I read two alarming things today. One was me, somewhat erroneously, being described as “a girl who is into hip-hop” and the second was it being “refreshing” to have a girl being supportive. While the first is so totally wrong it makes me giggle a little bit inside, the second reminded me of this graffiti that’s turning up in grotty venue toilets all around London: “If girls weren’t so bitchy, we’d rule the world.”

Girls can be mean, dispiriting, cruel and downright harpie-like in nature, and ‘Mean Girls’ went some way towards showing that in a mainstream manner. There has to be something to counterbalance all the earth mother hormones sliding through our bodies going “Make a baby you retard!”, and bitching is it: kid gets the love, fellow woman get bitch slapped with unkind remarks and insecurity.

Both the alarming things came from comments on a blog. Everyone’s panicking at the moment, especially boys. The DJourno was getting into a tizzy about packing for Bestival, and, wherever he is, the Journalist is probably winding himself up about something that’s happening in the Middle East. This post was written by one of the few hip-hop acts I genuinely like, Akira The Don (read it here now). The man usually writes very good, insightful blogs. At the moment however, he’s writing snippets and snappets, presumably because he’s got a lot of other stuff on like running a radio station, releasing a single and plotting how to overthrow the government.

Loosely, it was about an email he got from a fan in Swansea, Gina, asking him to vote for her in the FHM High Street Honey’s competition so she can go to vet school, but really it was about his shock at the government retracting grants and making a nation’s women prostitute themselves to the grand altar of China White. You should go there and read what was said because otherwise this will just be a blog repeating another blog and other comments which is far too PWEI a concept for me to entertain at 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

Certainly girls are capable of some rotten things. Some of the worst bullying I ever experienced at school was from girls in the years above me, probably because they despised my nerdiness and general social ineptitude. When I moved to London last year I was in the totally unfamiliar position of not having any male friends there with me. I love my boys. They are sane, logical and funny. Happily, I found out over the next few months that all my girlfriends have the same qualities and they won’t bite. Only one of them has ever given me any grief, and that was because she was going through some kind of mental fuck-up of her own and disappeared for months.

My girls are wicked, but GIRLS can be horrible. I went out with a very nice boy when I was 19, whose best (female) friend got very possessive and started flirting with him whenever we all went out together which, seeing that she was four years older than me was practically retarded. But, quite often because we sub-consciously promote a society in which men are stereotyped as cock-brained thickos who need to be led in the right direction by someone in fabulous shoes, we compete with each other where there’s no need. We’ve become so “equal” with men, that sometimes women patronise them by treating them like territory, and any ravenous slag who gets in the way had better cross herself. This, naturally, is not conducive to a good female image.

Just as most women’s magazines promote this ridiculous idea of men as post-feminist doorstops, so do men’s magazines promote a similarly far-fetched image of women, but that is not the point here. Why, when books like Belle Du Jour are so bloody popular is it considered the final sin for a girl to enter a lads mag competition? I suspect it’s because while Belle Du Jour is a fantasy that women can claim as their own, the lads’ mag market is for an (illiterate and breathtakingly stupid) Average Joe’s eyes only and so it’s as though she’s staking her claim on being the sexy one which is going to freak out people who don’t get that it’s all smoke and mirrors, just like Hollywood, just like being a popstar. Only with more tits.

“I have real problems with being friends with most girls because so many of them are so insecure and bitchy,” Gina said, and you can just imagine the reactions of same when she says she’s going to be in an FHM competition. I bet some stupid twat calls her names, even though she’s an ecology student. I hope she doesn’t, because if she wants to do it for the right reasons (ie; not using it as a quick step to a footballer husband and a Juicy Couture tracksuit) then there shouldn’t be a problem and I do not mean this naively.

She wants to raise money for vet school for Christ’s sake, and if any person, man or woman, can’t see that that costs a shed load of money and wish her well, then that shows how little they understand about the line between the images themselves and how they’re obtained. It’s work, not glamour, and she’s not going to be stealing away her mates’s boyfriends by stripping down to her scanties. Unless the boyfriends are really, really thick and incapable of telling the difference between fantasy and reality.

Hey girls: you can vote for Gina by emailing honeysvote@fhm.com and titling your email Gina Bartlett number 93. Let FHM do something good for once and give the world one more vet.