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.