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'.