Kealey: More burkas, please!

Academic pervert Terence Kealey has written, for the Times Higher Education magazine that:

Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

Enjoy her! She's a perk.

She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.

As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch.

Outraged overachievers everywhere called for the pervert academic's head for insinuating that 'normal' girls ought to disrespect their lecturers and just go out constantly, saying: 'First, A-levels are easy enough to be sat by monkeys, and now this. He's effectively saying that only the most abnormal of females actually cares about interacting with the people who have been paid to teach. Caring about what degree classification you get makes you a freak. Why doesn't he just ship our bright young women over to America, India and China himself?'

An unnamed female student at Buckingham University said: 'Actually, this is all the result of a terrible misunderstanding. The reason most of the class abjures his company, is because this pool of saliva forms on your desk if you happen to ask a question whilst being female. And he has really bad breath, and is often incoherent because he can't stop licking his lips and keeps jumping in the air and yelping whilst rubbing himself.'

She added: 'I would also like to categorically deny that I, or for that matter, Lucy - yeah, she's a friend of mine - 'flaunted our curves.' What's a girl to do when she forgets her glasses and has to go up to the lecturer to ask what the hell that weird squiggle on the whiteboard says?'

When contacted to clarify his remarks, Kealey insisted: 'What I said was highly moral. And you can't pin anything on me anyway, because the fault lies with the females. Everyone knows that a human woman higher education student is exactly like a female cat in heat. When she asks you for suggestions for her dissertation, EVERYONE knows she might as well be a pussy-cat lying back and showing you her bits. She WANTS IT.

And if she will insist on asking me to perform the duties for which lecturers are employed in the first place - well, I will have no choice but to imagine her face superimposed over that of my wife's. Spanking my Johnny. Nightly,' he added, twitching. 'Yes... it is good to think about the firm, white mounds of Lucy Norris each night... Night in, night out... Forgotten my glasses, she says! Got to check her final essay, the dirty minx!'

After a sudden, inexplicable 30-second break, Kealey resumed in a somewhat different tone of voice. 'Of course, my advising people to become obsessed with female students because it's better to constantly masturbate - I mean, copulate - to them rather than just listen to what they're saying, is common sense. Naturally, the way to avoid sexual liaisons *guffaw* is to encourage male lecturers - don't make me laugh, there aren't any 'female lecturers'! Ha! Ha! Ha! - to think non-stop about the foxy girlies. Look but don't touch - unless you're touching yourself.'

Adopting a sterner tone, he said: 'As I said, it's all the fault of the females really. I do so wish they would stay indoors. 'I want an education,' honestly. Still, if they WILL insist on intruding into the male public sphere, they could do worse than adopt the policy many of my female students appear to have taken up recently. That is, they dress in these frightfully practical black sheets so that you can only see their eyes. I sometimes wonder if there is always a woman under there. You know, it's not always clear by voice alone! Still, I get my job done without any stresses or hassles. Jolly good!'

On a point of principle

I am writing this in a boiling fucking rage. My already glowingly rosy cheeks are aflame. They say anger doesn't necessarily make for the best writing, but you know what? I COULD GIVE A FUCK. For the first time in a long time, I commented on Liberal Conspiracy on a Rowenna Davis article, mostly to give her some support in the face of people refusing to engage with what she wrote in any kind of sensible or useful way.

Naturally, this meant that my comment was not prize-winningly clear and accurate in what it stated. See what you think of it here. This meant that a passing fucktard wheeled himself erroneously onto the thread to abuse myself and otherwise and just generally be the kind of posturing asshole that almost makes you hate men, particularly those on the Web. Those kinds of people - sadly far too common on the left as well as the right, as Cif bingo demonstrates - make me almost wish I could email myself through their screens to hand them their asses. I contented myself with shooting his assumptions about me down in flaming pieces:

Much as I’d love to resort to your style and call you a wanker, I’m better than that.

Ah, the quaint local customs of the natives, Yorkshire’s noble savages. Luckily progress, in the form of misionaries from the Church of Vegetaria in Hampstead, is reaching that dark and backward country. Erm, you really have no idea how your post comes across, do you?

Newsflash: if I gave a fuck what the likes of you assume about me, I’d be sobbing in the corner. I suppose you’re almost right on one count; my vegetarianism was religiously-based. On account of being Sikh, not middle-class.

The whole reason I said that banning ads aimed at kids is a good start is precisely because I DON’T think people should have to change the way of eating they’ve had for years, moron.

I don’t live in Hampstead; although judging by your arrogance you probably do. I know you entitled morons think that the whole web is made up of others like you, but shock! It isn’t.

As I clicked 'post comment,' it occurred to me that I was perhaps using my race (or rather, my religion and the implication of my race) as a weapon. Is it fair that non-whiteys like me are tricking these morons into showing themselves up as the prejudiced fuck-cunts they are? I mean, this fellow was trying to catch me out in the crime of being middle-class. However, I caught him out in the process of being an entitled motherfuck.

Then, the thought settled in my mind like a peaceful pigeon. Sites like Pandagon have had discussions on online racism before, and people on there were mentioning the fact that commenters' attitudes to them (not necessarily on Pandagon) changed visibly once they revealed themselves to be non-white. Someone may have remarked on how white dudes, liberal and otherwise, try to perpetuate the 'real world' power structure online by assuming (with typical entitled ignorance) that everyone they engage with is a white (middle-class, but not always) male.

In the light of that, I say we non-whiteys use this to our advantage. If people want to rant their prejudices, use the power of intersectionality against them. Any attempt to discuss racism in the British public sphere that appears on Cif, is usually met with some bollocks along the lines of 'this is what happens when identity politics gets taken too far.' The posters saying this almost always claim to be white working-class males.

Now I find this laughable. Fuck you, you hypocrites. Sunny wrote this marvellously sensible piece a while back, from which I must quote:

The class-warfare that has defined British society since feudal times is classic identity politics.

The problem we have is that public debate have become less about accepting people’s multiple identities and more about demands for their own tribe.

I think this is important. I can't help wondering if, with the tireless work of anti-racist campaigners, people have realised that certain prejudices are more 'acceptable' than others. It's OK to wantonly abuse people if they're middle-class. Their class placing outweighs their gender or ethnicity. Now, how fucking stupid is that?

I'm not calling for some free pass on anyone who sounds 'middle-class', but the fact is that people shouldn't get away with using that kind of knee-jerk stereotyping. Are all people who are middle-class exactly the same? Or, let's rephrase: are all working-class people exactly the same? Are they all benefit-scrounging, early-motherhood-reaching white trash chavs, or overly-fertile Somalis? Obviously not - but then again, the only 'middle-class' people who suggest that are the likes of the tabloids as well as the Telegraph and probably to some extent the Times as well.

Putting aside the fact that a lot of these so-called 'working-class' white males probably aren't (I mean, people on the right and left have made much of the BNP's attempt to court this particular demographic, but Nick Griffin's hardly salt of the earth, is he?), times have changed. The stupid class stereotyping that people fling around says a lot about them. In many ways, they remind me of first-generation Asian immigrants desperately trying to force certain values on their children because 'that's our culture.'

Groupthink - whether it's a group of conservative elderly Asians or the 'white working class' - is dangerous. I can't help suspecting that a lot of it is basically the same desperate attempt to project unity that you see in all oppressed groups. Still, I can't really forgive it. All working class people are individuals, just like everyone else. Same with middle-class people. I am not going to be ashamed of the fact that my parents came here and have worked their asses off for 30-odd years to allow us to lead a better life than we would've had in India.

Anyone who tries to tell me that I'm 'middle-class'; what the fuck are you talking about? Seriously, what do people even mean when they say things like that? Our class distinctions are highly outdated now - 'working-class' usually seems to mean 'poor.' I want to know what is behind the flinging about of this accusation, because really, for the most part I and other non-white people (even if we're considered as 'middle-class') are not holding the white working classes back. It's mostly the white middle classes that are doing that, thank you. Who writes for the tabloids and right-wing 'quality papers' that routinely demonise white-working class people? Gosh, there are so many non-white BBC senior execs, you can't move for them! Let's not even start on those City banks, those elite Oxford and Cambridge and public-school associations that heave with non-white faces...

I'm tired now, so I'm going to stop this particular rant here (the effort of not screaming while my mother criticised me at length during a walk just before this post - I believe it was for about 20 minutes running or so - was majorly knackering). Sam Leith had an article a while back which was slightly irritating - in an inevitably knee-jerk way - but once I got over the gut instinct, I really couldn't help agreeing with a lot of it.

People self-identify class not on the basis of where they are in life now, but of how they grew up: where they lived, where they went to school, what their parents did for a living and, clumsily, how much money they had.

... why is it that the aspect of their lives in which so many people vest so much of their pride and shame - and which, on the ugly side, makes them freely congratulate themselves on sneering at strangers - is the aspect that has nothing whatsoever to do with them?

Yet right and left alike pique themselves on this imbecile prejudice. Readers of right-wing papers sneer at "chavs" and "the underclass", while on ostensibly liberal internet forums, the term "middle-class" is routinely used not as if it were a description, but an accusation.

He's got a point, and you know it!

In other, non-ranting news, I am doing my utmost best to put into practice a technique that the counsellor told me, of 'feeding back' to my mother when she victim-blames. Unfortunately, just as I thought I might've got the hang of it, my mother has moved to attacks on me instead. These are somewhat harder to deal with, as you might expect.

However, I realised two things about my mother: part of what makes her (and my other family members') attacks so effective are two things. Firstly, that she doesn't actually do them in an unreasonable or overly harsh tone of voice. I clocked this like a lightning bolt whilst describing one incident to The Libertarian on the phone. Suddenly, I thought 'Hang on - she never actually sounds like this when she's speaking to me. She sounds almost... normal. I parody her, but she's far more subtle than I've been giving her credit for.' Secondly, they come out of nowhere.

Textbook example: The other day, while waiting for a friend to arrive at the station near my house so that we could go collect her, I sat and watched the end of an old Bollywood film. One character was fat, but it looked odd, as if he had maybe padded out his middle instead of real weight. Without really thinking, I began aloud: 'Wow, he's really fat, but -'

'... but it doesn't look real'. Before I could finish, my mum suddenly proclaimed: 'You are really fat!' She sort of prod-pushed my arm and smacked my thigh, going 'Look! Look at you, you're all thhul thhul! I'm worried about you, you know. You're young, you should be slim.' I don't remember exactly what she said after that, because I was too busy reeeeling. 'You need to start watching what you eat,' she said. 'I know you go to the gym, but maybe you're not doing the right exercises? You need to do something to make your stomach smaller.' I asked her what I ate that was so bad that I needed to cut it out, and she said 'Well, I don't know, but...' I had to resist the urge to ask her if it wouldn't be prescient to just stop eating altogether.

The day after, I got up in the evening after a nap, with a headache. My sister's divorce was being discussed in the kitchen. I kept myself pretty much out of the way, coming in and out of the kitchen. Then, some devil impulse made me drift towards my mum who was standing in a corner and turn my back, so that I was leaning against her. She put her arms around me - and grabbed my stomach. 'See?' she said. I disengaged myself immediately and left the room.

Today, she went on at me about the need to have the life skill of dressing up for parties so that people who I would hate anyway, don't think that I'm stupid and prevent their sons from marrying me. She compared me unfavourably with my cousin YET AGAIN, saying that I need to learn to get all saji-baji the way she does for weddings. Spending the whole week/day shopping for said event/deciding what to wear/getting ready as if for a catwalk show is, according to my parents 'a life skill.' My mum eased the blow, though, by saying that my brother and I were 'simple' and 'naive'. Basically, it's not my fault I'm inept and unkempt - it's just my nature! Hooray! My father told me that I needed to 'be a good cook' and 'cook for lots of people.' Somehow, I didn't knife him.

UPDATE: GO FORTH AND COMMENT ON THE LIBCON THREAD! Despite my explaining that my vegetarianism is a result of growing up Sikh, the guy is too thick to process it. I ended by saying:

That’s ‘different,’ love.

I still don’t see the relevance of your religion, I’m not sure why you mention your gender and I’m not in the least bit embarassed

Wow – in that case, I can help you no further. Specsavers might be able to, though.

P.S.: Read this, it's BRILLIANT! Malky Muscular satirizes the whole Nick Cohen & Clive James Vs Western feminists foolishness. MM, I love you. Also, this post 'What Would We Do Without White Privilege?' over at Womanist Musings is THE WIN.

'Feminist betrayals'

I have new glasses. No, wait - New Glasses. This means everything looks all super and awesome and slightly higher than usual, and sometimes even 4-D.

Yeah, that's right. 4-D.

If anyone was worried by the last post - I will just reiterate that writing about suicidal thoughts is my standard way to free myself of them. To quote The Golden Notebook yet again - 'Literature is analysis after the event.' To blog my fears is to seal them in the syntax-coffin and push 'em off to a Viking burial of publication. They shrink to Roman characters and stop being fuzzy visions of potential futures in my head that might grow and grow until I find myself inside.

My dear oldest sister was fool enough to attempt undertaking the topic of my brother's general bumassery with my parents (specifically, my mother) this evening. Much as I care about her, it was a fool's errand. Firstly because it was SO not the time to pick a fight and secondly because, well, he's TWENTY YEARS OLD. It's a bit late to institute miracles of parental authority, especially when now more than ever, they're huffing about being old and selling up and moving somewhere in India (ha! Yeah right. Dad would end up getting BARBECUED) and how they just want to be left alone.

They were on top form, interpreting it as an attack on their parenting, attempting to obfuscate the heart of the matter by fixating on technical details ('Have we ever forced either of YOU out of bed?' etc.) and finally, my mother squawked, her natural rougeur heightened by sunburn, 'WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO?' My dad echoed this earlier (less forcefully) and sort of wandered in and out being 'righteous' and basically accepting his role in the argument enthusiastically. I actually told my sister to give it up and told my mother not to drag me into it when she attempted to. I did, however, laugh cynically. Which was not necessary, I guess.

Earlier, my sister and I had a spin class. No, not the New Labour kind, but this fucking insane bike-astride form of exercise which kills about a thousand calories at a go or something and is SO not the thing to do if you have any sort of problems Down There. I neared weeping 20 minutes in, but somehow lived through to the thirtieth minute. My crotch was most unhappy, and I think I may have saddle burn. Good freaking God. The surreality of the experience was heightened by the fact that we were in a pitch-black room lit with electric blue here and there so that everyone was all teeth, eyes an' T-shirts. The speakers weren't working so the instructor basically turned down the (shit) music every now and again to yell incomprehensible instructions, which were then transmitted to me by the sororal teeth to my right. Just remembering it is making my crotch get mad at me.

Onward, to pastures less private-related! I was almost amused to see that the usual crock of shit about Western feminists not doing enough for Muslim women was doing the rounds. I went on to Heresy Corner to hit back, but guys - I'm pissed. Why the fuck do feminists keep taking flak for not 'saving' Muslim (or non-white) women all the time? Why is it exclusively our job? Given all the talk about liberating the women of Iraq, the American government doesn't seem to have bent over backwards to avoid a similar fate (i.e., things going backwards) in Afghanistan.

I'm sorry, but I'm having a little Red Mist moment, so to those who argue like the Heresiarch has, can I just say: um, fuck you? I could care less whether swearing is big or clever right now, I am really fed up of (often male) people who don't normally go out of their way to support women's rights or racial equality fucking telling women how to behave. The post on HC - 'Silence of the Fems' should REALLY have been thought out more, because - yes, rich white Western feminists (or a few renowned ones anyway) perhaps SHOULD highlight these things more.

However, there are plenty of us Western feminists who aren't white and we know better than anyone how hard it is to save ANYONE from a deeply patriarchal culture, let alone Muslim women. Also: do 'Muslim women' as a group have the monopoly on oppression? You'd think it judging by that post. Whereas a middle-class Indonesian woman is obviously NOT going to be as oppressed as an Indian hindu chamar (untouchable) female. Also, what about the oppression of poor migrant women (frequently non-Muslim) by Muslim women in the Middle East?

Obviously, things aren't as wonderfully simple as HC would like to make out. It mentions Geraldine Brooks's Cif article, launching an attack on the first few lines and missing the point spectacularly. The whole HC post pretty much boils down to 'But OMG! Western feminists didn't ADOPT AYAAN HIRSI ALI! How dare they? Traitors!'

Which is clearly utter cack. I'm sorry, where does it state that 'Hirsi Ali' and 'all Muslim women' are one and the same? Where is the proof that Western feminists rejected her and 'left' her to be bankrolled by neo-cons? Furthermore, why is it not society at large's responsibility to bankroll her (rather than just feminists') if Western liberal democracy is so loving and tolerant and all of those other things it claims to be? Shouldn't everyone be signing her up to advertise, or something?

I demonstrated the appalling lack of research to some extent, by linking to a recent F-Word post calling on suggestions from readers for how to help the women of Mali in my comment on the post. Check out this bit of pathetic emoting though:

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose unforgivable crime is to be black, a woman, an immigrant AND a believer in the liberal principles of the Enlightenment

This coming from a blogger who was among those thinking that Henry Louis Gates might have been 'imagining' racism, and I quote:

That Henry Louis Gates should have interpreted Crowley's challenge as racist isn't surprising, though. Gates isn't just black (African-American, if you insist). He's a professional analyst of the black experience. And he has always been a politically-engaged scholar. He is, perhaps, primed to see racist behaviour where there is none.

That's right kids, he was one of those uppity negroes. Not like good old Ali, who has been playing the victim alongside neo-cons to HC's satisfaction! He made the mistake of showing the ugly racism, the Dark Side of liberal democracy.

To return to Geraldine Brooks though; her article grated with me at first, but once I had finished reading it, I was hard pressed to argue. I mean, what excellent advice:

I'm not saying here that a human right is what the local despot says it is. I find the kind of moral relativism that justifies practices such as female genital mutilation disgusting and fatuous. What I am recommending is a little humility. Western feminists with a genuine desire to raise the status of oppressed women in Afghanistan or elsewhere should call their nearest mosque and make an appointment to talk to the sisterhood there.

Sadly, such logical and non-patronising advice is wasted on the likes of Nick Cohen and the Heresiarch who clearly feel that feminists should simply be seen to be doing something. Do they have any fucking idea how patronising it is that they, white people with very little awareness of the day-to-day realities of growing up in another culture, are telling feminists with experience on the ground what to do? We should launch a feminist Iraq War mark II, should we? Geraldine Brooks actually provided a suggestion on what to do to get Muslim women engaged with Western feminism - precisely so that they can be 'saved' as the Heresiarch so patronisingly put it. I haven't seen that from any of the men sounding off.

I grew up in another culture, and guess what, wannabe neo-cons? Them darkies are not that different to you. People everywhere just want to belong, just want the safety of a group identity and freedom from individual angst. For people juggling more than one culture, it is really confusing. In the same way that you so-called liberals (because it's not authoritarian at ALL to scold feminists for not executing your will, oh no sirree) clutch your 'liberal secular democracy' and English breakfasts and beer at the pub (or whatever) like a comfort blanket - so too do they clutch their separate language, customs and religions like a comfort blanket. That doesn't mean that we should leave them to it if what they're doing is wrong - but I'm fucked if I can see how shouting in their faces about how they need to stop being medieval and telling them that their way is wrong is effective. You don't want to let go of your 'liberal values', why on earth should you expect them to want to get rid of theirs as if by magic?

Even if you believe it (and I must confess, it didn't take me too long to get sold on atheism and Western liberalism), people take a very long time to deprogramme. When they're not even of your country, and you throw in a shared inglorious history of colonialism and imperialism - well, you can expect a lot of shuffling away and a lot of failure. It's better to work like that renowned Western politicker Machiavelli - through discreet fanning of the flames of rebellion. These Muslim women that get tossed around and routinely consigned en masse to oppression - they too are people with agency. They need supporting and encouraging - not to be trampled on so that we can make way for Liberal Democracy 2.0 or whatever.

I mean ferChrissakes, I come from an educated middle-class Indian family who have lived in this country since well before I was born, and I'm a British national. I have tried the full-on approach with female relatives quite a few times and it was like they simply tuned me right out. Women living under oppressive regimes are very often so floored by the fear of taking the hard road and standing up for themselves that they simply concede. It is easier to surrender oneself to low expectations and run from reality. I myself had decided that I would rather die than follow my mother in becoming the sort of person that thinks a domestic violence-free marriage is 'successful.' There's the grey area around what exactly constitutes DV in our culture anyway - it seems to be an unspoken thing that if it's not frequent, then you shouldn't really leave. Thankfully, that's changing but it's taken at least 20 years to start changing! So... to reiterate what I was saying earlier - busybodies, kindly take a hike and get a reality check already.