The world is on the edge of great catastrophe; Trump and Colonial xenophobia have already come after many, and though it is a time to pull closer to love and intersectional solidarity, let’s not overlook the vast importance of celebrating commercial, heteronormative expressions of class-based solvency. For tis the season for female-read* people to be berated into working harder at pretending they aren’t putting effort into their appearance, while simultaneously making sure to cover up their alienation and eye circles so as to secure a man-date for the upcoming day where we observe the holy communion that is chocolate wrappers and the supremacy of the prison that is monogamy. Because showing a hint of your minority stress and human anxiety isn’t cute and fuckable and we all know what a woman’s primary goal in life should be.
CAPRICORN (Dec 22 – Jan 19):
Expect an apology from your ex-lover around Valentine’s Day. But if he’s really sorry, he’ll be stripped bare, covered in shit and on all fours crawling towards you obsequiously with a bunch of black roses in his mouth. Don’t accept anything less.
AQUARIUS (Jan 20 – Feb 18):
You’re high from the elation of developing your pussy eating skills and swearing off cis, straight men forever. Your plaid, masculine, lesbro look has you very much off the MENu, and cackling all the way to the gay bars. Alas, you’re finding you still need some kind of deterrent for those Chucks and Lory’s who nevertheless find you fuckable and are therefore convinced you’re available, no matter how many times you yell over the dank electro, ‘I’m SUPER gay!’ It might be time to try out some kind of badge that says ‘I’m gay, but not the type of “gay” that sucks your cis, het dick. Sorry-not-sorry, Fella’.
PISCES (Feb 19 – March 20):
You and your pals would never do anything to exclude or make First Nations people feel uncomfortable. You said so yourself. You obviously deserve a pumpkin sticker! You did happen to mention that Aboriginal groups need to ‘let go’ of what white people did because your generation didn’t steal their children, take their land, or make them slaves and outcasts. You might not be joining the KKK Becky, but you and your white logic are about two steps away from voting for Pauline Hanson and supporting a wall on the Mexican-American border.
ARIES (March 21 – April 19):
If the polite arts scene makes you want to shave all your hair off and never wear a 50’s dress again, that’s understandable. Shun the crowds of clean girls who communicate all too loudly with their cream ballet flats: ‘I’m totally quirky and offbeat because I have a blunt fringe and wear chunky knit cardigans over my willowy frame. My five year goal is to get married, have 1.5 kids and cash in on my white privilege.’
TAURUS (April 20 – May 20):
Your uncle’s suggestion that you go on a juice fast and pick up meditation again were meant well, but maybe your ongoing struggle with anxiety and depression, including regular flare ups in suicidal ideation, aren’t a consequence of the acidity levels of your blood. Perhaps it’s rooted in the government driving you to self immolation through the pointless humiliation of work for the dole, the Centrelink benefits that are below the poverty line and the defunding of the arts that can no longer afford to offer you work. Or, maybe it’s the senselessly high housing prices that are getting you down, which means you face sharing a house in your forties, still yelling at teenage turds to clean their cum off the Persian rugs. Yeah, maybe it’s not the acidity levels of your blood.
GEMINI (May 21 – June 20):
Buddy, you’re all about supporting your LGBTQI+ friends, especially supporting your now firmly lesbian ex and her new girlfriend get on your cock. It doesn’t take a mystic to see you’re hungry for the fairytale lesbians who are flattered by your attempts to creep all up inside them. For some incomprehensible reason they’re aggressively offended by your shoddy industrial goth-boy company and friendly desire to initiate them into ginger butt plugs and veined dildos. It shouldn’t take the wisdom of the zodiac to figure out why.
CANCER (June 21 – July 22):
Oh honey, you’re in gross trouble if you’re mocking The Purity Myth and think it’s okay to ignore your friends every time your bf is up from Brisbane. You’ve ditched your older and wiser girlfriends, and though they’re clicking their tongues, you better believe they’re also chilling a pink martini in readiness for the day when you come crawling back after 6 years of gaslighting, casual sexism, economic abuse, suffocating cohabitation, diet pills and doing all the laundry. They’ll be ready with tissues, a moon cup and the ghastly truth about cis, white, straight men that you didn’t want to hear about the first time round. You won’t be making fun of Everyday Sexism then, darling.
LEO (July 23 – Aug 22):
You’re a young libertine who denounces property ownership and the fascist obsession with mowing the lawn. Marvellous! What’s that though? You’re not interested in reading female writers, not even Virginia Woolf, and it’s clear from your swagger and black, tight jeans that you strive to emulate the general distaste expressed towards women by Byron and Henry Miller. What a terrific rebel you are! No man ever has shaken off his class oppression but remained committed to misogyny and the maintenance of his power through female subjugation. You’re a fucking gem!
VIRGO (Aug 23 – Sept 22):
While you’re playing devil’s advocate and ‘fair mindedly’ having a chuckle about admiring Trump’s ability to at least create press for himself, all those who aren’t middle class, straight, white, cis men, are wondering whether they’ll have their few tenuous rights whipped away from them within the year. Whether they’ll have to use a coat hanger to give their rights tangibility, be kicked out of the country, or how they’ll survive the gunshots and daily threats from victoriously enraged, Neo Nazi beefcakes who yell, ‘We won! American belongs to men! Go back to Africa!’ But please, don’t think twice about your balanced and scaled, whitewashed polemic – of course Trump voters aren’t bigoted, they just didn’t trust a woman or a Jew to run their country.
LIBRA (Sept 23 – Oct 22):
Honey, no one is being fooled by you super weak, super ‘progressive’ I’m an equalist talk. It’s common knowledge that it’s a made-up term only used by white people drinking white wine, in loudly slurred tones in super mod kitchens. Nice try, but you’re becoming increasingly recognised as a cafe crusader and a heteronormativity apologist. But with the full moon in Leo coming up you better watch out for a brutally malignant awakening that’s going to have you returning to yoga classes as well as realising your male friends are the kinds of blokes who get called ‘nice guys’ but regularly sexually harass women.
SCORPIO (Oct 23 – Nov 21):
Conceivably, you’re not so much attracted to bratty Subs because they’re your preferred ‘submissive’, but because you need a 19 yr old wearing clip-in cat ears to shape the play date, you loafing grog-Dom. You’ve got all the sexual creativity of a white boy who’s grown up over-consuming one entitled man/two faux lesbians porn. Having no desire to learn the subtle art of domination while wanting to get sucked off on command isn’t a ‘kink’. That’s called being a sexually selfish simian and thinking you’re an uber Dom because you put on a body harness and have a scrotum.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22 – Dec 21):
The world is in vaster turmoil than usual. The result of which you hope will be a leftist backlash of seventies, cyber punk proportions. But remember, you can take a break from advocacy and activism so as to look after yourself. You aren’t one of those all too common femme-phobic fucks; the plodding, previous decade feminists who see frills, bows and ‘girly’ things as demeaning or for the intellectually frail. So get stuck into some self care and get cosy in the restorative world of cat cafes, Japanese selfie filters and Shoujo manga. Just because you shop for Gothic Lolita bonnets online doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy Yaoi with an emphasis on tender emotions and anal torture. Nor does any of this preclude you from dismantling Trumpland and breaking the hands of those that try and re-enact his pussy grabbing fanaticism. You can get back to being a loud and proud Nasty Woman tomorrow.
* ‘female-read’ is the act of the ‘female’ gender being attributed to individuals who may or may not identity as women. A cisgender woman, non-binary individual, a-gender person, or trans man etc may be read and assumed to be female by others based on appearances. In this context, ‘read’ is used as a verb.
Gender attribution, whereby an observer decides which gender they believe another person to be, is linked to the default assumption that everyone ascribes to a binary gender identity which is tangible to anyone who observes another’s physicality, mannerisms and way of dress. This is furthermore linked to the monolithic idea that biology, certain genitals, body types, behaviour, interests and hair styles, for example, are inherent indicators of gender – as if the shape and texture of someone’s meat prison can and should lead to a static, causal assumption about that person.
Rachael Nielsen has a Bachelor of Writing from the University of Canberra and has studied literature at Oxford University and the Australian National University. Rachael has interned at the M16 Artspace, the National Library and at the ANU Press. Currently she is one of the Content co-Coordinators at Scissors Paper Pen and Assistant Editor for Grapple Publishing, as well as penning nasty little predictions for Verity La as part of her work writing The Stars. When she isn’t pouring her latent bile into The Stars she is writing about feminist issues and is fixated on short stories. Her work has been published by Curio, Woroni, Lip, Vegan ACT, the ACT Writers Centre, the ANU Women’s Department and Feminartsy. You can follow her ramblings about being an emerging writer and editor on Twitter @rachaelandjane.