", he replies. "I think of the vaginal - personally...'


That's fantastic but then...

'...That's what comes to mind for me, or Praxiteles' sculpture, the ass ... "


oh dear....

'The ass he's referring to is that of the Venus of Knidos, carved by the ancient Greek sculptor, Praxiteles, and displayed in a temple that allowed pilgrims to view the goddess of love from all angles. Classical writers tell that enthusiastic beholders stained the marble statue with their ejaculations. And this is a clue as to why he's keen on sex, as an artist. Eroticism has always been the territory par excellence where lofty ideals are betrayed by basic physical drives: where the beautiful becomes banal. This is why it made sense for Koons to explore pornography as art - because when we lust we are all Jeff Koons.'

Humpf. Patriarch. Leave me vagina alone.

Glorious, I return!

Hail, readers and cohorts! And welcome to all my new American friends. I'm back and 'all up in the UK', complete with lots of new lingo and a huge boozy grin after having been reunited with my old friend Martini Rosso. I'm a little jet-lagged after having been travelling for 26 hours, all random and painful connections and mishaps included (I sort of missed a plane a little after I caught up a little too quickly with the M.R. at Philly. It turns out it doesn't mix well with the over-the-counter diazepam I picked up at Walmart. I was eventually found wandering the airport and was popped on a good old BA flight and sent on my way by a kind, though slightly patronising, staff-type person.

On board I met an attractive but gauche young 'grad' student (??? I don't know what that means either!) who started telling me how excited he was to go to England and about various other spiritual experiences gained on his many travels, so I quickly put him off scent by lecturing him on the virtues of staid community life, then explaining the plot of the sublime Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell to him (and no I didn't see the fucking TV adaptation, though I'm sure it was dreadful). After an hour or so's laborious retelling of what is really quite a short book, he was suitably lulled, so I quickly slipped in my headphones and watched Bride Wars (inexplicable dross - avoid) followed by He's Just Not That Into You, which conveys the timeless "he doesn't love you/maybe he loves you/you're a pathetic dolt/he's cheating/you have no judgement/omg he does love you now you can marry him" message with effortless grace. A sigh and back to Cranford.

BUT just an hour ago I received an email from this young star-traveller, whom I had left this morning in Gatwick with one of my cards and with the idea in his head of avoiding London in favour of the quaint pleasures of Knutford. Instead he set to writing a poem for me about this 'incredibly moving experience', detailing all the other things in his life that had taken about the same time as our little literary chat, and their absolute insignificance compared to unimaginable, life-defining hour and 23 minutes he spent talking to me. BOR-ing! I knew I had him pegged for a chauvinist on the plane (exhibit A: beads. B: a tattoo of a bird on his thumb), but this really took the biscuit. Because every time an attractive and young (I am both, of course) woman discourses competently on any subject, even an intentionally alienating and uninteresting one, does a man treat her as an intellectual equal, a fellow traveller in search of the truth, a worthy friend or adversary? Of course not! Instead he falls hopelessly in love with her, and becomes incapable of offering any stimulating responses to her conversation unless they're directed at her knickers, or her 'beautiful soul' (excuse me while I raze off my own corneas).

And what are intelligent women to do? Stop being so intelligent is the only thing that comes to mind. That, or quickly get yourself a boyfriend as the best guarantee of being completely ignored my men in conversation thereafter (the no-chance-of-lady-garden-access:no-beautiful-soul paradigm). The moral of the story, and the general content of the email I returned to the pathetic lad, was:

"Of course you find me interesting, I AM interesting. The fact you find this surprising/intriguing/fragile and rare only proves that you are a person with terribly dull friends and also a massive chauvinist. Do you think I found you interesting, or did you just take that for granted? Now begone!"

Lady readers, beware the advances of doe-eyed graduates with romantic notions, lest 'he's just not that into you' becomes 'he's completely obsessed with you and I think he's written a fucking poem about it'. Help!

Poesie Rider - is there no end to my transatlantic stardom??

Great news fans! I'm hitting the bright lights of Buffalo tomorrow for the final leg of my sell out poetry tour of the Americas. Those of you based stateside should seriously check me out!

Back in Blighty soon for Martini Rosso.

xx

Feminist Poster competition!

It's a poster competition for feminists! click on the above title to access the website and vote for your favourite tribute to the great Mother of Social Movements. I have to say I would never normally engage in this kind of 'street art', however I shall make an exception in this case.

I'm designing one right now... so watch this space!

Voting will begin for this poster theme at midnight, 22 Jun 2009.

Why not submit your own poster?

Meow!

Look there's even my trusted friend, the old Bic razor...
If you're going to self harm at least do it like a feminist.

American Lady Poets

As the internet brings me news of the Daily Male's sexist musings from across the pond, so I can bring to you the wonders of America via the internet (except, of course to my many American readers, who of course have all that sort of thing on tap, or from a 'keg', which I suppose has a tap? Will check).

Anyway, check out this great book from American Poets Project, which accumulates poems from the WOMEN's MOVEMENT like a tampon accumulates sweet earthmother blood. Read this poem from the collection, edited by honor moore (cool use of no-caps!)

Spot the conceit! I REALLY like this poem, but don't you think, equally she could, like, NOT wear the dress? And personally, I don't run unless I'm being chased. Maybe that's the point of the poem? I mean, she's obviously not out jogging or she'd tell the MAN (aka reader) to wear tracksuit bottoms and comfy shoes. Oh dear! Exegesis crisis!

An Answer to a Man’s Question,
“What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?”
by Susan Griffin

Wear a dress.
Wear a dress that you made yourself, or bought in a
dress store.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear elastic,
around
your hips, and underneath your nipples.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear a sanitary
napkin.
Wear a dress and wear sling-back, high-heeled shoes.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin
underneath,
and sling-back shoes on your feet, and walk down
Telegraph Avenue.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin and sling-
back shoes on Telegraph Avenue and try to run

Rock on!

'Womankind defies nature', says Daily Male

Praise be! The Daily Male has once again shared with us their little perils of wisdom! This time they're warning all us broody females not to have children too late, because we might not be able to have children.

My cat Emmeline Pankhurst sent me an email with a link to this awful article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1193296/Have-baby-35-Meet-deadline-risk-missing-motherhood-say-doctors.html

It preaches that women should definitely have babies between the ages of 20 and 35 or risk having a successful career. Thanks to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists for drawing our attention to the 'optimum age' for childbearing and the 'epidemic of pregnancy' taking place among 40-somethings. Even if this is scientific stuff (which I doubt it is, see below) there is no need to phrase it so crassly.

I personally can't stand children, but maintain it should be a woman' s right to chose when, where and how she should open herself up to the world, almost bleed to death and give birth. On the other hand birth can also be a beautiful experience- I remember when my old college friend Natalie gave birth to triplets in a water tank. She had eight epidurals and said it was better than the summer solstice.


But do you know what this really reminded me of lady readers? Nazi Germany? 1935? Persecution? The Fascists started making up medical facts to prevent Jews reproducing, whilst constructing despicable laws to prevent Aryan and Jewish weddings. Well I say to you, same sex marriage- no one's too happy about that are they? And what do we really know about the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists anyway..?


Mine Fuhrer is that a copy of The Daily Male or are you just pleased to see me?

Thanks Melody!

Look at the cool picture Melody sent me 'on e-mail' this morning. Thanks Melody - it cheered me up a treat and emmeline Pankhurst says meow too. xxxx

Wallpaper

ALERT ALERT! I am finding it extremely difficult to locate some of my old friend (see left) stateside.

Oscar Wilde once said that America was a violent country because its wallpaper was so ugly. Well I say it's because they don't have the sweet nectar the colour of my womb. AND I might add that there is another book also about wallpaper MR WILDE which I suggest you consult, 'tis called The Yellow Wallpaper (by Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and it is about female depression and psychosis. The tale is actually based on the life of my great great grandmother, Beatrice Rider, who accidentally shot herself in 1889. The body was found by my great Aunt Lilly who now has a severe aversion to wallpaper, especially of the yellow variety.

The hunt continues... Not that I need Martini Rosso you understand, I mean I am totally over my break up with Martin. You might think it strange that I'm addicted to a drink that starts with his name, but reality is a social construct and that is your opinion.

Poesie Rider in the New World!

Look! I'm on tour in North America being a poet! Fuck you Steve! I've gone to a land where they can appreciate me, as a woman, for who I am - a woman! More news and photos soon darlings! xxx

The door of poetry is Openned (sic) - for MEN!

Hail, readers. As you well know, I am a writer, and like to dabble, dawdle and dip my brush in an intimidating range of media (plays, novels, histories, polemics, masques etc). As if that wasn't enough, I'm also an able poet, having wowed the world with my psychoanalytic thriller Gulf Scream, Labial Elegiac and the recent Aphorisms for my ex, which extends over many more hundreds of pages than I dared to publish to my blog (for legal reasons, I've been told: apparently some of my honest admissions in that work, for example the details of how I hacked Martin's internet banking and stopped the child support payments to his ex wife, could actually be used as evidence against me. Whoops! Has no one ever heard of artistic licence??).

Anyway, last night I had the good humour to attend a poetry reading in the 'Xing the Line' series (pronounced Zing the Line I think, poets eh!). I went along primarily to schmooze, I mean why else would I go, and met some very attractive Beta males who had lots of interesting things to tell me about themselves. All was going well until, two glasses of Rose down, I encountered literary sexism of the kind that hasn't been encountered since William Wordsworth nicked all of Dorothy's best lines. I was told at point blank range by the curator and tsar of a prominent poetry reading series, who shall remain nameless (you know who you are, Steve) that I, a lady writer, was unsuitable to make an appearance at his 'night'. I was informed, however, that if I wanted to pass my poems to a MAN to read, or make a short video of myself reading them in a bikini with a soft core Bashment backing track, I would be allowed to participate, but otherwise, no!

Once more the mesmeric ivory bower of the literary establishment was Clossed for women. The fact that other ladies have been admitted to these readings is merely further proof that sexism is rife in the world of poetry: does everyone remember Working Girl? That film, apart from being solid gold entertainment, taught us that it's not only men who polish and buff the glass ceiling - women can be raging, careerist chauvinists intent on keeping other women down as well. Like little Tess was abused by the Ivy League show off bitch, Katherine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), so little Posie has been cast to the wayside by the sorts of trustafarians who can take a year out to complete a 'Poetry MA' merely in order to meet a few people who they could meet anyway by merely attending a poetry reading and offering around a few cigarettes and looking 'needy and interesting'. In my early twenties I had no time for such things and, until Aunt Lilies' estate was wound up, had to labour and toil hard in Miss Selfridges as a personal shopper merely to afford a panino at the Nero's across the road in my lunch hour. Any poems I found time to write were scrawled on the back of a receipt for shoes, and my first novella, Me, Tim and My Quim (now a major motion picture) was written entirely on an All Bar One wine and nibbles menu. It's experience like that that makes a great writer, like Hemingway, not arsing around and paying good money to be deemed a 'qualified writer' by an academic institution. (I should say as an aside that I am now enrolled in Birkbeck's Summer Course in Female Memoir Writing, but what of that?)

Anyway, having been turned away so cruelly, there was nothing for me to do but consume further Rose, vom a little on my skirt, then come home and plot my revenge. This post, set to lay waste to the blogosphere, is merely the beginning. I have skills, for example internet banking fraud, and I have rage on my side. I've also just had a contraceptive implant (which stops your period for three years girls!) so, like Lady Macbeth, I will cry unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty!

Step one, an protest poem! I feel just like Brecht! Enjoy!!

Openning the cowl

I am self published!

Hark lute! Thumb me an envious tune

and autopsy reveal

the various instances

of the demise of the crowd song.

Openning the cowl

I am self kettled!

Authoritatively pilfering

lyrical nonchalance from

complacent bloggers all set

on their own aggrandisement.

Openning the cowl

I am self-harming!

Just to see if I can write.

Trade marking utterances best left be

or taken out used worn destroyed

passed out again

through the thigh of a pig.

Pour into moulds the

filling of the Arctic Roll tube

as capillary excess waste

laden tissue damage

but let’s turn this about

and call it dessert!

This is like me!

Fanny art!

Hi gals! Thought you might like this... The one on the right is actually my friend Fran; she just loves tattoos and thought she'd go all out for her thirtieth!

Isn't it pretty?

Can men be feminists?

William Godwin, John Stewart Mill, John Lennon, the list of male feminists is endless(ish), but can men ever really be feministing when they lack that all powerful 'fe' suffix?

Posie Rider says "no". Men jumping on the band wagon of female endeavours has been going on for years. They have taken over cooking (Jamie stole the limelight from our Dehlia); clothes (Matthew Williamson); and makeup (transvestites and media types). And now Feminism too?

Well I say "no", you bastards. My ex said he was a feminist but he wasn't; he was a fucking liar! J. S. Mill travelled round the east end of London distributing 'contraception literature' to prostitutes because he believed in the sovereignty of free speech: he was doing it in the name of liberalism, not feminism.

Feminists have argued that liberalism even hinders the agenda. Although she is my idol, I had to take on board Dr Kapur's* comments about Catherine MacKinnon at a recent feminist networking lunch. Kapur argues that MacKinnon's discourse of liberalism (particularly neo-liberalism, which sporned the deathchild post-feminism and it's evil twin 'men can join in too') only works to 'victimize' women. Discussions of female rights have spiralled out of control, as Western values dictate the agenda and acquire the despotic qualities of patriarchy. Feminists like myself aspire to label the conditions of alternate cultures as good/bad; just/unjust, without having any concept of the complexities at hand. For instance, I only found out the other day that Egypt was in Africa. How could I have known that when I live on the other side of the world?

I can only conclude that if feminists must be cautious when conversing with our sisters from abroad, how are men expected to understand the problems of women? They 'Other' us because they must.

I DO like Martini Rosso though.

* Please see Kapur's wonderful book Erotic Justice