Vivat Libertas

So every time a new album or novel or TV show comes out by some upstart no-one's ever heard of (rare enough as it is), the creator is instantly hailed as the voice of a generation depending on their age. People are absolutely obsessed with this concept of creators speaking for the ordinary person, with the idea that you find some band or novelist when you're 14 or 15 who like, totally gets your teenage angst and how you're so totally not like the others. However, these media are sufficiently generalist in scope that they manage to attract a significant number of suspiciously similar misfits, who then create a subculture based around being able to keep up with the same stuff. You guys are lucky. You will never need to develop the skills to speak for yourself, because there'll always be someone there to put the words in your mouth. You will always have someone else to speak for you, someone to speak for your generation. I am a part of my generation. I'd be s...

Dear reader, whoever you are, I want you to know this: women aren't stupid. If you know me, you might be slightly confused because I'm constantly ranting about how stupid humanity is, so I might as well amend that statement: women are not some special kind of magical, sparkly, feminine stupid that somehow manages to make other genders look cleverer by comparison. We are just as intelligent (or as stupid) as you are. At this point, if you're going to trot out men having bigger brains than women or having higher IQs than women, I have this to say to you: firstly, men are physically bigger than women. This is why their brains are bigger. Relative body size has to be factored in when talking about relative brain size. As to men having higher IQs than women? Laying aside the debate about whether IQ is a decent measure of intelligence (because there is a debate, and because once you get past a couple of standard deviations it does break down quite spectacularly when it comes ...

I am a teenager; I am a teenager under sixteen, to be slightly more precise and to give you some insight into my life. According to my elders and my supposed betters, this means that I am hormonal, boy-crazy and reckless. I am supposedly incapable of not being dramatic; any unhappiness I may feel is me making a mountain out of a molehill, ruled by my hormones and in need of a big, strong adult to show the whiny bitch her place. Anything I'm passionate about is just a passing phase, unworthy of discussion. I have nothing resembling logic, and even if I did, how could it compare to the long years of experience that wore my parents down from fired-up people into passive consumers? In short, if I don't follow my parents' advice to the letter (and perhaps even if I do), I'm going to do something stupid, because a bint like me simply isn't capable of justified emotion, actually caring about something, or doing smart things. I used to get really offended by this line o...