HBO's Girls: the real issue here

You know what the current debate about HBO's Girls has been lacking? With all the noise about whether it represents All Of Womankind, sets a bad example, invisiblises unwhite people, glorifies slackers or is just the new Sex & the City, no one has thought to ask Internet Pervs Inc.

FYI none of them get naked.

 In other news, my research on this topic produced this strangely endearing search suggestion:

I'm off to do some yoga in trackie bottoms now, safe in the knowledge that somewhere, some dude is getting a boner at the thought of it.

SIDS and social class: a hunch, about hunches

Does anyone know of studies comparing incidences of parents being accused of child abuse following the death of their child (by SIDS or other invisible causes), and the parents' (perceived or actual) social class?

It's just a hunch. I was snoozing gently to the sound of this story on Radio 4, and was prodded out of slumber by the incongruous effect of the sound of a broad London accent on the Today Programme. Rohan Wray and Chana Al-Alas - both young, both of colour, and Mr Wray has an accent socially coded "poor" - were accused of abusing their baby, Jayden, following his death aged 4 months. This was in 2009. They've finally been cleared and are planning to sue UCH and Great Ormond Street for failing to diagnose Jayden's severe case of rickets.

This area is really fucking complicated, and decisions - and convictions - are often based on appallingly bad logic. The choice of whether or not to investigate a sudden, unexplained death further could be made on little more than a gut instinct. And gut instincts are mostly made up of unexamined prejudice.

We love to project negative qualities onto working class people. "They" are uncouth, violent, racist, uncultured, uneducated and generally unseemly: and more likely to abuse their children. So all else being equal, I'm willing to bet that people in authority (doctors, police officers, social workers, etc) would be more likely to treat this kind of death as suspicious if they perceived the parents as being poor.

It gets even more complicated when you consider that there are possible reasons for SIDS occurring more often in working class households: poverty itself is a risk factor, for example; also, working class people are more likely to smoke, and smoking inside the house has been strongly linked with SIDS.

This hits pretty close to home: my parents' second child died of SIDS. Had they not been so acceptably middle class (and had this tragedy occurred in the 90s/00s - reactions to these deaths has changed massively, and frequently, since 1900), I could have spent my first few years in care while they battled desperately to clear their names.

It's a shitty horrible mess and for once I have literally no solution to suggest: one of the major problems is that we don't know what the problem is; whether the wider trend is "child abuse going unpunished", or "innocent parents being accused of crimes that were never committed", or both. (Obviously both occur - but we don't know whether either are an epidemic, occurring over whatever could be called an acceptable minimum.) We don't know enough about why children die in these circumstances, so we don't know what to look for; a thorough understanding of the phenomenon - and of statistical probabilities - could form the basis of guidelines for assessing the likelihood of foul play.

It's not my area. I'm in no position to draw up a comprehensive national policy on SIDS, child abuse, state intervention in family life and the operation of the Crown Prosecution Service. (Which sucks! Because Clause 1 would be "Every child must receive, at birth, a large trust fund and a small racing llama".) But it's worth looking into this stuff, because it's easy to forget that those nasty little prejudices lurking at the back of your mind aren't just about being a bit mean to people. They can get people locked up. They can get people dead.

Yay, you're gay! Comings out and diagnoses

You know how, when people ask "how are you?" they generally want to hear "fine thanks and you?" What they generally aren't looking for is "not too bad; searing pain in my right shoulder, excruciating stubble rash - should have changed that razor blade - killer period pain but very much enjoying not being on the pill, super-tired, knitting an awesome scarf out of silk and baby camel, just realised I'm on the downward swoop of An Episode Of Depression, have a massive craving for bananas, and yourself?" (But then I am the queen of overshare.) Or, for that matter, "pretty good, recently realised I'm gay", or "awesome, finally got diagnosed with Asperger's!"

A friend has recently come out. Which made me notice that although at least half the people in my Social Circle are not straight, this is the first official Coming Out I've ever been party to. Back in my foolish youth, it was always pretty much assumed that everyone was flexible in their gender-related kissing decisions - which is fucked up in itself; still normative, just to a different norm - so no one made any grand declarations, they just got on with prodding whichever combination of genitals seemed like a good idea at the time, with or without the lubricating influence of Asda value vodka. (Oh, the memories.)

When my sister introduced her then-girlfriend to the troops, the only familial blowback she got was from my Granny, who was mostly just annoyed that no one had told her. Her response was, "Well, I didn't exactly send out Change of Sexuality cards."

Which was not only a great line, but also potentially a great idea: "Congratulations on your newfound sexual identity! Wishing you the best in exploring your sexuality - I've enclosed a fiver towards buying that hottie down the Rose & Crown a drink. Love, Mum." Fuck it, we've commodified every other major life experience, why not add 'deciding which gender/s you'd like to sleep/romance with'?

In similar news, a colleague has shared her recent diagnosis of Asperger's with the office. Rather than being framed as an occasion for pity, for 'get well soon!' or 'there there', it's been presented as a positive thing. Several people have offered congratulations on getting a diagnosis - which is invaluable in identifying and negotiating accommodations and whatever medications or therapies might improve one's quality of life - and said how keen they are to read up on the condition and learn how they can adjust working practices to accommodate her specific needs.

Diagnoses are almost universally framed as negative (as if you didn't have the condition before it was made official); comings out as either neutral or negative. But in no small part they are both experiences to celebrate: finding out exactly what it is that makes you feel rubbish, and gaining access to the tools to make it better? Awesome! Figuring out what it is you're looking for in a relationship, and what/who it is you want sexually? Brilliant! If that's not something to throw a party for, I'm buggered if I know what is.

give the feminist a cigarette goes international!

Oh, New York, how I love your half-and-half. How I love your air-conditioned subway and your iced coffee and your delightfully un-get-lost-able grid system. How I love your second-hand bookstores and your unlimited refills.

The whole town was basically my own personal musical, every street bringing another song to mind: we weren't actually staying on Positively Fourth Street, but we were staying in that crummy hotel over Washington Square. Crossing a road to get to the Hudson I discovered I can still recite the entirety of Tiptoe, the piers off the West Side Highway sunset behind the skyline of Jersey walking towards the water with a foetus holding court in my gut from memory.

After two days we said darling let's get out of the city, we need to breathe some cleaner air, and took a train to where they brought death to Bruce Springsteen's hometown, boys, death to my hometown, and discovered he really wasn't kidding: a bizarre, empty place, like someone who has lost a lot of weight too quickly and has all that extra skin flopping around. Every Springsteen landmark was dead, gutted; literally in the case of the boys from the casino dance with their shirts open. We ran down to the Atlantic, dipped our fingers in the freezing water, singing always wanted something more than fifteen hours in a week and a paid vacation on the Jersey Shore to no one, to the wind. A photo-op by Madam Marie's and a meal in an incongruously fancy restaurant - Italian, luckily, so we got to do Sopranos impressions, quietly, so as not to piss off the locals. (They'd already asked if we were Australian.)

We went to see Frank Turner at a bar which was tragically not the Stone Pony, but served us ironic hipster beers and alcohol-free slushies regardless. Although the genius of Turner's lyrics is to make the very specific into something universal, it was still jarring, strange, to hear a packed out Jersey crowd screaming along to songs about the English Channel and Nambucca, cheap Southampton bistros and the Railway Inn, the South Downs and north east London reservoirs. I'm a Wessex Boy, Holloway and Hampshire is where I belong, and I'm a long way from home.

Back in New York, we did the sights, doing the proper tourist traipse around the Empire State Building and MoMA and Rockefeller Plaza and, oh yeah, the Natural History Museum. Now far be it for me to tell you how to organise your museums, but can I just say that dinosaurs, animals, rocks, and people who aren't white is a pretty fucked up combination of exhibits. Observe how the pterodactyls hunted for prey! Wonder at the unimaginable vastness of the blue whale! Marvel at the beauty of crystalline amethyst caves! Goggle at how African people manage to get along without the benefit of our great white and wonderful civilisation! How quaint.

After that experience, I was all ready to get thoroughly pissed off at the Ellis Island immigration museum, expecting an avalanche of hoo-ray propaganda about how wonderful it was that all these people came from terribly backwards places, completely of their own free will, to the wonderful shores of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave (but not the braves) and all grew up to be John D. Rockefeller. Happily, it was actually the best historical museum I've ever been to: thoughtful and intelligent, detailed, balanced, and not afraid to point out that the immigrant experience wasn't a barrel of laughs for anyone, including the Native Americans who "entered into this country as surely as anyone who came through Ellis Island". Of a wealth of written primary sources, the most moving paired anti-Asian rantings with the calm, measured pleading of a Chinese man that his community were "good people. We honour our ancestors and take care of our children. We pay our debts, both large and small." We are, almost literally, in the same boat. Let us become American as you did.

Mine are the ones not written by dead white guys. Surprise!

We went to Harlem and discovered that Chuck E Cheese is a real thing. We went to the world's first entirely organic restaurant. We did a whole lot of Bob Dylan impressions and bought a whole lot of books. I kicked myself for finding the one place in the world where cigarettes are more expensive than in the UK.

We went to see the Knicks and went Linsane. (We also discovered that American nacho cheese is the most frightening non-cheese concoction ever invented, and discovered that we were incapable of stopping ourselves from eating it.) It took me until the end of the second quarter to put my finger on exactly what was so peculiar to me about the experience: everyone was having fun. They were acting like they'd spent a significant amount of money to be entertained by men playing sports. Which sounds perfectly logical, but if you've ever been to a football match in the UK, you soon notice that no one there is having fun. They're biting their nails and shouting at the ref and abusing the players and clenching every muscle in their body in the desperate hope that please, god, just please let them win. It's far too important to be anything as frivolous as fun.

Damn, I'd better get some sexism in quick to honour the title of this blog, hadn't I? Okay: firstly, in Asbury, a statue of a Patriarch was too good an opportunity to miss.

Secondly, watching Liverpool v Stoke in a comically Irish bar the day after St Patrick's Day (I was very tempted to make myself a t-shirt reading "Don't kiss me, I have no Irish ancestry whatsoever."), I was gazing anxiously at the screen, biting my nails, generally not having fun as outlined above. My gentleman companion was looking down at his phone catching up on work emails. A bleary-eyed English guy, clearly still having too much fun from the night before, stopped by our table and asked the boy who had scored the last Liverpool goal. Because girls! They don't like football! We know this to be true.

And that, dear readers, is what I've been doing instead of entertaining you with my thoughts. I hear that some pasty-related crisis has been kicking off in my absence? Oh Britain, lovely, peculiar little Britain, I missed you.

No hatred or bitterness for anyone

The best way to enjoy your first long haul flight: combine lack of sleep with the first day of your period. The best way to return to work after your second long haul flight: a six day work week culminating in seven hellish hours on Saturday minuting two Board meetings, including one which you only found out you were required to attend ten minutes after it started ("Do I have time to get a bit of toast? I haven't had breakfast yet." "NO! NOW!"), and one which featured the following incident:

"He's a bit wary of working closely with the Board, probably because in his last job for a mental health charity, where every member of the Board was bipolar."

HILARITY ENSUED.

"Well, no wonder!"
"Was the boardroom padded?"
"Can you imagine!"
"Bipolar board!"

This went on for, and I am not exaggerating, about five minutes. At one point the Chair turned to me and said, "You're looking very thoughtful, we are being rather irreverant!" I said, "Well, I have depression, so..." but I'm not sure if she heard me over the CACOPHONY OF HILARITY.

If you've never heard the sound of twelve people in genuine hysterics at the idea of people with disabilities in positions of power, you haven't lived.

Wanna know the best bit? This is the board of a disability charity. Almost all of them either have the condition in question or care for family members who do. They had just spent ten minutes discussing what adjustments would be necessary to allow the new Chair to lead meetings given that she is also deaf. If anyone had made a similar crack about haha, the very idea of a Board of people in wheelchairs!, there would have been outrage, and quite rightly. Haha, the very idea of people who actually have experience of a disability running a charity dedicated to that exact disability! It's political correctness gone mad! Mad! Hahaha, mad!

I think this is the difference between people who come to charity work out of a desire to Do Good (which has its own problems, of course), and those who have one specific issue which they want to address in isolation. I mean, don't get me wrong, we all come to social justice because we're pissed off about something that affects us personally, but - hopefully - we then start to see the bigger picture. It's a never-ending process, learning that the world isn't actually perfect apart from the sexism, or the racism, or the one particular neurological condition that is getting in the way of our ideal life.

I know that beating yourself up for not being The Perfect Activist is a pointless endeavour, but as an aspiration, you've gotta love Edith Cavell. Patriotism is not enough: I must have no hatred or bitterness - or, hey, derision - for anyone in my heart.

I read books, and sometimes even like them!

1. Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Colour Complex by Marita Golden, a beautifully-written series of vignettes on the topic of hueism, drawing strongly on the author's own experiences: being told by her mother not to play in the sun, because "you'll have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake of your children as it is". Absorbing negative portrayals of dark-skinned women (as Mammy, or Sapphire, a hands-on-hips finger-snapper with Attitude) and positive, but hyper-sexualised, archetypes of paler Black women. Gazing at her afro as a young revolutionary and honestly believing herself beautiful for the first time. It's a wonderful, languid, impassioned read, which gently draws out subtleties that so often get glossed over; and it's wonderfully refreshing to read a book about racism which is absolutely not about White people: by which I don't mean "wahey, we're off the hook!", but that it is 100% about Black opinions and Black feelings and Black experiences. I love how when you finish even the worst book, you have a whole new life inside your head; Don't Play in the Sun has populated my Mind Palace with a cast of thousands, all saying things that had never even occurred to me before.

2. Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class by Owen Jones. I picked this up because the title alone made me realise: we do not talk about this enough. It gets lip service when social justice bloggers are presenting The List (I am a white cis bisexual woman of lower-middle-class background in a  menial job and a lot of debt and have physical and mental disabilities! If you were wondering), but it undoubtedly gets less airtime than many other axes of oppression. This review outlines the book's many shortcomings well - a little more theory would not have gone amiss - but I am enjoying its unapologetic stridency on such an unfashionable topic. I also had a great laughing-at-myself moment yesterday, when I cracked it open in a frightfully chi-chi cafe in Chiswick over my latte and pain au chocolat. (Matched only by the time I was reading bell hooks while waiting for a friend outside a Mos Def gig. I am fucking cool.)

3. How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran. On which I have... opinions.

First up: it is hilarious beyond the telling of it. Belly-laughing, snorting and hooting at every page, making embarrassing noises on public transport funny. It is delightfully crude in a deeply British way, talking about nipple hair and using the word 'minge' and generally being very honest about all the things it is considered unladylike to talk about in public.

All of this is for a reason, too: its mission statement is to take on the problems of The Modern (white, western, straight, cis, professional, TAB...) Woman with humour and theory. (That list of attributes isn't meant as a criticism, by the way - the book is a memoir as much as anything else, and you can only write about what you know - but what Moran has learnt about How To Be A Woman is clearly not universally applicable.) Not super hardcore Buterly theory, but an acknowledgement that many of the problems she has faced are not individual, but systemic: "we need a bit of analysis-y, argumenty-y, 'this needs to change-y' stuff. You know. Feminism."

However. My first beef was with the contention that modern feminism has "shrunk down into a couple of increasingly small arguments, carried out among a couple of dozen feminist academics, in books that only feminist academics would read" and that "no one is tackling OK! magazine, £600 handbags, tiny pants, Brazilians, stupid hen nights or Katie Price". (It's true: only feminist academics read the Telegraph.) I mean, come on: feminism that is funny and focused on pop culture? That is the raison pissing d'etre of the feminist blogosphere! This is what we DO! This is what we've been doing for a decade now! You're not vanguarding your way up some never-scaled-before cliff face of hilarity, you're joining a team, and Team Funny Feminism would like to be acknowledged.

Beef The Second was with the repeated worship of Germaine Greer: if you know that this woman, whose name is pretty much synonymous with feminism for the general public, is "crackers on the subject of transgender issues", it might be best not to hold her as your "heroine". (Or use words like "tranny".)

Then there's the line in which she describes herself as having "all the joyful ebullience of a retard". Which has, rightly, caught some flak. It's been changed to "idiot" in my edition (hmm) but the refusal to engage with people pointing out that it's a fucking slur - to the point of blocking them on Twitter - is worrying. We all screw up. It's what you do next that matters.

The passages where she presents Her Opinions on the burqa and on stripping (bad, and bad, respectively) are just kind of sad, to me; heart-in-the-right-place but ultimately misguided. One of the most blinding moments of revelation I've ever had since getting in on this blogging lark was: it's okay not to have an opinion. I know! I registered my own little part of the internet specifically to share my opinions with the world, and yet: sometimes, or even most of the time, my opinion is NOT THE DAMN POINT. I might find the veil disturbing or stripping demeaning, but it is, shockingly, none of my fucking business. The world can live without my searing analysis of these issues. Maybe Muslim women, and strippers, actually have more interesting things to say on matters which concern their actual lives.

I almost feel bad for lambasting the book, for listing its flaws rather than wooping its virtues. I did enjoy the crap out of it: but then I am not a sex worker, or trans, or developmentally disabled, so the bumps in the road outlined above were occasions of "dude, that is uncool" rather than the literary equivalent of being kicked in the face.

I think its problem is that it falls between two stools. Too political to be solely a memoir, not theoretically grounded enough to be a feminist treatise, it's bound to irritate those of us who probably spend a lot more time thinking about this social justice malarkey. For the general reader, I can imagine it would be a great entry-point into considering these unremarkable facts of life - OK! magazine, £600 handbags, tiny pants, Brazilians, stupid hen nights and Katie Price - in a wider context, and hopefully deciding that "feminism" isn't such a dirty word after all.

Really, I just wish she'd spent a bit of time around these parts: a day wandering through Shakesville and Tiger Beatdown and The F Word and the virtual homes of a thousand other no-name bloggers like me would have demonstrated vividly that feminism - fast and loud and angry and hilarious and as concerned with 30 Rock as with rape conviction rates - is alive and shouting, and trying, however imperfectly, not to step on other people's heads on our way up.

Racist squirrels

"Who, me?"

I love those friends with whom it is almost impossible to have a boring conversation. Those people who reply to "how are you?" with "good, thanks, so I've been reading this book about Gandhi..." or "I have this amazing recipe for cheesecake" or "from a neuroscientific perspective, Jung's idea of the collective unconscious is both fascinating and completely unnecessary." So much more fun than "finethankshowareyou".

A lady I work with is a prime example. Being the two newbies and the two smokers in the office gave us ample opportunity to discover that we are both intelligent and interested people and so we never really waste time talking about the weather: typical lunchtime conversations will cover everything from theories of autism spectrum disorders based on how brains classify incoming data, with reference to Jung, Plato, and apples; systemic prejudice against people with natural Afro hair; the intricacies of incorporating waist shaping into a complex lace pattern repeat; and the peculiar simultaneous push and pull of weddings as bisexual ladies living in a patriarchal society. It is awesome.

So when she came over this morning talking about squirrels, my hopes were high.

You know when puberty begins its relentless assault, the pituitary grand starts sparking and you're more aware of your crotch than you've ever been before in your life - and suddenly everything reminds you of sex? Hayfever (trees spunking on your face!), crossing your legs a little too tightly, the pronunciation of the German word for 'six'. I remember actually getting aroused by an educational film we watched in Textiles class about cotton production. (Something about the motion of the mechanised looms was just really... thrusty.) Months pass in this bizarre la-la-land of giddy, glazed, hormonal lust.

Remember? Yeah? Well: getting interested in social justice is nothing like that.

But! I think this is what people who accuse us of Political Correctness think it is like. As if "trying not to be a dick" were this cool new fad, a perky obsession that inevitably fades with time; a pair of racism-coloured spectacles which make you see the entire world as Problematic. This version of events places the blame for oppression, micro-aggressions (or to use my preferred technical term, "fucked up shit") on the observer: if we wouldn't spend so much time looking for problems, everything would be fine! Because post-racial! Or something!

Which is obviously bollocks. This stuff happens all the time; social justice just gives you the theory to understand it and the language to describe it accurately

The squirrels, if you were wondering, had been accused of Coming Over Here And Taking Our Jobs/Women/Nuts. (There are also black squirrels, which come from Africa, and are more violent than delicate indigenous English Rose squirrels, who do not hold with foreign food or rambunctious behaviour. With the exception of the last clause, I AM NOT MAKING THIS SHIT UP.) Basically, this is the fauna-based equivalent of my current favourite Daily Mail article, the absolute culmination of 116 years of insular, frothing hatred: "IS THE PILL TO BLAME FOR IMMIGRATION?"