I found a freckle on my boyfriend's knee that he never even knew was there.
I was pretty gobsmacked by this. Not the freckle - it was a good freckle, but, well, freckles are freckles - but the idea that you could live for 23 years and not know every inch of your own body. Did he not spend his teenage years gazing into mirrors, wondering whether his eyebrows were too close together? Didn't he analyse his arse from every conceivable angle, employing complex arrangements of mirrors to ascertain whether both cheeks were actually the same size? Didn't he count every blemish, every imagined imperfection, and wonder just how hideous on a scale of grotesque to eyeball-meltingly horrifying they made him to other people? Did he honestly never think, "does this knee freckle make me look fat?"
Nope. Because he was an athlete, and, his whole life, his experience of his body was focused on what it could do, not what it looked like. He knows precisely how many sit ups he could do in one go when he was sixteen, but that freckle somehow escaped notice.
It seems like we're very extreme examples of how men and women - or teenage boys and teenage girls, anyway - live in their bodies. (I'm talking about specifically white cis people here, given that that's all I know; I'd imagine that race and transness colour these experiences in completely different ways. Disability, too; I'll get onto my own experience of that shortly, but it comes in all 32 flavours.)
From birth, little boy babies are encouraged to move more, run about, climb higher. People play more roughly with boys and estimate their strength and resilience more highly. Girls, though, are congratulated on being pretty, and long before puberty and the need to be Hot and the redoubled impact of the male gaze assumed everywhere, they're well aware that looking good is good. Their bodies are ornaments, while boys' are instruments.
To give a ridiculous, but still painful, example: I loved swimming when I was a kid. But then puberty hit, with its attendant body hair and fat in new places, and I was literally too paralysed by my disgust at the thought of myself in a swimming costume to even think about getting in the water again. The fixation on how my body looked made it impossible for me to even find out what it could do.
In the last few years, though, my attention has been brought back with brutal force to my body as an instrument, not an ornament: all the things it can't do make the fact that it doesn't look like some platonic Cosmo-cover ideal kind of irrelevant. Which makes swimming - one of the things it can do, and can do pretty well - a joy to be savoured. When I exercise these days, I'm not thinking about how I look, and I'm not thinking about how I will look; I'm not calculating how many calories this length will burn, or how much walking up these stairs will tone my quads. I'm enjoying the pure physical sensation of capability. Of the body working as an efficient machine, taking fuel in, using fuel to move, and taking pleasure in muscles contracting and stretching and working.
I still like looking pretty, I still wear fabulous outfits and wax my legs and occasionally even stretch to lipstick, but my body, with all its aches and pains and minor ailments and major fatigue is always demanding attention, asserting its physicality, in a way that can't be ignored (I no longer remember what it's like to live without back pain, say) that how it works is the primary mode in which I experience my body these days: how it looks has gradually become secondary. Which is sad in some ways: I'd love to be able to wear heels again, but I know that one extra twinge of pain is likely to tip me over the edge from 'exhausted but coping' to 'word-slurring eyelid-drooping wreck'. But it makes the moments of joy in the body's capabilities all the sweeter. Who cares what I look like? My thigh muscles just took me all the way to the third floor, and it was awesome.
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Wednesday, 20 April 2011
On getting your hands dirty
"Working for a charity which supports people who used to be in the Army? That's a bit right wing, isn't it?"
Haha, yes! In that very special right wing way of working to improve the lives of predominantly working class people! Funny thing about helping people with debts, DLA applications and rent arrears: they're rarely from the officer class.
Okay, I admit, I'm getting pretty defensive about this: a whole blog post in response to an offhand comment related to me at second hand might conceivably qualify as overkill. In my ultimate vision of my ideal career path, I didn't plan on working for a services charity: being a typical bleeding heart lefty liberal feminist, the grand plan is still to work with, say, a women's shelter, or a homeless outreach program, but these sort of charities don't generally come that high on funding priority lists (and have I mentioned recently how much money Britons give to saving the fucking donkeys?), so jobs are few and far between. My employers, however, get millions in donations every year, so they can afford to hire a charming and efficient administrator to make their fixing-people's-lives professionals' jobs easier.
And that charming and efficient administrator? Gets to do some pretty good life-fixing too. Seriously, last week I made a man cry with gratitude because I moved heaven and earth to enable him to repay money lent to him by his daughter. Without that money, her kids wouldn't have been able to go on holiday. Without that money, he wouldn't have been able to eat for a month. Without me and the terribly reactionary right wing charity I work for, he would have had to choose between souring the one good relationship left in his life, or risking his home and his already failing health by repaying the debt out of his own pocket.
But I guess because he was in the Army when he was young, he's just a tool of the establishment and I should have left him to rot, right?
I would absolutely love to be able to help everyone who needs it: it would be wonderful to be able to pay off the rent arrears of every struggling single mum, to help every person bewildered by the Disability Living Allowance application process to navigate an unfamiliar and uncaring system, to negotiate with unscrupulous credit card companies on behalf of every person they're trying to force into bankruptcy. But I can't. So if my choice is between making an unimaginable difference in some people's lives while being unable to help others, or throwing my hands up in despair rather than work for a services charity because I think that War Is Bad, I'm not that torn.
Sorry, dude, the revolution wasn't hiring. And may I ask - you're making the world better how, exactly?
Haha, yes! In that very special right wing way of working to improve the lives of predominantly working class people! Funny thing about helping people with debts, DLA applications and rent arrears: they're rarely from the officer class.
Okay, I admit, I'm getting pretty defensive about this: a whole blog post in response to an offhand comment related to me at second hand might conceivably qualify as overkill. In my ultimate vision of my ideal career path, I didn't plan on working for a services charity: being a typical bleeding heart lefty liberal feminist, the grand plan is still to work with, say, a women's shelter, or a homeless outreach program, but these sort of charities don't generally come that high on funding priority lists (and have I mentioned recently how much money Britons give to saving the fucking donkeys?), so jobs are few and far between. My employers, however, get millions in donations every year, so they can afford to hire a charming and efficient administrator to make their fixing-people's-lives professionals' jobs easier.
And that charming and efficient administrator? Gets to do some pretty good life-fixing too. Seriously, last week I made a man cry with gratitude because I moved heaven and earth to enable him to repay money lent to him by his daughter. Without that money, her kids wouldn't have been able to go on holiday. Without that money, he wouldn't have been able to eat for a month. Without me and the terribly reactionary right wing charity I work for, he would have had to choose between souring the one good relationship left in his life, or risking his home and his already failing health by repaying the debt out of his own pocket.
But I guess because he was in the Army when he was young, he's just a tool of the establishment and I should have left him to rot, right?
I would absolutely love to be able to help everyone who needs it: it would be wonderful to be able to pay off the rent arrears of every struggling single mum, to help every person bewildered by the Disability Living Allowance application process to navigate an unfamiliar and uncaring system, to negotiate with unscrupulous credit card companies on behalf of every person they're trying to force into bankruptcy. But I can't. So if my choice is between making an unimaginable difference in some people's lives while being unable to help others, or throwing my hands up in despair rather than work for a services charity because I think that War Is Bad, I'm not that torn.
Sorry, dude, the revolution wasn't hiring. And may I ask - you're making the world better how, exactly?
Saturday, 16 April 2011
Auntie Llama's advice column, with tax evasion, bad shoes, and poor quality photographs
Ah, Tory Britain. So full of sage advice. Did you know, for instance, that the financial crisis of the last few years was caused by a sly, pernicious group within society - a selfish, scheming collection of malefactors who care nothing for the hard-working majority and are only out for what they can scam off the state?
No, not bankers, you doofus! BENEFIT CHEATS!
Those bastards.
Imagine waking up with that outside your bedroom window. Especially if you are, in fact, receiving housing benefit. Clearly, there's only one thing to do, if you are an upstanding citizen with a dedicated commitment to the betterment of this nation.
I love this county.
(My own preferred defacement involved drawing attention to the fact that benefit fraud is estimated to cost the economy £1.6bn a year, as compared to the current 'tax gap' of one hundred and twenty billion... but apparently that's too long to be a good slogan.)
In other sagey onion-flavoured advice, may I suggest that, should you find yourself presented with the opportunity to travel halfway across London barefoot, you decline the challenge?
It also behoves me to suggest that, should you be presented with the opportunity to buy Clarks shoes, you heed this broken-footed blogger's warning.
No, not bankers, you doofus! BENEFIT CHEATS!
Those bastards.
Imagine waking up with that outside your bedroom window. Especially if you are, in fact, receiving housing benefit. Clearly, there's only one thing to do, if you are an upstanding citizen with a dedicated commitment to the betterment of this nation.
I love this county.
(My own preferred defacement involved drawing attention to the fact that benefit fraud is estimated to cost the economy £1.6bn a year, as compared to the current 'tax gap' of one hundred and twenty billion... but apparently that's too long to be a good slogan.)
In other sagey onion-flavoured advice, may I suggest that, should you find yourself presented with the opportunity to travel halfway across London barefoot, you decline the challenge?
Friday, 15 April 2011
2582 characters demonstrating precisely why Twitter is not my preferred medium
I've been moonlighting as a pro-choice tweeting crusader for a while now, and it's immensely gratifying to see our dinky litle abortion fund becoming a target for people who find the existence of uterine occupancy options infuriating.
You get the amusingly direct:
In short, generalisation! Not case study. The whole point of which is to look for the relationship (or lack of relationship) between two factors! So criticising the researchers' approach for not being "multi-factorial" enough is really quite silly! Furthermore, "factorial"? Really?
You get the amusingly direct:
@AbortionSupport @keairaroland abortion is murder
(Well, that's me converted!)
You get the "funny" ones:
@AbortionSupport Yur... I just be havin me 6th abortion and me cannot afford to travel back to Errland, who gun pay me. #LostIrishBlackGirl
You get the actually, though unintentionally, funny:
@AbortionSupport Jesus loves you! Jesus Saves. Trust Jesus!
and the just plain weird:
@AbortionSupport Planned Parenthood will kill 500 women today!
WITH THEIR ROLLING DEATH MACHINE OF AIDS TESTS AND PAP SMEARS!
But, as ever, the flat-out obvious offensive stuff never really wounds or annoys. It's the sneaky ones. The ones that don't call you a murderer, exactly, but don't you think the idea that abortion ends a life is a valid argument? It's not that we think you're lying, it's just that 5,000 women a year coming over from Ireland for abortions... that seems an awful lot. I'm not saying abortion's bad, but wouldn't adoption be better?
And now: it's not that we think abortion makes you mad, bad and sad, but posting a link to [yet another] study which has [once again] failed to find any link between abortion and mental illness - well, that's
@AbortionSupport, a rather sweeping generalisation on such a multi-factorial issue.
Now, I can't help but feel that the above chap is rather missing the point of scientific research: when one is looking for a statistically significant relationship between two phenomena, surely the very essence of what you're doing is making a generalisation? An analysis of the studies discovered no causal relationship between abortion and mental health problems - not this girl, in particular, found her experience of abortion traumatic, and her sense of guilt, combined with the pressures of secrecy and the financial stress involved, triggered her long-term propensity towards depression.
In short, generalisation! Not case study. The whole point of which is to look for the relationship (or lack of relationship) between two factors! So criticising the researchers' approach for not being "multi-factorial" enough is really quite silly! Furthermore, "factorial"? Really?
So it was with some relief that I greeted the next mention. At least it gave me a giggle.
@AbortionSupport PLANNED PARENTHOOD IS PATRONIZED BY MURDERERS!!!!
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Caps lock will not kill you
One of the caseworkers in my office is going to visit a client at home tomorrow. While we do have various safeguards, it's still not really a good idea to make these visits solo, and my colleague was getting more and more anxious thinking of The Possibilities.
Looking through the file, another colleague said, "Look at this. You can always tell if someone's a bit mental if they write perfectly normally, followed by one sentence all in caps."
I FOUND THIS QUITE OFFENSIVE.
1. "It is universally agreed that the majority of the mentally ill who are receiving appropriate treatment, do not carry more risk for violence than the general population."
2. The second colleague? The one who made the super-speedy logical leap from caps to mad to probably homicidal? Knows that I have a mental illness.
3. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH USING CAPS ANYWAY GOD DAMN.
Looking through the file, another colleague said, "Look at this. You can always tell if someone's a bit mental if they write perfectly normally, followed by one sentence all in caps."
I FOUND THIS QUITE OFFENSIVE.
1. "It is universally agreed that the majority of the mentally ill who are receiving appropriate treatment, do not carry more risk for violence than the general population."
2. The second colleague? The one who made the super-speedy logical leap from caps to mad to probably homicidal? Knows that I have a mental illness.
3. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH USING CAPS ANYWAY GOD DAMN.
Monday, 28 March 2011
Build me a path from cradle to grave: class and culture part 3
Sit down kiddies, your friendly neighbourhood llama is going to tell you a story. An uplifting, heart-tugging story of triumph over adversity, of beauty and determination and the resilience of the human spirit.
It's cool though, it ends with a lonely death in a failing hospital, so the tweeness will not be overwhelming.
When my maternal gramma was little, she had to visit the local wool factory every day to bring her dad his lunch. The place terrified her: it was noisy, and dangerous; dirty, and ugly. The idea of working there when she grew up - like her mum did, like her cousins did, like everyone did, because there weren't a huge array of options in a collapsing little town somewhere east of Manchester - horrified her. So she decided one day, at 8 or 9, that she never would. She'd find a way to do something else. Anything else.
She wanted to be a teacher. But she was poor and she was a girl and even secondary school, let alone university, was a ridiculously impossible dream. But she never did go to the factory - she became a clerk in the town hall. A respectable job, a cushy job, a job that is extremely unlikely to cost you any of your fingers. A job that - to her mind, at least - put her a cut above the hoi polloi. (Bless her, she was a great old lady, but an incorrigible snob.)
My mum wanted to be a teacher too. So she went to grammar school, then to uni, then did her PGCE and a TEFL course, and the woman can rule a classroom like nothing you've ever seen. (OFSTED inspector: "Never before in my life have I been moved to tears by the sheer quality of a lesson. You are amazing.")
Ladies and gents, I give you the finest invention ever conceived by western civilisation: The Welfare State! Can we pause for a round of applause for Clem Attlee?
I have a thing for making possibly spurious links between personal and historical events - like how the IRA and BNP conspired to break my parents up, or how Thatcher played a prominent role in my teenage mental breakdown - but this dude, more than any other, is who made my mum's glorious career possible. He catapulted both my parents, along with millions of others, into the middle classes, and changed the face of the nation beyond recognition.
Plus: pipe.
And it's this that makes the British class system such a complicated beast to wrestle with. Post-war baby boomers came of age in a magical moment, in a time that almost certainly offered more opportunity for social mobility than any other in the nation's history. But that social advancement didn't occur on a simple straight line, from poor to rich. Because although some kids from working class families rode the welfare state gravy train all the way to Parliament or the City or the boardroom, lots of others gained something less tangible from it, less easily measured.
My parents, for example, became effectively culturally middle class: they have values and aspirations and reading habits and culinary tastes which are virtually unrecognisable to their own parents. They live deeply middle class lives, with their fresh coffee and their Radio 4 and their French literature, but these cultural signifiers disguise the fact that they're both still pretty broke.
And yeah, whether you listen to Radio 4 or Radio 1, whether you like your cheese on toast with brown sauce or oregano, doesn't make a massive difference to your Relationship With The Means Of Production - but the values, attitudes and aspirations of the middle class mindset (which I've drawn a brief sketch of in parts one and two) give you so many more options in life.
When you know your family will fund you safely out of your fuck-ups, you have options other people don't have. When unemployment benefit forms the safety net between you and destitution, you take chances you wouldn't otherwise risk. In a way, the welfare state performed the same function for the many as inherited wealth always had for the favoured few, allowing poor kids to dream big. And despite the never-ending attacks on the welfare settlement - sometimes tentative, sometimes an onslaught - they've bequeathed that attitude to me. I've been able to act as if the safety net's there, even as Thatcher, Blair and Cameron have inched it out from under me.
But yeah, not sure what I'll be able to say to my children, other than "good luck".
It's cool though, it ends with a lonely death in a failing hospital, so the tweeness will not be overwhelming.
When my maternal gramma was little, she had to visit the local wool factory every day to bring her dad his lunch. The place terrified her: it was noisy, and dangerous; dirty, and ugly. The idea of working there when she grew up - like her mum did, like her cousins did, like everyone did, because there weren't a huge array of options in a collapsing little town somewhere east of Manchester - horrified her. So she decided one day, at 8 or 9, that she never would. She'd find a way to do something else. Anything else.
She wanted to be a teacher. But she was poor and she was a girl and even secondary school, let alone university, was a ridiculously impossible dream. But she never did go to the factory - she became a clerk in the town hall. A respectable job, a cushy job, a job that is extremely unlikely to cost you any of your fingers. A job that - to her mind, at least - put her a cut above the hoi polloi. (Bless her, she was a great old lady, but an incorrigible snob.)
My mum wanted to be a teacher too. So she went to grammar school, then to uni, then did her PGCE and a TEFL course, and the woman can rule a classroom like nothing you've ever seen. (OFSTED inspector: "Never before in my life have I been moved to tears by the sheer quality of a lesson. You are amazing.")
Ladies and gents, I give you the finest invention ever conceived by western civilisation: The Welfare State! Can we pause for a round of applause for Clem Attlee?
 |
| I like my heroes with pipes. |
Plus: pipe.
And it's this that makes the British class system such a complicated beast to wrestle with. Post-war baby boomers came of age in a magical moment, in a time that almost certainly offered more opportunity for social mobility than any other in the nation's history. But that social advancement didn't occur on a simple straight line, from poor to rich. Because although some kids from working class families rode the welfare state gravy train all the way to Parliament or the City or the boardroom, lots of others gained something less tangible from it, less easily measured.
My parents, for example, became effectively culturally middle class: they have values and aspirations and reading habits and culinary tastes which are virtually unrecognisable to their own parents. They live deeply middle class lives, with their fresh coffee and their Radio 4 and their French literature, but these cultural signifiers disguise the fact that they're both still pretty broke.
And yeah, whether you listen to Radio 4 or Radio 1, whether you like your cheese on toast with brown sauce or oregano, doesn't make a massive difference to your Relationship With The Means Of Production - but the values, attitudes and aspirations of the middle class mindset (which I've drawn a brief sketch of in parts one and two) give you so many more options in life.
When you know your family will fund you safely out of your fuck-ups, you have options other people don't have. When unemployment benefit forms the safety net between you and destitution, you take chances you wouldn't otherwise risk. In a way, the welfare state performed the same function for the many as inherited wealth always had for the favoured few, allowing poor kids to dream big. And despite the never-ending attacks on the welfare settlement - sometimes tentative, sometimes an onslaught - they've bequeathed that attitude to me. I've been able to act as if the safety net's there, even as Thatcher, Blair and Cameron have inched it out from under me.
But yeah, not sure what I'll be able to say to my children, other than "good luck".
Monday, 21 March 2011
Some guy's boner, and a worker's right to sneeze
Oh, commuting, you never cease to amaze me! Every time I think you've reached the pinnacle of grotesquitude, you pull some fresh hell out of the bag to torment me further. Panic attacks on the Victoria line! Fainting in the middle of a carriage, coming to with my head on someone's knee, and not one single person asking if I was okay! And today, a greasy little old man showed his appreciation for my frankly amazing outfit - his very firm, engorged appreciation, up against my left bum cheek all the way from King's Cross to Bank. Thanks, old man. I thought the necklace really set off the colour of my eyes too.
I always tell myself that in a really obvious, clear-cut scenario of harassment or tube-groping, I could be that hero who tells the attacker what-for. "Excuse me, sir, could you remove your penis from the vicinity of my buttocks please?" But somehow that undeniable situation never arises. (Har har.) Even now, I'm thinking, what if it wasn't his boner, but his hand? In his... pants? And if I'd turned round and given him an earful, I would have been the crazy shouting tube lady, and then we'd have continued to share extremely close proximity for the next ten minutes, with a whole carriageful of commuters studiously avoiding our eyes.
Which is, I suppose, the great attraction of busy public transport for the average groper: plausible deniability, and the safe assumption that your victim will be too embarrassed to challenge your behaviour. (S/he sure as heck can't find enough room to kick you in the baby-maker.)
In completely unrelated but much more cheery news, I think I'm in love with my boss. See, a year or so ago I got fined for having a heart condition. Literally! While I was lying on an operating table, floating merrily on morphine with extraneous bits of heart meat getting fried off by electricity and science, my boss was docking my pay for having the temerity to have a chronic illness.
But in glorious new job of joy and wonder, I sneezed once, and new boss said, "GET THEE HENCE! I will not tolerate germs in my office, go home and get better and do not darken my doorstep again until you feel well!" And for this fairly basic employment right, I am being charged... nothing at all. What with this and my immeasurably beautiful pay cheque I might be the only person in Britain getting rich in the third sector right now.
I always tell myself that in a really obvious, clear-cut scenario of harassment or tube-groping, I could be that hero who tells the attacker what-for. "Excuse me, sir, could you remove your penis from the vicinity of my buttocks please?" But somehow that undeniable situation never arises. (Har har.) Even now, I'm thinking, what if it wasn't his boner, but his hand? In his... pants? And if I'd turned round and given him an earful, I would have been the crazy shouting tube lady, and then we'd have continued to share extremely close proximity for the next ten minutes, with a whole carriageful of commuters studiously avoiding our eyes.
Which is, I suppose, the great attraction of busy public transport for the average groper: plausible deniability, and the safe assumption that your victim will be too embarrassed to challenge your behaviour. (S/he sure as heck can't find enough room to kick you in the baby-maker.)
***
In completely unrelated but much more cheery news, I think I'm in love with my boss. See, a year or so ago I got fined for having a heart condition. Literally! While I was lying on an operating table, floating merrily on morphine with extraneous bits of heart meat getting fried off by electricity and science, my boss was docking my pay for having the temerity to have a chronic illness.
But in glorious new job of joy and wonder, I sneezed once, and new boss said, "GET THEE HENCE! I will not tolerate germs in my office, go home and get better and do not darken my doorstep again until you feel well!" And for this fairly basic employment right, I am being charged... nothing at all. What with this and my immeasurably beautiful pay cheque I might be the only person in Britain getting rich in the third sector right now.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)