tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70258795949504101432024-02-08T01:55:21.530+00:00the old jaw jaweffing the effing ineffableallamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.comBlogger273125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-30820821665581068022015-12-10T09:30:00.000+00:002015-12-10T09:30:00.128+00:00The Crotch Rot Doc RocksHey guys, remember <a href="http://oldjawjaw.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/introducing-dr-dickface-mcbullyo-nhss.html">Dr Dickface McBullyo</a>? AKA The Worst Doctor I Have Ever Had, AKA The Only Thing I Don't Miss About Living In Seven Sisters?<br />
<br />
A recap:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
PATIENT: Hi there, medical practitioner. I have been experiencing some
abnormal and uncomfortable heart rhythms. Maybe we could check that out?<br />
<br />
DR DICKFACE MCBULLYO: I see from your file that you have a history of depression. You're having panic attacks.<br />
<br />
PATIENT: No, I have had panic attacks in the past, these are not panic
attacks. Also, when the odd heart rhythms are occurring, I'm not
panicked, and you'd think I'd notice if I was under so much stress that
my body was initiating a fight/flight response, no?<br />
<br />
DR DICKFACE MCBULLYO grabs PATIENT's arm and points vigorously at five-year-old self-harm scars.<br />
<br />
DR DICKFACE MCBULLYO: What are these, then? You did these yourself,
didn't you? You're having panic attacks. I can prescribe some
anti-depressants.</blockquote>
<br />
It was <i>supraventricular tachycardia</i>, motherfucker.<br />
<br />
Consider this Exhibit A, or, One Of The Worst Ways To Discuss A Patient's Mental Health.<br />
<br />
Exhibit B: Yesterday a Superhero Nurse was taking my blood pressure. She gestured to my now ten-year-old self-harm scars (without touching them), confirmed they were very old, offered me an appointment with a counsellor, and took my word for it when I said my mental health needs were covered elsewhere.<br />
<br />
And <i>that</i> is how you do it, Dr Dickface. You notice, you make it possible and comfortable for someone to disclose issues if they feel it's necessary, you offer relevant services without pushing, and you <i>believe what they're saying to you</i>.<br />
<br />
You know. You treat them like a fucking human being.<br />
<br />
Episode 36 in I Fucking Love GUM Clinics.<br />
<br />
My blood pressure is perfect, by the way.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-63274845711300515072015-12-09T09:02:00.002+00:002015-12-09T09:32:50.319+00:00Today in the colonialist history of medicine, and everything else you love in this worldFun things about working in a hospital:<br />
<br />
1. People walking round in pyjamas<br />
2. People walking round carrying coolboxes which are presumably full of internal organs. I gaze at them in the lift, thinking, damn, it really matters whether or not you come to work in the morning.<br />
3. Being able to nip downstairs on your lunch break to have a quick chat about the pros and cons of the progestogen-only pill, get a prescription, squeeze in an unrelated blood test and still have time to get yourself a sticky bun.<br />
<br />
Fun things about researching hormonal contraception:<br />
<br />
1. Turns out I'm not the only person who found that the combined pill made me (more) sad, (more) tired, and utterly annihilated my sex drive. "Congratulations, you can now have all the sex you want!", I imagine The Pill saying to me. "YOU WILL NOT WANT TO HAVE ANY EVER AGAIN."<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO9SDkL3oxo4LNb5pkzkxRVoPFtd2xqs39XTTYUIQr-v3kFIGCsURdKuaYmsQ0SG6RCQonB9QTz_YWYwhwn0S-Q7trgsUlnE8873iZD4ry-ZgR8TgkxztxKlFvmE6HWqnGp2ijWKFU7dg/s1600/Enivid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO9SDkL3oxo4LNb5pkzkxRVoPFtd2xqs39XTTYUIQr-v3kFIGCsURdKuaYmsQ0SG6RCQonB9QTz_YWYwhwn0S-Q7trgsUlnE8873iZD4ry-ZgR8TgkxztxKlFvmE6HWqnGp2ijWKFU7dg/s320/Enivid.jpg" width="167" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">LIBERATION! And chronic nausea.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
This is definitely something I'd like to look into more, but finding reputable sources is going to take some digging - there's a delicate but important line between "the pharmaceutical industry is deeply, systemically, globally fucked up, and is more into making a profit than promoting human wellbeing" and "oh, I never take drugs, all those nasty chemicals; I imbibe only Natural remedies derived from dew settling on flowers" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_flower_remedies">I wish I was joking</a>), and I very much <i>don't</i> want to end up reading bollocks written by the kind of people who think vaccinating their children against fatal diseases is likely to give them autism. Got any resources? Gimme!<br />
<br />
2. "When asked about the potential of a male contraceptive pill, politicians
involved in the public defense of the trial disregarded the idea as
ridiculous and impossible, on the primary explanation that the drug
could do harm to the man and his reproductive system." AHAHAHAHAAAAA. I mean, I can't actually find a source for this (the quote's from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraceptive_trials_in_Puerto_Rico">Wiki</a>), but man, I hope it's true. Well: I hate the idea that people could be so ridiculously bigoted as to think "it's totally cool to footle about with women's bodies, I mean, we don't really know what we're doing, we're giving people double the necessary dose, but it'll probably be fine, right?" at the same time as holding The Mighty Wang and its associated support systems as sacrosanct. But I also find such blatant hypocrisy <i>really fucking funny</i>.<br />
<br />
3. Have you heard of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraceptive_trials_in_Puerto_Rico">Puerto Rico contraceptive trials</a>? I had not heard of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraceptive_trials_in_Puerto_Rico">Puerto Rico contraceptive trials</a>, and I am well into feminism, and history, and contraception. But until yesterday, I was not aware of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraceptive_trials_in_Puerto_Rico">Puerto Rico contraceptive trials</a>. I was not aware that the researchers developing the pill were like, "we can't get FDA approval until we do a large-scale trial, but we can't do a trial in Massachusetts, because contraception is illegal. I know! We have this useful little colony! It's full of women! Let's do it there!"<br />
<br />
And if you're thinking that this bright idea is a massive ethical minefield, clearly you just don't have the far-sighted revolutionary thinking necessary to exploit women in the developing world in order to make a whole bunch of money.<br />
<br />
"Uh, so, a lot of these women are illiterate, a lot of them don't speak English. Are we going to provide translation services to ensure full, informed consent?" said ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NO ONE.<br />
<br />
"Uh, do you think that making 'agreeing to carry a pregnancy to term should you conceive during the course of the trial' a condition of participation is a touch coercive, maybe?" said NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON.<br />
<br />
"Uh, this pill seems to be working, but it also might be, sort of, killing off some of the participants a bit? Should we mention this to the FDA? Should we mention it to our future target market, US women? Should we mention it to <i>the participants in our fucking study?" </i>said our old friend, NO ONE AT ALL.<br />
<br />
The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraceptive_trials_in_Puerto_Rico">Puerto Rico contraceptive trials</a>: tell your friends.<br />
<br />
4. Is there any way to assuage one's conception-anxiety without supporting morally bankrupt organisations, if one is into touching a P with a V? Haha, NO.<br />
<br />
5. This song is still the best.<br />
<br />
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<br />allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-56787310670111293432015-12-04T14:46:00.000+00:002015-12-04T14:46:31.631+00:00Strong in the broken places: I heart Jessica Jones"SO there is this new show on Netflix about a woman who's not long out of an abusive relationship, and how she deals with the trauma of him coming back into her life, and how he manipulates everyone around her to get her attention and fuck with her head, and it deals with PTSD and self-medicating and the impossibility of getting authority figures to believe you, yet alone to convict him, and it discusses rape of the non-stranger-jumping-out-of-the-bushes variety AND doesn't even have a super-sexy titillating rape scene, and...<br />
<br />
Oh yeah, and the two of them have superpowers."<br />
<br />
You guys, I submit to the court that Jessica Jones is <i>freaking amazing</i>.<br />
<br />
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<br />
The classic superhero thing doesn't really appeal to me - it always seems to be all about fancy costumes and bombastic storylines rather than anything as humble as character. But Jessica Jones is about, well, Jessica Jones: this mardy, hard-drinking, casual-sexing, small-business-owning, abuse-surviving, fucked up, fucked off young woman. It's about how she got to be that way and what she's going to do about it. It contrasts her superhuman physical strength with her only too human emotional frailty; and, ultimately (spoiler!) it's the fact that she was so broken by Kilgrave that makes her able to defeat him in the end. ("Strong in the broken places": sometimes Papa Hemingway got it right.)<br />
<br />
On my second viewing, I'm noticing other things that make its world seem vividly real. It's set in a New York that is not (as is so often the case in TV Land) populated entirely and inexplicably by white people. It has a load of ladygay characters whose ladygaiety is not the entire <i>point </i>of their characters.<br />
<br />
It's like Veronica Mars and Buffy got together to talk about all the things they didn't get right and had a beautiful foul-mouthed baby.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-53673969936624302282015-11-26T14:00:00.000+00:002015-11-26T14:00:45.023+00:00It Made Me Want To Kill Myself! Hilarity ensued.This is a post about things that trigger me with regard to suicide. So, trigger warning for suicidal shit! Should you not want to deal with this today, here is a beautiful picture of a cat with a bluetooth gramophone.<br />
<br />
Is there any more hipsterish gadget than a bluetooth gramophone? I think not. <br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
<u>Things Which Make Me Think About Killing Myself</u><br />
1. Bridges: particularly Archway, Northam, Severn, but basically any bridge with a significant drop.<br />
2. Medications: particularly painkillers, which is a giggle given that I am in pain more often than not and thus buy painkillers pretty regularly; whenever I'm prescribed something new, I automatically skim through the info leaflet inside to figure out how many of them I'd have to take to not be alive anymore.<br />
3. Blades, particularly scalpels and razor blades. <br />
4. Every fucking time someone describes mild frustration or sadness with the phrase "it made me feel like killing myself!"<br />
<br />
Like: I'm saner than I've ever been, right now. Merry bushels of meds and two and a half years of drawing pictures of my feelings every Monday night have finally paid off, and I don't actually want to die, which makes a nice change. I thought I was having a relapse the other week, but it turns out it was just PMT; while I was relieved when I figured it out, I also found it unbearably sad to think that I hadn't actually noticed getting PMT for years, because I basically felt that miserable every single day.<br />
<br />
But I am still me, and I still have my own history, and my history includes between one and three suicide attempts, depending your criteria. (I'd go with one 'proper' and two '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasuicide">para</a>'.) And any mention of the topic reminds me of the things I did and the reasons I did them.<br />
<br />
So here's what I think of when you say "It made me feel like killing myself!": I think of stockpiling painkillers for weeks, and downing the lot in ten minutes. I think of razorblades bought from our friendly local pharmacy, and how they felt digging into my wrist. I think of all the times before that and all the times since that I've wanted, desperately, for life to just <i>stop</i>, and all the times when minor stresses and gentle criticism and boring meetings and having to stand on the tube have genuinely made me feel like killing myself.<br />
<br />
Literally every time suicide comes up in conversation, or my mum drives me over Northam Bridge, or I walk past the pain relief or hair removal aisles in Boots, some or all of that will go through my head. On a good day, it's a sad reminder of an awful period of my life. On a bad day? It's sent me on a super suicidal shopping spree.<br />
<br />
As you can tell from the list above, it's not possible for me to exist in the world <i>without</i> being triggered fairly frequently. I can't entirely avoid all bridges and pharmacies; I can't start all conversations with the demand that no one mention suicide in any context. It wouldn't be reasonable to expect people to know what thoughts a casual mention of painkillers or razorblades (still less bridges, for fuck's sake) evoke in me.<br />
<br />
But using "It made me feel like killing myself!" as a way of exaggerating how unpleasant you found an experience - comical hyperbole, because <i>obviously</i> you don't <i>actually</i> want to kill yourself, it's not like you're <i>mental</i> or anything - is an entirely predictable and entirely unnecessary trigger to me, and to a whole bunch of people like me. Not saying it - removing one phrase from your rhetorical arsenal - would not inconvenience you at all, and be of enormous benefit to me; saying it is of no real benefit to you and causes very real suffering to me.<br />
<br />
It's the <i>predictable</i> thing that gets me: the fact that, if you think about the words you're using for more than two and a half seconds, it's so glaringly obvious that someone who has been affected by suicide - their own attempts, those of a loved one, losing someone that way - will react negatively to hearing you throw those words out so casually.<br />
<br />
So (unless you're being deliberately cruel) you can only use the phrase in this way if you assume that no one within earshot falls into that category. Presumably you assume that anyone who has experienced mental health problems is instantly recognisable by signifiers like "permanently crying", "talking to The Voices", or "frothing at the mouth". (Ugh, that <i>hilarious</i> conversational trope "The Voices", there's a whole other blog post.) You disregard the possibility of recovery, or going through the motions of an outwardly Normal Life while struggling with depression or psychosis or anxiety or plain old wanting to die. You assume that mental illness is another country, whose inhabitants never visit yours, and who never return once they've crossed the border. <br />
<br />
Yeah, well, we walk among you. We're sitting next to you in meetings pondering the unbearable idea of surviving for the next sixty years until we can die without upsetting anyone too much. We're behind you on the W5, fighting back a lurch of nausea as the bus goes over Archway Bridge. We hear you describing the experience of trying to set up a direct debit with British Gas as "so bad I felt like killing myself!"<br />
<br />
And what we hear is that you don't hear us. You don't see us. You don't think we matter for the simple reason that you have the unbelievable luxury of not having to remember we exist.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-53022648958344783002015-11-24T09:29:00.002+00:002015-11-24T09:29:36.295+00:00when friends attackToday in "conversations I had with dudes several years ago": a roof terrace in Elephant & Castle, drinking Red Stripe in the evening summer sunshine. We were talking about old friends, fun times, and an ex-friend. He became an ex-friend after a party where he persistently followed a woman around, groping her, trying to kiss her, as she got more and more wasted to the point of incapability. He only stopped when she woke up enough to ask my Straight Best Friend (a man; a big burly ex-rugby player; a feminist, if imperfectly, but then aren't we all?) to keep him away from her. This was not the first time he had behaved in such a predatory way, but it was the time that got him excommunicated from our gang.<br />
<br />
Straight Best Friend actually dealt with this whole situation brilliantly, putting the woman to bed on the sofa and staying up to keep an eye on her and prevent Creepy from making another attempt. The following day, when Creepy called full of empty apologies and ridiculous excuses about how the booze made him do it, etc, SBF told him it wasn't okay to do that shit, ever, and hung up.<br />
<br />
On the rooftop, I referred to Captain Creepy as "a fucking rapist", if memory serves, and Straight Best Friend told me off.<br />
<br />
"He didn't actually rape her," he said.<br />
<br />
"Sure, he's creepy, predatory, pushes boundaries to see what he can get away with, but he didn't actually rape her." he said.<br />
<br />
"If you throw that word around, it dilutes its meaning, and he didn't actually rape her," he said.<br />
<br />
I backed down at the time, but you know what? I am actually entirely comfortable with my assessment of Captain Creepy as A Fucking Rapist.<br />
<br />
No, he didn't succeed in raping that one woman that one time. And no, I have no knowledge of any occasions on which he has succeeded in raping someone. And no, as far as I know he has not been convicted of rape, not that <i>that</i> means a fucking thing.<br />
<br />
But from everything I've read about rapists (which, honestly, is probably too much for my mental health), and everything I know from hanging out with that guy for two years, convinces me that, if he hasn't raped anyone in his life, it's not for want of trying.<br />
<br />
That guy went out drinking almost every night. He pursued women in that manner every time he encountered a suitable target. He clearly had a premeditated plan to take advantage of inebriated women in classic <a href="https://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/">Social Licence To Rape</a> style. He had the archetypal Nice Guy mentality, constantly whining <i>but why will these bitches not provide me with sex in return for me acting like a decent human being</i>, though paraphrased, slightly.<br />
<br />
It fucking breaks my heart to think about it, but I just can't
believe that someone can say those things and act in that way and not,
at least once, put it into practice. <br />
<br />
No one wants to think of their friend as a rapist, even though, logically, we know they walk among us without handy name badges identifying them as such.<br />
<br />
And for some people - like, say, straight cis dudes, who are statistically much less likely to be raped than I am, and who are not conditioned to live in fear of that eventuality - think that it is very important to Use Words Carefully and not call someone a rapist until you have incontrovertible evidence of him doing some raping, preferably videotaped. Me, I am not willing to give the benefit of the doubt to people whose best claim to Decent Human status is "hasn't raped anyone yet, that we know of". If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you know? I'm going to stick my neck out and Choose My Words Carefully to say: that duck is a fucking rapist.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-4982866019855232072015-11-19T16:41:00.000+00:002015-11-19T16:41:35.289+00:00A clarification: sexual assault is a bad thingI'm feeling a bit ooky about my last post. Like, I think it would take a determined case of squinty selective reading to get "sexual assault isn't always that bad" from what I wrote, but it's a possibility, and it's not a possibility I want to live with. So.<br />
<br />
Sexual assault is really fucking bad. You should not do it. Just so we're clear on that.<br />
<br />
What I meant to say was that different people react to experiences in different ways because they are different people in different circumstances with different histories.<br />
<br />
About four hundred blogyears ago, <a href="https://fugitivus.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/street-harassment/">Harriet J talked about how we all unconsciously set our own "acceptable" levels of sexual harassment</a>: that, at one stage in her life, she classed getting catcalled several times a day as "acceptable", because it was unavoidable; to class it as "unacceptable" would make it impossible for her to leave the house. Similarly, I think I have classed a certain amount of a certain type of sexual assault as "tolerable": not that I don't get freaked out sometimes, or kick off at the dude if I feel safe enough and if I have it in me that day; "tolerable" as in it is a really unpleasant but survivable (and, thankfully, rare) aspect of my life. That tolerance level has varied over the years, and I would imagine other people's levels vary from person to person and individually over time.<br />
<br />
Or, in short: people react to sexual assault in different ways according to a variety of factors, and the fact that one person's response to one incident at one particular moment in time was not either "suicidal misery" or "homicidal rage" does not imply that sexual assault as a whole is not A Bad Thing. <br />
<br />
Like: I have a friend who survived an abusive relationship. Since that time, she's experimented with BDSM, and enjoys being tied up - but she finds being pinned down by someone using only their own bodyweight unbearably triggering. If you hadn't had a chat with her about this beforehand, there's no way you could know that; if you skip the "having a chat" section of sex prep and hope that these things will just flow from one brain to the other via ESP and your interaction will magically turn out blissfully, it's entirely likely that what you see as a non-aggressive move in your mating dance will prompt a massive fucking freak out on her part. <br />
<br />
So if you make a habit of jizzing on unconscious people without asking prior permission, you're going to get a variety of different responses, ranging from "mmm, crusty face" to "what the bastarding motherFUCK do you think you're doing" via unintelligible weeping, and probably a good few more.<br />
<br />
But even if you do obtain permission first, you are still committing an assault: the person you plan to spunk on will be asleep at the time of the spunking, and sleeping people cannot give consent.<br />
<br />
Some people like being woken up by someone going down on them. Some people also like being hit on the butt with a spanking paddle. Because our collective attitudes to non-sexual violence are slightly less fucked up than our attitudes to sexual violence (and because 'enjoying pain' is a minority condition, whereas 'enjoying sex' is erroneously assumed to be universal) it's fairly uncontroversial to say that hitting someone on the butt with a weapon <i>is an actual crime</i> unless the person you're hitting says something as unambiguous as "please hit me on the butt with this spanking paddle".<br />
<br />
And the point is that exactly the same thing is true of sex.<br />
<br />
Keeping in mind the fact that having sex with someone is <i>an actual crime</i> unless they unambiguously communicate something along the lines of "I would very much like to have sex with you right now, please" is the only way to avoid that infamous Grey Area.<br />
<br />
The thing about sexual contact with unconscious people is that by definition there is no way to make it consensual: they're asleep. They can't consent, because they also can't withhold consent, because they can't communicate anything, <i>because they're fucking asleep</i>. So even if someone says, "I would very much like you to wake me up by putting your tongue on my genitals tomorrow morning, please!", when you put your tongue on their unconscious body you are still committing an assault. Even if they wake up all breathy and orgasmic and thank you profusely for rocking their world, baby, all the stuff that happened when they were unconscious? Still an assault.<br />
<br />
Even if they asked you to do it, they might wake up freaked out or pissed off or disgusted or just realising that they didn't enjoy it as much as they expected to, and you need to be prepared for that. You need to be ready to stop at the drop of a hat with no warning and no recriminations. Not sulk because "but you <i>told</i> me to!".<br />
<br />
The conclusion isn't "don't do it". The conclusion is "if someone asks you to do it, talk about it, a lot, for the love of all that is holy, and be even more aware of consent issues than you usually should be". <br />
<br />
I'm going on about this at such length because I worry about the exact opposite of the argument I spoke about in the last post - <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Some people get awfully nervous when you describe transgressions like
that as "sexual assault", despite the fact that the events meet the
dictionary definition. The argument is that if you include "lesser",
"less traumatic", "less extreme" acts within that category, people will
take the category as a whole less seriously because it's been diluted by
these things that "aren't really a big deal".</blockquote>
- instead, I worry that if we aren't crystal fucking clear that these "lesser" violations are absolutely included in the category of Sexual Assault, it's way too easy to restrict that category to an ever smaller pool. To say, "if waking someone up with a blow job is okay, then sex with unconscious people in general must be okay".<br />
<br />
And, y'know. It isn't. I'd love to believe we were all agreed that any kind of sex in the absence of an enthusiastic uncoerced YES is assault, is illegal, is <i>wrong</i>, but we don't live in that world, do we?allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-40130099111337366432015-11-16T11:00:00.000+00:002015-11-16T11:00:36.755+00:00and then he came on her back: defining sexual assault<b>Trigger warning! Rapey bad shit warning! </b><br />
<br />
So a dude and a lady are making out. Sexy times, presumably including ye olde P-in-V, are afoot. But no! The lady's dad comes home! He doesn't come into her room, but knowing he's in the house makes her uncomfortable proceeding with The Sex, so they agree to go to sleep. She does so.<br />
<br />
The dude, however, miffed that his testes are brim-full of ejaculate that has been robbed of the chance to fulfil its destiny, has a wank and comes on her back.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
A friend told me that story in the middle of a light-hearted loltastic chat about, I don't even remember, sex and some Ricky Gervais sketch and teenagerdom, I think. He told me that story as if it was part of the same world, as if it wouldn't bring the whole conversation screeching to a halt, as if it wasn't a story that hit a fun day on the head with a hammer.<br />
<br />
"And then he came on her back! Haha!"<br />
<br />
Just a punchline. Not, you know, an assault.<br />
<br />
"But she didn't mind!", he said, when I expressed mild discomfort (I was a lot less confident/willing to ruin someone's day by shouting WHAT THE ACTUAL RAPEY FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY back then). "She thought it was funny!"<br />
<br />
Oh cool, so sexual contact with unconscious people is fine as long as they can laugh about it afterwards? Good to know. Lucky that he was able to see into the future and divine that this would be her reaction, because otherwise, spunking on someone's unconscious body would kind of suggest you don't really <i>care</i> what their feelings are on the matter.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Because this has happened to me, too: I was doing the walk of shame home from some godforsaken suburb of south east London, ran my fingers through my hair, and thought, what? I'm pretty sure I haven't used hair gel since, like, 2002. Huh.<br />
<br />
I sleep the sleep of the heavily-medicated dead, so, though I'm apparently quite chatty while unconscious, I have no memories of anything that happens during snooze-time; it was only a few weeks later that the chap in question mentioned off-hand that he had in fact jizzed on my face while I was sleeping.<br />
<br />
And no, I'm not that fussed, I didn't find it traumatic. (Which isn't to say someone else in the same situation would react the same way.) But it's still sexual assault. Because of that whole unconscious-people-can't-give-consent-to-sexual-contact thing. <br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Some people get awfully nervous when you describe transgressions like that as "sexual assault", despite the fact that the events meet the dictionary definition. The argument is that if you include "lesser", "less traumatic", "less extreme" acts within that category, people will take the category as a whole less seriously because it's been diluted by these things that "aren't really a big deal".*<br />
<br />
This seems <i>precisely </i>backwards to me. If we don't include all acts that involve sexual contact without consent in the category, it's easy to forget that this is what matters, that this is the violation. That rape isn't only bad if your rapist also beats you. That it still counts as sexual assault whether or not you run away from the experience screaming hysterically. That the methods the assailant uses to avoid or overpower your autonomy - force, alcohol, unconsciousness - are tools to achieve their goal; their presence or absence don't affect whether or not we categorise what happened as a sexual assault.<br />
<br />
If one person spunks on another without their enthusiastic consent, that's assault, regardless of how they circumvented the lack of consent.<br />
<br />
If the person who was spunked on freaks the fuck out when they learn what happened, or shrugs, washes their hair and puts the kettle on, it's still sexual assault.<br />
<br />
The reaction of the victim isn't a factor in the definition. The method used isn't a factor in the definition. An inclusive definition of sexual assault reminds everyone that the <i>only</i> factor relevant to the definition is consent.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Apparently it is easier to accept this argument if you explain it via the medium of tea.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
* Quote marks because I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of a universally applicable hierarchy of bad things / badder things / The Worst thing. <br />
<br />
<br />allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-15626879108678805462015-09-17T15:00:00.000+01:002015-09-17T15:00:01.658+01:00Metropolis and satellite as defined by a whatsapp conversation about ball gagsI was just about to use the phrase "throwing a paddy" when, purely because I was talking to a dude from Belfast, I suddenly went had one of those <a href="http://yoisthisracist.com/">Yo Is This Racist?</a> moments.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCwkGRl203DB2sA4f8CgQ9X693rnf6ZpbYG18f4GePYtBUm1Hwmy9-e4UdMCF9P8le_P3AZX2CxlpA_Amxn-xK1D03DBx_ht-vQQZq0irRtbZLKD-n0an75wAG_vgJ6iHf9kPSwC87ccM/s1600/irish-shanty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCwkGRl203DB2sA4f8CgQ9X693rnf6ZpbYG18f4GePYtBUm1Hwmy9-e4UdMCF9P8le_P3AZX2CxlpA_Amxn-xK1D03DBx_ht-vQQZq0irRtbZLKD-n0an75wAG_vgJ6iHf9kPSwC87ccM/s320/irish-shanty.jpg" width="264" /></a></div>
<a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/paddy">Turns out, it is totally racist!</a><br />
<br />
Shocker, right?<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Late 19th century: from Paddy, associated
with obsolete paddywhack 'Irishman (given to brawling')."<span style="color: #1f497d;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So two things:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1. That is a truly fantastic way of adding linguistic insult to colonial injury. Steal someone's country, kill a bunch of its people, outlaw their language, culture, and hairstyles, make up faux scientific theories about how they're the missing link between apes and humans... and then basically accuse the entire nation of being pathologically grumpy and prone to punching.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Haha, we piss you off, and THEN we mock you for being pissed off! Gosh it's good to be the centre of the known universe."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
2. Apparently broadening one's social circle to include people you <i>haven't</i> known since you were 15 is pretty useful in the life-long project to be a bit less of a dick.</div>
allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-10955089263452401972015-09-16T12:50:00.000+01:002015-09-16T12:50:22.888+01:00OKMisogynyMy favourite moment in any instance of sexual harassment is the point where a dude turns on a dime from<br />
<br />
"I would like to place my penis inside you"<br />
<br />
and, receiving any response other than "hooray, please do so right now, right here in the supermarket car park!"<br />
<br />
says something along the lines of<br />
<br />
"BITCH PRICK-TEASE CUNT DYKE WHORE."<br />
<br />
It's one of those beautifully clear-cut, undeniable moments where you get to see a particular facet of misogyny in its purest form. It is the platonic ideal of the hatred of female sexuality, whereby women who will sleep with you are sluts, and women who will not sleep with you are bitches.<br />
<br />
Turns out if you dip a tentative toe into the murky waters of online dating, you get to see this magical moment a <i>lot</i>.<br />
<br />
Sunday morning, a chap started chatting out of the blue. All good fun. Talking to me like you would talk to a human. But then...<br />
<br />
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And there it is. "Have sex with me, you Comfortable Girl!" <lack of response, in this instance because I was talking to my sister about courgettes, like the attention-seeking prick tease that I am> "I HOPE YOU DIE WHY WON'T YOU LET ME PUT MY BONER ON YOU."</div>
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Fun fact, though: they don't expect you to talk back.</div>
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The temptation to list all the people who's swimsuit areas I've ever been invited to was overwhelming ("I am pretty and have sex and stuff! I'm not a man-hating feminist! Or, I wasn't until now") but, seriously, that is not the point here.<br />
<br />
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Man, I really <i>did</i> miss out, didn't I? His dick is like a holiday destination I'll never get to visit. It's a club, and I'm not on the list. It's every job I'll never get and every boy who didn't ask me to prom.</div>
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<br /></div>
I mean, this guy was hilarious as all get out, and I really enjoyed ripping him a new one, but for all my bravado I came home shaking and it took an hour and two cups of tea and a long talk with my SisterMumDaughterWifeHousemate about gender and abuse and misogyny and distance and why people are the fucking worst before I calmed down.<br />
<br />
She said that, for her, the misogyny was secondary; that what was happening was primarily one person so filled with anger and fear that a three minute delay in achieving gratification causes them to lash out at the nearest target. She asked what I'd call it if a woman sent me the same message.<br />
<br />
And yeah, it would be abuse, but this was a particular <i>kind</i> of abuse that calls on a long and ugly history of men attacking women for having/not having sex. You can't separate out this one instance from every other dude who's ever thrown a strop about who a lady chooses to touch with her velvet underground.<br />
<br />
("Velvet Underground" is currently competing with "Georgia O'Keefe" for the top spot in my ever-evolving list of favourite vulval ephemisms.)<br />
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One day my prince will come. And he will come angrily and prematurely, judging by this exchange.</div>
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<br />allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-32442402589347981012014-11-27T11:13:00.001+00:002014-11-27T11:13:18.059+00:00Hoseland securityFor the first time in my entire life, I actually feel financially secure. Not like the giddy spendthriftery that comes with the first student loan payment ("I can buy a DRINK! In a PUB! I don't have to smuggle in my own booze!!") or the fortnightly coming up for air when your JSA comes through or the monthly cash injection of an actual pay cheque that never lasts more than three weeks. But genuinely secure, to the extent that I'm going to put money in a savings account, like some sort of responsible person.<br />
<br />
I knew I'd reached some marker of adulthood when I realised that when my tights got ripped, I didn't have to keep them ("well, this one has a hole in the shin, so I can wear it with boots; this one has a hole in the toe, so I can tie a knot in it, it's not that uncomfortable; make do and mend, don't you know there's a war on?"). I had, finally, got to the point where I had enough confidence in my income that I believed that if I had runs in all my tights, <i>I would have enough money to buy a new pair</i>.<br />
<br />
Then I think, this is what rich people must feel like all the time!<br />
<br />
It's like when I switched meds and got the SSRI high for the first time. I felt fucking <i>invincible</i>, man; I slept for eight hours a night and woke feeling refreshed and minor hassles did not bring me to tears and gentle criticism did not instantly trigger visions of gouging a dirty great hole into my left arm. It only lasted about a month, but it was the best I've felt since I hit puberty.<br />
<br />
And that, I guess, must be what sane people feel like most of the time!<br />
<br />
Don't get me wrong, I know that mentally healthy people don't all have easy lives; I get that life isn't wall-to-wall sunshine and periwinkles for everyone who isn't me. I imagine even rich people have feelings of some sort. But there is a meaningful difference between "not having a perfect life" and "tube journey making you want to actually die".<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
But tights are really a perfect example of our disposable, oil-guzzling, decadent western lifestyle, aren't they? Usually made of synthetic fibres derived from oil; easily damaged; impossible to repair, so you just have to keep buying them, buying, buying, forever.<br />
<br />
So it was lucky that my "I can afford to buy tights!" realisation came at the same time that I read <i>Animal, Vegetable, Miracle</i> and <i>This Changes Everything</i> and started actually thinking about The Environment and that and stopped using my vegetarianism, lack of a driving license and sustainable menstruation practices as a get out of jail free card.<br />
<br />
So I can't send the tights to landfill. They're probably recyclable, but the likelihood of my finding the nearest collection point and actually delivering them before the ever-growing pile of manky old nylon drives the boyfriend to distraction is... slim.<br />
<br />
The answer, of course, is to cut old tights up into strips and knit with them.<br />
<br />
Even better, I can knit little bags to put Christmas presents in, removing the need for wrapping paper.<br />
<br />
I'm pretty sure this idea is either pure genius or utterly insane.<br />
<br />
I just hope someone stops me before I end up in a yurt woven from my own leg hair, eating nothing but wild dandelions and drinking only dew.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-79755615505823742192014-11-24T15:45:00.000+00:002014-11-24T15:45:18.388+00:00A hard day's mug<div class="tr_bq">
I have somehow ended up on the Conservative Party's mailing list.</div>
<br />
This concerns me.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCsJ18s6nZjTvLAIPVvaPk_IIFbgLo7Ird35CX7T2UY8d6aJ_am0wG6LJuEz9M_ocBzz5j4KlgLXVAe8zvrG-7WcL0vY__PNkvZaUxRThkRY6KturHEuMtm2_sADNrT06H46aylNlDfww/s1600/mug.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCsJ18s6nZjTvLAIPVvaPk_IIFbgLo7Ird35CX7T2UY8d6aJ_am0wG6LJuEz9M_ocBzz5j4KlgLXVAe8zvrG-7WcL0vY__PNkvZaUxRThkRY6KturHEuMtm2_sADNrT06H46aylNlDfww/s1600/mug.png" /></a></div>
<br />
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</div>
<br />
To reiterate: "While Labour are bankrolled by the trade unions, we rely on hardworking people like you."<br />
<br />
Okay. Trade unions aren't like gigantic piggy banks, though, are they? Their money comes from members' subscriptions, members who are... "hard working people", like me, actually. And don't think I didn't notice your sneaky use of the phrase "bankrolled", implying that Labour and the unions are <i>rolling</i> in money. You can try and deflect it all you like, but you're still the fucking Tory party. Pointing at someone else and calling them rich does not change that.<br />
<br />
And claiming that the Conservative Party is funded (exclusively, by implication) by "hardworking people like [me]"? Seriously?<br />
<br />
It took me two minutes on google to find out that<br />
<br />
<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.3999996185303px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.5em;">
In the first decade of the 21st century, half the party's funding came from a cluster of just fifty "donor groups", and a third of it from only fifteen. In the year after the 2010 general election, <b>half the Tories' funding came from the financial secto</b>r.<span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></blockquote>
<blockquote style="background-color: white; color: #252525; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22.3999996185303px; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-top: 0.5em;">
For 2013, the Conservative Party had an income of <b>£25.4 million, of which £749,000 came from membership subscriptions</b>. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Party_(UK)#Funding">Source: Wikipedia, of course!</a>)</blockquote>
<br />
And thirty seconds on a calculator to figure out that "hardworking people like me" are providing a whole 2.9% of the party's income. Fair enough, though; it must be hard to twist "we are funded by the financial sector. Yes, by bankers. Who are our current folk devil, for good reason." into a cheery invitation to buy a mug.<br />
<br />
Fun as this was, I really don't need bullshit missives from David Cameron gumming up my inbox on a daily basis, so I shall send the above back to him, unsubscribe, and brew myself up a cup of proletarian tea in a mug that does not taste of lies and the destruction of the NHS and pure, pure evil.<br />
<br />
Mmm, tea.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-40642439232017549202014-11-06T13:50:00.002+00:002014-11-06T13:54:10.583+00:00Meet my new husband<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I am an American man, and I have decided to boycott American women. In a nutshell, American women are the most likely to cheat on you, to divorce you, to get fat, to steal half of your money in the divorce courts, don’t know how to cook or clean, don’t want to have children, etc. [Damn, that is a pretty big nutshell. ~ Ed.] Therefore, what intelligent man would want to get involved with American women?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
American women are generally immature, selfish, extremely arrogant and self-centered, mentally unstable, irresponsible, and highly unchaste. The behavior of most American women is utterly disgusting, to say the least.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This blog is my attempt to explain why I feel American women are inferior to foreign women (non-American women), and why American men should boycott American women, and date/marry only foreign (non-American) women.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
BOYCOTT AMERICAN WOMEN!</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
Such was the strident call to arms left by An American Man disgusted by American Women, on a <a href="http://oldjawjaw.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-capitalist-patriarchal-anti-vagina.html">blog post predominantly about the bacterial inhabitants of my vagina</a>.<br />
<br />
I'm curious: does he think I'm an American Woman (GET AWAY FROM MEE-HEE, as Lenny Kravitz would say, before he became a fashion designer in the Hunger Games and approximately 900% more cool) and is therefore coming to tell me what an immature, selfish, arrogant, self-centred, mentally unstable, irresponsible and highly unchaste woman I am, by virtue of the bacterial inhabitants of my vagina?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://heather-graham.org/photos/albums/other-work/video_lenny-kravitz_american-woman/lenny-kravitz_american-woman_086.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://heather-graham.org/photos/albums/other-work/video_lenny-kravitz_american-woman/lenny-kravitz_american-woman_086.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">ARTIST'S IMPRESSION: why would any intelligent man want to get involved with this cheaty divorcing fatty half money stealing uncooker or cleaner? WHY, GOD, WHY?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Is he aware that I am an English woman, and therefore within his Foreign Women Group, and therefore asking me to join his valiant crusade against American Women? (This would be difficult: boycotts rarely work unless you tell the people you're boycotting a) that you're boycotting them, and b) why. I am friends with around ten American Women on Facebook, so could inform them by a handy group email that I am Boycotting them because of their immaturity, selfishness, etc, but there are several million <i>other</i> American Women who <i>wouldn't know</i> that I was deliberately choosing not to date them. Perhaps some sort of nationwide poster campaign? Or, hey, I know! I could trawl the internet for blogs that are probably written by American Women, and post my manifesto in their comments section, for no real reason! YES!)<br />
<br />
Or... given that I am, by his rules, a Foreign Woman, could this possibly be a marriage proposal?<br />
<br />
I'll be over here, in Foreign, pulling petals off daisies and hoping that he faxes me a big fat blood diamond.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-10344386768759276672014-10-30T13:56:00.001+00:002014-10-30T13:56:27.178+00:00The capitalist-patriarchal anti-vagina complex: on feminine freshness spraysOnce, years ago, a guy drunkenly asked me about the relationship between sexism and capitalism. (My reputation for being fun at parties, clearly, precedes me!) I'd just finished Lindsay German's <i>Sex, Class and Socialism</i>, so briefly outlined concepts like middle class women as a reserve army of labour (who can be encouraged into factories when lots of workers are needed, like during WW2, before everyone suddenly remembers that actually biology dictates that they should be in the kitchen hoovering up spilt fake-baby-milk-powder, like in the 1950s).<br />
<br />
What I really should have said, though, was: Femfresh. That one product is the best example of how capitalism and sexism work together in perfect harmony to make money out of exploiting female insecurities created by sexism.<br />
<br />
Femfresh's argument is: "Your vagina smells GROSS! Everyone around you is secretly thinking, my GOD, that vagina smells SO MUCH LIKE A VAGINA, because your vagina smell is SO STRONG that it can penetrate three layers of clothing, and possibly walls too - which is why your neighbours hate you! You'd better spray our fabulous vagina deodorant all over your vagina to stop passing strangers passing out from the toxic vagina fumes."<br />
<br />
As a marketing strategy, it's fucking genius: firstly, harness the widespread cultural belief that vaginas smell bad. Second, convince the vagina-enabled that the only possible solution to this infernal stench is to use your product. Thirdly, cackle madly with evil-genius glee at the fact that your product will in fact <i>make the normal smell into a bad smell</i>, ensuring that your customers are locked in to a never-ending arms race of vagina fumigation, for the rest of time.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Nine years ago, I came home one day to find that the entire house stank to high heaven. My housemates and I ransacked the place, trying to figure out where it was coming from - was it the mouldy yoghurt in the fridge? The sanitary towels in the bathroom bin? Had Mrs Next Door turned her house into a pop-up slaughterhouse and forgotten to tell us?<br />
<br />
Turns out it was a dead rat decomposing under my floorboards. Over the next few weeks I had the chance to get intimately familiar with the smell, as the estate agents outdid their usual uselessness by dealing with the problem by <i>sending us an air freshener</i>. Super: now my bedroom smells of sickly-sweet vomitous pink chemicals, as well as rotting flesh! What joy!<br />
<br />
So when I got a similar whiff the other week, there was no mistaking it. Somewhere, something had died, and the odour of its decomposing cadaver was permeating the flat. I hunted high and I hunted low; I sniffed into cupboards and behind appliances; I considered training the cat as a corpse-hunter. It took a couple of hours of this incredibly gross Easter egg hunt for me to realise that the smell seemed to be following me around.<br />
<br />
And <i>that</i>, my friends, is the story of my first encounter with the exciting condition known as bacterial vaginosis.<br />
<br />
Too much information, you say? Well: I say this is <i>just enough</i> information to make it entirely clear why using "feminine freshness sprays" is a ridiculously bad idea.<br />
<br />
As we learned from <i>Even Cowgirls Get The Blues</i>, the vagina is a self-cleaning organ. That's what its usual clear discharge is for. If you mess with its very precise internal balance of microbes (penicillin was my downfall) or increase its pH by using soap or feminine fucking freshness sprays, things go wrong. Good bacteria get crowded out by bad bacteria. And bad bacteria? In this instance, they <i>smell like something has crawled up your cunt and died.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
The point is that if you think your snatch smells bad, go to a damn doctor. Go to your local sexual health clinic to reassure yourself that you don't have AIDS, or syphilis, and to load up on free condoms. (I'm told the Soho clinic is very groovy.) If it does smell bad, that's a sign there's something wrong, and the correct course of action is to ask a vag-specialist: not to smother it in glorified air freshener.<br />
<i><br /></i>
...<br />
<br />
I'm sure you'll be relieved to hear that I'm better now. My lady garden does not smell of lemon thyme and rainbows, nor does it smell like a rat turning itself back into its constituent parts: it smells like a vagina.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-33382709661194154962014-09-02T10:58:00.000+01:002014-09-02T10:58:34.627+01:00Alias nothingWeird things that happen when you rewatch Alias for the first time in five years:<br />
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1. OH GOOD GOD THE CULTURAL DRAG IS FUCKING UNBEARABLE. Nope, dressing up as a geisha or an Indian lady is really, really not the same as doing your sneaky spy biz disguised as a maid or a soldier or a hot girl. Other people's cultures: not your fancy dress.<br />
<br />
2. Speaking of Hot Girl, good grief there is a whole lot of pandering to the male gaze going on. Are you aware that Jennifer Garner has breasts? She does! Two of them, right there on her upper chest! Barely covered with a filmy layer of nothing! Let's take a long, slow, camera-trawl over them, taking in some stomach and butt and legs for good measure.<br />
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"The key to doing this well," Sydney informs Marshall, is to "be inconspicuous". And what's more inconspicuous than a skin tight rubber mini dress?<br />
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I mean, I get that there is more than one way to be inconspicuous, and that dulling evil doers' suspicions by hypnotising them with your tits before kicking them in the head and stealing their microwave bomb laser could be construed as a quasi-feminist girl power kind of dynamic, but the entirely gratuitous "HEY LOOK BOOBS!" shots that are apparently obligatory every time she changes outfit (ie. six or seven times per episode) take the shine off this message of empowerment somewhat.<br />
<br />
3. Thinking about it, the scenes where she's at home, having discarded all aliases and disguise, she's usually dressed in jeans, no apparent make up, no "FOLLOW THE BOOBS" camera work: the implication being that this is Sydney in her natural state. This posits femininity as performance, inherently artificial, and used to deceive and befuddle men - which is troublesome enough. But it also implies that the other cultures she plunders for her dressing up box are equally artificial, whereas early 21st century urban middle class life is neutral, default humanity.<br />
<br />
4. At the same time that I was coasting through season three, I was reading up about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra">MKUltra </a>and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_ARTICHOKE">Project Artichoke</a>, and the roads that led to Guantanamo. The cognitive dissonance between "the CIA are wackily, bizarrely, and yet grindingly prosaically evil" and "the CIA are our only defence against cartoon villains with nukes designed by a 15th century prophet, go team USA!" is kind of odd.<br />
<br />
5. The phones look so <i>quaint</i>.<br />
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<br />allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-22784698970378131702014-08-19T10:44:00.000+01:002014-08-19T11:06:19.775+01:00Chastity: the new rape defenceAnd the award for Today's Most Hilarious Troll goes to...<br />
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<br />
THIS GUY!<br />
<br />
I'm glad he's called Larry. I've never met a Larry I didn't want to avoid the heck out of.<br />
<br />
So, a quick recap: a 17 year old girl became pregnant as a result of rape. When she discovered this, she became suicidal, and requested an abortion. Too bad for her, she was in Ireland, and didn't have a visa to travel to England, so her only option was to become an unwilling guinea pig for the shiny new Protection of Life During Pregnancy, If Two Psychiatrists And An Obstetrician Agree That You're Going To Be Really Very Dead If You Carry On Being Pregnant, Maybe, <i>Maybe</i>, We'll Let You Make A Decision Regarding Your Own Uterus Act.<br />
<br />
So the psychiatrists supported her claim, while the obstetrician - you know, the one whose job <i>isn't</i> assessing people's psychological health - ruled against.<br />
<br />
In utter desperation, she went on hunger strike.<br />
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[She] believes that the government deliberately delayed her
case – both through the state’s decision to ignore psychiatric experts and via
her inability to travel because of her legal status – so that she would have to
carry the pregnancy at least through the fetus’s viability. After going on a
hunger strike, she was forced to undergo a caesarean section at just 25 weeks
into her pregnancy.<span style="background-color: transparent;"> </span></div>
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That’s 17 full weeks after she first sought help.</div>
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~<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/18/pregnant-suicidal-victim-ireland-abortion-law">Jessica Valenti in The Guardian</a><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
She first requested an abortion at eight weeks, by the way.<br />
<br />
You know what, that is unbelievably fucking depressing. And infuriating. And heart breaking. We need a break: let's generate an artist's representation of what "Larry" looks like.<br />
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Eurgh, <i>Larry</i>.</div>
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So in response to this case, Larry thinks we should focus less on the desirability of killing babies, and more on the virtues of chastity.</div>
<br />
Chastity does not actually mean never having sex. That would be celibacy. <i>Chastity</i> means having the appropriate amount of sex for your circumstances, as defined by the baby Jesus: it includes nuns and single people saying no to nookie, but also honeymooners fucking like bunnies. So presumably Larry isn't aware of the hundreds of married women who contact <a href="http://www.abortionsupport.org.uk/">ASN</a> each year.<br />
<br />
But bringing up the "don't have sex unless you're prepared to have a baby!" argument - which is gross at the best of times - in a case where <i>the woman is pregnant as a result of rape</i>, is just mind-blowingly cruel.<br />
<br />
"Sorry love - you played by The Chastity Rules, but your rapist didn't, and you know who should pay the price for that? Yes! It's you! When life gives you lemons, the Irish government gives you major surgery against your will!"allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-37439919263377262762014-08-14T10:53:00.001+01:002014-08-14T10:53:46.868+01:00An arm through a doorwayThat thing men do when they insist on holding the door open for you, even when you both got there at the exact same time, and the door is opening towards you, so it would be much easier for you to hold it for them to go through.<br />
<br />
Firstly, it's annoying, in a basic "what, my spindly lady arms will snap if I open a door for myself?" kind of way.<br />
<br />
Secondly, it's annoying on a more complex, "I am being chivalrous and <i>demand</i> that you accept my chivalry, or I will castigate you as ungrateful, unfeminine, and out to symbolically castrate me" level.<br />
<br />
Thirdly, it's actually kind of invasive: unless it's a very wide doorway, you're basically forced to slide your body incredibly close to his, hoping that he won't take advantage of the configuration of your two corporeal forms to grope you or grapple you or press his wang into your hip on your way past.<br />
<br />
It's one of those moments where you see so clearly that this system of social relations that makes life so difficult for women is not perpetrated exclusively by moustache-twirling patriarchal villains, but, sometimes, by individual men who think they're doing a nice thing. Who can't step out of their own experience for thirty seconds to understand what an interaction looks like from someone else's point of view. Who don't deal with the daily encounter with <a href="http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/">Schrödinger’s Rapist</a>, and don't realise that women do.<br />
<br />
This is one of bell hooks' many vital concepts: that those on the margins must understand the rules of those in the centre, but those in the centre can live in total ignorance of what life is like on the margins. I understand that every guy who's ever held a door for me is not trying to piss me off or violate my personal space, either to enjoy the exercise of his tiny little power, or to remind me of my subordinate place in The Grand Pecking Order Of Oppression. But he doesn't know that this is exactly the impact it has on me.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-4559521095467486592014-08-01T11:40:00.000+01:002014-08-01T11:40:21.910+01:00Feral Youth: bootstrapping for beginnersI've just finished <i><a href="http://pollycourtney.com/books/feral-youth/">Feral Youth</a> </i>- and loved it, mostly - but while the story was engaging, its overall message troubles me.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.thesprout.co.uk/img/fullsize/photo15907.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.thesprout.co.uk/img/fullsize/photo15907.jpg" height="242" width="320" /></a>The protagonist is Alesha, a 15 year old mixed race girl living on an estate in Peckham. She's lost touch with her mum (and has never met her dad), and is living in her friend's great-grandma's flat. In the first chapter, she gets permanently excluded from school for assaulting a girl who's affiliated with a rival gang. The book follows her attempts to hold on to family, money, a floor to sleep on.<br />
<br />
Luckily she has a saviour in the form of her lovely white middle class ex piano teacher. It was these passages that struck an uncomfortable note, for me: Miss Merfield is basically always right, always knows best, and will always save Alesha from whatever scrape she's got into this time. As the book goes on, it becomes clear that Miss Merfield will also save Alesha from her entire life.<br />
<br />
The message of the book seems to be: learn to work within the system; negotiate bureaucracy at the housing office and the job centre; get a minimum wage job and hope it will lead to something better; all with the help of your white lady-knight in piano-playing armour. Relying on gangs - or even your friends - for support, employment, protection, a place to stay might be the easier option, but it is morally wrong and will lead to deserved disaster in the end. Don't, whatever you do, try to change anything, it's too big and it will crush you.<br />
<br />
Basically, don't try to change the system, don't operate outside the system, definitely don't take a fucking big hammer to the system: just learn to work within the system. That's the only way to succeed.<br />
<br />
It's the Tory model of aspiration that revolves around trying to escape from the working class - rather than trying to improve the lot of the working class as a whole. A lucky few are allowed to do so against the odds, and held up as examples of industry and bootstrapping. <i>If they can do it, you can too; you just have to try harder. Believe in yourself.</i> Failure to escape into the well-heeled tree-lined life of East Dulwich is proof of your lack of ambition, drive, self-belief. A psychological failing, not the almost inevitable result of trying to work a system which is designed to keep you down.<br />
<br />
It is a good book. I loved the character of Alesha, I loved the window the book opened onto a world we white middle-class people so often ignore, steadfastly avoiding eye contact on buses or scurrying home to close the curtains over our barred windows in sold-off council flats. I loved that this young scarred woman of colour, living precariously on London's margins, got a voice - got to tell her story without whitewashing or intermediary. That hoods and knives and muggings and riots got put into context, not just explained away by Moral Decline or Absent Male Role Models or plain old Badness.<br />
<br />
But going through all of this to have Alesha come to the blinding realisation that <i>the middle class lifestyle is what I should aspire to!</i> and <i>if I don't succeed in life, it's because I haven't tried hard enough! </i>seems, to me, to be doing her a disservice. The world genuinely is fucked, and the odds really are stacked against people who are poor and not white and not "well-spoken". There really are more people than there are jobs, and all the positive thinking in the world won't find decent work for all of them. Even if Alesha herself manages to claw her way out of poverty by Self-Belief and Hard Work and having a posh white saviour who will teach her how to trim her personality and voice and behaviour to fit this new world - that doesn't make the system any less awful. It changes Alesha's life, which is no small thing, but it leaves hundreds of thousands of other Aleshas languishing behind her. <i>Feral Youth</i>'s philosophy offers scant hope to them.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-90049666178403689382014-08-01T09:47:00.001+01:002014-08-01T09:47:51.160+01:00Man Trousers.Weird places I have celebrated my birthday over the years:<br />
<br />
1994, age 8: Netley Marsh Steam Fair<br />
2002, age 16: Stay Beautiful (in retrospect, my 21 year old not-boyfriend getting 'Barely Legal' dedicated to me was maybe a bit creepy)<br />
2007, age 21: Tottenham Job Centre (aka The Day I Memorised My National Insurance Number, due to having to write it out no fewer than 23 times in a two hour appointment)<br />
2014, age 28: Wood Green.<br />
<br />
You may laugh, but I stand by my choice of birthday activities. I have been trying to steal Straight Best Friend's trousers for years now, ever since I hemmed them, tried them on to check whether they were hanging right, and discovered that man trousers are the most comfortable trousers in trouser town, make me look like Katherine Hepburn, and also have pockets as deep as the ocean. Seriously, you could fit a fucking <i>marrow</i> in those things. Sadly, it turns out that they are in fact his <i>only </i>pair of trousers, so their theft is unlikely to go unnoticed.<br />
<br />
And my birthday was the day I realised that I could sidestep this whole apparel-appropriation attempt and just... go to a man shop to buy me some man trousers.<br />
<br />
Now: due to having hippie parents (and old ones at that), a 'unique' dress sense, a big mouth and a big brain, my childhood was basically a crash course in People Are Going To Look At You Funny, It's Really Not Worth Getting Embarrassed.<br />
<br />
Furthermore, I never stop banging on about restrictive gender roles and the irrational separation of clothing, behaviours, toiletries, jobs, emotions (I could go on! If you'd like!) into MALE and FEMALE piles.<br />
<br />
And yet, wandering through the gentleman's department of Next, holding pairs of trousers up against myself to try to gauge what size I might be, and striding up to the changing rooms with several pairs slung over my arm: I got some weird looks. And I felt them.<br />
<br />
It's not like they were enough to halt my quest for the perfect man trouser. Or enough to make me lie and say I was shopping for my boyfriend/brother/whatever. But it's interesting: this is how culture gets transmitted, norms and values and what we as a collective deem it okay to do. Thou Shalt Not Kill is inscribed in statute; Thou Shalt Wear Gender-Appropriate Clothing is inscribed in sidelong looks and half-hidden sniggers.<br />
<br />
It's worth noting that I got off incredibly lightly, relatively speaking - a lady doing man stuff is always more acceptable than vice versa (because man stuff is obviously better, why wouldn't you want to move up the ladder? Whereas lady stuff is inherently inferior and a man choosing to move down the universal pecking order makes everyone nervous.). A femme-enough lady wearing dudely clothing is vaguely eccentric, but a stone butch in the same trousers is more often the subject of ridicule, disgust, and scorn. I'm thinking of Eddie Izzard shoplifting make up, not because he didn't have the money, but because he didn't fancy being outed as a transvestite at 15 in a town where the girl behind the till in the chemist knows everyone you know.<br />
<br />
So I'm not telling this story to elicit pity - wahh! It is so hard to be me, shop assistants looked askance when I bought man trousers! - but to build a bridge, I suppose. To notice those little moments in your own life which are a flickering shadow of bigger oppressions that blight other people's.<br />
<br />
I got the trousers. They are epic.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-89741925178213440922014-07-17T14:41:00.000+01:002014-07-17T14:41:00.147+01:00special and unique snowflake, level 8You've probably seen <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-28319907">this beautiful letter</a> sent by a headmaster to his pupils after taking their Key Stage 2 SATs. It's flipping heartbreaking, the fact that this guy can see through the league table box-ticking bollocks that pervades English schools, and the fact that he cared enough to send letters reminding everyone of that.<br />
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The endless grind of academic pressure was one of the things that sent me mad in the first place: SATs, mocks, coursework, GCSEs, A levels; there wasn't a single moment from 1999 to 2007 that I didn't have a constant, low-level anxiety running alongside whatever else was going on: <i>have you revised enough maybe you should get started on the reading coursework needs to be handed in next week why haven't you written that fucking essay you are going to fail everything and if you don't get top marks you are a worthless human being learn facts remember facts spew facts get marks repeat forever.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
(That and the fact that five sixths of my A-level History course was about fascism, which is just ridiculously depressing.)<br />
<br />
Sadly, my headteacher was not quite as lovely as the chap at Barrowford Primary School. Instead, she sent a letter saying:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I understand that Hannah has been feeling the pressure somewhat.</blockquote>
Which is a nice way of saying "Hannah is mad as a bag of mad things, had to be artfully arranged in the school photo to cover up her gaping wounds, and was given detention for writing 'I hate myself and want to die' in her Biology workbook". I mean, detention, for fuck's sake. If it had been detention for the deeply embarrassing decision to quote that Nirvana song with no ironic distance, I'd applaud their decision, but you'd think at least one of them would have thought, "Gee, if she tops herself, we're gonna get sued - let's send her to counselling or something".<br />
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However, wouldn't it be wonderful if she could be the first person at Heartless Bastards Secondary School to achieve all A*s in her GCSEs!</blockquote>
My point - and yes, I do have one, this isn't just a Prozac Nation pity party - is that this league table box-ticking soul-sucking individual-ignoring education culture isn't just annoying. It doesn't just churn out students who have only been taught how to absorb facts rather than think for themselves. It has the potential to kill people really, really dead.<br />
<br />
So. More Barrowfords, please.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-22869026900445194302014-07-16T14:42:00.000+01:002014-07-16T14:42:47.090+01:00Piper Chapman: a walking lesson in privilege navigationOnce again, Piper Chapman gives us all an object lesson in how <i>not</i> to navigate your own privilege.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"MY FEELINGS"</td></tr>
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When I finally succeeded in getting my Gentleman Admirer to watch Orange is the New Black, I explained that you just have to suffer through the scenes with awful Piper and her awful pie-fucking boyfriend, via the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2013/08/13/211639989/orange-creator-jenji-kohan-piper-was-my-trojan-horse">Trojan Horse</a> principle, in order to get to the good stuff.<br />
<br />
Quite often, on my first view of an episode, I'll drift off a little during Piper and/or Larry scenes: they're a good opportunity to deal with the dropped stitch, put the kettle on, check my phone. I'll keep half an ear open so I get what's going on, but neither Piper or Larry are what I'm watching for.<br />
<br />
There are times, though, when Piper's incessant, inexorable <i>Piperness</i> is used to tell an actually interesting story: a story that isn't "rich white girl goes to prison, meets people who aren't rich or white, Hilarity Ensues", but more like "rich white girl meets people whose lives break through her nigh-impenetrable self-obsession to bring a tiny glimmer of awareness of just how privileged she is in every way". Life throws you these little tests every now and again. And Piper fails them, every time.<br />
<br />
So. Spoilers! Piper's grandmother is ill, possibly dying. She applies for furlough - a temporary leave of absence from prison, granted so rarely as to be basically mythical - explaining to her counsellor that she has no real hope of getting it, but wouldn't be able to live with herself if she didn't try.<br />
<br />
She gets it. Sister Ingalls describes this as "a miracle".<br />
<br />
So here is how Piper deals with this boon she has been granted, in no small part, because of her unearned privilege as a well-off white lady:<br />
<br />
1. She tries to give it back. After hearing other inmates' stories of being denied furlough - for the deaths of their mothers, children, husbands; for the birth of grandchildren; Sophia has a particularly heartbreaking story about her father hoping to reconcile with her before he died - Piper realises that she does not deserve this good fortune. (In the words of Aleida, "Tell me how it's dark at night and cold in the snow.") So the most humane thing to do is, obviously, to give the grand prize back.<br />
<br />
Except that this solves exactly fucking nothing. Piper giving up her prize doesn't mean anyone else gets to have it. It doesn't let Anita DeMarco hold her first grandchild. It doesn't give Poussey the chance to "say the things you're supposed to say to your moms before she pass". It doesn't give Sophia the chance to hear her father say he's sorry for being a dick when she transitioned. All it would achieve is making Piper feel better about herself, which is, ultimately, the only thing Piper cares about.<br />
<br />
2. She tells everyone to stop being mean to her. Tiring of her fellow inmates muttering about her everywhere she goes, suggesting she only got furlough because she's white and middle class, or because she sucked off her counsellor, she flips out. Stands up in the dining hall and shouts that even if she's getting special treatment because of her white privilege, SHE LOVES HER GRANDMOTHER AND EVERYONE SHOULD LEAVE HER ALONE.<br />
<br />
I mean, jesus <i>fuck</i>.<br />
<br />
"My feelings! This is all about my feelings! Your feelings about entrenched, systemic racism, about the innumerable ways, from the microscopic to the life-defining, that life is made easier for white middle class people, are completely irrelevant, because you expressing your feelings about that is hurting MY FEELINGS, which, lest we ever forget this for a second, is THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS IN THE WORLD EVER. PS you can't call me a racist because I know the phrase 'white privilege'."<br />
<br />
Thank you, Piper Chapman, for giving us all a shining example, in every situation you find yourself in, of what <i>not</i> to do.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-45380011493132206822014-07-15T14:35:00.000+01:002014-07-15T14:35:00.238+01:00Haircuts and big ears: learning to STFUThis year, on Pride weekend, I celebrated my love of the Elgybeeties by having the world's most righteous haircut.<br />
<br />
They are explicitly LGBT-friendly. They have a sliding price scale where you pay what you can afford, so that even the impoverished can have queer hairdos. They have an option for you to indicate your preferred pronoun on the booking form.<br />
<br />
They are <a href="http://openbarbers.tumblr.com/">Open Barbers</a>, and they are <i>awesome</i>.<br />
<br />
You know that awkward hairdresser conversation which rarely strays beyond the officially ratified safe topics of work, holidays, and split ends? Not here. We chatted about mutual friends, sordid pasts, Orange Is The New Black (which, thinking about it, is possibly the feminist/trans/ladygay equivalent of Nice Weather We've Been Having), Irish abortion law, Belgium's haircutting equality law, and, well, my haircut, obviously.<br />
<br />
At the beginning of your appointment, you are also given the option not to chat at all.<br />
<br />
I'd been thinking a lot about counselling training and empathic listening, about how, when talking to the women who call the <a href="http://www.abortionsupport.org.uk/">Abortion Support Network</a> hotline, your politics and beliefs are instantly sidelined: they're probably what brought you to the work in the first place, but they could hardly be less relevant to the woman on the other end of the phone. Like, if the woman you're talking to refers to Londonderry, that's what you call it for the rest of the conversation. If she says she lives in Northern Ireland, or Ulster, or The Unlawfully Occuppied Six Counties And By The Way I'm Still Pissed Off About The Treaty Of 1921 - well, you'd probably shorten the latter, but you don't, ever, correct her. She has the right to define her own life. When so much agency has been stripped away from her, the last thing she needs is you taking that little bit more. Similarly, you follow her lead in referring to The Pregnancy, or The Baby, or This Fucking Alien Parasite Squatting In My Uterus. If she tells you flat out, "I am going to hell for killing this baby," this is not the time to convince her of the righteousness of the pro-choice cause. You're there for the practicalities: first and foremost, to listen to her.<br />
<br />
So during my revolutionary haircut, we were talking about the unexpected similarities between righteous barbering and volunteering for an abortion fund. Of the importance of listening to what people are actually telling you, leaving a blank slate inside yourself rather than a series of tick boxes. Monitoring your own responses so you're not giving people cues as to the "right" response, whether the question is "how long do you want your sideburns?" or "does anyone else know you're pregnant?".<br />
<br />
It's something I try to do in life, as well; while there are some non-negotiables - like, if someone starts revving up the Men Are Just More Visually Stimulated Than Women bandwagon, I'm not going to respect their right to define the world as they see fit, because they're talking untrammeled bullshit and also disrespecting <i>my</i> right to define my own reality, so fuck them - when people are talking about stuff that matters, I make a conscious effort to leave a space around what they say rather than mentally shoehorning it into the most appropriate pigeonhole and racing to give them my own interpretation of what they've just said.<br />
<br />
One of the most common ways I've screwed up around social justice stuff is in trying desperately to show how cool I am about someone's gender identity or ethnicity or whatever. "LOOK," I shout, metaphorically speaking, "I AM SO COOL ABOUT THE FACT THAT YOU ARE NOT A STRAIGHT WHITE MIDDLE CLASS CIS DUDE, LET ME SHOW YOU HOW COOL I AM." I'm learning that, sometimes, just not responding - leaving that space open for them to say more - is infinitely more valuable. Chilling the fuck out, basically. Not leaping in with what you think they mean to show how read up on The Issues you are.<br />
<br />
It's also a lot less tiring.<br />
<br />
So back to Open Barbers.<br />
<br />
They give you the haircut you actually want, rather than the one they think you should have. They give you the option to face away from the mirror while they're working. They create a sense of endless time, never making you feel like you should just cut your losses and accept a do you don't actually want rather than boring them any longer.<br />
<br />
They are awesome, and you can book your very own righteous haircut <a href="http://openbarbers.tumblr.com/">here</a>.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-10199441089758622862014-07-14T12:47:00.000+01:002014-07-14T12:47:10.142+01:00The bark on your very own crazy tree: queerness and mental illness<i>Content note: self harm, suicide, homophobia, fun shit like that. Also, if you are my mother, I would consider it a great favour if you didn't read this. Thanks!</i><br />
<br />
LGBT people are ten times as likely to try to commit suicide as cis straight people.<br />
LGBT people are three times as likely to experience anxiety disorders, and six times as likely to experience depression.<br />
<br />
<b>Up to 50% of LGBT youth will try to kill themselves.</b><br />
<br />
(Source: <a href="http://www.polarisedproject.com/about-polarised/">The Polarised Project</a>)<br />
<br />
I'm never sure how to think about these statistics. When I think about my colourful psychiatric history, the fact that I like to fuck girls doesn't seem particularly salient, you know? Queerness is about sex and love and life and joy; throwing 100 painkillers down your gullet in your empty teenage bedroom is about the opposite of all of those things.<br />
<br />
When I was digging holes in my left arm back in the heady days of 2002, I wasn't thinking, "Gee, I am so sad because the kids in year 8 called me a dyke outside Maths, also because I do not see positive representations of queers on TV and because people who are into sleeping with people of the same gender face workplace discrimination".<br />
<br />
But getting to the point where you want to throw 100 painkillers down your gullet in the first place is, in part, about having been treated like a freak your entire life; about never fitting in and losing your ability to hope for a future which will let you breathe.<br />
<br />
(Yeah. I know. Whiny teenager alert. This shit was over a decade ago, but I can think myself back there like it was yesterday.)<br />
<br />
My comparatively easy ride is unsurprising given that I grew up in a nice white middle class home with parents who were pretty much unfazed at having produced two queer daughters. Any oppression is easier to deal with in isolation: this is the basic point of that impenetrable academe-speak "intersectionality", yes? No one told me I was going to hell for wanking over Chloë Sevigny; I wasn't thrown out of the family home for "losing" my "virginity"* with a girl long before I met my first boner. The abuse I got was from people I hated anyway: it still takes a toll, but it doesn't gut you like abuse from people who are supposed to love you.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Just because I hate that phrase and the entire worldview it encompasses</span><br />
<br />
I think I just get nervous when people attribute mental illness to social discrimination because it seems so pat, so easy: pump stigma in, mental illness comes out. I've lived through both, and I know it is never that simple.<br />
<br />
But then, when you take a step back, stop minutely examining the bark on your own particular crazy tree, and get a look at the whole gigantic New Forest of not-straight people who are so miserable they want to die: yeah, maybe there's a link. Not being straight doesn't inexorably lead to discrimination, unemployment, homelessness, drug use, survival sex work, but there is a correlation; these life experiences don't <i>cause</i> mental illness, because mental illness is a lot more fucking complicated than that, but they can be part of the oh-so-fabulous cocktail that sends someone down their own, very specific, rabbit hole.<br />
<br />
In 2004, maybe, or 2005, a 15 year old boy came to stay with us for a week because his parents had kicked him out when they found out he was gay. I made him dinner, baked a cake, watched shit tv with him. It was one of those houses where there's always someone new on the sofa, impromtu parties starting on Friday night and ending a few days later when the drugs run out or the last person has to go to a lecture or sign on. So it wasn't a big deal to give him a roof over his head for a while, but I think back now and wonder what he would have done if he hadn't happened to have bumped into my housemate in Heaven that night; how many other kids end up sleeping rough because they didn't have a friend who could offer.<br />
<br />
I took myself on a date to see <i>Kate Bornstein Is A Queer and Pleasant Danger</i> at the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival a few months back. I arrived early, sat in the foyer, and watched people stream through; I couldn't put my finger on what it was - I still can't define it, really - but it felt so fucking good, after living in an increasingly straight milieu for longer than I want to think about, to be around the homo multitudes again.<br />
<br />
Because being queer isn't just about fucking at all. I was going to say "How nice it would be if it was" - if it <i>didn't</i> come with a massively increased chance of depression and anxiety and trying to make yourself dead - but there is a positive side. That part of the "community" that actually acts like a community, that cares at least as much about homeless kids as marriage equality, that reminds us that the Q can stand for Questioning and prods us not to stop at questioning the reductive maths of boy + girl.<br />
<br />
Heteronormativity may well have played its part in dragging me down, but it's my eccentrically, brilliantly unheteronormative friends who help me back up again every time.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-9308989125184776482014-05-28T08:49:00.003+01:002014-05-28T08:49:39.134+01:00Disabled DinosaursIf you're looking for a quick and easy way to explain the social model of disability, I have come to tell you that the resource you need is:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.sadanduseless.com/2014/02/t-rex-failing-at-life/">T-Rex Failing At Life</a>.<br />
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The social model of disability states that individuals are not disabled by their bodies' defective nature (ie. T-Rex's arm being too short to reach his mouth) but by society's refusal to make appliances, buildings, furniture, streets (and so on ad infinitum) that can be used by people with all sorts of bodies. In this instance, there's a nice simple solution: longer lollipop sticks. Or for a more widely applicable solution, something akin to those grabber devices favoured by litter pickers and old ladies who don't bend as much as they used to.<br />
<br />
Going back to humans for a minute, the social model says that someone who uses a wheelchair to move around is disabled not by the fact that they can't walk, or by the illness or accident that caused this inability. They are disabled by the fact that so many doorways are not wide enough to let wheelchairs through. By the fact that so many buildings have steps up to the entrance. By the fact that so few tube stations have lifts, let alone full step-free access from street to platform. By the fact that the vast majority of cash machines are set at eye-level for a person who's standing up. It is the decisions made by the people who design our built environment - the priorities of society as a whole - that rob wheelchair users of their ability to participate fully in society, not the fact that they can't walk.<br />
<br />
T-Rex trying to turn off a ceiling fan, use a buffet with sneeze guard, or use a water fountain all illustrate this same principle. His arms are not the problem: the design of the equipment is the problem.<br />
<br />
And just for kicks, this series also shows how we automatically assume that a creature is male unless we're told otherwise: women are constructed as Other, different, a variation on the norm. Note how all of the T-Rexes are simply labelled 'T-Rex' - except this one:<br />
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Male T-Rex = normal; the 'male' is implicitly assumed by the creator of the image and by us, its viewers</div>
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Female T-Rex = Other.</div>
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<br />
Also in my mind all T-Rexes are French. "All Ah want to do ees brush ma teeef, Ahm so peessed oeuf weez zees tiny toofbrush. Wanquere!"</div>
allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-61575285155710664122014-04-02T09:35:00.000+01:002014-04-03T11:11:46.165+01:00Very Simple Concepts Day: Don't Get Raped!<div class="separator tr_bq" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
Welcome to Very Simple Concepts Day at the old jaw jaw: perhaps a recurring event! In this series, I retread well-covered ground, in the hopes that repeating observations that many have made before me will somehow help the forces of goodness reach critical mass and triumph over evil.</div>
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Today we will be discussing why my Facebook feed being filled up with people telling me not to get raped makes me want to pluck out my surgically-enhanced eyeballs and throw them at people who are idiots!</div>
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<br />
(That last comment is why I still get out of bed in the morning.)<br />
<br />
You know what? Fuck this. I am too <i>tired</i> to explain <a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2009/10/rape-culture-101.html">rape culture</a>, to explain that<a href="http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/meet-the-predators/"> strangers jumping out of bushes are extremely far down the list of people you need to protect yourself from</a>, especially when the entire feminist blogosphere has done such a good job of articulating this already.<br />
<br />
Instead, I propose that every time someone <a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2007/09/cosmo-reminds-ladies-its-their-job-to.html">reminds you that it is your job to avoid being raped</a>, you come back with one of the following:<br />
<blockquote>
LADIES: don't risk spending any time alone with your boyfriend, as he is statistically more likely to rape you than anyone else is! </blockquote>
<blockquote>
FELLAS: don't risk getting drunk, as you are statistically more likely to rape someone while you're under the influence of alcohol!</blockquote>
I'm sure we can come up with hundreds of these.<br />
<br />
For people who don't spend a significant portion of their free time thinking about rape culture (it is true, these people exist!), I do understand that sharing this sort of thing feels like a moral obligation - offering information about how women can protect themselves. Because the popular conception of rape is the Stranger Jumping Out Of The Bushes model, because the general public isn't aware that the rapist has a prior acquaintance with his victim in circa 80% of cases - and because of the Just World Hypothesis, whereby bad things don't happen to good people - we can convince ourselves that figuring out the rules will protect us from harm.<br />
<br />
Even if they are in the minority, stranger rapes do occur; you could argue that sharing information like this, about a specific threat, is worth it if it saves even one person from being attacked.<br />
<br />
But on a society-wide level, you have to balance the possible good of such warnings against the definite harm inflicted on women as a whole by being constantly lectured on <i>keeping themselves safe</i>, circumscribing their behaviour, tailoring their whole lives around avoiding sexual assault - all of which carries the unavoidable implication that, should you be raped, and if you failed to follow each and every one of these rules, you will be responsible for the crime committed against you.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7025879594950410143.post-84653674151586662252014-04-01T10:55:00.001+01:002014-04-01T10:55:11.569+01:00Privilege, illustrated1. A few years back I ended up in A&E with an extremely exciting heart rhythm (250 beats per minute, not that I'm bragging). I got propped up in bed with about twenty electrodes superglued all over my body, hooked up to some mightily terrifying machines monitoring every facet of my heart's function, before being taught a very simple method of halting a supraventricular tachycardia (basically, make a hamster face and pretend you're really constipated). Five hours later I was deemed fit as a fiddle and sent home.<br />
<br />
I was working for a deeply evil company at this point, which gloried in paying me as close to nothing as legally possible - so despite my weakened and freaked out condition, a taxi was not an option, and I took the tube home alone.<br />
<br />
It was only when I looked in my bathroom mirror on my return that I realised I still had every single electrode still attached, with several wires snaking over my torso. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menezes">One can literally be shot in the face on the Victoria line for less.</a> Lucky for me, I am white, and thus remain unshot in the face!<br />
<br />
2. I appreciate that this might make me sound a bit odd, but I actually quite enjoy going to the crotch rot clinic. I'm not particularly self-conscious about strangers peering up my hoo-ha; I get a silly-but-enjoyable Strong Independent Lady Taking Charge Of Her Sexuality And Reading Cosmo vibe from the whole thing; and it's always nice to get a text message informing you that you don't have chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis, herpes, or HIV. Plus: free condoms!<br />
<br />
Now: some things leave my handbag after only a short stay, some pop in and out on a regular basis, but the net flow is of things going into my handbag and never seeing the light of day again. Current contents include:<br />
- a map of Walthamstow (last used November 2013)<br />
- three lipsticks (last worn August 2013)<br />
- an unopened pack of razor blades (bought in a weak moment in January 2014)<br />
- six or seven knitting patterns (various)<br />
- two sizeable envelopes stuffed with free condoms.<br />
<br />
It's conceivable I'll transfer said prophylactics to their allotted home at some point or other, but until then, I will be prepared for al fresco fucking wherever I go.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/07/19/us-police-practices-fuel-hiv-epidemic">Lucky for me, I am cis and white, unlikely to be profiled by the police as a sex worker, and so don't have to worry that possession of condoms will be used as proof of intent to commit heinous crimes</a>!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://stjamesinfirmary.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/condom-mockup_070412.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://stjamesinfirmary.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/condom-mockup_070412.jpg" height="320" width="315" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">StJamesInfirmary.org - they are awesome, support them.</td></tr>
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This is your daily reminder that, while the world is rubbish, it is more rubbish to some people than it is to others. Which is rubbish.allamahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08866852147657326822noreply@blogger.com0