Awkward Situations For Girls Blog

On getting your baps out ‘to raise awareness’

I walked in the living room on Saturday and found my boyfriend giggling about Boobstagram. (Potentially NSFW!) 

Launched in France, Boobstagram pulls in photos of boobs from Instagram ‘to raise awareness’ for breast cancer. 

Yuh huh. I guess we just worked out why Mark Zuckerberg dropped a billion dollars on Instagram.

My boyfriend haltingly tried to tell me that looking at 53 pages of boobs was for a good cause, so I whipped off my bikini top and catapulted it in his eye, which probably raised his hazard awareness.

I’m certainly not going to moan about charitable causes, because I think fundraising to improve research, care for sufferers, and support for families is absolutely fantastic and we can all do a little more. But there is a social trend right now around ‘raising awareness’ - campaigns like the controversial Kony 2012 drive, ‘change your facebook profile picture to a cartoon to raise awareness for child abuse’ (what?), and visual ephemera like Twibbons. ‘Raising awareness’ is becoming a buzzword, and I worry it might detract from causes which are actually, y’know, raising money.

To this end may I respectfully suggest that, if you want to get your funbags out to ‘raise awareness’ for breast cancer, you do the Moonwalk? That way you can earn some cash for charity by walking around at night in your customised bra. I’ll personally sponsor the first person to create some sort of Total Recall Kuato adornment.

More info
Top Design Mag looks at 30 ad awareness campaigns

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Awkward Situations For Girls: Being Cut From The Telly

I was invited on BBC Three’s frenetic new TV show, Britain Unzipped, to talk about blogging, boys and Twitter. I made an actual effort, cutting my afternoon biscuit allowance down to six, ironing my checked shirt collars with hair straighteners, and braving my scarily high ankle boots covered in cats. 

Yes, I actually wore these. In public. That is cat tapestry, yes.

During recording I sat next to Vanessa, writer of award-winning blog Nightmares and Boners, and we gossiped and felt old and misplaced together while surrounded by 19-year-olds who seemed to find Russell Kane’s sex fart jokes funny.

Filming took 6 hours, and to add insult to fucking-high-cat-boot-injury they cut my story out of the show, keeping merely half of one of Vanessa’s answers about online dating.

So you’ll never get to see us lambasting a professional ‘Pick Up Artist’ - some average-looking guy who has practiced picking up women for one hour EVERY NIGHT for the last SEVEN YEARS - because he refused to sign the release form after filming, thus losing the whole segment from the show. And you’ll also never hear me talk about meeting my boyfriend on Twitter.

I don’t believe in online dating. I’m incredulous that mysinglefriend.com is not just about shagging everyone who can spell ‘LOL’ in a private message. I’ve not yet overcome the stigma of people meeting on websites, or gained faith that somebody might be looking for more than bumping uglies with your avatar. 

But a year and a half after I first tweeted my boyfriend I am now totally ratified that he is, what they call, ‘a good one’. How do I know? What made it clear?

Having sat through 45 minutes of unbearably hyper knob-gag television, only for my chat to be chopped, he truly showed his mettle:
“Well, your hair looked GREAT.”

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When what he says changes a little bit

When you first meet your fella, you’ll probably say nice things to each other all the time. Stuff about finding each other wildly attractive; “I like your hair pushed back off your face”; general rubbish about being destined for one another because no one else would’ve spotted that clever reference in the film you saw together that one time. 

When you’ve been together a year, your conversation is likely to skew a little more like this, which I enjoyed yesterday:

Him: Are you going to wash your hair today?
Me: *puts on mirror face, tosses hair, smiles through eyelashes* Do I need to? 
Him: Yes. It smells like wet straw. 

Romance doesn’t die: it simply gets absorbed into the practicalities of the everyday. Things you might tolerate with affection at the start of your relationship - “aww, her hair’s like a damp hay-bale!” - become factual truths we chuck in each other’s faces without a care. (“I wasn’t kidding when I said your feet smell like Brie.”) But who else do we do that to? Well…

It’s sort of what we do with family.

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Tick, tock, biological clock

“The clock’s ticking, and so’s the bomb.” - The character no one can remember in Face/Off

I want to clear up a few misconceptions about the term ‘biological clock’. I work near a horribly cute children’s clothes shop and the other day a passing man laughed, ‘Tick tock, biological clock’ in my face as I pressed it against the glass.

A woman’s biological clock is not, as popular belief would have it, activated upon seeing small children. We do not gaze at grubby-faced, grinning little monsters and think, ‘Cor! I must put one of them things in my womb!’ Holding a friend’s farting baby does not start a ticking timebomb in our uterus. (Plural? Uteri?) We may coo at a stripey sailor t-shirt the size of our thumb, but it is not miniature clothes which make us broody.

My biological clock started the year I turned 28. In a strange, Lynch-like dream, I was pregnant on a cliff. (The cliff may be irrelevant.) Knocked up: brewing a beerful of baby: bun in the oven. For much of the next day, my mum noticed my hands kept returning to my belly, resting them on it, vaguely aware I missed the feeling… of not being alone? I’m not sure. In another dream, similarly far-flung from reality, I gave birth to and met my daughter, Isabella May. (Is this Twilight?) She was completely beautiful - and funny! Isabella was funny. She gurgled and we shared massive lolz. When I woke and realised she wasn’t real, I felt bereft for three whole days. I couldn’t believe my daughter’s huge personality had never happened, and was something my subconscious had conjured.

This is the real nature of the biological clock. It is not some clucking-hen broodiness, activated by a baby’s belly-laugh in a nappy advert. The biological clock is an animalistic, inherent, embedded, deeply-rooted warning within a woman’s psyche. In January I’ll reach thirty, and some sort of chemical reaction within my brain is warning me that 90% of the eggs I’ll produce in my lifetime have gone. My clock fills me with longing - when sense dictates I’m not remotely ready to be a parent. (I haven’t yet mastered the art of cooking, y’know, in an oven.) My clock makes me render human beings in my dreams. It forces me to miss my own children - before I’ve even met them. 

Some women will disagree, and some will never have this feeling; but many of my friends dream about being pregnant, giving birth and having children, and they also feel the morning-after absence. So the next time you want to gesture pointedly at your watch, giggling, ‘Tick tock, biological clock’ at your sister / girlfriend / RANDOM LADY ON THE STREET, you might want to imagine that she’ll respond with a tick-tock-timely kick in the babymaker.

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