A crash course in price points: why is a slice of cake $5?

Perhaps you could understand the price point (literally the amount you pay) as the cost of flour, sugar, strawberries and cream, plus a profit margin and cost of labor. Or maybe you could look at the cost of cakes in all the bakeries in town, and work out what the median cost of a slice of cake is, and what your customers are prepared to pay. Or maybe you look at the demographic of people who have access to a cash fee of $5, and come up with a strategy to make them all buy cake. All of this is…

Sexuality, like all things, comes with the good, the bad, and the ugly. It can mean incredible closeness, intimacy and affection between you and your partner. It can mean a slightly embarrassing crush at college. And it can mean having an attraction that is so monstrously warped that an individual ends up causing serious harm, or even death. As the big media platforms and mediums rightly take aim at sexual abuse and violence, it does however raise an interesting question: how should we, as as a society, navigate harmful and dangerous elements of sexuality?

A friend of mine, a hockey dad with three boisterous athletic daughters, discusses his latest worry at navigating a safe path for them in a world where girls as young as three or four are routinely sexualized and endangered through increasingly ugly pop culture. “I get that they want to be like their friends,” he says, anxiously, “But it really creeps me out when I see them copying sucking on their fingers, lollipops and a cutesy Lolita aesthetic. I’ve had to ban Arianna Grande in my house.”

It’s not really hard to see why. Queen of Lolita Pop, Arianna Grande…

I’m used to people treating me like a stupid bimbo when they hear I ‘work in PR’. The expectation of extraordinary stupidity and a vacuous grin. The unnecessary attempts to simplify everything down to what they assume a stupid, boring woman who can probably look pretty at a shareholder meeting could understand. The problem is that real PR, PR at a level that actually saves you millions, requires a whole lot more thought and research than what you’d probably thought. As AZ found out, the hard way.

I could go off in a rant here about the number of (predominantly male) clients who have suggested that I research their sector, or insist on explaining ‘profit’ to me, but that’s not why I’m writing this. PR isn’t, contrary to popular imagination, calling boring board members ‘babes’ at conferences as you hand around useless leaflets saying actualize and optimize. We don’t really do press releases anymore. Conferences are more egofests than any genuine attempt at learning or releasing anything. A lot of PR is gritty research, networking, getting information from hardcore academia and investor documents into an understandable format…

I’ve been on this planet for twenty-four long, drawn out years. Sometimes it seems like a lot longer, if I’ve spent too long going through my message requests. Throughout it all, from training bras to conference calls with Madrid, I’ve endured both the brilliant and beastly of male attention. I’ve seen success, and I’ve seen failure. I’ve been repulsed, and I’ve been overwhelmed.

And I don’t hate you, incels. In fact, I hope I can help.

Surprisingly for some, although definitely not for others, I haven’t always been the girl in the bright red lipstick rolling her eyes at frightened men in Players. In fact, if you knew me at all before I turned twenty, I think you’d find it surprising that I’d even be let into a club, let alone one where I’d have the dubious honour of having a Lord pin me against a vodka stained piano surrounded by hollow-hearted civil servants bellowing Mr Brightside. So, let that be a lesson to the bitter hearted among you: I was unattractive, too.

I was an…

Okay, I’m not a monarchist. I’m a teeny, tiny, bit extremely biased against the idea of inherited power because I vehemently oppose everything that means to a society. But- and I will die on this hill- there’s a lot Americans get very wrong about the monarchy in the UK, and that’s an easy way to annoy us. So I made a quick list. You’re welcome.

1. Don’t say the ‘The Queen of England’ unless you want to tread on some seriously sore toes.

We say the British royal family, or, if you’re being super accurate, the monarchy of the United Kingdom and various islands and small overseas territories you’ve never heard of. Why? Because Wales, Scotland and Northern…

The dry grasses swelled over the concrete slabs and whispered out into the nowhere space between the borderwall and the final block of Unit 5A9. The grown ups weren’t allowed play there, the barracks firing bullets at random if they approached. But they tolerated the smaller children, watching silently through binoculars and drones as they made chains of wild poppies and made pets from field mice.

Alice was six by that hot dry summer of 2059, running barefoot through the crumbling tenements with the other feral children. No one could afford the shoe ration, as the Protectors didn’t like to…

What’s an ‘attractive man’? Depending on whether you’re a bloke or not, your answer might well be very different. When asked to identify men they consider attractive, heterosexual men are far more likely to select very muscular men than heterosexual women are. What? I hear you say. Women find muscles attractive! Well…probably less so than you’d think.

First of all: please be aware that all of this is based on the median average. If I went into an in-depth discussion of the Kinsey scale and body positivity, we’d be here until Christmas. I digress. Having asked around, heterosexual women attach…

Part 1: Why witches existed, even from a modern secular perspective

Witchcraft has a lot more to do with fraud, theft, and harassment than toads, bats and frogs. It’s tempting- and understandable- to view all the women who died in the witch-hunts of the 13th to 17th centuries as delicate virgins wronged by superstitious morons. And that, as with much of history is…half true.