The 10 best jokes from the Edinburgh fringe

Paul Fleckney in The Guardian


Robert Garnham: Insomnia is awful. But on the plus side – only three more sleeps till Christmas.

Dan Antopolski: Centaurs shop at Topman. And Bottomhorse.

Paul Savage: Oregon leads America in both marital infidelity and clinical depression. What a sad state of affairs.

Caroline Mabey: I’m very conflicted by eye tests. I want to get the answers right but I really want to win the glasses.

Athena Kugblenu: Relationships are like mobile phones. You’ll look at your iPhone 5 and think, it used to be a lot quicker to turn this thing on.

Evelyn Mok: My vagina is kind of like Wales. People only visit ironically.

Phil Wang: In the bedroom, my girlfriend really likes it when I wear a suit, because she’s got this kinky fantasy where I have a proper job.

Gráinne Maguire: The Edinburgh fringe is such a bubble. I asked a comedian what they thought about the North Korea nuclear missile crisis and they asked what venue it was on in.

John-Luke Roberts: How did the Village People meet? They obviously led such different lives.

Olaf Falafel: If you’re being chased by a pack of taxidermists, do not play dead.

What makes a slut? The only rule, it seems, is being female

It's a warning more than a word: a reminder to women to adhere to sexual norms or be punished

• 
• • Jessica Valenti
  •  
  • theguardian.com, Monday 23 June 2014 12.30 BST

Being called promiscuous is sometimes just a way to excuse the behavior of others. Photograph: Josh Reynolds / AP

Sandra Fluke heard it when she talked about insurance coverage for birth control. Sara Brown from Boston told me she was first called it at a pool party in the fifth grade because she was wearing a bikini. Courtney Caldwell in Dallas said she was tagged with it after being sexually assaulted as a freshman in high school.

Many women I asked even said that it was not having sex that inspired a young man to start rumors that they were one.

And this is what is so confounding about the word "slut": it's arguably the most ubiquitous slur used against women, and yet it's nearly impossible to define.

The one thing we do know about "slut" is that it's the last thing a woman should want to be. Society is so concerned over women and girls' potential for promiscuity that we create dress codes, school curricula, even legislation around protecting women'ssupposed purity. Conservative columnists opine that women having sex is tantamount to a "mental health crisis", and magazine stories wonder if we're raising a generation of "prosti-tots".

Leora Tanenbaum, the author of SLUT! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, told me that "a 'slut' is a girl or woman who deviates from norms of femininity. The 'slut' is not necessarily sexually active – she just doesn't follow the gender script."

This nebulous, unquantifiable quality of the slur is what makes it so distressing – there's no way to disprove something that has no conclusive boundaries to begin with. And because it's meant to be more of an identity than a label, it's a term not easily shaken off. "Slut" sticks to a person in a way that "asshole" never will.

So what makes you a slut? It seems the the only hard and fast rule is that you have to be a woman.

Men, of course, are immune – absent, really – from the frenzy of concern. For instance, a new study out of the University of Michigan showed that teen girls who "sext" are called sluts while boys who do the same remain free-from judgement. In another example, the American Medical Association breathlessly released a study in 2006 with the headline "Sex and Intoxication More Common Among Women on Spring Break", intended to warn women about their "risky" behavior while on break – but there was nothing about the men the majority of these young women would supposedly be having all this drunken sex with.

As always, women are sluts and men are, well, men.

For those who haven't had the pleasure of being called promiscuous, it may be hard to understand just how profound an impact it can have. Women's value and morality are closely – though wrongly – tied to their sexuality. So "slut" (or any of its variations) is an accusation with power behind it.

When multiple attackers videotaped themselves brutally raping an unconscious teen girl in California, for example – stopping to take dance breaks and find new objects to penetrate the young woman with – the first trial resulted in a hung jury because the defense argued she was promiscuous. "The things she wanted done were done", argued one lawyer. Another asked the jury: "Why was her vagina and anus completely shaved? Sex! She's a sexual person!"

The accusation doesn't have to be that explicit to have real power. Cherice Moralez –raped by her 49 year-old teacher when she was just 14 – was called "older than her chronological age" by the judge in the trial – a more diplomatic way of saying she had it coming. Her attacker was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Moralez later took her own life.

Multiple girls have taken their own lives of late after being "slut-shamed" – an indication that the slur shows little sign of waning in the damage it does personally.

Tanenbaum, whose forthcoming book is I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet, said that many of the girls she interviewed "had intentionally embraced the 'slut' label as a badge of honor to advertise their sexual empowerment."

But, she added, "they ended up losing control of the label when their peers turned it against them".

Broader efforts to "reclaim" the word – via marches like SlutWalks, for instance – have largely failed. While the anti-rape protests that spread across the country a few years ago were popular in terms of attendance and media coverage, and I was an early supporter, many women felt the word "slut" was irredeemable - especially women of color, for whom racist stereotypes about their supposed innate promiscuity always presented a unique danger.

The "slut" idea hurts women politically as well. A safe contraceptive and a cancer vaccinewere both held up for years because of fears they would make women "slutty", and anti-choice legislators and activists insist that that abortion providers are in the "business" of promiscuity – and use that accusation as a way to defund critical health care providers like Planned Parenthood.

So, what's a "slut", then? It's any of us, and all of us – especially those of us who step out of line in some way real or imaginary. It has little to do with the number of our sexual partners, or the way we dress or flirt, or if we take birth control or not.

It's a warning more than a word – a reminder to women that we must adhere to the narrow standards of femininity and sexuality set out for us, or be punished accordingly. And in that way, the real meaning of "slut" is terrifyingly clear.

Vaginas may be weird and hairy, but they certainly don’t need steaming

We’ve moved on from stripping our most sensitive regions of their natural hair, and have
apparently started paying for vagina beauty treatments. Olivia Goldhill rounds up some of
the most absurd products imaginable, including the vajacial. Some women do this, but on their vaginas.  

By Olivia Goldhill
3:45PM GMT 05 Dec 2013

In the good old days, all you needed to be ready for sex is two willing participants and a healthy dose of sexual chemistry. Then pubic hair went out of fashion, and women suddenly had to start plucking, shaving, waxing,trimming away their natural state before copulation.
Now, it seems that vajacials are a thing. As in, facials, but for your vagina.

Apparently, these started off as a relatively simple affair in 2010, with a papaya enzyme mask, deep cleanse and tweezer hair extractions. They’ve moved on though. Impossibly, beauticians have moved on from convincing women that a papaya-scented nether region is a necessary aspect of good sex, and have introduced a whole new
range of vagina-themed beauty products.

Some women, before a big date or perhaps a romantic mini-break, actually book themselves in for a treatment of vaginal steaming. Presumably, they sit back, spread their legs and allow steam to gently (I hope) cleanse their vagina. But what temperature is the steam, where (exactly) does it go, and how on earth is steam any better at cleaning than plain water?
The treatments are usually done a day or two after the woman's period ends, and "heals any
imbalances" in the vagina. Which suggests I've been walking around with an unbalanced vagina for years.

Vaginoplasty is another trend, where you can shape your vagina into the desired shape. But what is this desired shape and who has a vagina that needs to be cosmetically re-modelled before sex? Poetry aside, vaginas are weird-looking things - they’re so un-pretty, I’m unsure what a “beautiful” vagina is supposed to look like. Perhaps we’ve been going overboard with the flower metaphors and some women actually want their vaginas to look like a rose.
Symmetry and neatness are listed as the longed-for traits, but this raises a whole new set of questions - is everyone else measuring their vaginas for perfect symmetry?

Now London’s getting in on America’s vaginal fashion trends, with salons offering "vaginal
rejuvenation" for hundreds of pounds. Bad news for students then (and most other people), who will undoubtedly struggle to afford an appropriately-preened vagina. Maybe it can be a special treat that a couple saves up for once a year, when they can enjoy annual sex day with properly presented sexual organs.

The vagina is apparently rejuvenated by a costly serum, which was originally created to treat wounds, but has moved on to a new life sprucing up female genitals. Magically, this serum can improve "vaginal function" and "tighten and firm the vaginal walls".

I’m not surprised that these treatments exist, but I’m a little scared that women—even one, solitary woman—is paying for them. There are women out there who are so anxious about what their partner will think about their vaginas, that they spend hundreds of pounds making them look “nice”.

But they need to stop this. They really do. No one envies the sex life of a woman complimented on her jojoba and rosemary scents. No one envies the sex life of a woman whose partner notices her jojoba and rosemary scents.

Vaginas are weird and they are hairy and that’s how they’re supposed to be. We need to stop worrying out what our poor vaginas look like during sex. It’s how they feel that really counts. OK?

Three reasons why a vagina is not like a laptop

Former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross seems to think there are parallels between rape and property theft

• 
• • Sarah Ditum
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 May 2013 14.04 BST

‘This is an idea that belongs to the dark ages when women were permitted to own nothing apart from their "honour".' Photograph: LJSphotography / Alamy/Alamy

"Don't have nightmares!" Nick Ross used to say, when he hosted Crimewatch, but little did we guess at the Hellraiser-esque horrors haunting our plucky watcher of crime until this weekend. In an extract from his book, Crime, published in the Mail today, Ross reveals that he has been afflicted with a terrible case of visual agnosia which has left him unable to tell the difference between vaginas and laptops.

He writes: "We have come to acknowledge it is foolish to leave laptops on the back seat of a car […] Our forebears might be astonished at how safe women are today given what throughout history would have been regarded as incitement […] Equally they would be baffled that girls are mostly unescorted, stay out late, often get profoundly drunk and sometimes openly kiss, grope or go to bed with one-night stands."

Obviously, writing a manuscript in a state of perpetual confusion between portable computers and female genitals is a distressing condition – is that a return key or a clitoris? – and Ross is to be applauded for battling through to the end of his wordcount. And so, in a spirit of compassion for the baffled, I would like to offer Ross a brief guide to the ways in which women and their vaginas are not like cars and laptops.

1. Not every car contains a vagina

When you carefully tuck your high-value portable property under the passenger seat (just kidding, smash-and-grabbers! That's definitely not where my iPad is!), it's because you don't want potential thieves to know it's there. But draping your vagina in a floor-length modesty frock is unlikely to persuade anyone that don't have one, and therefore might not be worth violating. This is not a quantum mechanics problem. Schrödinger's fanny is not a thing.

2. A laptop is a portable electronic device, a vagina is a body part

Does it whir? Does it make small clicking sounds? Can it be placed in a briefcase and carried around separately to its owner? That is a laptop. Is it a fibromuscular tubular tract located between a woman's thighs? Vagina. Taking the former from a car would be an act of theft. Penetrating the latter without the woman's consent would be a physical assault – and that's true even if the woman has behaved in a way that makes it obvious that she has a vagina and sometimes uses it for fun! No one says to the victim of a beating: "Well, anyone could see you had teeth. You were just asking to have them broken with all the eating you do."

3. You can't insure a vagina

Having your car broken into and your valuables taken sucks. But, understanding that this is a world where some people might be driven to desperate acts for small rewards, you might make a heavy sigh and sweep up the glass (secretly hoping that the drugs your laptop has paid for turn out to be mostly cornflour), and then go and put in your insurance claim. Being raped is – and I know this is going to surprise you, Nick Ross, so prepare yourself – worse than that. There is no insurance that lets you claim back the state of being not-raped. There's no cloud backup to restore your pre-rape internal data. You've been raped, and that is profoundly horrible.

When Ross compares rape to theft, he presents it as a crime of property, not a crime of violence. It's an idea that belongs to the dark ages when women were permitted to own nothing apart from that abstract quality called "honour". Now – oh, fortunate modern females! – we are understood to have to rights to all sorts of things, including the right to decide who we do or don't want in our own orifices. And that's a right we cannot forfeit. Whatever we've drunk, however we're dressed and whoever we've kissed, a vagina is never a laptop.