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Thursday, June 5, 2008 |
Independent: "If you are English, male, single and thinking of nipping across to Canada to improve your sex life - forget it. English men are not world renowned as great lovers anyway, and our reputation in North America is about to take a nosedive, courtesy of a Canadian journalist named Leah McLaren who turned up in London six years ago, as correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail, aged 26 and single, and thinking that she was in for some exciting sex in the city.
Her English dates turned out to be a crashing disappointment - too polite, too repressed and too misogynist to go through what a young North American would recognise as a decent courtship ritual, she claimed.
Her initial quest for excitement in London drew her to the conclusion that the English male is either a repressed homosexual, a drunkard whose alcohol intake renders him incapable, a boarding school product deprived of his mother's love too early in life, or simply a woman-hater."
Oh dear, oh dear! But the English man - well some of them - is working on it.
NewStatesman: "Men: it's time to throw away your razor, start fashioning a handlebar moustache, get a crate of beer in and begin referring to women as 'the little ladies'. In the past few weeks there has been an outbreak of nostalgia for an old-fashioned understanding of masculinity. First, there was the ludicrously overblown launch of the new James Bond novel, Devil May Care, involving a Navy destroyer, helicopters and a willowy blonde model in a catsuit, all celebrating the return of a character who may be a new man in this latest tome - I haven't rushed to read it - but whom Pierce Brosnan described as 'sexist, completely'. Then there was Jeremy Clarkson, boasting that the fastest he has ever driven 'on the public roads' is 186mph. And then came publication of The Retrosexual Manual: How to Be a Real Man, heralded with a spread in the Daily Mail. 'Still mincing along to book clubs thinking you're going to pull a quiet one who's a screamer in the sack?' asks the cover. 'Well, it's time to go back to basics - back to when men were men and women made the bacon sarnies after a night of your unbridled passion."
In Holland a new men's magazine was published some time ago, called 'Man, Male, Macho'. The cover of the first issue had a picture of Regilio Tuur, a boxer who beat his wife and later his new girl-friend and was then jailed for 15 months. The good old Neanderthal macho work!
And if you are a conservative or right-wing neocon (including Tony Blair) you do the obligatory sublimating and repressing, and start a war to show how manly you are, screw the law and take whatever you want.
Independent: "A secret deal being negotiated in Baghdad would perpetuate the American military occupation of Iraq indefinitely, regardless of the outcome of the US presidential election in November.
The terms of the impending deal, details of which have been leaked to The Independent, are likely to have an explosive political effect in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that the accord, under which US troops would occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, will destabilise Iraq's position in the Middle East and lay the basis for unending conflict in their country."
No, give me this Englishman any time:
GetReading: "A peace campaigner from Newtown will tomorrow ask Reading magistrates for a warrant to arrest George W Bush.
Peter Burt, of Biko Court, is taking his case to court to try to get the American president arrested for war crimes.
Mr Burt, of Reading Peace Group, plans to outline the offences that 'Dubya' has committed and the international laws that he has broken, including the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Afghanistan and the abduction, illegal detention and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay."
He said: 'The historians of the future will mention the name Bush in the same breath as the names of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and other great criminals who have committed the most appalling crimes that humanity has known.'"
2:50:46 PM 
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