parismarisamadonna

Killer Queen – Queen 1974

Last week while many of you, most especially the menfolk, were grunting and gurning and gyrating with excitement as 22 very small men wearing very large plastic exoskeletons threw a ball back and forth, I was watching the ads. Well, I watched them the next day on YouTube, but let’s not get pernickety on the details.

Had the time zone been marginally less stupid o’clock, I would still not have watched the Big Game live. I don’t appreciate American Football. Learning the rules of the three codes of football (Rugby League, Rugby Union and Australian Rules) played prevalently in Australia was quite enough until I got to Europe where I’ve since gathered the requisite working knowledge of soccer. Adding a fifth code is just plain ridiculous; especially when I’ve got so much data already vying for space in the corridors and alcoves of my mind palace.* However, pop culture fangirl that I am, as every year, I was curious to check out the latest crop of mega-buck Super Bowl publicity.

This year, a spritely little vignette featuring Anna Kendrick briefly interrupted the traditional worship at the altar of Budweiser and machismo. There was something very long and boring starring Arnie and even Ellen Degeneres, seemingly the antithesis of all that is the testosterone turbocharged NFL, danced about to flog her powder blue earphones.

My own little world stopped when they started banging on about cars, which is odd because I do not own a car, and even odder, because I cannot drive. When Jaguar decided to brand their 60 seconds of football-fuelled propaganda #BritishVillains, I obligingly sat up and paid attention.

The Jaguar advertisement was made exclusively for American consumption and will not be screened for Her Majesty's, or any of her subjects' pleasure; the country in which it was filmed, the country from whence Jaguar hails and the country native to the three men who feature in the humorous little celebration of all that is bad in Britain. The three actors make suppositions as to why it is that the baddies are so often British. They reference power, the stiff upper lip, the precision and their obsession for details. All of them are wearing suits and bowties as they approach the Palace. All of them are very, very handsome.

Ben Kingsley. Dishy Bald Brit.

 

Ben Kingsley won an Oscar playing the most generous man that ever lived in Ghandi, Tom Hiddleston is more often seen in Shakespeare than Asgard and Mark Strong is regularly cast as the Arab intelligence officer, despite being Italian. But in this advert, these three men were bundled together representing the new British Invasion. Americans aren’t bad enough to play their own baddies, so they’re importing them from the UK.

When interviewed by the ultimate British baddie Jeremy Clarkson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Star Trek’s resident baddie, was asked why all the bad guys in Hollywood films are British. Cumberbatch suggested that it was because Americans speak with warm round vowels while Brits speak in a staccato of clipped consonants. He implied that their accent makes them sound more intelligent, rendering them much nastier than their cousins across the Atlantic. Being well spoken, being intelligent naturally suggests that you are bad.

Mark Strong. Dishy Crooked Tooth Brit.

 

I don’t disagree. Our collective consciousness is drowning with idiots getting their 15 minutes because they were filmed doing something stupid on a smartphone. If you don’t believe me, check out the latest episode of Rich Kids of Beverly Hills^ or check out just about anything on Twitter or Instagram. Being vacuous and inane is its own reward in our new establishment. You might even make a million from your sextape. Being clever is not only frowned upon; it is potentially the root of evil.

Why are British actors taking over Hollywood? Why is America gaga for Maggie Smith’s vitriolic barbs in Downton? Why was a man with a moniker most people can’t spell let alone say voted sexiest man?

Ben Elton, the brilliant mind that wrote Blackadder and We Will Rock You, suggested during one of his stand up routines that Hollywood movies use British voices for baddies because it harks back to the War of Independence. The original American bad guys were British soldiers; think Jason Isaacs in The Patriot. Elton’s theory certainly makes sense, but I’ve got another one.

Ralph Fiennes. Dishy You-Know-Who Brit

 

Maybe it is just because many contemporary American actors, pumped up on inflated paychecks, scientology and macrobiotic goji berry smoothies are very, very conscious of their public image. Playing a character that is mean, or controversial, or unchristian, is anathema to securing lucrative cosmetic and jewellery sponsorship deals. 

I’m a big fan of the mega hit Homeland. I wondered early on why it was that the lead actor, Damian Lewis playing an American soldier, was not American. That character, Nicholas Brody, is a traitor to the American people, a converted Muslim that spends much of the first series on his knees calling out in Arabic. Is it too much to theorise that the casting agent couldn’t find a local star willing to do it?

Tom Hiddleston. Dishier than his Aussie Brother Brit.

 

As with any rule, or any of the gross generalisations previously featured on these pages, there are exceptions. The lately departed Phillip Seymour Hoffman had the biggest acclaim of his career playing a very, very nasty gay man and John Malkovich does a brilliant baddie, but generally speaking, if ever a character is going to be universally despised, the actor is foreign. Stephen Spielberg cast Englishman Ralph Fiennes as the German Nazi camp director in Schindler’s List, American Hannibal Lecter is portrayed by English Anthony Hopkins and in Titanic, the poor good Irish were trapped downstairs while the nasty English drank tea from porcelain cups before sailing off to safety in life rafts.

I’m sure that when Jaguar made their ad, they were just being funny, playing up on the recent anglophilia that has gripped the stars and stripes. Their little girls are fainting over One Direction while their mums are having hot flushes for Matthew Crawley. London has just this past year overtaken Paris to become the European city most visited by Americans. I suspect that the Olympics had something to do with it. I also suspect that the current craze for all things transatlantic is not likely to end anytime soon.

 

If it means more Benedict, I’m not going to complain.

Benedict Cumberbatch. Dishy 6 Syllable Brit.

 

 

*Yes, that is a reference to Sherlock. He and I share the same megalithic intellectual capabilities 

^Actually don’t. Even my admittedly low-level crap-o-meter forced me to look away after 15 minutes

Crazy – Gnarls Barkley 2006

Have you seen Silver Linings Playbook? If you haven’t, you should. Or rather, you shouldn’t, you must. I demand it. Watching it for the first time last week, I was one of the last people in the non-torrented world to see the film, so you have no excuse.

The film has just been released on DVD, exceptionally early, to capitalise on the recent Oscar hype. I missed its cinema release in Paris. I didn’t realise that a film called Happiness Therapy (in English, not French) was in fact Silver Linings Playbook.

French film distributors have a weird habit of translating original English film titles into revised English film titles for no apparent reason. The Boat that Rocked with Rhys Ifans became Good Morning England, Date Night with Steve Carrell became Crazy Night  and Bradley Cooper’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive’ happened in France thanks to Very Bad Trip, and not The Hangover. Apparently French people know what a trip is, but don’t know what a hangover is.  We must therefore infer that French people prefer their MDMA to their C2H5OH.

In this instance, I would suggest that during it’s general release in the English speaking world, “Silver Linings Playbook” would have benefited from being translated into an English that even Anglophones might have understood. Such a wordy America-centric title overly complicates what is, at its core, a very simple story of family and friendship. A story interpreted by four actors, each so talented, each giving such an unaffected performance, that all four were nominated for an Oscar in their respective categories. This was the first time since 1981 that one film garnered all four acting nominations, the last being Warren Beatty’s Reds. Jennifer Lawrence, the only actress on your screens who has eaten anything other than raw spinach since 2011, went on to win Best Actress, and trip up the stairs in her Dior fish tail, and I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Not Crazy..Normal

You see…Jennifer does good crazy. So does Bradley. So does de Niro. So do I.

Most films that recount the existence of crazy people tend to focus on the extreme. Think Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, indeed most films starring Jack Nicholson, or Girl Interrupted with Winona and Angelina. Films that document crazy like to show crazy people in asylums; they like to show them sectioned away from the rest of us normal folk in their crazy white rooms, strapped to their crazy white beds. Crazy people are like exhibits at the zoo; they exist only behind a glass wall, separated from us ‘normals’ by electric wire and flinging shit at each other like the chimps. Worse still, commercial films like to use crazy as an excuse for violence and horror. Crazy adults kill the normal people, crazy kids are the demons of Lucifer and crazy women torture their favourite author. In large part, we have Stephen King to thank for the demonization of crazy.

Imagine I am Dianne Wiest, a kindly, motherly type who asks you over for a cup of tea and a chat. Let’s talk…

Crazy doesn’t exist only in mental asylums, it doesn’t exist only when pretty young women are walking alone in dark alleys and it doesn’t always involve a violent tirade of amputation or multiple homicides. Crazy happens everyday, in everyday situations to everyday people. That is what made Silver Linings Playbook so unique; it took the crazy out of crazy…if you follow my meaning.

Crazy does not frighten me, it isn’t special or interesting, there are no white coats or straight jackets, crazy just is.

There is a lot of crazy in my family, so to protect everyone’s anonymity, I’ll not go too much into detail. A short resume of our familial mental maladies reads like the index of a psychiatry textbook. We’ve got depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and my father’s extra special genetic gift to his offspring; bipolar disorder.

I am not ashamed of my crazy. Au contraire, the fact that I manage as well as I do is because I’ve acknowledged it. I’ve been medicated, I’ve been psychoanalysed and I’m still a fully functioning human being*. My blood cells share their haemoglobin with the virus Herpes Simplex 1; that means I get cold sores when I’m run-down. I get brain-splitting migraines when I am tired. I suffer heightened symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder as a result of anxiety and stress. I sometimes experience panic attacks; heart-pumping episodes where you are genuinely convinced you are dying and I have to be careful of high cholesterol. Crazy is just the same as sick, you diagnose it, you treat it, and you hope you get better. 

Somewhere between Luther and Bush, the religious right decided that crazy was something to be ashamed of. They told us it wasn’t Godly; they shut it away in the basement and pretended it wasn’t there. Perhaps it was Queen Victoria’s fault. She didn’t approve of anything outré like sexuality, creativity or individuality. In fact her own great-grandson, Prince John, was shut away in a country cottage until his adolescent death simply because he was epileptic.

Hysteria, panic, delusions, anxiety, stress, high-strung, however you describe it; we all suffer from some form of mental disorder. The brain controls the whole shebang that keeps us breathing and standing upright. Under such immense pressure, it is by no means surprising that, from time to time, the grey matter needs a tune up. The reason no one treats his or her cerebral sicknesses is sadly because we’ve been taught to be ashamed to acknowledge they exist.

Ovarian cancer deaths are declining all over the western world because women have finally gotten over the shame of showing a Mister Doctor their Missus Vulvas; yes, the whole experience is uncomfortable, but we do it anyway. Stirrups and the metal duckbill are more tolerable than decaying slowly from the inside out. At the same time, the menfolk of our race are too ashamed to let a university qualified medical professional penetrate their anus. Prostate cancer deaths continue to rise because religious nutters (the real crazies) have frightened men into believing they will lie in eternity with Lucifer if anyone goes near their bottom. Men can do what they will to a woman, but their own anuses are one-way only.

Religion is not to blame for all the ill in the world; North Korea are supposedly atheist and they’ve got all kinds of genuine crazy goin’ up there at the moment, but there is an obvious conflict between what we are told to believe and what we naturally are. Biology and theology are not easy bedfellows; sense and sensibility only go together on the cover of Georgian romance novels.

If we could teach each other to be honest about having the flu in our brain or a common cold in our psyche, a lot less people would be dead. The statement is simplistic, but it is equally true. If sick people were taught to get help instead of guns; they might be less inclined to take an AK47 to their local cinema or an Uzi to their local primary school. If people with sicknesses in their mind were given half as much attention as an ailing dog, our world would be a healthier one… and maybe the remaining dogs would be OK with that too.

Thank god then for Jennifer and Bradley’s modern tale of normal life, with normal people suffering completely normal illnesses.

Crazy is getting a starring role everywhere these days. If 2011 was the year of the singing sitcom, 2012 was the year of the depressed debutante. Lena Dunham’s Hannah has started counting everything, a symptom of her OCD and has subsequently been alienated by all her GIRLS-friends. Similarly, Toni Colette shook her mental mammaries at the residents of Coolangatta in PJ Hogan’s latest effort, Mental. Modern cinema is finally forging a little space next to violence, action and romance, a little space giving crazy its long-awaited starring role.

Crazy is having its day in the sun; I will too.

 

 

*Apart from the alien right foot, the social alcoholism and the borderline obsessive compulsion for Madonna.

Sweet Nothing – Florence and Calvin Harris 2012

I work too much. I live alone. I have a few friends. I live 16950.69 kilometres away from the person I love most in the world. I am a little bit insane, really, not just melodramatically and I have a co-dependant relationship with wine.

When your life is the sum of so many things that are so very effective at making you feel effing shite, one creates an ecosystem of stuff that makes you feel deliriously happy. My father was bipolar, his Wicked-y wife told me I was too. Spending so much time bouncing around the ceilings to forget the days that drag on in the sludge of misery sounds like a pretty good case for saying I am.

But rather than bore you with tales of woe and misery and everythingbutthecatsinglewomansadness (my cousin has told me to stop) here is the list, a list of stuff that sends me soaring into joy, delirium, utopia and glee.

So let’s start with Glee.

I wake up early on a normal day, usually around 6am, or I could say with the poetic lyricism of Australian, sparrow’s fart. Even if I’ve been out on the Jamba Juice until 4am, I still can’t sleep past 9…I’ve been waking up early since I was a teenager commuting to a far, far away private high school. In 2012, thanks to the wonders of broadband Internet, I can use those extra dark early morning hours, no longer spent on a train, to some useful means; watching television. On a Friday, from my bedroom, as the rest of Paris snores to the rhythm of it’s own self-importance, I am sitting cross legged, wrapped in a quilt, nursing a mug of coffee. My eyes are wide, my grinning lips even wider, I giggle, I laugh, and at regular intervals, I throw off my quilt like a Championship Boxer throws down his robe and belt out a show tune. Or as was the case this week, a fully choreographed rendition of the Hand Jive, a song I learnt many moons ago, a song that features in Grease, a song they sang this week on Glee.

Glee is the kind of jazz hands-y, spirit finger-y fun that has come to flourish in the modern age of Simon Cowell. He of the dodgy hairdo, man-nipple-exposing white T-shirt, sly grin and exceptional arrogance is one of the smartest bastards on earth. Apart from being ridiculously rich, Simon invented the second thing on my list, The X Factor.

They can’t always sing, they are usually barely literate, the gays-on-a-float choreography is the spangliest kind of cheese and the judges have no discernable talent earning them the credibility to critique anything more complicated than a three legged race. Except of course for Gary. Gary Barlow OBE, my all-singing, all-dancing Christian Grey is the highlight of my week. His syrupy Cheshire brogue, his only out of one side of his mouth smile, the piercing blue eyes and the granddaddy suits with matching wartime haircut are all compliments to a smart-arsey witty repartee that makes Simon’s open harassment just plain mean. Gary might be mean, but at least he’s mean in a Tom Ford Tux. And that makes it Fifty Shades of fine by me.

If Gary is the Spice, then Rylan is the Sugar. If you haven’t seen it for yourself, I am not going to tell you. Google it. Only in the United Kingdom could someone so camp, so orange and so helmet-coiffed be voted for by the public, every week, for over a month, and continue to be so bloody entertaining. The costume designer deserves an Oscar.

When I am not stuffing myself with really bad television, I enjoy stuffing myself with really good food and even better wine. I have a tendency to overindulge, so I eat/drink/smoke only three days a week and then drink soup and coffee for the other four. A recently acquired uncomfortable pain in the abdomen might put paid this bipolar regimen, but for now, I can still fit into the third thing on the list, my Burberry Trench.

Louis XIV, my trusty sidekick in my superhero movie life, a movie that would be called The Fast and The Luxurious, has left the safety of employment in France for only 35 hours per week minus the 7 weeks holiday and lunch vouchers and free boat lessons, to join the bastion of everything British, Burberry. Since I was about 15 I have dreamed of being Posh enough to buy, and then actually wear, a Burberry Trench. I am not yet Posh enough to buy, so Louis helped out with 75% off. I am definitely not Posh enough to wear, I have a bad habit of flipping up the collar to reveal the signature plaid underneath. But I love that the rain runs off it, the little metal clips all over it and that when it is all done up, I look like a detective; a detective with lots of fuzzy hair and worn out Doc Martens, but secretive and James Bondette all the same.

That would be the next thing on the list, I love going to the movies.

I queued for 2 hours to see Skyfall. I saw it at Leicester Square and I cried before the movie even started. I laughed out loud at the touchy-feely Javier scene, I gasped when Bond jumped off the bridge, I thought Q was rather sexy; I bloody loved every one of the 143 minutes of it. And I cried because I saw the extended trailer for Les Miserables; Russell sings, Hugh sings, all that busty baritone, my lungs expanded as I swallowed back the tears, but they fell across my cheeks anyway. Just like they do at least 3-4 times a week.

I cry at Glee, I cry sometimes when I sing a song I really love, I cry when the Two Minis over in Sydney sing me nursery rhymes on Skype, I cry when I wake up in the night because that bastard still occupies my subconscious, I cry as often in happiness as I do when I am sad. That is the last thing on my list, being someone who truly loves feeling.

I have been travelling a lot these past few days; I’ve been fortunate enough to see some really breathtaking bucket list stuff. You’ll be able to read about that soon, but suffice to say I stood in the middle of a square, surrounded by tourists and was overwhelmed by absolute beauty. I cried, I put on my sunglasses, and I kept crying.

Two weeks ago, wizzed under the channel by the high-speed train that I sleep in more often than I do my own bed, I went to the V&A. More specifically, I went to the Hollywood Costume Exhibition. You’ve just read the list above, she loves singing, dancing, sparkles, fancy jackets, jazz hands and movies*. For me, this was like a once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca.

Wandering through the hundreds of costumes, the first time I cried was the Green Curtain dress from Gone with the Wind. A lifetime obsessive of the story of Rhett, the first celluloid arsehole I fell in love with, the tears rolled down my cheek. I couldn’t believe how little she was. I was stunned into shock and then I saw the splendid royal dresses.

There were mantuas from Marie Antoinette, there were three different Elizabeth 1st’s and there was a dress worn by Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon. I cried then because I was reminded that I am named after her in that movie. Motherbear heard the radio advertising the film as she lay in bed just after I was born. That time I cried because I wished Motherbear was at the exhibition with me…I cried when I just typed that bit too. 

I walked into the next room, another Scarlett O’Hara dress, more tears. Darth Vader, 7 feet tall, those large eyes with no eyes staring down at me, the fear of a little girl watching that first time when he strangles the other guy without actually touching his throat flooded my memory… I cried. 

Robert de Niro’s coat from Frankenstein, tears. Meryl Streep’s sparkly finale outfit from Mamma Mia, I wept. I wept that time because I remembered that I wasn’t married to Colin Firth. Then I came into the last room.

There is just so much, so many icons, so many moments in film I remembered so vividly, I could no longer hold myself together. Han Solo, Moulin Rouge, Atonement, James Bond, Batman, Spiderman, Superman (special tears for poor Christophe Reeve at that one) Black Swan, Marilyn’s White Dress and then I came to my very own macguffin.

These eyes, wide with joy and haloed by tears for an entire life, eyes that have seen babies born, fathers die and even Madonna’s left boob; these eyes have now seen the Ruby Slippers.

The shoes that started it all, still sequinned, still topped with little bows, still bottomed with very sensible heels (are you listening Posh?), are everything I expected but for one minor disappointment, at almost 100 years old, having outlived their owner, they were no longer red.

Well I still am.

The little girl who loved watching that movie, who danced and sang and imitated the Munchkins, has become the woman who dances and sings in her own Ruby Slippers..to her own tune…whenever she likes…

…like this morning as I walked the platform at St Pancras.

 

 

*I know what you are thinking; the only thing missing is being a gay man. The greatest travesty of my life is that so much Gay was stuffed into a very hot-blooded heterosexual woman.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pleasure and Pain – The Divinyls 1985

As pouty Chrissy* screeched, ‘it’s a fine line between pleasure and pain’.

I’m a single 36 yr-old woman who lives alone, does her own housework, cooks her own dinner and works non-stop for a multinational mega-company. The pleasures of my life are few and far between. They usually involve eating some kind of cheese or downing a bottle of perfectly chilled Rosé. Meanwhile the pains, in my legs from running, in my brain from working, in my heart from just being me and in my soul from being perpetually misunderstood, are like my freckles; increasingly visible as I age but covered relatively easily with a layer of heavy-duty make up.

This week, profiting from the national holiday in France, the Sainte Marie or the day the Angel Gabriel told Mary she was going to give birth to Jesus but have no sex, I took a mid-week mini-break to London. Louis XIV has quit the Kingdom of France in an effort to colonise Great Britain. He will no doubt teach them the ways of his land; gilded luxury, bacchanalian excess and sensual pleasure are his order du jour. I decided to take Louis’ lead and spend two days doing exactly as I pleased. I wandered the streets of Belgravia, I shopped for myself, I sat in cafes for hours reading trash magazines and I watched a movie about male strippers.

 

Rather unmagical as it happens....

 

Yes, I’ve now seen Magic Mike. Much like my last experience with a naked human male, I was really disappointed. Steven Soderburgh directs the film so I had very high expectations. I imagined it would be some kind of witty take on what a man who dances naked for a living thinks about women in 2012, or maybe how he does it because he was damaged by his mother as a child, or maybe like a reverse Pretty Woman he would be paid by someone dominatrix-y like Angelina to dance on command and be at her beck and call.

It wasn’t, it was a story based loosely around some very handsome men dancing around in G-Strings. Call me crazy, I think men are very handsome in all manner of get-up. I like them sweaty in their gym gear, dashingly Bond-y in a Tom Ford tux, Ralph Lauren-y weekend casual in Bermudas with boat shoes or just out of the shower with a towel slung low over their hips. I think men are sexy in their Y-Front undies, I think they are sexy in boxers but I have never, not once, ever, even when I was very drunk, looked at a man in a Stars and Stripes G-string and thought, wow, give me some of that! Men in G-strings look like one of two things, obsessive steroid munching Body Builders or just-off-the-parade-float Gays. Whilst I have I have the utmost respect for the lifestyle choices of both, I have no plans to shag either, so I prefer my men to be wearing pants that cover their bum cheeks thank you very much.

The glossy magazines will tell you that Magic Mike is part of the 2012 phenomenon that is the rise of women’s erotica, mummy porn or the age of the Christian Grey. However you choose to brand it, I am not so sure…

 

Slap me silly and call me hooked

 

Just in case you are one of the 3 people on earth who has not yet read the Fifty Shades trilogy, here is a basic plot summary. Girl meets very wealthy Man, Man ties virgin girl to a couch and shags her senseless, de-flowered Girl comes loudly every single time Man touches/whips/shackles her, Man falls in love with miraculous-orgasm Girl and they live happily ever after in a very big house filled with whips, chains, servants and bags of cash. 

After I overcame the shock of reading three novels that recounted the exact events of my life (said no one ever), I got back to thinking about why these books have become the fastest selling paperback novels ever. Yes they’ve now outsold that other magic man with a big wand, Harry Potter, and they haven’t even been translated into languages other than English. 

There are blogs and articles all over the Internet and traditional media crediting the success of Grey to us gals are taking back our sexuality at the same time as we hold down full time jobs and in most cases care for children, husbands and homes. Aren’t we women just amazing, having it all, showing our poor old 20th century suffragette ancestresses  just how it can be done. 

Well no, we aren’t. The women of the 21^st century don’t have it all. We are all more than a little bit insane, we are increasingly dying of breast/ovarian/lung cancer, we’re quaffing Sav Blanc with every meal to stave off the workplace stress and popping pills to control the manic and/or chronic depression.

Perhaps you are lucky enough not to be suffering simultaneously from all three of the above, but we are most definitely not having it all. If we are, please feel free to share your tale. My guess is there is a fair amount of money involved, or alternatively absolutely no sex.

Since the 1960’s men have been freely permitted to escape their daily grind into a Hefner-ised world where women have mounds of blonde hair dripping from their scalps, a permanently open come-hither mouth, perfectly sculpted silicone breasts and a rather unfortunate habit of lounging back on a chair with their legs splayed exposing their naked labia. This must really be discouraged should a rogue wasp be flying by…Men have always been able to wander into the bathrooms of their world and shake out the syrup of their stress into the shower, the toilet or an errant tube sock.

So maybe we are taking our cue from them?

I don’t think women have become more comfortable with porn, I don’t think we’ve taken back our sexuality – if we had done Anastasia Steele, the leading female in the Grey trilogy, would not be a sulky wimp who only opens her mouth to squeal in ecstasy. She would instead be someone who has a job she got all by herself, who washes up dirty dishes, who meets her friends on the weekend and who has opinions she sticks with, even in the face of the horsewhipping hunk of Grey.

No, I just think us gals have become increasingly anxious and stressed. Instead of staring at the bathroom mirror sobbing through mascara stained cheeks at the harsh cards we’ve been dealt, we are taking a lesson from our fapping men friends and indulging in a wee bit of soft-core porn before bedtime; a moment’s pleasure easing the burden of a lifetime of pain.

 

The Irony..openly Gay Matt, entertaining the women of the world in both Magic Mike and Grey...

 

 

 

*Chrissy Amplett is the lead singer of the Australian group The Divinyls. She is first most famous for singing the Number One hit; I Touch Myself, which was banned in America. She is second most famous for playing Judy Garland in the musical The Boy from Oz which made Hugh Jackman famous on Broadway…