Her-Story

- Caroline Criado-Perez

So I was in the shower, where all great ideas come to the patriarchy, thinking about the nasty cobwebs on my ceiling. I tried repeatedly to block them out with images of fairies . Woe is me, it worked not. But out of the vortex (more on this later) created by this image clusterfuck, came, amazingly, a bona fide IDEA. (Must’ve got sucked in by the fearful female gape on its way to its rightful residence, which was obviously in the filing cabinet hidden in an underground labyrinth, guarded by Plato, marked ‘subversive ideas that might untether our women’). Anyway, luckily, my gape got hold of it and there I was, I possessor of both a wandering womb and an idea.

Eureka! I cried

And quickly dried

My hide.

I really should thank Woman’s Hour and Google actually. Why? Well, dear children, sit down and I’ll tell ye a[nother] story. It was a dark and stormy night (stop that – Ed). Well, it was actually, despite being June 2012. And, as one does, I was vaching around on my computer, when I came across a Google page that tells you what gender it thinks you are. Curious, I clicked on it. It thought I was a man.

I was so angry I decided to go to sleep.

I woke up the next day still filled with that hysterical rage that Freud should have therapied out of my kind years ago, and went to have a shower, listening to my Woman’s Hour podcast. It was while listening to this programme which pretty much never lets me down, that I thought, ‘why on earth is this the only thing aimed at women that doesn’t assume that I am a vacant consumer-driven hole, just begging to be filled with make-up, handbags and fashion?’ Reader, it was quite a moment.

I ran down the stairs and told my patriarch-in-waiting. He thought this this was a fabulous idea. So on his say-so (naturellment) I called in a make-shift council and relayed orders. As you can imagine, this was met with malaise and sulking. But as you can see from the fact that I’m writing this now, after a quick whipping, with insinuations of minor flaying to come, I rounded up a respectable number of contributors.

So here we are, all ready to unleash the proverbial pox over the patriarchy:

• La Coucs: Minor feminist celebrity with a penchant for cows.
• La Vache: Lesser-spotted bovine beauty; distinguished by her perennial Liberty ™ print frocks.
• La Slav: Does what it says on the tin.
• Le Piaf: Top Ornithological Scholar
• Le Boufant: God knows who let him in. (Who? – Ed.)
• L’Artiste – Design and Duran Duran
• Le Guru ‘Marketing’ – just ticking off those gender stereotypes
• And of course our guest contributors, who will be introduced as and when they appear

So the plan is to create an alternative to the weekly dross that is drip-drip-dripped into our vacant minds. We’ll look at current affairs and women’s issues, but we’ll also follow those wandering wombs where’ere they lead us. As suggested by the pronouns in our founder member list, we’re for men as much as women: as far as we’re concerned, the patriarchy sucks as much for most of them as it does for women. Sickeningly, we hope you enjoy reading this as much as we’ve enjoyed writing it. And we hope you like it enough to want to join in! All submissions / ideas to apoxonthepatriarchy@gmail.com