Recently, I received an email from a literary publication asking me to comment on why ‘women are underrepresented in major publications’. Since I’m a single mother, working six days a week, and I wasn’t going to be paid, I didn’t respond. But I thought I’d do it here, so Overland will give me cash. It’s simple, really. Men are published more than women because men are better writers than women.

Becoming single again is sometimes called, with cheerfully callous accuracy, being back on the ‘meat market’. This phrase neatly points to the fact that love and money are as intertwined as man and wife, and that the rhetorics of the marketplace have thoroughly infected even the supposedly rarified space of love.

Now, I’m no Sheila Jeffries, so I would never suggest that pornography straightforwardly teaches us how to perform our sexuality. However, despite mainstream industrial heterosexual porn making a point of marking itself off as a pornotopic ‘fantasy space’ in both narratives and aesthetics, I would argue there is certainly an interaction between the doings of porn and the doings of sex and sexuality in the real world.

The online dating website OkCupid (OKC) helps us to do this with the help of ‘science’. The aesthetics of the site set it apart from the naff divorcee vibe of RSVP, the smooth torso-driven hunkiness of Grindr, or the visceral inflated fantasies of Adult Matchmaker. Instead, it has minimalist styling, a playful and ironic approach, lots of quizzes to complete and games to play. It generates percentages for how compatible people are, and its ‘robot’ suggests people that you might like. Their tagline is ‘we do math to get you dates’.

When I first entered the dark satanic mills of parenthood, I spent a good deal of time stomping around shouting, ‘This job should be unionised!’ The hours are terrible, the demands unreasonable, there are numerous occupational health and safety breaches, you are always ‘on call’ and its really hard to understand what your boss wants. The pay is horrific too.

When I was a kid, I’d watch my Dad eat salami. He’d skin it like a banana and eat the whole thing for afternoon tea. I’d watch him eat steak. He’d always get the biggest, with hot mustard and all the fat left on. I’d watch him drink gravy straight out of the plate.

I’ve always enjoyed ironic living, even (especially) before it was fashionable. I found it a useful coping strategy that helped me navigate late capitalism, especially in the long stretches of my life when I was broke.