If you were to walk down any civilised shopping strip in the Western world and randomly ask people if they believed men and women should have equal rights, the vast majority would say yes. Sure, there are misogynists out there, but in today’s society people don’t have to go around saying “I’m not racist” because it is usually taken as a given until they give you cause to believe otherwise. And this is how I believe it should be with feminism. The core values are now so common in modern Western society that they do not need to be stated. To state you are a feminist today is therefore pretty much as powerful as stating you have two hands, and abandoning the term might just be the way forward. The word feminism means that you believe men and women should have equal rights, but it is often misunderstood to mean that women hate men. Truth is that, like it or not, there are negative connotations which come with the word. Ex-Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, who also avoids the term, said that for her “feminism is bra-burning lesbianism. It's very unglamorous”. Many people reject the argument for dropping the term...

I made my first windfall finding coins under the shelves of supermarkets and video rental stores. If I was still small enough to crouch down and peer under shelves I’d be a rich man today. Those things were goldmines. It was on one of these entrepreneurial outings that I saw it lying forgotten under the shelf, the dust gathered around it, its silver foil wrapper stifled by the lack of light and I thought what a shame to see it there forgotten, and I thought I could give that to my mum. I would stick it on a card and then on Easter Sunday I would go to her room, wake her up and show her the gift I had created for her. I put it in the drawer of my bedside table. Sometimes I would open it and just stare at it a while. Eventually it melted in there. I remember reaching down to touch it and the silver foil was the only thing stopping the liquid inside from oozing out. So I threw it out. It wouldn’t have been right anyway, giving it to my mum. I continued to live with a feeling of terrible guilt, running...

A woman has just dropped her pants and taken a dump in front of about fifteen people at the Hayward Gallery on London’s Southbank. Martin Creed, who won the Turner Prize after turning the lights off and on again in an empty gallery, has taken over the venue for the next three months with his new show entitled What’s the point of it? . The exhibition includes a stack of chairs in a piece called Stacks , a line of boxes in a piece called Boxes , and a stack of planks in a piece called, you guessed it, Planks . Going through, I know this is exactly the kind of exhibition I should be admiring; but I can’t help thinking that I could’ve taken a shit and stacked chairs at home, and I wouldn’t have been out of pocket afterwards either. I had a fairly open childhood when it came to the human body, so sex and nudity are not particularly shocking to me; however it is an easy crutch for art to fall back on for instant kudos, often justified by the artist by their need to provoke some reaction from the audience. I, too, couldn’t help...