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Cindy Gallop – if she ran the world…
Aspire Magazine ran my article on Cindy Gallop on the cover of September magazine. It was probably the hand action that secured the success of the micro talk at TED2009, that or the fact that Cindy Gallop had broken TED’s porn cherry with the description of her own sex life, the merits of hardcore porn and a personal preference not to watch sex films that resembled open heart surgery. In just ten minutes, a global sensation was born and a Cindy Gallop’s fame washed out of advertising circles and into mainstream social consciousness. Her diminutive frame and well-articulated vocabulary were at direct odds with her subject matter: the creeping ubiquity of porn and its damaging effect on society. However, Gallop is not anti porn, on the contrary she is a discerning consumer of it, but she worries about the effect that male dominated porn has on an impressionable younger generation, both male and female. Gallop explained her problem and how she encountered at first hand the direct impact of porn on Generation Y, or GenY. In short, she dates GenY men and has sex with them. This point is only of interest as Gallop would be considered a cougar, and […]
Continue reading →Credit Cards have a way with Words
Credit cards have a way with words. Some of the best lines have centred round their use. From the ‘No charge’ slogan in the 80s, to the Not the Nine O’clock News sketch with Pamela Stephenson where she invited her credit card customer to stroke her boob (ok, it was a location joke, a vintage location joke playing on the fact that America Express took an exalted view of its own brand of commerce) to the most recent Mastercard line, There are some things money can’t buy, for everything else there’s Mastercard. Of course, the ultimate irony with credit cards is that while they are selling you a way of life, in reality they are just helping you spend money more easily and costing everyone a percentage into the bargain. Credit cards take their cut, like Shylock’s pound of flesh, and usury is a dirty business after all. Being a credit card is a bit like being a parent. Or is that being a parent is just like being a credit card. It’s all spend, spend, spend on one’s progeny. Unlike credit cards, however, there is not a fixed expiry date. It just keeps bobbing along until the parent expires. […]
Continue reading →Censorship – Write Like your Parents are Dead!
Censorship is alive and well and living inside every writer’s head. It comes to fore when the topics get tough and every word matters. A clever observer once said the key to finding your true voice was to write as if your parents were dead. As writers, we have to grow up, to mature, to throw off our exhibitions, ignore the urge to self censor and just write (as if our parents were dead). My first act of rebellion was to include bad language. Somehow writing the f word seems much stronger than saying it. For one thing, it remains on the page in full view long after it is written. There is no denying its presence. A spoken curse on the other hand can be an accident or an ephemeral explosion of sound. It may not even be heard. My next was to discover that a central character, the mother, was as horrible as you might even have the misfortune to meet. My third was to include sex, lots of it. In desperation my sister suggested I publish this terrible book under my ex husband’s name; and bring shame on my in-laws instead! My mother politely suggested I write […]
Continue reading →Argument in Favour of Fifty Shades
(this article first appeared in www.TheDailyShift.com on Saturday 4, August 2012) Guest contributor Jillian Godsil reveals why she believes E.L. James’s infamous novel Fifty Shades of Grey has had a positive impact on modern society and is liberating women around the world… Yes, that ubiquitous book again. It’s the name on everyone’s lips and it’s still flying off the shelves at an amazing rate. Everyone is calling it ‘mummy porn’ and the idea is that eBooks have liberated women and they can read erotica without anyone knowing. There are some very funny jokes about the Fifty Shades face on the Luas. The trick is to look at women reading Kindles on public transport and guess if they are reading erotica. It’s called the Fifty Shades face and it’s a public version of a woman’s orgasm face. Actually, we’ve leapfrogged past the part where women are reading erotica discretely; we’ve already gone well past that little hurdle. Women are openly talking about it, women of all ages, and the sales of the physical paper back are through the roof. So it’s not as though women are reading it on the sly. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Instead, what has happened is […]
Continue reading →I was built for comfort not for speed
I was built for comfort, not for speed. I knew this as a child. Although taller by a full foot than most of my contemporaries, I never won races. Looking at me it was a surprise: long and leggy, I should have been fast, but my abiding memory was of running my hardest and yet still seeing titchy things overtake me on the track and win. My school sports were hockey and tennis, neither of which I excelled at. A brief spell in goal seemed to suit me and I even made the senior team and went on tour to Wales aged 13. Too young really to enjoy this freedom as I did not drink and was very much the baby of the team. But my niece was born while away which was wonderful and John Lennon was shot and killed which was not. The Wales of my memory will never be the same again. After a few close misses with hockey balls flying past my face, I opted to return to the field again and finished my school sports career in my final year as captain of the Thirds: the captaincy of which came as result of my age […]
Continue reading →Recent Posts
- Wicklow Good News (1) Michelle Power Lynch
- Before the Surge
- Jonha Richman – where in the world is Jonha Richman?
- Kleros – The Justice Protocol Explained
- FundRequest, Aiming To Monetize Open Software
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- Creating A Safe Haven For Crypto Investors
- Blockchain And Traditional Industries – Where Is The Overlap?
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- Trying To Inspire Socially Responsible Trading, Bobby Bhatia, TrakInvest