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      Life is pain … but it doesn’t have to be painful, aka the introduction

      ‘Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.’

      Thus spake the Dread Pirate Roberts/Wesley to Buttercup in the glorious 1987 movie, The Princess Bride. Aside from learning that one should ‘never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line’, this is probably the most valuable lesson that wise film taught me. But, contrary to what the Dread Pirate Roberts/Wesley¹ appears to advise in this scene, I have never believed that one should just accept it.

      The Nietzschean pirate was not wrong. Life is definitely pain: the Daily Mail exists; there are still people in the world who believe that banning abortion will lead to happy families as opposed to mutilated women; every straight man I’ve ever met prefers boring Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to glorious Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story² and, call me a crazy idealist, but I’d have thought that by the twenty-first century any movie that suggests the only happy ending for a woman is marriage would be deemed as unacceptable as any movie that suggests the only jobs available to black people are maids, drug dealers, sassy best friends or Nelson Mandela. Oh. Wait a minute.

      Then there are the pains that come from within and, going purely from my own experiences and observations, women are particularly enthusiastic about inflicting these on themselves, almost as much as some of the aforementioned exterior agencies are about inflicting them on them, and it is entirely possible that the two sides to this equation are not unrelated, even an ever-interlooping system. After all, bullies look for susceptible targets.

      This is not to suggest that women are delicate victims who need protection, or that feminism treats them as if they are, or whatever nonsense some folk come out with to justify not confronting such things: ‘Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by … an inappropriate comment about her appearance and I will show you a rare spotted owl,’ one journalist wrote in an editorial in the New York Times³ in 2011, suggesting that secretly women love to be reduced to their physical appearance and only pretend they don’t because they think to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the Sistahz and their ‘Orwellian’ attitudes to sexual harassment. But then this journalist also seems to think that a woman’s age (‘young’) and employment status (‘professional’) are in any way relevant to her credibility as a sensible person and, rather more jarringly, suggests that only weak women can’t handle harassment (or worse), thus putting the focus and blame on the women’s reactions rather than the men’s actions (an all too common tack in a variety of contexts), so perhaps we need not waste any more of our time on this theory. Although I can’t help but regret not getting to see that owl. I do like an owl.

      It’s hard to be awesome in an occasionally lame world. That so many bizarrely retrograde clichés and expectations still dominate so much of society and pop

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