More tales of bad behaviour…

A bit of a belated hollaback, this one, but I’ve been off doing other things lately and haven’t had the chance to sit down and write properly for a week or two. The next bit will partly explain why.

I’ve been injured for the last three weeks. For the last two of those, I have been stupefied on painkillers and had the attention span of a gnat. Thankfully, I’m on the mend now. (It was a sprained foot).

Now you’d think that a hospital waiting room would be a fairly safe place, during the day at least. All those signs up saying that attacks on staff will not be tolerated, people passing in and out all the time, everyone being too caught up in their own personal problems to bother with bothering their fellow patients.

Step forward Twat MkIII. Yes, it is you I’m talking about, you were in the waiting room of the Royal Liverpool Hospital some time after 11 am on the 27th of May. Youngish guy, wearing a cap, you had an ominous Christian book open on your lap. (I was a poet and I didn’t know it!)

Now, when a woman is sitting in a hospital waiting room, waiting for the nurse to call her name, so she can hop into the consulting room and have someone reassess her dodgy foot, she doesn’t want to get to know people like you. Especially when she has shown this by hiding behind her own book. When she ignores you and feigns massive interest in the “Look After Your Heart” wall display to the side, don’t embarrass and annoy her by continuing to try and get her attention, in the way you would a small dog. Don’t you know how rude that is? Do you not realise that people do not go to the hospital to be chatted up?

Honestly, some people.

The next bit of street warrior-ness happened earlier today. I don’t think it has anything to do with feminism or that it really counts as street harrassment, but it’s bad behaviour nonetheless.

Right, you, you in the silver Vauxhall (I think, I didn’t stick around to take notes). The arsey-looking bald-headed guy with the tenuous knowledge of the Highway Code. Passing by Abercromby Square sometime shortly after 1pm. Yes, you.

When a traffic light is on red, you stop. When the little green man is flashing on a pedestrian crossing, people are going to walk across. It is not optional for you to stop, you self-important prick. When you do feel the need to ignore the basic rules of the road, DO NOT give the innocent road-crosser you just nearly hit evil looks, as if it’s her fault! I make no apology for shouting or using foul language towards you, as you bloody well deserved it.

I admit this probably had nothing to do with my gender, but it does illustrate the kind of self-important, entitled mindset that feminists often find themselves up against. We are constantly told how we should feel aabout things like street harrassment and expected to second-guess other people’s unpleasant behaviour – of course it was only a joke! Likewise, when out and about of an evening, we are supposed to second guess what any given passer-by might do and make sure we act accordingly – mustn’t drink, mustn’t use certain streets, mustn’t wear revealing clothes, unless a random pervert happens to be passing by. As if we can. As if we can work out in advance anything that a lurking misogynist might do, any more than we can anticipate what traffic signals a substandard driver will or won’t obey.

Okay, some time this week, I’m going to put another more positive post up. I’ve been to see Gunther von Hagens’ Bodyworlds and have plenty to say…

Peace, love and Niki de Saint Phalle

Thankfully, I have no street harrassment to report this weekend. Instead, I just managed to catch Tate Liverpool’s Niki de Saint Phalle retrospective before it closes on the 5th.

I had heard of Niki through articles in Sunday supplements, but had never seen much of her work. If this exhibition is touring, then I advise anyone reading to go and take a look. Niki had a long and varied career in art, involving many different styles. She is most famous for her “Nanas” (pictured), large, stylised goddess-women, shown in poses ranging from proud, pregnant to playful. They are typically sculpted in papier mache on wire armatures and painted in bright, assertive colours. I like the Nanas. There is something very cheerful and comforting at the same time about them.

Niki is also known for her “tirs”. These were relief sculptures with concealed pouches of wet paint and foodstuffs within, which were released when the artist, or one of her accomplices, shot at them with a .22 rifle, also on display at the Tate. The tirs developed from being quite abstract to being astute political statements, dripping with their own “blood”. Niki was opposed to the imperialist regime in her native France, its treatment of the North African colonies and the far-Right organisations that were proliferating when she made these works.

Coming between these parts of her career were her “bride” sculptures, and this was when she started working predominantly with the idea of womanhood, feminity and female experience. The brides, with their wide, distorted bodies made of lace and bits of broken doll, conrast with the exuberant Nanas. They and some of the tirs are the most explicitly feminist pieces on display, although Niki never identified as a feminist artist, perhaps because she had managed to sculpt and shoot her way into elite artists’ groups and did not wish to be marginalised. 

I am no art critic, so cannot really describe all of what was on display adequately. What I left the exhibition with was a huge admiration for Niki de Saint Phalle, her huge and vibrant personality, her talent for melding the aesthetic and the meaningful, her ideas and her energy.

It’s a great exhibition, you should go!

Oh dear, not more bad behaviour in the street…

Following on from last week’s post about the hideous scene I was forced to witness in Lewis’s last week, I’ve decided to call out another weirdo and his nasty public behaviour. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t go round looking for this stuff – the fact that I’ve witnessed it twice in two weeks has just made it stick in my mind and get on my nerves that bit more. Both times, I’ve been doing stuff that I do every day or at least every week, without a problem. It just proves that women going about their everyday lives can come up against hatred, or in this case, just general creepy strangeness, in any situation.

 

Okay. Now for this week’s total twat. Yes, I’m talking about you, the one with the short, dark brown dreadlocks and the ring in the left eyebrow who was wandering round Abercromby Square in Liverpool, today, the 26th of April, at around 12:50, close to the Sydney Jones Library. Wearing black clothes, with a hoodie or cardigan sort of hanging off your left shoulder. You kind of looked as if you were on drugs – am I correct?

I was walking along the pavement towards the Sydney Jones, so that I could take some books back and meet a friend. Mr Twatoid materialised through the gate from the Abercromby Square quad and walked towards me, seemingly normally. He started looking at me quite intensely, but i just assumed that he thought he recognised me from somewhere. I did a quick mental check to see of I remembered HIM and was perhaps being ignorant, but drew a blank. I had never seen him before.

As he got closer, the staring intensified and he mouthed something at me. I have an idea what it was and it looked like “I hate you”, but I can’t be 100% sure of that. It could have been some other incoherent twat-talk like “High hay hooooo” or “Highgate loo”. I was mildly perturbed, but kept on walking. The staring continued and Mr Twat moved directly into my path, almost deliberately walking into me. As he passed, he said something I didn’t catch in a weird high-pitched voice. I was slightly more perturbed, but kept on anyway, making sure he wasn’t following me.

This incident pales into insignificance compared to last week, but I felt like recording it as another example of a male using intimidating behaviour for NO reason. It was more irritating than frightening.

I did not speak at all during the whole exchange. What on Earth had I done to have someone mouth weirdness at me and try to barge me off the pavement? I walk to the Sydney Jones carrying books several times a week and this doesn’t happen. It’s not normal and it sucks!

I’ve decided that I’m going to record all of these incidents in my blog in the future, but I hope there’s not too many, because there’s loads more stuff I want to write about…

Blog back up and running

The Burrow is now fully operational, following a long period of downtime on the Rodent’s PC. Please check back regularly as several updates are planned.

Welcome to my blog.

Welcome to The Burrow of the Radical Rodent.
At the moment I’m 27 and living in the Midlands.
I’ll be using the Burrow to explain some of my views on Feminism, Socialism and whatever else takes my fancy. However, beware, the Radical Rodent is, well, radical, and not everyone will agree with what comes forth from this Burrow. Feel free to comment – I’ll aim to show a representative selection of comments, providing they are more enlightening than “you suck”. Those comments get fed to the badger…
Other woodland creatures will be joining me to spread their views from time to time.

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