Just another false alarm...

I've long been accustomed to writing 'her' when writing about an unspecified subject in my work. For a while I went through a period of making all my unfavourable subjects male and all my favourable ones female, partly to see if anyone noticed. Admitting prejudices, I tend to be dismissive of the views of someone who continues simply to write 'he', 'him' or 'his', unless they're damn fine views otherwise (which I could appropriate for my own ends).

But using simply female pronouns doesn't seem much better. More enlightened, yes, but not satisfactory. 'His or her' is clunky, and 'they'/'them'/'their' is ungrammatical. So what's one to do? The temptation would be to create new terms for the purpose of each piece of work - 'sie' is one I've seen used by trans sites, presumably taken from German - but this is in turn alienating to the reader, and would go against my own intent to persuade. After all, a writer, even/particularly one who wants to change our normative culture, must operate within that culture's language, simply to be persuasive ('every revolutionary... is obliged to march backward into battle').

So 'she' or 'she or he' would seem to be the way to go, but the choice isn't easy, since on the one hand I might get dismissed as an overly strident feminist (fine by me, yes, but not when I want to succeed) and on the other I might get dismissed as a coward (fence-sitting doesn't do too well, either). We're too tied down we are by gender boundaries, since we can't begin to operate in mainstream discourse without using them, and without using one or the other in particular. The subjects in my head are mostly male, so they've crossed genders as soon as I put them on the page, and that's probably why I think about these things more often than most, and about twenty years too late. But that's probably not particularly normal...

I always thought the school I went to between 4 and 11 was a bit of a hippie school. In assemblies we'd sing things like 'Streets of London' and 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' (the source of my unfailing disrespect for the Beatles ever since). The principles were all pretty lefty, too, but I never before realised that some of our songs were taken direct from The Socialist Songbook!

I was singing this when I was five years old:

The ink is black, the page is white, Together we learn to read and write, to read and write...

But I didn't realise that the rest of the song was about social justice:

The schoolhouse doors were closed so tight, were closed up tight. Nine judges all that signed their names To end the years and years of shame, years of shame.

Of course, it's probably just the case that the song was used in a 'promoting multiculturalism' sort of way, but it's fun to think that whoever chose it could have been reading the same thing that gives us this:

Onward, Christian soldiers!
Duty's way is plain;
Slay your Christian neighbors,
or by them be slain.
Pulpiteers are spouting effervescent swill,
God above is calling you to rob and rape and kill,
All your acts are sanctified by the Lamb on high;
If you love the Holy Ghost, go murder, pray and die.

Primary school education was more fun in those days.

[Via Crooked Timber and Backword Dave] It's National Poetry Day today. I've been waiting for a while now to have an excuse to link to some part of a long poem called 'Curing Homosexuality' by Jim Everhard. It's not a good poem, but it is very funny, and also moving in a naïve, awkward sort of way. At this point, he's discussing how, according to psychiatrists, "everything you saymeans something else even more sinister than what you meant":

For instance, never say: "I put my umbrella in the closet and found my brother in the backyard beating the shit out of a roosterwhile looking at nude pictures of Judy Garland."

To a psychiatrist this means:

• umbrella = phallic symbol = womb = death = fear that it will rain atyour funeral and no one will come
• closet = phallic symbol = womb = mother castration = desire to work for a fast food chain = prostitution = fear of underwear
• brother = phallic symbol = sibling rivalry = castration = desire tostick your finger up your ass and smell it
• rooster = phallic symbol = cock flying = fear of Karen Black =crashing = fear of impotence = hatred of women = fear of oxygenshit = phallic symbol = fear of dirt = work = puritan work ethic =father's penis = sexual frustration = deviations = fascination withdirt = bad toilet training = sexual hostility toward pilgrims
• nude = phallic symbol = opposite sex = original sin truth = fear ofgardens = self-deception = poor sanitation habits desire fordeath and return to Earth Mother = return to disco = hatredof mother = love of analyst but always waiting for some-one to come along and say no = desire to live in ahole in the ground
• Judy Garland = phallic symbol = fear of tornadoes = love/hate ofsucking = confusion of identity = desire to have oral relations witha lap dog = necrophilia = fear of Easter bonnets = desire tobe a woman = fear of bad breath = spiritual destitution = desire to be Dr. Kinsey = existential mal-function = fear of tubas = fear of dude ranchesand desire to perform unnatural acts withMickey Rooney = fear of short, pimply people

Like a cancer, one sentence can devour your entire psyche.

My addition to the sonnet debate would be arguments in favour of 116, but I could never remember it by heart the way some say they do for other sonnets. I don't make any great artistic claims for the music I like, but if Shakespeare could be put to popular music, then it might linger a bit longer. Of course, he'd have to be translated into the right style, and since all the popular music of our time is country and western, it would have to be something like this...

Don't let me put a bottle in the way
Of fools who think alike. Love just ain't love
Which changes when a man gets old and grey
Or cracks like broken hearts that beer won't soothe:
No sir! it is a Lord-lovin' affair
That twenty hurricanes could not impair;
It is the sev'n-eleven of the night,
Whose worth's untold, although it's price is right.
Love don't groan, though sweet-tongued airs and graces
Made me moan when you'd sleeve all your aces:
Love don't change with the oil in your old truck,
But bears it out even when down on luck.
Shoot me down if I tell word of lie,
And I'll hang down my head and cry-y-y-(oh-lord).

[Via Norm] Guardian columnist Mark Murray is worrying about his son going to university:

"How will he cope with the sporty young men, the willowy young women and the politicos with their shock of hair and answers to every question? Will it make or break him? "

Willowy young women? Has he seen a British university recently? There are certainly some people who fall into the final category, but most of them aren't students...

New medical research suggests that vitamin pills may only take you closer to death. I'm not sure whether this means that my inability to remember to take them (as a vegan) is good or bad... It seems I'm screwed either way, but as with so much of medical research these days, the overall impact of conflicting evidence tends to make me, and many others I know, abandon any attempt to follow health guidelines at all. Which I'm sure isn't the result intended.

Taking a break from work, I've been reading about Iran's somewhat surprising approach towards transsexuality. While there's still huge stigma attached to it, and most get branded homosexual - sometimes leading to the death penalty - the gender reassignment procedure is becoming more accepted and receiving religious approval from, among others, Ayatollah Khomeini. There are clerics trying to show how it's consistent with Sharia law, state subsidies are sometime available for the expensive operations, and once successful the subjects will gain new birth certificates and national identity cards. (As a comparison, the birth certificate change is only coming in in Britain with the passage of the Gender Recognition Bill 2004 - a very important bill, which isn't receiving enough attention).

It's still not a great situation, though, with medical discrimination such that some male to female transsexuals have been cutting off their penises in order to receive as an emergency the surgery they can't get any other way. Also, the male dominance of Iranian society has produced the strange result that female-to-male transsexuals are much more easily accepted once operations have taken place. I certainly admire, and wonder at, anyone who would choose to become recognised as a woman in Iranian society, no matter how true it is to their real gender identity.

The main problem as I see it, though, is the illegality of homosexuality, which will almost certainly mean that some go through a very painful and lengthy procedure simply in order to avoid the death penalty for their sexuality. This in turn will make the general public more suspicious of genuine transsexuals, who will think that they are simply gay and avoiding punishment.

More needs to be done.

I don't think this particular googlebomb will work, given the low result, but here's an interesting piece of information about the British National Party.

Just a quick one - I'm going to buy a laptop (finally) in the next couple of days, and I'm finding all the possible specifications baffling. Does anyone have any recommendations as to what models are good? I need it to be Windows unfortunately, as I won't have the time to get used to a new interface, so I guess that limits it to 'least bad'...

UPDATE: Bought. Against advice (see comments), I went for the cheapest I could find, as there's been a financial mess-up. So Windows it is, and we'll see how long that lasts me. Thanks to all.

And, having only briefly returned, I'm away now for a week on holiday in Devon. Supposedly a chance for me to read large amounts of Hegel and Marx; in reality a chance to pretend I can surf while avoiding jellyfish the size of Milton Keynes and trying not to tan.

Then it's back to Oxford, where boredom should keep me updating regularly until things get back into full swing.

John B points us in the direction of a newer Devil's Dictionary, 'YouWhat?', which is so far aiming its attacks at corporate speak and trades unions for the main part. From there:

"Flat corporate structure: An excuse for management to pay themselves an obscene amount of money whilst leaving everybody else at the level of toilet cleaner with no prospect of ever raising themselves up "

And on a political note:

"Aristocracy: A dwindling number of bitter individuals who haven't yet come to terms with the fact that they stopped exisiting the moment universal suffrage was introduced"

Not much there yet, but it looks like it could be quite fun, and invites contributors with things to rant about.

Michael Brooke links to an Independent piece about the increasingly hardcore nature of French cinema. Whether, as he argues, it's a recent phenomenon or not, the openmindedness towards portraying great and often sexual violence is something I've noticed too. Yet the audiences for these films are usually pretty self-selective, anyway. The only place you can see pieces like A Ma Soeur, Seul Contre Tous or Dans Ma Peau is in an independent cinema, where if you go regularly you go almost expecting to see large amounts of violence and films that no one but the most pretentious could pretend to understand anyway.

I once went to a film at the Edinburgh festival where two of the reels had got swapped by mistake, so we saw it in the order '1, 4, 3, 2' . Yet not a single person walked out and we all happily clapped the (admittedly very boring) film at the end before the Festival's director came onstage to apologise. Independent film audiences can't be going to the cinema to get a story, since as often as not the films are non-linear flashes of blurred memories and waking dreams, so something else has to go in its place, and increasingly directors seem to be opting for 'violence = message/psyche exploration' tactics, which frequently don't work, when the only point to the violence is to test whether the audience can handle it.

A Ma Soeur, for example, has been advertised as a study in child sexuality, but is in reality mostly an exercise in boredom until the final baseball-bat murder and rape scene, where a stranger comes from out of the blue to put a gruesome end to their mundanely awful holiday. But who cares? Pointless violence may often enter unexpectedly into our private lives, but in a film I'd still (perhaps naively) expect it to be related in some way to some sort of purpose.

The Independent article quotes Noé, the director of Seul Contre Tous (genuinely worthwhile, and reviewed at more length by Michael here) saying: "I'm happy some people walk out during my film. It makes the ones who stay feel strong." Well, not so much strong as completely desensitised. I was more amused than anything else when half the audience progressively walked out of the Film Festival showing of Dans Ma Peau, since the film happily advertises itself as a graphic study in self-harm, so really you get what you came in for. There's nothing big or moral in leaving something like that, yet these people held their heads up as if they were trying to make a statement by their exit. The only statement I could make about this film, though, is that it's unrealistic and sensationalist, something which you have to sit out the whole film to understand, since the woman involved goes from an accidental gash on her leg to eating slices of her own skin within the space of three days. The speed of this tests any idea that the film is investigating the mentality of the self-harmer, as sensationalism overtakes everything else.

Eventually these violent films just become another notch under the belt. "You're not a proper indie film goer if you haven't added incestual rape, flesh mutilation and increasingly bizarre methods of murder to your list of ones to watch!" Sometimes I wonder if it's really worth sitting through all the rubbish just for a few good moments where you find something truly worthwhile. But then, what else would I do with a Sunday afternoon in the rain?

[From 365gay.com]

Statistics released by the state of Oregon show that same-sex couples who married earlier this year in Portland are older and better educated than most newlyweds... The Oregon Center for Health Statistics studied the 2,968 same-sex marriages and compared them with the 11,004 marriages between a man and a woman that took place between January and June, when gay marriages were stopped.

• The researchers found that three-quarters of the gay and lesbian couples had at least one college-educated partner - more than twice the rate among heterosexual couples.
• Same-sex couples on average, married at age 42 while most opposite-sex married while in their early 30s.
• In addition, in about half of the heterosexual marriages at least one partner had been married before. In a third of the cases, both the man and woman had been in previous marriages.
• The study also found that in 43 percent of the marriages between lesbians, at least one of the women had been married to a man. In 27 percent of the marriages between gay men, at least one of the men had been married to a woman. About 7 percent of the same-sex weddings were between partners who both had been married.

The age thing isn't particularly interesting, since as a new phenomenon, gay marriage will naturally attract older people who could not marry before (or strange marrying fanatics who thought they'd make do with a straight partner in the meantime, by the look of the statistics).

But is gay marriage purely for the educated establishment types? If so, it perhaps supports the more general idea that marriage is for the most part based on cold economic calculation – the more educated tend to be wealthier and have more property to protect through marriage than others - while its greater predominance among the straight population can be put down to mere cultural pressure.

So if gay marriage is allowed in more places and this trend continues, it might lead more people to question why they want to get married, and whether they could achieve the economic aims of marriage by other means. It might even undermine the idea that financial benefits should ever be attached to any sort of romantic relationship. This in turn would help us achieve the aim only liberals (of any sexuality) have ever denied we had; that is, the total destruction of the institution of marriage. Excellent.

[Via Pansexual Sodomite] A group in America is trying to introduce a bill which would make male circumcision a crime:

“We have a blatantly discriminatory circumcision policy in this country,” said Hess. “Doctors and mohels who circumcise girls are thrown into prison, but if those same doctors and mohels circumcise boys, they are rewarded with a paycheck – even though circumcision impairs sexual function in both genders.”

There seems to be plenty of evidence to suggest that circumcised men aren't generally hindered in their sexual functioning, and it seems quite strange to argue, as the group's FAQ does, that circumcised men regularly suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Also, while in most respects female and male circumcision are very similar, the key difference has to be that female circumcision is usually very damaging, while male circumcision is only sometimes so.

However, none of this has ever come directly within my experience. I don't know what proportion of the men I know are circumcised, nor how it affects them. If it is generally harmless and the reasons for performing it are mostly cultural, there seem to be no obvious reasons to argue against it, since to ban it would be to eliminate certain group rights for those to whom it is an important cultural or religious symbol. If sufficient information is provided, then people can make their own choices.

What I would be in favour of is just that, though - allowing men, not parents, to make their own choice. I doubt a bill banning male circumcision until the age of 16 or so would be ridiculed in quite the same way this one has been. In this country you can't get a tattoo until you're 18, and since circumcision is similarly permanent, it should probably have similar restrictions. That is, unless we remove all body modification restrictions, which could be quite fun.