If 'doms, why not dams?

It's about twenty to four on a Sunday afternoon. Having spent an hour in Boots frantically but unsuccessfully searching for what I need, I am now in my local pharmacy. This pharmacy stocks literally every product under the sun and is open seven days a week till ten p.m. Do you have a minor skin ailment on the underside of your left knee-cap at certain times during the month? This pharmacy has a multitude of creams and lotions for it. Do you find that your child resolutely only speaks German whenever your second cousin comes round? The person behind the counter will prescribe you something, trust me. I'm taking my time, sidling around the shop, looking extremely casually through every shelf. Then I find what I'm looking for. The contraception section has, very cunningly, or so I think, been shelved next to the oral hygiene section. 'Aha!' I say to myself (silently)'. Someone here has a warped sense of humour, and has slid the dental dams in next to the condoms, but on the oral shelf. Brilliant.

But no such luck. Condoms and lube give way to dental floss and toothbrushes. Not a sneakily placed packet of dental dams in sight. After looking intently at hairbrushes for at least five minutes to placate the multitude of people in the shop judging me during my contraception contemplation, I finally pluck up the courage to talk to the lady behind the counter.

'Excuse me', I shout awkwardly, 'do you stock dental dams?' Unfortunately the operative 'dental dams' bit of the sentence comes out in a strangled whisper so I have to repeat it several times, like, 'what?', 'dental dams', 'what?', 'dental dams?', what??' DENTAL DAMS??!'. It's a bit like that scene in every sketch show where the protagonist of the sketch deliberately doesn't hear what someone is quite obviously saying in order to embarrass and frustrate them. The woman stares at me like I'm a bleeding idiot and gets another chemist out from behind the medicines section to deal with me.

So I have to ask again: 'do you stock any dental dams?'
'Dental floss?' he asks, pointing to the dental floss in case I am unclear on what it is.
'No, dental dams,' I reiterate.
'What is it for?' he asks me, and at this point the feminist conviction that I should be completely comfortable talking to anyone and everyone about sex and sexuality is starting to lose out in my mind against the instinct to run away and forget this ever happened.
Like an immature thirteen year old, I mutter, 'for contraception'. (Even though strictly speaking they are not contraceptive but prophylactic, I know. Maybe this is where I went wrong.)

'Contraceptive pill?' he asks.
'No, dental dam.'

Hey baby, I've got us a little something for later

Firstly, I'm not exaggerating this conversation. It genuinely took place without recourse to verbs or adjectives. Also, my simple request has now caused enough consternation that the chemist gets another chemist out from the medicines section, and together they start debating the merits of dental floss as contraception in a low whisper that somehow manages to highlight to me the flashing 'DOC MARTINS WEARING DYKE REQUESTS PERVERSE ORAL SEX PROTECTION MECHANISM' sign above my head. As if I hadn't noticed it the minute I started talking about dental dams in public. The chemists go back behind the counter and beckon me to follow them to a computer upon which they are presumably looking up what a dental dam is. They're looking at the computer and I'm on the other side. The kinds of websites that might be coming up are running through my mind and I'm trying desperately to keep a straight face as if this is completely routine and normal.

After about five minutes the first chemist looks up and says, 'dental...can you spell it?'

'D, E, N, T, A, L, you know, like dental, that well known thing that you stock many products for, D, A, M. Like a dam. D for dog, A for apple, M for Mother. For contraception.' An eternity seems to go by as the chemists stare at the screen. I can't tell whether I'm making it up but the one on the left seems to be trying not to laugh. I imagine them looking at pornographic pictures of straight-man's-lesbians using dental dams in various ways upon each other. I'm trying not to laugh/cry in sheer horror at a situation in which asking for what should be a pretty routine prophylactic turns into the equivalent of me walking into a shop full of people and shouting 'I AM A LESBIAN! SHOULD I GET INTO A SEXUAL SITUATION I WOULD LIKE TO PROTECT MYSELF AND OTHERS FROM ORALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES! PLEASE ENABLE ME TO DO THIS! OH BY THE WAY I AM A LESBIAN!'

Anyway in the end the first chemist looks up, and says in a faux-conspiratorial tone, 'I think I can get the thing you want. Call us tomorrow.' As if we're in a B-movie drugs heist. So I leave the shop with as much dignity and grace as I can muster. I'm not going back.

But the point of this piece is, apart from to detail both the acute embarrassment I felt in asking for dental dams and the unbelievable level of ignorance that my request was met with, actually surely it isn't just lesbians who need to use them? Presumably anybody who is buying condoms needs also to buy dams, or customize their condoms and then put them back in the little packets for future reference, in order to up the old safety levels? Why aren't people using them, and given that my internet research tells me that increasingly people are, why aren't they stocked in chemists? I'm pretty sure that this shouldn't be as fringe a thing as it seems to be, and despite the fact that covering your partner's genitalia with a latex rectangle is probably quite unsexy for most non-fetishists, the equally vile condoms seem to have caught on. So why not dams? Answers on a bit of plastic, please.

Circus Of Horrors: A Review

I wrote an article for Bellyflop magazine. Find it here: Circus Of Horrors

A Step In The Right Direction

This is what an anti-rape/rape awareness campaign should look like. This is SO much better than those horrific, triggering, titillating, victim-blaming ads that Tfl have only very recently taken down. Here some of the regressive, sexist ideas that I got from the last Tfl campaign:

a. It is a woman's responsibility not to get raped.
b. If you have been in an illegal minicab, worn revealing clothing, had a drink, flirted, spoken to someone, walked home alone, kissed someone, walked home in the dark, walked home with female friends, been outside with female friends, danced in a club, been inside with your windows open, failed to fight back enough, passed out in your friend or boyfriend's bed, fallen asleep generally, not shouted 'no!' repeatedly, loudly and clearly enough when someone is trying to rape you, AND SO ON AND SO ON AND SO ON you are in some way responsible or to blame for the fact that someone has raped you.
c. There will always be rapists because rape is a natural male urge, therefore anti-rape campaigns should just be damage limitation.

The point is, no matter how many precautions you take, you may still get raped. The point is, men face no such restrictions on their movements. As long as there are still rapists, there will still be rape survivors. As long as advertising solely urges women to take precautions, there will still be a world of ignorance out there, in women and men, about what is and isn't rape. So, you know, maybe the London authorities could allocate just one of their campaigns to raising awareness about what rape actually is? So that when a woman, having taken all other precautions on all the other days of her life HEINOUSLY SLIPS UP AND HAS ONE TOO MANY DRINKS, the person who may otherwise have committed rape, thinks about it and does not do so?

Here are three counterarguments to what I've just said. First, there will always be rapists so it is unrealistic to expect advertising to stop rape. Second, 'women-take-precautions!' adverts do something concrete to help so it is counterproductive to argue against them. Third, we don't campaign against other crimes by asking people not to commit them, i.e. a campaign saying 'don't murder' would be ludicrous.

I find the third the most immediately convincing of these counterarguments, and certainly its the one I've seen most used on internet forums and other places where such issues get discussed by calm, rational people. But the problem with it, as an argument goes, is that it fails to take into account just how much confusion there is surrounding rape. Like, killing is killing. If you kill someone you are a murderer, unless you are in some way legally less responsible, in which case it is manslaughter, which is also a very serious crime. Nobody thinks it is not real killing if you get killed by your partner. The only way you might be in some sense responsible for your own murder is if you have a history of violence against the person that kills you. If you walk home by yourself it's not your fault if you get killed. There might be other issues to discuss, but it is still killing. Rape is a different story. So many people, myself included, are unsure, in some cases, about whether what has happened is rape or isn't rape.

The recent 'Wake Up To Rape' (I think it's an unfortunate title, but hey) survey run by The Havens, based on a random sample of 1061 people in London, found that:
-Close to one in five respondents agree with the statement, "most claims of rape are probably not true" (18%)
-Close to one in five respondents do not know whether in a committed relationship it is rape when a man makes their partner have sex when they don't want to (18%)
-One in ten do not believe it is rape when a man makes their partner have sex when they don't want to (10%)
-20% of people have been made to have sex when they didn't want to.

Even taking into account a possible bias either way from the kinds of people who respond to rape surveys, I think some of these statistics might be related? Here's a feasible argument: if quite a large percentage of people are unsure what is and isn't rape, some people are committing rape through ignorance rather than willful criminality. Isn't it possible that some people may be stopped from raping if they know that what they are doing is a crime?

Let's talk about the second of the counterarguments, that if this kind of advertising stops even one person from being raped, it's doing its job and therefore, to campaign for removal is ridiculous. To some extent, this argument has a point. Of course it is better to have advertising that helps even slightly than nothing at all. But neither is it right to be entirely uncritical about what there is. When what there is could be improved, why not improve it? I do not frankly believe that there could be many women who have not been told repeatedly all their lives not to take endless, onerous security measures. I can't walk home by myself without hearing my mother's 'I don't like you out alone at night, it's not safe. Don't wear that skirt. Be careful not to drink too much.' voice resounding around my head. I don't think there is really a lack of awareness amongst women about staying safe, but there definitely is a lack of awareness among people about what consent is, what consent isn't, and about in what situations sex is rape. I will continue to contend for as long as it takes to anyone who will listen that it is in no way necessary or good to have anti-rape advertising that is so very distressing to both rape survivors and non-rape survivors (I MEAN, WHY ARE WE LOOKING AT THE WOMAN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE RAPIST IF THE AD IS TARGETING POTENTIAL ATTACKEES?! Talk about male gaze!). The same point can be made in a million different, almost invariably better ways. The Tfl campaign was made with little to no collaboration with women's groups who, you know, work on this stuff for a living. The new one, which has just gone up, is a little better if just less graphically traumatising, but still doesn't really hit the mark in the way that 'Don't be that guy' does. If it is felt that a safety based campaign is necessary, why not couple it with one like the Canadian one featured above? Its not like there could be too many.

Last, the first counterargument, that it's unrealistic to expect advertising to stop rape. I've pretty much answered this already anyway. It's hugely patronising to men to suggest that rape on such a large scale is inevitable. We can, at the very least, reduce occurrence of rape to roughly the same occurrence as most other crimes.

Back to the Canadian campaign. Its not just that it places the onus squarely where it belongs, on those who may not know what constitutes rape or who may otherwise feel tempted to rape. It also makes clear that those men who become rapists are not, generally, psychopaths or lurking-behind-bushes-weirdos, rather, rapists are everyday men who for whatever reason (pick some: they don't think its rape, lack of awareness/understanding/empathy, patriarchy, dehumanisation of women, misogyny, participation in culture that blames women for rape, internalisation of raunch culture ideals about female sexuality, fallout from society that demonizes women for saying yes or no or nothing, etc etc etc) choose to exercise unwanted power over a woman, man or queer against their will.

I'll leave you with a really great comment I saw on a facebook group called 'Please please stop victim blaming on the London Underground', from a person called Kay Ri, who I hope won't mind me reproducing it here:

"Incidentally, when a thief is found with his hands full of stolen Christmas gifts, legal professionals tend not to conjecture that the theft was a willing donation.

"But Mr. Smith, you give to charity all the time-are you sure you didn't just make a big donation and then regret it the next morning?"

"You say that they were Christmas presents Mr. Smith; is it not true that Christmas is a time of giving? And yet you *claim* they were stolen...""


And finally finally, here are some other good links on this:
-Sexual Assault Prevention Tips That Work
-But Why Shouldn't She Take Some Responsibility Too For The Rape?

Fancy some anonymous outdoor sex? No, I'm a woman.

Its hardly the most earth-shatteringly important story running at the moment, but it was surprising to read about Stephen Fry's idiotic comments on the lacking nature of the female sex drive in a recent interview. This is apparently what he said:

In uncharacteristically extreme comments, the openly gay Twitter champion said he believed most straight men felt that "they disgust women" as they "find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are".

"For good reason," he declares in a candid interview in the November issue of Attitude magazine. "If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: 'God, I've got to get my fucking rocks off', or they'd go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn't happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it."

Fry, 53, continues: "I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want," he said. "Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

"If you expect me to believe you really like sex you'd better do it my way"

Jarring ideas from someone so purportedly intelligent. Maybe some straight men do feel that way. And, as has been noted elsewhere, some women and men do probably use sex as a bartering tool. And some men and women don't. And some gay men don't go around 'having it' the way Fry seems to assume. But on top of this, what's surprising is the lack of analysis in the two superficial comment pieces I've seen countering Fry, here, and here.

One really important thing that both the above pieces are fundamentally missing is reference to patriarchal/kyriarchal* control of public space. Its simply this: the fact that there are no particularly well-known male-female or female-female cruising grounds has little to do with sexuality that isn't about the construction of female sexuality through control of space. This isn't an inherent thing whereby all men biologically control space and all women biologically don't, this is just another sign that we still live in a patriarchy, or overwhelmingly 'masculine' dominated culture.

Most public areas are run, still, as they always have been, along the lines of a traditional culture of masculine interest, and are kept this way not just through resistance to change, hostility to feminism, divisiveness between women, and so forth, but by an implicit threatened violence that physically and mentally keeps women (and men!) in their places.

To take an example of a public space central to our culture, how often are pubs colonised by men (and token women) doing stereotypically male things like watching men's teams play sport? Isn't it expected, at least during the 'World Cup' (not any world that interests me), that every pub will be taken over by the competition, and if you don't like it you can stay home by yourself, you spoilsport? Women do run events for women in pubs, but the overwhelming culture of the traditional public house is masculine, and more than that, macho.

I for one have never casually dropped into a pub screening something stereotypically 'female', whether a women's sports game or an episode of Sex and the City. I have also never been to a pub where groups of mostly women dominate the public space and marginalised tables of men sit as far away from the noise as possible. It just doesn't happen.

We might conclude from this that women don't like hanging out in pubs as much as men do, (as Fry would say, 'women will protest that they do like drinking in groups with their friends but if they do, why haven't they traditionally controlled society for all of time in order to create public houses specifically tailored so that they can do that in peace?'). Rather, if it can be said to be the case that women like pubs less than men, maybe its because men overwhelmingly control and run public houses in line with traditional male pursuits/traditional ideas about about what people should like to spend their time doing.

Of course the analogy with anonymous sex isn't direct, but the point stands. Just as some women go to pubs and enjoy men's sports with their male friends and just as sometimes one sees a group of women drunkenly shouting and laughing at a pub or bar, so it is that some women have and enjoy casual outdoor sex. At least, browsing the Craigslist personals section suggests that there are some straight women interested in anonymous sex with men.

But coming back to notions of male and female sexuality, think about what would happen if a group of lesbians tried to set up an outdoor cruising space? Well there are two subsidiary issues that fall underneath the pretty, I think, undeniable fact that space is patriarchal. The first, sexual violence, the second, fear of sexual violence.

On the first point, as soon as some unfortunate subsets of the male population got wind of any lesbian cruising area its quite probable that it wouldn't be left alone for long. I can only speak from my own experience here, but one of the only times I've had anonymous sex in a public area I looked up to see at least ten men standing around watching. Which soured the mood somewhat.

I'd like to think that the majority of men would be completely uninterested in any lesbian cruising area, but even if that is the case, sexual violence happens, and weighing up the attraction of anonymous casual sex with the possibility of being raped is a risk seemingly much greater for any woman than for a gay man.

Even if we believe now that the majority of rapes in the UK are carried out by perpetrators already known to the victim (see footnote four of the Stern Review), i.e. a boyfriend/girlfriend or friend, or acquaintance, it is still the case that violent stranger-rape is a cultural motif. We are taught that as soon as it gets dark, behind every bush lurks a rapist, and whilst obviously this kind of rape happens, fear of this kind of rape is one issue (though of course not the only issue) that - I'd speculate - prevents many women from ever experimenting with the kind of sex that Fry reckons all gay men have.

When spaces, both indoor and outdoor, are so often controlled by men, and where women are taught not to recognise or develop their own physical strength and bodily autonomy, and where the fear of rape is something so internalised - is it any wonder that women aren't all out having anonymous sex on Hampstead Heath? Its not for no reason that female reclamation of space, such as Reclaim the Night, generates so much controversy and feels so radical and groundbreaking. It is radical and groundbreaking.


*From this point on I'll say 'patriarchal' or 'male' rather than kyriarchal, because I'm particularly focusing on gender insofar as it makes any sense to talk about gender as something separate from the other axes of oppression. Likewise, to talk of male oppression is not, in my view, to talk of all men oppressing all women, but rather to talk of a particular kind of masculinity and a machismo-glorifying culture that also discriminates against some men.

A Suitable Aside

This is who I actually want to be: Fran Lebowitz. Just - famous for being a bit dilettante, not writing a book, and wearing bespoke suits. What an amazing woman.

The Lesbian MP Scandal

This week Theresa May admitted to having once walked ('intimately' said the press) next to a nice woman who looks a bit as if she might be a lesbian. The Sun, with typical irreverance, led with 'MAY-BE A MUFFDIVER?' and the Telegraph, 'THERESA, NO SAINT'. She later released a public statement denying the circulating rumours, also confessing that her husband has suffered from kidney stones in order to dispel the claims. Of course, this follows on from Harriet Harman's separation from her husband last year in the wake of the Daily Express's secret filming of her conducting slightly flirtatious conversations with other women ('HARMAN'S FOR NO MAN'). And we all know about Baroness Amos and the famous footsie under the cabinet table with an as yet unidentified female MP ('AMOS' AMORE AMYSTERY MISTRESS?')


Theresa May, caught walking 'intimately' with women who might be lesbians

Well, not really, and perhaps I shouldn't give up the day job in expectation of a headline writing career just yet. Also I have nothing but respect for Harman and Amos. But unless I'm missing something big the national fascination surrounding 'gay' MPs is currently, boringly, for the boys only. In fact the only sexual news involving a female MP that I can remember was the one where somebody's husband watched some porn. Now, given the number of female MPs in the cabinet (like, four?) its not even slightly statistically likely that a lesbian scandal would happen to an MP prominent enough to make the news. Also, there's no doubt that the minute something like this is even whispered of, the press (and I) will have a field day. There's also no doubt that my paralyzing desire for overblown lesbian drama goes hand in hand with my dependence on The L Word. But wouldn't it be fun, if, in particular, massive homophobe Theresa was discovered to have a secret bevy of nubile beauties stashed away in her room that we all thought was dedicated solely to the dreaming up of ways to further disadvantage sexual minorities?

Wishful thinking aside, the furore surrounding gay scandals can be thoroughly disingenuous: cases of soap opera masquerading as concern for political honesty/concern for wives, and so on and so forth. In this respect it bears some similarity to the reporting of rape cases, where often the level of detail given about what exactly happened during the rape looks more like deliberate titillation (i.e. perpetuation of the 'rape isn't that bad and women mostly just make it up' myth) than news coverage. The obvious response here is that we've come to expect this from the tabloid press; the whole of its success might be put down to the ability to turn serious news into bite size drama to be juxtaposed next to someone's actual tits. But even if we expect it, it doesn't say much for the relevance or integrity, rather, of the media when the thought that two men shared a bed outside wedlock, and the subsequent fallout, is big news in every national paper.

Aside from the non-existence of lesbian political scandal, there's also a curious juvenility regarding the options given to MPS accused of sex with men. Thinking of the way the David Laws case was handled, or that of Crispin Blunt, would give anyone the impression that people, particularly MPs, are either normal and straight, or dishonest homos. Our cultural appreciation of sexuality does usually include a 'bisexual' button, but you wouldn't know it to read the press. If a male MP has sex with a man, the speculation is always over whether said MP is 'really' gay, or if he's been lying about really being straight but now is really gay, etc etc. Bisexual is never considered. That he (and I mean he, see above) might have been really straight but now be really gay and not have been lying at any point, is likewise never considered. The thought of a straight man having sex with a man once, or twice, or a hundred times, is likewise inconceivable. The contention seems to be that having sex, even once, with a member of the same sex, even if you've been married for thirty years and have five children, makes you completely one thousand percent homosexual. Its nonsensical. That's not to say that lots of people don't come out as gay after 30 years of marriage, or that sex with a member of the same sex might not change your mind, or that you might not be gay really anyway. My point is that homosexual sex isn't sufficient for homosexuality, and that this shouldn't really be news to the news.

Unfortunately its still the case that sexual orientation is understood by many people as being defined in binary fashion by the kind of genitalia you allow your genitalia to touch. Many people believe that if you solely have sex with 'people of the same sex' (whatever these 'sames' and 'opposites' mean), you are homosexual, and that if you solely have sex with 'people of the opposite sex' you are heterosexual, and that if you have sex with both you are bisexual, and that's all there is to it. This understanding is fundamentally deficient. The implicit belief in this understanding is that sexual desire aligns neatly with the gender binary (which, on this view, is real) - and so heterosexuality involves desire for the opposite gender, repulsion from the same gender, and no funny business round the edges. This, of course, says nothing about the wholly transient nature of gender identification, and more, it says nothing about the more complex nature of desire, which can so often, as we see in the news, fail to live up to expectations. This shallow understanding fails to take into account that we might desire different kinds of people in different ways, or that its possible to have sex with someone you aren't fundamentally attracted to (because you were horny, or because you were drunk, or because you were curious, or because you felt like it that day), or that there are queer and transgender and transsexual and intersex people for whom the notion of 'hetero' and 'homo' and 'bi' is something quite different, or that you might be attracted to the kind of sex acts that a person of a gender you don't usually desire wants to perform, and that this might outweigh your natural repulsion for their otherwise wholly uninviting body.

The most important problem with the above shallow understanding of sexuality is that the label 'homosexual' does, and I believe, should, carry something of identity about it in a substantial way that is ignored when same-sex sex is equivocated with sexual orientation. To suppose that homos should be just like heteros in every way except that they fuck people of the same sex supposes that hetero-norms, hetero-culture and hetero-ideology are somehow more real or natural than the homo equivalents. This is all about gender: men are a certain way, women are a certain way, and homosexuals just swap opposites for sames. But its important that homos aren't just like heteros, its important that homosexuals challenge and dispute and blur the lines of gender, and the way that different genders are supposed to look, act, and feel. Heteronormativity is no more than a bad habit that has become ingrained, to everyone's detriment. We don't see how arbitrary, how reversible, it really is.

Coming back to gay MPS, and their attendant scandals, the above is why I believe that none of this is really about dishonesty, or ability to do one's job, or that we are in any way justified in turning these things into scandals for the sake of weeding out the unworthwhile politicians. Maybe William Hague had sex with Christopher Myers, and maybe he didn't. But even if he did, there are still numerous, important reasons why he might be being entirely honest to deny that he is, or ever has been, gay.

In propria persona: a guide to philosophical excellence, qua the Cambridge philosophy tripos

Devoid of any remaining critical capacity to create some sort of opinion piece, I've been thinking rather of what the last three years ostensibly undergoing a philosophy degree has taught me. I thought I'd share some key moves, some baton deploy*, some shapes, if you like, to whack out when faced, as you inexorably will be one day, with the need to write some words on something philosophical. I speak particularly with reference to what I have learnt from the Cambridge Philosophy Tripos.

A GUIDE TO PHILOSOPHICAL EXCELLENCE:
Its so easy. There's one step you can follow, one fail safe key rule that if you use from the beginning to the end of a degree, will result in lifelong happiness. Are you ready? Here it is: Get up early in the morning. Go to the library. Spend at least eight hours there working (i.e. not staring into space/browsing the internet). Come home, get an early night. Repeat.

On the other hand, that's a bit like hard work, and if, like me, you would rather sit in your room eating and watching D.Housewives than doing hard work, below are ten alternative steps to excellence:

They just published a particularly successful paper on Kant, probably following the below guide.

1. Throw in some latin. 'Wollheim seems to be positing something SUI GENERIS' sounds much more impressive than it would if you hadn't said 'sui generis'. It doesn't really matter if the latin is accurate, nobody speaks it anymore.

2. Repeat the same irrelevant point over and over again without expanding on it. Good in exams.

3. Make a spurious distinction. Drive a contrived theoretical wedge between what clearly could easily be one concept and another aspect of the same concept. Stating that one concept is two concepts is almost like making an argument that one concept is two concepts.

4. Talk about all the different ways you might respond to a particular argument. Don't commit to any of them. This is what is technically known as treating them mean to keep them keen (the arguments, not the examiners. But also maybe the examiners).

5. Write obscene and/or misleading remarks in textbooks - that will distract other people trying to read the same thing after you, and you'll get a better mark than them.

6. Spend loads and loads of time making up funny songs about philosophers. This is a much better way to engage with the text than reading it.

7. Be dismissive. So Wittgenstein was able to tell his own PhD examiners that they would never understand his work because he was a massive genius? Big deal. I can refute him in one sentence. Like this, 'Wittgenstein has clearly not thought this point through.' Next paragraph.

8. Give only the reasons 'this is intuitive' or 'this is plausible', and no further explanation in favour of any conclusion. Examiners don't like to be spoiled.

9. Allow each of your essays to rest on an unexplained assumption, like that the radical feminist perspective on things could logically be the only correct one. Allow this perspective to permeate everything you say, without ever justifying it. For example, 'surrogate pregnancy is clearly derogatory and bad'. End of argument, next paragraph.

10. When in doubt, come across as slightly bigoted - 'Multiculturalism gives too much power to ethnic minorities, liberals should use interventionalist policies to stop all and any minority cultural practices'. End of argument, next paragraph.

Hope this helps!


*Due credit for 'baton deploy' is given to its creator, Josh Ebsworth

But it's just harmful fun...

Ladies, Gentlemen, and those of you who are neither, your attention needs to be drawn to a rebranding exercise of grandiose proportion. The Cambridge Union Society's decision to put on 'pole fitness' classes this term is the ploy at hand. For those of you who may be confused by this new terminology, pole fitness is apparently something empowering, fun, harmless and sexy, and not to be conflated with pole dancing, a more contentious activity done in lap dancing clubs. The choice to put on these classes has already been defended by the powers that be at the Union and by some of the less salubrious characters on Comment is free. It's also been brilliantly torn apart by David Mitchell in this article: Actually, you won't find female empowerment halfway up a pole

An ongoing discussion on the email list for college women's officers highlights some of the mixed opinions going around. Women's officers clearly care enough about the nuts and bolts of female participation in university life to volunteer for the job, and yet the suggestion that pole fitness classes might go against Women's Campaign tenets like working 'towards political and social gender equality in the University of Cambridge and in wider society' has drawn out a certain amount of ire.

To give you a flavour of the discussion, comments on the list included such gems as:

'It's not insulting to those who don't go and it won't marginalise them because it's optional',

and

'After discussion with fellow undergraduates, women had nothing but positive things to say about the idea of pole fitness, and a strong theme throughout all conversations was that feminism should be about empowering women to make the choices that are best for them individually...They also felt that pole fitness could indeed be separated from the sex industry, if a conscious effort was made to do so.'

The same comment goes on:

'To try to elude that by supporting such things, we are also condoning some of the horrific sides of lap dancing clubs and similar is quite frankly insulting to the intelligence of fellow women's officers and the general undergraduate body.'

'Empowering'. It's become such a buzz-word for proponents of post-feminist ideals, like the idea that being able to choose to writhe up and down on a pole scantily clad was actually what feminism was aiming at all along. Another excellent article has been written about this on The Onion,'Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does' so all that really needs to be pointed out is the obvious: choices aren't formed in an ideological void. Yes, feminism is about empowering women to make individualistic choices, but it's also about campaigning for a setting of equality in which to make choices, so that women are not just presented with the same range of choices as men, but so that the attitudes that pressure choice-making aren't gendered. In this situation, it's clearly not the case that the privileged and intelligent female undergraduates choosing to take up pole fitness are being forced into it, or victimised. But as Greer pointed out back in the day, pussy power, the power to make men look, to entice sexually, is a limited kind of power.

Obviously it feels empowering to gain the ability to be sexier to men; winning the approval of anybody with more power than you feels good. And whilst many of the women who take part probably do, or at least in future will, wield economic and political power of a very real kind, given that relatively few numbers of men are choosing to take up pole fitness classes at present (the classes are women only), I'd say that more work needs to be done on the context in which choices are being made. I'd say that real empowerment lies being able to stand up against things, like pole dancing, that perpetuate the construction of a cultural sexuality in which eroticism is defined by male/female inequality, without being scared of being seen as less sexually attractive. What I'm trying to get at, in a very roundabout way, is this: if pole dancing is really empowering, why don't men do it? If they don't do it, as the common response to this question suggests, because men and women don't find it arousing when things are the other way round ('errrr... it's a basic supply and demand situation, stop trying to make it gendered, you bloody feminist') why is it the case that men and women don't find it arousing the other way round?

There's a couple of possible answers to that. Perhaps the sexualities of hetero men and women are biologically and naturally constituted this way. It just happens to be true that, due to like, testosterone, or chromosomes, or something, that men find the visual aspects of naked women arousing to the point where fetishising the unclad female body as a collection of object parts is an omnipresent part of everyday life. It just happens, biologically and naturally, to be the case, conveniently, that women find it arousing (and empowering!) to be objectified so, and increasingly, to self-objectify in this manner, to the point where it has been institutionally accepted at Cambridge University, the most prestigious centre for learning in the country.

Or maybe both these tendencies are developed as part of the social construction of our sexualities, and maybe it doesn't make sense to talk about what is biological and natural given the fact that we are born into and have lived every day of our lives in an unequal society in which men historically have held all the real sexual (and economic and political and physical and academic and cultural and and and and) power, in which expressions of female sexuality have been historically decried as unnatural, unethical, and crazy, and in which today, the only acceptable female sexualities that there are are those that conveniently play into the dominant subject/object paradigm of sexual relations that has been set up under a framework of prejudice. Why does the rhetoric of empowerment only big up things like pole dancing, in which the only real arousal is male? Could it be the case that the female arousal suggested in pole dancing, in stripping, in prostitution, in porn, is more the arousal generated by the taboos inherent in the brazen and graphic imitation of genuine, actual arousal? I'm not suggesting that pole dancing can never be erotic for the dancer. Like everything else about us, sexuality is created by the myriad of pressures we internalise. What is arousing is what we've been told is arousing. But actually, pole dancing, in its sex industry form, is about the continued relegation of eroticism and arousal to paradigmatic heterosexist power relations. You might say it's no more about fun and harmless expressions of female sexuality than my right foot.

Pole fitness, in no way like pole dancing.

So far I've mostly talked about pole dancing in a loose sense. The other stand out point from the women's list discussion is the idea that pole fitness classes are separable from the sex industry, and that to condone the classes is in no way to condone the nasty bits of sex work of the institutionalised variety. This is a claim that needs some unpacking. Why are the kinds of people who would probably never be caught dead frequenting a lap dancing club, who know that there are substantial problems with the sex industry, who may describe themselves as 'egalitarian' if not *clears throat* feminist, so keen to stand up for this 'pole-fitness-is-completely-different-to-pole-dancing' business? Can it be just that they want to be seen as in line with the pole dancing is sexy and fun agenda so that they aren't seen as frigid and uptight and hairy and probably lesbian? Or do women at Cambridge genuinely believe that pole dancing is fine as long is its just about fun and fitness rather than dancing for men? Well, David Mitchell puts it rather well, 'Even if you say that it's just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs?'

As someone who enjoys other kinds of dance for genuine fun and fitness, it seems pretty obvious that learning a form of dance where the fundamental thing that you need to do the activity (i.e. the pole) is something that you only have in the studio (or in strip clubs) seems rather to miss the point. Practice makes perfect, after all. Also, are they going to get a pole for every participant, or will there be just one pole, so that the other women stand around...er... watching... when it's not their turn? Can't be that good for fitness if you spend half the class waiting for a go. It just seems a little bit like wishful thinking/willful denial to try and rebrand pole dancing as just fitness when it is clearly an activity that takes place almost exclusively in lap dancing clubs (and, I suppose, the homes of people who are keen enough to have their own poles). Calling it something different doesn't make it something different. In a cultural vaccuum, yes, those same moves might be completely fine, sexually charged or no, but actually, the sex industry does exist, and it does exploit/abuse/rape/violate/traffic women on a daily basis. Being a pole fitness apologist is a bit like writing a book called 'I'm not writing a book', about how you aren't writing a book because what you are writing is actually a new form of thing called a schbook, which is completely unlike a book.

Until we have gender equality of some sort, there is no context in which pole dancing can ever be something other than the perpetuation of limiting sexual norms that it is, and whilst it is not at all bad to engage in forms of highly sexualised display, it won't be until these things are openly engaged in on a footing of gender equality, in a culture that doesn't constantly reduce women to sexual performance monkeys for male benefit that I will believe that its just 'fitness'.

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Quote from website: 'Talk about branding, their logo was placed right behind all the girls and the entire room was memorized by the view.'

On the mass-marketable battleground that is the world of public imagery, women and girls are merging. Conceptually and physically. We are seeing an ever increasing sexualisation of female children and, simultaneously, the infantilisation of female adults. Much has been written already about the ways in which little girls are now encouraged to present as commercially sexual female adults - Bratz dolls and the insidious creep of the Playboy brand are just two cases in point. But there's another side to this coin: an increasing, dangerous, boiling down of women-into-sexual-girls.

Now, it's not at all groundbreaking to suggest that women have traditionally been treated like children. Pre-women's lib and let's face it, post-women's lib in most countries and most places, it's not uncommon to see women regularly othered as girls. This method of control is nothing new, but it is slightly distinct from a modern tendency concerning the way in which society genders the recipient bodies of sexual desire. As our girl-children are now, in many places, becoming fair sexual game, we are seeing a corresponding relegation of 'female sexuality'. It seems to me that the lack of body hair in mainstream imagery depicting women sexually is just the first stage on the way to a writing out of women as acceptably sexual. Naming is a powerful factor here: how often are fully grown women now referred to as 'girls' whenever a heteronormative sexuality is at question? And how often do we question it? There is now, seemingly, rarely a 'woman' in mainstream pornography - girls become MILFs, then GILFs. Pop groups like Girls Aloud and the Spice Girls have done nothing to help here. Perhaps the Spice Women would have been less disgustingly post-feminist.

Anyway, if you aren't convinced, type 'girls' into google search, you'll see what I mean (incidentally, my scientific research was conducted with safesearch on moderate. It makes little difference). Type 'young girls' into the main google search. Shockingly, the entire first page of links are porn-related, but (I hope - as the perhaps slightly lesser of two evils) that they feature pictures of women, not actual children.

One worrying thing about this trend is that the idea of a commercially sexual girl should be all rights be oxymoronic. Of course I don't dispute that many children have a kind of sexuality: that's not the point. Any second-waver worth their salt will tell you that gender just is sexual being, a main difference between a woman and a girl (apart from extra lashings of repression, prejudice, etc) is an emotionally and physically mature expression of sexuality. When women can't exhibit sexuality with the het-norm public's approval except 'as girls' there is something drastically, hideously wrong.

Why is this happening? Well it's only a theory, but I think this is just one more backlash. We know that feminism works in epicycles - no sooner do we, post-Female Eunuch, claim our sexualities as our own, claim the right to enjoy sex, the right to expect orgasm, and indeed, the right to be sexual aggressively, than the patriarchal machine takes that aggressive sexuality and infantilises it, reclaims it as something childish, something controllable, something ultimately passive. If all commercially sexual women are just girls, the male viewer seems justified on his pedestal of superiority. If women are just girls, then female sexuality is back to unthreatening old male-centricity.

A sexual woman is a force to be reckoned with and a person to be admired, and treated with respect. A sexual girl is not something that should ever be on a website. Women and girls are rightfully distinct, let's keep it that way.

University Li(fe)-brary

This is a horrific place. I keep deliberately incarcerating myself in the UL in the vain hope that library hours produce work. One day I will look back on this and laugh.*

In good news, had a nice evening drinking with Libby and watching The Lovely Bones. Pretty sure I cried three times, which is something given the basic complete inaudibility of the stream. Moral of the story = don't trust anyone who tries to lure you to a secret kids' hideout (the hideout is secret, not the kids) in the middle of a field.

I've got to a point in my life where a misplaced apostrophe is THE FUNNIEST THING EVER. 4343 words of dissertation down, probably one million to go. I write at approx. one word per hour.

Basic summary of my day in the UL:

1. Get there before 9.30. This is before the reading room opens (I've only done this once).

2. Wait with the seething hordes of maniac academics (you can tell because they manage to read books angrily in a way that just screams 'take the book I want and I'll make your life unliveable').

3. Sit down. Spread out books. Go to tea rooms for cup of tea and snack. Get shouted at by the inexplicably aggressive man. ('IVE HAD TO CALL YOUR NAME FOUR TIMES FOR THIS PANINI')

4. Pretend that being in the tea rooms constitutes a social life by chatting frantically to anyone and everyone you know, even if you only know them because you stare at them in the tea rooms.

5. Return to seat. Check facebook, googlemail, facebook, googlemail, blog, facebook.

6. Read a sentence. Write one word. Erase it. Write a different word in another paragraph. Delete that.

7. Repeat steps 3-6 a few times.

8. At six o clock, leave.

I aspire to look like this


*Manically, from my prison cell.

Yes I Make Post Hi (Knights at Danielle's)

So there has been Christmas and Wales and New Year and some parties including togas and running practically naked in the snow and punch with fully seven types of alcohols (a.k.a. 7-Alcy Punch). Standard nights involve bellowing, beer and Zone Horror. I wish the last sentence could have been alliterative but it just wasn't.

Sometimes I think that I really like being in the countryside because when I am there I always read loads and eat loads (I had a 9 course dinner) and have a great time not worrying about the matrices of urban social dependency.

Last night we went out for Secret Santa Dinner and afterwards in the pub there was a group of drunken louts and one said 'Say happy birthday to my friend, it's his birthday' and the little 'WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO CLAIM SPURIOUS AUTHORITY OVER ME/PRESUME THAT I WILL RESPOND TO YOU IN THE WAY THAT YOU WANT' switch triggered, and I predictably refused, and so predictably the situation escalated with various drunken men coming over to make nice before reiterating the demand. It could have been nastier, there was some muttering about feminist dykes (I assumed they were talking about some very intelligent modern geography), but the main problem was in the drawn out length of the whole non-event. Obviously it would have been easier to just say it, so everybody could move on with their lives. But I just can't help analysing these things in terms of social power structures and fuck me if I'm going to concede to a presupposed gendered power dichotomy in the way required. That probably makes me a massive dick.

I have also realised that Andrea Dworkin is in fact AMAZING and massively misrepresented. Her book 'Woman Hating' is pretty much spot on. Simplistically, she links the regulated enforcement of gender roles to traditional fairytale mythology, and advocates replacing this understanding of gender with one informed by androgyne mythologies. And she has some hard-hitting (Daddy would say 'knockabout') stuff about foot-binding and witch burning. And also advocates the destruction of the family, incest and bestiality.

I basically love you Andrea.