The End of An Era...

The capitalised title's back, people. D'you know what that means?! It means I have BIG NEWS (note the caps returning again there!).

Today (or should I say yesterday, Wednesday?) was a big day. It was officially the end of the last term of my final year. I have exams and a teaching placement coming up, as well as a research project and an essay - but I am mere months away from OBTAINING MY DEGREE. It seems incredible to think that this was my last day of teaching "ever" (apart from when I start my Master's, haha). Time is a wriggly caterpillar - sometimes it squiggles along, very speedy, and you follow with your eyes, conscious of the rapid movement; sometimes it basks wearily, slumping as if beaten down upon by the sun and at other times, it heaves the many compartments of itself efficiently over the leaf. Very often, we miss the latter because we bounce between extreme activity and then none at all. I think it's very handy when we do though, since it reminds that Time does not stop and start in blocks of 'routine' as we do, but is ever flowing.

Er... not too sure where that came from. Blame the fact that I'm delirious from a heady cocktail of sleeping late, waking early, reading a book on the Internet, and seeing TL. Seeing TL is a fine way to get drunk without the alcohol. I think that if I were with him in company and he held eye contact, my knees would bid me a speedy farewell. I'd like to remonstrate with them, but really, it just doesn't work. What chance does my brain have against someone who actually made my pulse race for a day and a half - yes, a day and a half! - after we first kissed?

It's not just the end of an era at university though. It's the end of a destructive era for me, I hope. I realised that I was running from dealing with family-based issues (which are probably the source of any depression I may have), because my previous relationship was very co-dependent and so if you like, my bad feelings about myself were inflicted upon me by a proxy - my ex. This time round though, I have a super-awesome libertarian, really great blog-readers and friends and I've realised that writing might help more than I've given it credit for previously. I made an appointment with the doctor for next week, and then jumped around shrieking happily. Ironic, much?

I also made an omelette yesterday. Yes. It wasn't bad at all, and next time, I'll remember to put the cheese into the beaten egg so that it's even better. :-D Resolutions have been taken - not promises made, because breaking promises brings on guilt, whereas you can't really break resolutions. I mean, you're resolving - you're essentially steeling yourself to try to do something, rather than committing. I think that's why they're called 'New Year's Resolutions,' so people don't have to feel bad if they fall off the wagon!

1) I will continue to write.
2) If I'm sinking, I will admit it - even if it's just to my blog. People ARE capable of love. The world is not a cartoon, and I will not be 'put down' for being stressed.
3) I'm going to the doctor, the lady doctor. I laughed when I realised that not even at the fucking doctor's was I safe from my family.

Anecdote time: my doctor is a Sikh man (so, like my family). A couple of years back, I was a bit chesty and over from abroad, so my dad took me to see him. On a previous occasion, I'd seen him with stomach trouble and just mentioned that I hadn't eaten much and hadn't been eating properly because of my stomach being weird. He said breezily, 'Well, you've gained weight.'

... So anyway, I asked him when it might clear up - politely as always - because it'd been around about 2 weeks, and I don't generally do illness. He essentially revealed in a hectoring way that he didn't know - that it could be up to a month or something. He and my dad were sort of sporadically making conversation at this point, I think. He said my nose had gotten sore (of which I was, unsurprisingly, aware), probably just from blowing it too hard. I asked if that was the only reason why it was so red, 'because,' I said, 'it does seem redder to me than previous times when I've had a cold.' I don't really get colds, and maybe I sound like an ignorant prat, but is that really such an awful thing to say?

He became exasperated. 'Well, you probably did before, but you just don't remember it. That's why you think it's worse now. We tend to remember significant events in our lives. Illness is hardly a significant event, is it?' Withering gaze. 'I mean, in conversation, we retain only 40% of what we're told.'

In the shallows of my mouth, the cry of Arrogant tosspot! died bitterly on my tongue. This was swiftly followed by the rejoinder 'Well, next time you want to show off to my father, you might as well just fellate him - and not in front of me either, PLEASE.' Still, my dad is slightly hard of hearing and rarely ever tuned in enough to other people's conversations to have realised what was going on. Even then, it's not like I can count on his - or any of my family's - support. I kept quiet, stunned. My suspicions about him wanting to show off were forthwith proven when he and my dad engaged in a sort of random and automated braggadicio-bout of what community work each had done. There was a strange sentiment to it, as though they were in reality striving for the same thing, but by nature falling into a wearied machismo routine of competing cockerels.

So yeah, that fucking charmer? Not testing me for depression! Although this may sound terrible, I really suspect that were I to see him and not absolutely insist on confidentiality, he might find a way to suggest something, if not bring it up, to my family upon encountering them.

4) I made an omelette yesterday. With mature Cheddar cheese and fresh parsley. I fried up some shredded ham, sliced fresh spring greens (originally misspelt as 'grins'! Oh dear), a plum tomato and one large-ish mushroom. This I piled on top of the omelette, with two pieces of wholemeal toast and a very fine dinner was had by all.
5) I will keep trying new things with The Libertarian. In the space of just two weeks, or so, he has gone from having no strong feelings about wholegrain strawberry Biopot yoghurt, to actively encouraging me to buy it at Tesco, because 'it's only 30 pence more.' This, here, is proof of the goodness of the world. My lover adores yoghurt as much as I do now. I was also absurdly proud of him when I made one of my makeshift desserts (rhubarb and vanilla Biopot poured over warm golden syrup cake - SWOON) and he rapidly cleared it. Were I not so busy thinking 'Crikey, this is moist,' I would've shed tears of joy, I tell you. TL is of a, er, limited palate to say the least, but his heart is large and so I have converted him to many a cuisine and the journey ain't stopping yet, ohhhhhhh no.

(I apologise to anyone who is suddenly repulsed and morally outraged by my food-based burblings. I LOVE food and always have. Some people like to look at porn, or celebrity gossip late at night. I floss to cake recipes. Yes, that's right. Cake recipes. I actually emitted animal noises of wounded envy and desire when discovering that people, out there, have combined brownie and cheesecake).

Something I meant to do ages ago, but had neither the time nor energy to do - I think it's really high time that somebody either a) assassinated the Pope (why is it confined just to political leaders?!) or b) committed him. I'm sorry to sound so violent, but my patience wears ever thinner with this dangerous loon, who practises inefficiency, corruption and hypocrisy at Olympic levels and continually endangers public health/human rights/world improvement in the process.

This is old news, from the 18th. I just couldnae resist though:

The Roman Catholic Church believes marital fidelity and sexual abstinence are the best way to prevent the spread of HIV.

... On his way to Cameroon, the Pope said HIV/Aids was "a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem".

The solution lay, he said, in a "spiritual and human awakening" and "friendship for those who suffer".

SPIRITUAL AND HUMAN AWAKENING? FRIENDSHIP FOR THOSE WHO SUFFER? Oh, don't worry, woman-who-has-no-rights-thanks-to-our-religion-upholding-cultural-misogyny! If your husband cheats on you and then infects you with the virus, it's OK, there's nothing you can do about it - because it's YOUR FAULT in the first place! You clearly didn't work hard enough at putting him off sex in the first place and erecting the correct psychical walls of guilt and shame in his consciousness! You should have put him off sex, apart from procreation, and then none of this would have happened!

I mean, you've failed in your basic wifely duties and he may accuse you of cheating - for a betrayal has occurred, hasn't it? You've betrayed him, just like Eve betrayed Adam. He may as well cast you out. Don't even THINK about getting an abortion, you've got a baby to bear - and if you die, then that's just divine retribution, really. Don't worry about that latex thingy that could've stopped the transfer of bodily fluid that gave you HIV! God made it, he'll deal with it! *looks desperately heavenwards, then develops carefree glint in eye* And if he doesn't, well then, tough shit anyway. As long as the white Western world's safe, you darkies can go on dying en masse for all I care. I mean, sure, I can hold you up as an example of outstanding devotion when it suits me, but you lot don't have the money or influence to lobby international governments and 'do God's work,' do you? You're the foot soldiers.

"In the context of globalisation with which we are all familiar, the Church takes a particular interest in those who are most deprived," he said.

A particular interest in making sure that 2/3rds of global Aids victims continue to die in sub-Saharan Africa, sure.

He said it was the duty of Christians to help to build "a more just world where everyone can live with dignity"

... Just not the duty of Roman Catholics.

From a separate analysis:

The Pope said the "cruel epidemic" should be tackled through fidelity and abstinence rather than condoms, and that "the traditional teaching of the Church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids".

Bull-fucking-shit, Benny. Seriously, is your dress laced with psychotropics? Since when does 22 million infected Africans = 'the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids?' EPIC fail.

OK, 3.05 a.m. Face melting. Will release my pincer-like grip now, and thank you all so much for your kindness, I LOVE Y'ALL.

P.S.: BBC Two is going to start showing The Wire! The fuckin' Wire! If you have not ventured forth into its glorious, glorious fictive terrain, then you MUST. Even The Times has counselled readers to get a piece of the action. Let's put it this way: it's routinely referred to by fans (including myself, I am guilty) as 'the best show on television ever' which is, granted, a little on the sweeping side. Just a little though. If The Wire by some freakish miracle, of the ever-hypothetical nature, were to transform into a person, then I would marry it and have its children. WITHOUT FAIL. Even if it involved polyamory. That's how good it is!

For those of you scared for my sanity - I'm going now. Really. Byeee!

Run for your life!

Well, I've thought about this for a while and some invisible thread always held me back. Tonight though, I realised something. I have problems, problems that nobody else can really deal with. Other people's sympathy is finite. God just isn't coming through for me like you might've hoped. This may not come as a surprise to you all (I say 'all' but hopefully all but the most devoted reader have scarpered), but I think I have depression.

I don't know whether it's always been so, but I think this year (trans: 2008-9) has definitely changed me in a way that I'm often struggling to deal with. Whether or not I'm bipolar, I certainly have issues that need to be dealt with, sooner rather than later.

I had a sort of mini-meltdown that came out of nowhere today, and I suspect, had a lot to do with my not having had enough sleep. That didn't mean I could discount it, though. It blindsided me and then sat on my chest for the evening, leading me to sink into a growing nebula of anxiety about everything. The Libertarian called me because I texted him, but his words offered scant comfort. In Jack London's book John Barleycorn, he deals (semi-autobiographically) with his experiences with alcohol and what appear to be alcohol addiction. The dangerous thing about JB, he writes (JB being the personification of alcohol) is that he brings on the 'white logic,' a crystallisation of the mind where one sees the futility and meaninglessness of life, which drives one towards suicide. During one such episode with JB, he even casts himself into the sea (I think), but then eventually 'comes to' and decides that actually, he does want to live.

I have those moments, but without the alcohol. I want to cry. I hate myself and I hate others, even those who are trying to help (like TL), because they cannot provide solutions. It's really not TL's fault - how is he supposed to know what to do? - but sometimes the gulf between us seems so gaping and profound that it terrifies me. As Nietzsche once said 'if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.' When you get on with somebody so well most of the time, suddenly looking up and finding that there is a sort of glass barrier between you is somewhat demoralising. Horrible questions uncurl themselves then in my mind. Are you two really so good? they ask me. Wouldn't it be better to be with someone more like yourself? To this, I can shake my head vigorously; no, I know that if anything that's worse, because you have to take it in turns to be unhappy, and that's surely not natural. Should you be with somebody so different? Should you be with anyone at all?

I really do wonder sometimes if I am going about things the right way. I'm reclaiming Get There Steppin' as my blog. If my readers want to stay, then you're welcome to, but I think I need to go back to thrashing out my problems where I feel at home. A home, a safe space, is something I have always wanted - but not a prison. I tried doing things the 'trad' way and having a private blog, but it felt like a sort of mental cell. I don't want to be on my own all the time - it's myself that I'm trying to get away from! It feels too much like an extension of the double life of my adolescence, when I had to hide my real self away all the time as though I were ashamed. Yet I'm not. Sure, I probably need to see a doctor and sharpish, but in the meantime, I'm back. I'll understand if readers disappear, but I need to do this, lest I end up one day disappearing myself. So yeah, hello. Or should that be, goodbye?

Man, FUCK the Catholic Church

Seriously, when you think of all the people the Vatican has fucked over and wants to continue fucking over? Totally fair and just course of action. If the Vatican had a basketball team or a barbershop quartet of its own (who knows, maybe they do!), they really should be called the Woman-Hating Wonders (replace final word with Wanderers for the basketball team...).

It's tried to avoid the allegations of child sex abuse victims for years, and as I pointed out in my post on abstinence, they haven't even got rid of some offenders, just transferred them! Classic evasion tactics, vah vah. In further evidence to prove that they will very resolutely do nothing, or at the very least, the minimum possible, the Pope called for 'continuous prayer' to deal with the problem of paedophile priests. Gee Benedict, I don't know... couldn't you ease off on priests a bit so that they don't have to be celibate? That way they might not turn to preying on whoever they can get their hands on (children aren't the only ones... if you've read Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate or watched The Magdalene Sisters, you'll know that women were/are also, unsurprisingly, victims of sexual abuse by priests). Alternatively, if a priest has had accusations levelled at him - FIRE THE FUCKER. Better safe than sorry, and what with the Catholic Church's antediluvian attitude and image, it might provide some much-needed positive PR.

Child sex abuse aside, let's not forget that the Catholic Church don't believe in contraception (just GREAT for all those male Catholics in poor countries who can keep on knocking up their poor wives, whether they like it or not!) and are rabidly anti-choice (ditto). Let's now look at two very recent cases where the Catholics continue to prove that they should really not have the privileged legal and political status they have. Sarah Palin was roundly and rightly condemned by many for her views, but she was one individual. This is a whole fucking group of patriarchal nutters - AND they have special observer status within the UN, meaning they can stick their oar in on things which don't have anything to do with them, like human rights.

Firstly, the frankly disgusting and horrifying case of Eluana Englaro. The Guardian ran a very thorough article on this which I can't recommend enough. Eluana had been in a vegetative state for 17 years, and her father wanted the tubes to be removed, in accordance with her wishes. The poor man is currently caring for his wife, Eluana's mother, who has cancer. So what did the Vatican - working through Berlusconi, of course - do? Kick up a fuss about it, declaring it 'a crime against humanity' (what about your paedophile priests, eh?! Surely that's 'a crime against humanity'?) and according to this Times article, describing it as a 'monstrous and inhumane murder.'

This is a woman who has been vegetative for 17 years and whose brain is so severely damaged that doctors have stressed that she will never 'come round', as the Guardian article states. That charmer Berlusconi justified his decision by saying: 'I would be failing to rescue her. I'm not a Pontius Pilate' (Clearly he thinks he's Jesus...) and - get this - saying that she couldn't be allowed to die because she is still 'in the condition to have babies.'

Wow. Just wow. I think that's the only appropriate reaction here, don't you? Thankfully, with the quietly diligent work of the doctors, Eluana died before any more meddling could take place, and Italy's own President refused to side with Berlusconi. It is gobsmacking though. I remember reading an aghast comment somewhere about this, saying something along the lines of: 'So who would they get to impregnate her, then? Rapists?' Well, quite. Clearly the Vatican does not have the FIRST FUCKING CLUE about what constitutes 'human behaviour'; they are masters of misogyny (and I believe that the Vatican should be renamed 'The Ministry of Misogyny' or 'Misogyny Capital of Italy'...). Perhaps Berlusconi would perform the deed and then claim it was immaculate conception. Or a virgin birth, seeing as how he thinks he's Jesus.

The latest story to raise my hackles is this, on the rape of a nine-year-old girl. Nine-year-old girl gets raped, most likely by her stepfather who has now been arrested, and becomes pregnant with twins. Her mother takes her to have an abortion, which y'know, makes sense because she's just a nine-year-old child who has suffered sexual abuse. There is absolutely no way she can be made to take responsiblity for this happening to her.

Abortion is only permitted in Brazil in cases of rape and where the mother's life is at risk...

So, clearly one-nil to the Catholic Church in Brazil - their political stranglehold is making life hell for every woman in the country who wasn't raped/in danger of death and wants to make the decision to have a baby or not for herself.

and doctors say the girl's case met both these conditions... The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday.

So... more of the same humanity, compassion and understanding from our frock-wearing friends! The fun doesn't stop there though, oh no:

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.

Jesus wept. If I was that girl's mother, I'd be glad my daughter still had a life ahead of her, not bothered about whether some religious nut had excommunicated me or not.

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

Oh, how generous of you. Who knows, maybe in a few thousand millenia, you won't be forcing women and girls to bear the brunt of male-inflicted rape and abuse! Then again... I won't hold my breath.

However, doctors at the hospital said they had to take account of the welfare of the girl, and that she was so small that her uterus did not have the ability to contain one child let alone two.

Bastards, bastards, absolutefuckingBASTARDS. This bit actually made me want to cry and/or be sick. That poor, poor little girl.

As with the case of Eluana Englaro, I'm absolutely delighted that the Catholic Church hasn't claimed any victory, but really, the Italians must do better. Peter Tatchell's Cif piece was very good, measured and so forth, but really, considering that the Italian taxpayers fund the Vatican's ongoing existence, it's time for a change. It's time the Italians got all 'what the fuck? You're not the boss of us, or anyone else worldwide for that matter, biatch. God's representative, my ass. Oh wait, I think my ass would in fact be a fairer and more reasonable representative of tha Lord than Benny-dick and his befrocked flock.'

To finish, a little game:

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

Replace 'all those' etc. with 'all those who damn child rape and sex abuse victims.' Then, take 'from the Catholic Church' and put it after 'all those who'. Replace 'secure' with 'by preventing'. Lose 'an' and put an s on 'abortion.' Finally, lose the whole first part of the sentence up to 'all', and replace 'excommunicated' with 'assassinated.' What do you get? Answers in the comment-box please!


Disclaimer: if you honestly think I am advocating the murder of anyone, then please read my previous post for clarification and get a grip, ferChrissakes.

Rihanna, Chris Brown & Gossip Folks

Let me just begin by saying that one thing I really hate in modern society is the continually schizophrenic attitude we have towards celebrities. Overtly, people will bitch about how they're not as glamorous as they used to be (cue misogyny - frequently in gossip magazines - which involves slagging off female celebrities for having the temerity to um, go to the gym in their gym-clothes and the like, while sanctimonious twats reminisce about Marilyn Monroe and 'old Hollywood' actresses, and how 'women were so much more glamorous then') while secretly feeding greedily on every make-up free picture, every wardrobe malfunction and every failure to conform to a pre-ordained fashion trend or rule.

It's not in the least logical. Anyone who thinks about it - just think of Marilyn Monroe, if nothing else comes - can see that women weren't necessarily more beautiful or glamorous 'back then.' It's just that there was more privacy for, and respect of, celebrities in general - and then there's the issue of technology. HOO BOY. I daresay that the only reason celebrities from 'back then' had the privacy they did is because there wasn't computer software sophisticated enough to be uploading pictures of them all day long. Nor were there the kind of super-advanced cameras we have now that mercilessly and minutely capture a person's flaws. When you think of movie posters, for example, a lot of the 'old Hollywood' movie posters were painted - a lot easier to prettify someone that way. Photos of them are also frequently in black and white, which as any fule kno, is one of the easiest ways to make a picture look more flattering. Not to mention that there wasn't a 'gossip industry' quite as unscrupulous as today's.

(It is ironic, actually, because MM was never completely OK with being a 'sex symbol' and wasn't a natural blonde either... I've also read that she cut the tip off one of her heels to emphasise the wiggle in her walk, but I don't remember where I read that... Still, at least she had, by today's standards, quite a hand in controlling her public image).

Aaanyway, the worst thing about all this - gossip magazines, gossip sites, celebrity gossip in papers, etc. - is that it only encourages and reinforces the worst of human tendencies - that of leaping to judge people as if it is some divine right of ours. Now, judging others is a tendency of ours which isn't going to go anytime soon, and to some extent it's of course necessary, but snap judgements - fuelled ably by our obsession with celebrity-gossip culture - are just another way for us to pander to that which is lowest in us.

You surely will have encountered somebody in your life who tried to pass these snap judgements off as having some sort of intrinsic, instinctive 'truth-value', because they are instantaneous. BOLLOCKS. I would say that they're actually much more of a Pavlovian thing, the result of elaborate social conditioning. For example, if I were not a follower of gossip at all, and happened to observe that a female celebrity had gained weight considerably, I might see her and think 'Oh, she's gained weight. I wonder why?' in a surprised/semi-curious way. That in itself, is not bad. What is bad is when an elaborate chain of associations make themselves instantly known in my head, leading to the triggering of a negative 'snap judgement.' Anyone who doubts the truth of this may want to experiment with the scenario I've just described, using a fairly young and 'unsocialised' child. Show them two pictures of a celebrity and see what happens. I doubt they'll associate shame and disdain with the celebrity in the way that gossipers - older, more socially-conditioned beings - would: 'Oh my God, that fat cow! She's obviously let herself go since so-and-so dumped her' or similar.

Note that - despite it being a 'snap judgement', it's anything but simple. That's because humans, despite what reactionaries and pseudoscientists of all stripes would like to have us believe, are NOT SIMPLE. In that negative response, which is posited as a 'natural' occurrence, we have: disgust/disdain at the person's lack of shame in refusing to conform to a particular expectation, dehumanisation, instantaneous removal of their agency (she's 'let herself go', that is, given up instead of controlling and policing herself like she should) and extrapolation on a situation on which the commenter knows fuck-all based on a hamfisted appropriation of biographical detail.

Sorry to get so long in trying to make my point, but I'm trying hard to convince here! The patriarchy (I hate saying that sometimes, because it makes it sound more big, powerful and shadowy than I'd like to accept) has socialised us to react in ways which are posited as 'plain-speaking', 'straight-up' or 'natural,' when they're anything but. This is why the case of Rihanna and Chris Brown is so distressing (if you're not following, please follow the link for a speedy update, I'm not going into any more detail!).

By chance I came upon this response to the whole affair, which I found extremely heartening. Pricks on the Internet just LOVE trying to shout down feminists when they comment on things like this. One of the most frequent and infuriating techniques - no matter WHAT the issue - is to indulge in whataboutery by crying 'What about TEH MENZ??!!1!!1' Hence - naive that I am - I always like to see feminist-friendly articles written by men. It's still all too rare, which I can't help thinking fuels these idiots further. So I read it, thinking: 'Hmm, a black man commenting incisively and eloquently on the issue. Hopefully this won't be besieged by trollery, seeing as how it's a man...'

Alas, I was hoping in vain. I had reckoned without the power of the modern-celebrity-gossip-strengthened snap judgement. A quick scroll through the comments, and - hello! The whataboutery begins with the very first fucking comment. I'm not going to try and chronicle just how many people indulged in this type of comment, because I want to sleep sometime this night, but there were many, and not just here but on other posts about this which criticised the 'Blame the Victim' culture. The classic tactic is to respond (imagine someone saying this as if thinking causes them great difficulty, while their knuckles rub lightly against the floor): 'Well he shouldn't have hit her, but a woman shouldn't hit a man either, innit, and if she does, then it's SELF-DEFENSE!!1!!1!'.

The worst thing about these snap judgements is that they breed, and perpetuate more of the same, keeping the hateful misogynistic rumours in steady circulation. The above type of comment, while missing the point of the post entirely, also manages to distort the seemingly simple message that 'Violence is not OK. Ever.' By doing so, it generates a whole noxious narrative from where there previously was none. It is immediately implied that Rihanna must have hit Chris Brown which was why he hit her back, of course - it was self-defense, right?!

Er... well, actually, no. Nobody but Rihanna and Chris Brown actually knows what happened between them. Furthermore, if scum like the above really believed the crap they spouted, then they wouldn't say what they said. If they really believed that violence is always unacceptable, they would've said something more like this:

'Now, I don't know about this matter, but Chris Brown seems to me like a good fellow. Maybe Rihanna struck him first. Even if she did, though, he should not have retaliated - he should have walked away, because that is the mark of a mature and sensible adult. Violence only begets violence.'

Still, that's not going to happen because many of these male-privilege flaunting desperadoes are hypocrites. They don't care about violence being wrong, they just want to disseminate the 'crazy bitch' meme at all costs. They're basically trying to encourage more attitudes like Chris Rock's, as cited at the start of the post. I do believe in innocent until proven guilty, but if we're going to play the gossip-extrapolation game, let's look at the facts: just by looking at Chris Brown, and knowing that he's had extensive martial arts training, one can comprehend that he's far more capable of doing damage to Rihanna than the other way round. Again, violence must be used responsibly and carefully - especially against a weaker opponent! Black mark. Also, as anyone with a shred of brain activity knows, people who are abused tend to become abusers themselves, and Brown has previously spoken out about his abusive stepfather. Again, this would imply that HE was in the wrong, HE behaved in a way unacceptable by the rules of martial arts and human respect in general - but let's not let that get in the way of a good round of misogynistic Blame-the-Victim.

Finally - if you were actually pushed to the point of 'self-defense' by someone smaller and weaker than you - as the morons are trying to suggest - that suggests that the situation would be so extreme that you would lash out simply to protect yourself. Either it would be a blind strike, or you'd try to knock out/immobilise your attacker, right? Especially if you'd had martial arts training. Rihanna had 'deep bruises on either side of her forehead, blackened areas around her eyes and what appears to be blood at the corners of her mouth' in the photo leaked online, which seems - gee, I dunno - more like domestic violence.

Especially now that Rihanna has apparently reunited with him and has declined to press charges, I can only see the victim-blame escalating. Cynical as it will sound, the way these male-privilege assholes are ('Of course he can bruise her whole face in self-defence, she obviously struck first and/or was a crazy high-maintenance bitch, while he's just a poor little R'n'B crooner, which obviously goes to show how much he loves ladies, yes, even though I know neither of them'), I suspect it's going to reach farcical levels. I tell you, the trolls are probably going to love the latest developments and say something like 'Well, he didn't kill her, did he? And she went back to him. So what's your problem, femonazis? Move along, there's no victim here, you're just trying to hate on men again and stop a brother from having a chance'. Sigh!

Gail Trimble and the Guardian

In my previous post, I mentioned how a feminist can encounter misogyny in the most unexpected of places, namely on (supposedly) socially-liberal sites such as Comment Is Free and Liberal Conspiracy (in all fairness, both are generally OK, but the commenters on Cif tend to be prats, and you get the occasional prat on LC too...).

So today children, I'm going to take on the Guardian for some hypocrisy which verges on misogyny regarding the reluctantly-ubiquitous Gail Trimble, 'intellectual blitzkrieg' and female captain of the Corpus Christi college team on University Challenge. As anyone with functioning senses and a tendency to be exposed to the British media will know, she suddenly became an object of interest for her impressive intelligence and then linked to scandal - her team were stripped of their 2009 winners' title after it emerged that one of them was only a student during the first round of the competition.

Now, I have no real idea why on Earth so much has been made of Trimble, but I'll hazard a guess - misogyny, anti-intellectualism, desire to drum up publicity for the show, easy copy etc. I think it is great that sites such as the F-Word came out in defence of her, but to be honest, I think most people could give less of a monkey's about UC and its denizens. Though, as a publicity stunt, making a star out of Trimble seems to have worked - apparently the BBC garnered a 'record' audience of 5.3 million viewers for the final.

I want to take the Guardian to task over this article which is really rather hypocritical.

The stripping of the title from Corpus Christi is an ignominious end for Trimble's rollercoaster ride to fame.

Is just me, or is there a real element of gloating here? Firstly: who cares? Not Trimble herself - as pointed out in an article which appeared just the next day on the Guardian website, they magically remembered that she didn't ask for the attention.

While Trimble hogged the limelight, little attention was given to her team-mates, although of course that has now changed.

No - as the saying goes, a star is made, not born. YOU, the mainstream media, are the ones who thrust her into the limelight. She didn't have any desire to 'hog' it. If no attention was given to her team-mates, that's YOUR problem, not hers.

The article also begins with:

The winners of University Challenge, Corpus Christie College, Oxford – captained by "intellectual blitzkrieg" Gail Trimble

Lest we forget.


This hypocrisy is pretty impressive on the Guardian's part. In an article by the same authors appearing just the following day, they wrote:

Producing a series of barnstorming performances that made her an object of public admiration and anti-intellectual ridicule, Trimble almost singlehandedly propelled her team to victory

Sanctimonious, much? A few bloggers discussed her previously - you lot in the mainstream media turned her into 'an object of public admiration and anti-intellectual ridicule' for the sake of an easy and research-free story. Even if she DID win two-thirds of the team's points, you saying that she 'almost singlehandedly propelled her team to victory' continues rather conveniently to single her out, and all for your own ends. Let me just say that there are currently 38 articles on the website tagged 'University Challenge,' of which 14 directly reference GT. There are probably also a number of articles which mention her in the body of their text.

It really feels like the Guardian is trying to demonstrate some sort of class credentials as well, the way it continues to get mileage out of the Trimble/non-student scandal affairs. As I pointed out, their attitude in that article is pretty gloating, and just to really rub it in for Sam Kay and the Corpus Christi lot, the NINE most recent articles are about them losing their title in some way or another, often mentioning proudly how it was the Observer who found out Kay was not a student. Seriously - WHO CARES?! Pats on the back for a storm in a teacup, or what?! There were also two BBC-bashing blog-posts by one Vicky Frost, one with the smug tagline: 'Manchester's University Challenge team have surely won the PR battle today, proving graceful in defeat', as if CC were somehow being arrogant. It also prompts the question: WHAT PR BATTLE?! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU ON ABOUT?

Just because the Manchester lot aren't as obviously privileged as the CC lot, it doesn't mean they have to gloat - the CC team KNEW MORE. Which was the POINT of this competition. Talk about resorting to reverse-Mail tactics! One, you make a star out of someone to generate easy copy. Two, you then turn a rather minor scandal involving her team into a chance to escalate the storm and generate yet more copy, gloating about CC's fate as if they deserve it because 'they're upper-class, innit'. Three, you then undermine the Manchester University team's reaction by heaping praise on it, thus implicitly suggesting that their getting the trophy needs to be legitimised somehow. Four, you then get some woman whose opinion no-one really cares about to moan about the BBC's reaction - twice and talk about a non-existent 'PR battle', all in the name of generating more hits for the website, I suspect, judging by the tone, the references to all this and to 'Sachsgate.'

Perhaps the Grauniad's online editors have realised the standard of commenter they attract (think the Mail Online, or the type of person who frequents the BBC's 'Have Your Say' section - see here, here or here for details) and have decided to go for the jugular. As Dan Ashcroft would say: 'The idiots are winning.'


Recommended reading for everyone in the world, ever.

Misogyny To The Fore!

Oh, readers. It's not been a good week. Not in the usual emo-meltdown fashion (though there was a little of that), but in a deeper, more depressing way.

A certain listlessness, a fear about the future and increasing consciousness of the speeding-by of Time have set in. Lack of sleep, a lunatic sleep-schedule, awareness of the fact that I am going to effectively FINISH MY DEGREE in about two months' time commenced the deluge. Then, there was guilt over my responsibilities to others. I have been regularly cheering up my friend Colin with long phone chats, and trying to be a source of occasional support to my oft-insomniac friend Trish. (She has huge blue eyes which seem to get even larger as she gets worked up, and make you want, as The Libertarian said, to pat her and tell her to calm down). These moments were rare, though.

I tried to intervene between my sister and parents every now and again, including this evening. Her idiot husband wants to reconcile - so he sent her a 3-page list of her flaws, and then when she replied that she did not want to meet with him, responded with: 'I'm amazed by your reply.' Even now, some days later, he remains 'amazed.' I remain amazed that I have not *headdesk*ed yet. Or *facepalm*ed. I never realised that trying to reconcile with somebody involved systematic and repeated attempts to blame them for your relationship's failings, while also refusing to take any responsibility for anything yourself. Nor did I comprehend that, in essence, it involves behaving in exactly the same way that brought the relationship to a screeching halt. More fool me!

(Somehow, I have graciously restrained my urges to email him abuse, despite even being encouraged to do so by my mother *twitches with this saintly effort* Though if I did, I would say, quite simply: 'FUCK OFF OUT OF MY SISTER'S LIFE, YOU CHILDISH TWIT'. I might also add 'SHE MIGHT GIVE A SHIT, BUT NONE OF US DO, IF YOU NEVER MARRY AGAIN' (As he said to her). Oh Lord, that felt good).

So yeah, I'm antsy like I've bathed in chilli-powder, and have found it really bloody hard to motivate myself to work this week. It doesn't help that misogyny seems to be bearing down on me from all sides. Not just me, of course - laydeez in general, but that doesn't make it any easier to stand.

Let me just link you good people to this and this. The author of both these posts is one Chris Dillow, who I've seen showered with praise, particularly by sites I read like Liberal Conspiracy, presumably for the fact that he is a liberal/left-leaning economist who seems to know his stuff and provides good analyses of stuff. Now, I've no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the explicitly misogynistic tone of those two posts, ESPECIALLY the latter.

I left an infuriated comment on the LibCon article, which got ignored (unsurprisingly). The thing that really depressed me was that five women disagreed strongly with the bullshit on it, whereas only three men did the same. On t'other post, about 10 people said things which were supportive of women against Dillow's bullshit generalisations; there were other comments that sort of challenged him, but rather weakly. The rest of the comments included such gems as:

Sexist weekend should be a cultural institution:

What do you do if your dishwasher breaks down?

Slap her.

You've got 7 points about women here and sex doesn't appear in any of them: there's something far wrong with you, m'boy.

While I'm a roll here I'd just like to point out that political correctness was invented so that all women could nag all men, not just the ones they are married to.

and finally:

If your basic statement is "There;s nothing less attarctive than a middle class career girl who takes a perverse pride in her inability to cook and considers friday night a good time to stay in and talk about the realtionship" then I'm in full agreement. If women concentrated on buying and wearing attractive underwear the world would be a much happier place.

Only half of the non-misogynistic comments stuck up directly for women. There were quite a few mocking ones from women (not just from women), but I thought the fact that nobody just called 'misogynist' was rather depressing. The best comment came from one James Hamilton:

My experience of people possessed by one form of prejudice, such as yours against people you perceive as posh or public school, is that there's always another form of the same thing in them somewhere. So I've been expecting this. I'm surprised by what it is,though. I expect you'll get off in the same way you usually do - enough people prepared to believe that you don't mean it. I'll give you this much: I do think you're open about these things, and that you do mean it, although I think you lace them with humour. But you're not being ironic, in that crude and misconstrued blogosphere sense. Good luck.

Wherever you are, James - we love you! How accurate your predictions were, with so many people actually engaging with this kind of thing in some form or another in the comments. A poster called Katie (apparently female, then?) posted the following:

In terms of an intellectual exercise, I am not sure this is a success. Some of your points are opinions, while few are supported by evidence. It would be good to see an evidenced four way comparison: boys good, boys bad, girls good, girls bad, with every point evidence to compare for each points.

I felt like saying No, no, NO, Katie! Don't fall into the fucking trap! You should not have to engage with this, and this bullshit disguising of misogyny as intellectual ranting!

It is so shocking, as a feminist, to see this kind of thing in the so-called liberal blogosphere, just as it is in the mainstream media. It makes you feel like a real tool, because you can be quite sure that if a conservative/right-wing blogger had expressed similar sentiments, they would be roundly insulted and criticised. However, when someone like Chris Dillow does it (that post is from last year, by the way, I only became aware of it through the Valentine's post), people will look the other way as much as they can. I never saw any condemnations of that post of his on any blogs I read at the time. So, did most people just conveniently ignore it? It would seem so!

Feminists occupy a particularly ugly position, given that there's nothing that crosses boundaries quite so effectively as miosgyny. Muslims, Christians and Jews can argue about the likes of I/P forever, but many of them will find themselves in sudden agreement on the subject of how to treat women. I would argue that we're perhaps easier to demonise than any other group. There's always a particular minority group that will receive its undue share of media attention, as is happening to Muslims these days, but men of all stripes - gay and straight, black and white, atheist and religious - will come together under the banner of misogyny. It's so depressing.

Comment Is Free, for example, is a platform for Guardian writers to air their views. The Guardian is supposed to be liberal-left. Yet feminist writers are assured of being roundly shouted down when they post on there. Sometimes, as in the case of Julie Bindel and occasionally, Bidisha, this is somewhat warranted. However, even on more moderately-expressed opinions, you'll get loons going 'BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ'. They also routinely try to use the argument that 'feminism is itself sexist because it's feminism.' As Lily Allen once sang, please fuck off. On an article by Zoe Williams about rape, ferinstance, in which she argued that the fact of having consumed alcohol should not have led to a rape victim's compensation being cut, the first comment was by 'thetrashheap' who lived up to his name by saying:

Better than the editorial yesterday but why just rape?

How can being drunk mean you deserve to get assaulted in any manner [Isn't that the point of the whole fucking article, you numbskull?]. Rape can be less harmfull than a serious assult. I know a man who was much more damaged by nearly being beaten to death than a women I know who was raped ['It is true because I know it to be so, based on 1 or 2 personal experiences']. Yet with the indignation over rape the guardian can say in one of its editorials

"Cuts may be justified when a victim's drinking precipitates certain violent attacks "

[Did you ever consider that maybe they were just reporting something as they were told it, and that's all there is to it?] How does being drunk percipitate a violent attack? [Gee, that's exactly what Zoe Williams is saying right here!] If somebody does an action that makes them partly reponsible for violence then so be it but being drunk isn't a reason.

So why concentrate on Rape and demean assault? Why try and lift rape as a crime above all else? Murder is worse, being left as a cripple can be worse? Being left too scared to leave the house after a serious assault can be worse on a person than a date rape.

The law needs changed but it doesn't need such righteous indignation over one particular type of assault. How many drunk men a year get less compensation for being assaulted? The problem is the law regards alcohol and culpability. Women aren't the only ones who get screwed over by this.

Can you hear the cries of 'WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ'?! I don't even have any energy left to continue ripping this shit to shreds. This is the worst kind of comment in some ways, where a small grain of truth buried amongst astounding ignorance is inflated into hand-wringing self-righteousness.

Then you have the fucking Mail website, where the most poisonously vicious articles are written by women and published alongside conveniently half- (or, as was in the case of Peaches Geldof, fully) naked pictures of younger female celebrities, so that the women can tut and feel good about themselves, and the men can do the same while having a surreptitious wank. I patently refuse to link to the pictures of PG. I don't like her, but she doesn't deserve to appear naked in the Mail in an article which slags her off for having tattoos. One of the top-rated comments when I saw it was 'What the hell does she think she looks like?'

What the fuck is it to you, eh, armchair-moralist? And what the fuck is it to the Mail? It's supposed to be an outraged comment, but it turns out to be unwittingly insightful, because of course it doesn't matter what she thinks she looks like. Evidently, she likes the tattoos. What MATTERS is that the Mail are on hand 'to do the proper thing' and trash her for them.

To top all of this off, I'm taking a course on 'British Culture In the 1950s' which has all the fun you'd expect - a surge in evangelical Christianity, colonialism, racism... but, reassuringly enough, the thing that seems to unite all the writers so far is misogyny. Don't worry fellas, when you feel that Africans and Englishmen are irreconcilably different, you can always unite in your disdain for women! I've just read City of Spades by Colin MacInnes. MacInnes was openly gay and had a major sexual obsession with black men, especially Africans.

Now, you would hope that a gay man, as a fellow sufferer of persecution, would try to avoid the rampant stereotyping and mistreatment of women that liberally (haha) garnishes 1950s novels (let's not forget, it was the era of James Bond). I got really excited when I 'met' an independent and capable female character early on, who held a senior position in the BBC. I was optimistic about a girl who was quite shy and meek, but by no means a pushover, and her sister who had apparently chosen to live with a Gambian man.

Alas, it was not to be, my friends! The BBC woman turned out to be a frigid bitch who 'discovered' her femininity upon falling in love with one of narrating characters, and then got punished for this by losing her job when she revealed she was pregnant by him in court, as well as losing the baby. Of course, she'd learnt her lesson by this point: 'All I deeply regret... is losing my child.' Yes, because you've seen the light now, and you realise that other than as a mother, you don't really matter. Without your 'fragment of him' that you loved, your life is meaningless.

The shy girl got knocked up and abandoned by the same character - after he had lived off her and perpetually left her by herself at home - just as his father had done to her mother. Her sister turned out to be a prostitute, pimped out by her own husband and last appearing in the novel in hospital because her husband had cut her face up after getting out of jail.

Of Colin MacInnes:

'I didn't like him at all,' says Diana Melly, who was a showgirl at the Cabaret Club in Soho along with Christine Keeler. 'His idea of me was just the wife with young children who cooked lunch all the time. I don't know what gave him the idea that he could get so drunk and be so rude after having his lunch made.'

This peculiarly male-homosexual disdain for women is nothing new to me, it's just really depressing. MacInnes is another one who was 'liberal' by the standards of his time. Why is it impossible for people, if they can stand other races, religions, etc., to not be the same about women?

As a socially-liberal feminist, it feels like the worst kind of betrayal when men who claim to be liberal/left-wing suddenly reveal themselves to be misogynists, or unfurl the handy caveat of saying 'I'm not a feminist.' You feel very alone, all of a sudden. If feminism doesn't have a home within the liberal-left community, then where is there a safe space for feminists? Liberal Conspiracy held a BlogNation event some time back (which I didn't attend, because I didn't 'matter' enough, and I doubt I do even now!), and the subject of trying to engage with the feminist blogosphere was raised by Sunny.

Let me offer a much-belated tip to you, Sunny: why don't you call bullshit on your ilk who profess misogynistic views? That would be certainly preferable to the following dubious comment you left on the Valentine's thread, in response to Jennie Rigg:

You see, the thing is women, rather like men, ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS. We don’t all think the same, and there is no sure fire way to please us.

Well, yes and no. Everyone’s an individual… as everyone likes to think. But people also behave in remarkably predictable ways.

Excuse me? The Libertarian, a white, middle-class man (probably the sort who Chris Dillow would loathe) who initially identified as right-wing (now, he's not so sure, because he's actually socially-liberal on the whole - what do you think I am, insane?!) has proven to be much more a feminist than some people *coughs and glances upwards* who claim to be, even though he didn't initially consider himself one.

So yes, you can bet that I've been disillusioned this week. Though it's been an accumulation of things, not just current affairs. The stuff about 'men are responsible for the banking crisis, bring in more women!' was another stab in the weeping lesion. BRING PEOPLE IN ON MERIT, and yes, we need more females in that atmosphere, but merit needs to come into the equation and we need to start challenging society's assumptions. Banking is a deeply sexist sector from what I've (repeatedly) read, it doesn't surprise me. Women within that field need to be able to know that they won't be forced to go to strip clubs and act like 'one of the boys' just to retain their jobs. I really think that bosses, the people in charge of recruitment and management decisions, should be made to show proof of feminist credentials. Male OR female. It doesn't have to be anything major - just interview the women they've worked with previously, if need be.

Anyway, I'm hauling my tired ass off to bed. I was feeling very low, but then I remembered - hey, I'm seeing The Libertarian tomorrow! How childishly excited I got! I actually wanted to send my friend a text about it as if it were news. I fought the urge to mention it in in my Facebook status. He smiles with his whole face (eyes AND mouth), and what a smile it is. Good God. I'd take his over those of cherubs or female figures in classic art anyday. The Mona Lisa? You are the weakest link, goodbye. Next to green/hazel eyes, rosy cheeks, a freckled nose and the most effortlessly alluring pair of lips I have ever known, the Italian broad can just go hang (oh wait, she is already - in the Louvre *drumroll and crash*). Admittedly, I can't help noticing his lips because the top of my head only comes up to his chin. Still, why quibble? I'm getting feminist-kissed!

Recommended Reading:

Another bigot emerges, seemingly from nowhere.

Intelligence in women - still a topic for debate in the 21st century...

Two really good pieces on women and cinema.

Upskirting - warn all the women you know.

Another woman comes along to tell us that in fact, if we willingly prop up the patriarchy, it can only be good for us. Cheezus.

More Sex Please...

I'm a feminist. Hur hur. I am using this post to clarify what I said in the previous post, and also to talk about other 'ish.

I'd like to say here and now, just in case it wasn't clear from the previous post that I'm not against waiting until marriage to have sex at all. Provided that it's actually a choice (some people are strong-willed/religious enough to do that) - a genuine choice and the person has sufficient awareness of contraception, diseases and their body parts to not do themselves any harm, then great. If they've found the right person and yadda, yadda, yadda, then more power to them. It is genuinely admirable.

That's just it though - when it's not a choice, but a cultural expectation, we're entering Whole Different Kettle-o'-Fish Land. All too often, it IS a cultural expectation, conveniently underpinned by misogyny. Worried that girls are getting pregnant too young? Hey! Don't get your knickers in a twist! You don't have to do anything as difficult as tell boys that they're just as responsible for the being that will be created. I mean, it's only 50% of their genetic material, and it's not like it's growing inside of THEM, right? Naaah, man, there's a much easier way to deal with it. Teach your girls to JUST SAY NO! Everyone knows they're the weaker sex anyway - you'd better drum it into them just to be safe.

I mean, girls are nothing but empty vessels, right? Shout that abstinence message right into their ears and it'll keep echoing delightfully around in their pretty little heads. They won't get pregnant, no sirree. They won't have sex.

... Except, as any fule kno, they will, because girls have desires too. Sometimes, even when they might not want to go 'all the way', a coercive boyfriend will tell them to do it 'if you love me', passing off a frankly galling selfishness that would have no place in REAL love under cover of emotional blackmail. Then, once they do, if they haven't used contraceps - that's right, up the spout! If they were told that 'abstinence is the only way,' then you can bet they're going to end up DOUBLY screwed.

Granted, the abstinence movement is bigger in the US than it is here, but there are things which make me think of it in this country too. Like this, for instance.

Why the flying fuck is The Times even giving this dumbfuck print-time, seriously? I was utterly UNsurprised to learn that the most prominent critic cited was affiliated with a religious body.

Simon Calvert, deputy director of the Christian Institute, attacked the leaflet, saying: “The idea that the government is telling families not to pass on their values [they're not... have you read the leaflet?] is outrageous.

“Preserving children’s innocence is a worthy goal. We would like to see more of that kind of language rather than this amoral approach where parents are encouraged to present their children with a smorgasbord of sexual activities and leave them to make up their own minds.”

Oh, Lord forbid that they should MAKE UP THEIR OWN MINDS! NOOOOOO! IT'LL BE SODOM AND GOMORRAH ALL OVER AGAIN, FORNICATING IN THE STREETS, RIVERS OF BLOOD...

(as opposed to the good ol' down-home repressed approach that some righteous Christians use to deal with their urges... Speaking of which, don't you just LOVE that the Pope not only didn't fire Cardinal Bernard Law, but transferred him, and then called for 'continuous prayer' to deal with the problem of paedophilia within the Church? Instead of like, y'know, doing something about it. Like firing those who do it, and recognising that it's PAEDOphilia - being attracted to children - NOT linked to those with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies" as the Supreme Morons put it).

It beggars belief. I mean that literally. It reduces belief to beggary for the many Christians out there who are not utter morons - like Derek_M.

Seriously dude, if that's how you think, you should be sterilising people, because as soon as a human being is born, they are equipped with a fully-functioning (in most cases) mind of their own. The whole thing that's meant to be 'divine' about humanity is that they can choose and judge for themselves, not blindly follow the call of biology as the rest of the Animal Kingdom does. Adulthood is about children learning to make up their own minds. So, what do you suggest we do? Kill 'em when they're 18? Sterilise everyone just to be safe?

I thought of the abstinence movement here because what screamed out at me were the LIES, LIES, LIES in what Christofascist (sorry, had an attack of 'teh internets' there) Calvert said here:

"Preserving children’s innocence is a worthy goal."

It is, my frothing moron, it is. Don't think the warm glow of a universally-accepted statement is going to get you off though, because, you see, it doesn't apply to you. You're just a meaning-twisting liar like so many others out there.

You don't give two hoots about children's innocence. You want to amend that phrase to read 'Ensuring children's ignorance is a worthy goal' because that's what you mean. If you're worried about children's innocence, start taking bad parents to task - and I mean in a genuinely productive way, not through something like 'continuous praying' (snicker).

I think Mr. Calvert needs to have a read of this, if you ask me. The Virgin Mary might've done alright, but let me remind you, Mr. Calvert, that she was carrying the Son of God. Little girls out there who get pregnant are not all carrying the Son of God (wouldn't that be interesting!) and little boys who pick themselves up a nice STI or twelve and learn nothing about respecting women in the process are not Joseph. They ain't going to be visited in no dream by no angel, telling them to stand by her because they'll get fried otherwise!

And if the stuff about Alfie Patten's mother spreading the story to make money is true, then your rant is even worse than useless. People need money to live, especially in a recession, and if God doesn't come through for them but pre-marital teenage sex does... whatcha gonna do about it, huh?

Given that he hasn't even read the leaflet (it doesn't forbid passing on your values, it encourages it. All it does is (quite sensibly) warn against moralising when it comes to sex), I don't think there's many a strip more to be tearing off him. AND - perhaps most tragic of all - he confuses sexual activities with teaching kids about contraception and STIs. Good God.

Sex Before Marriage - Bring It On

I have been moved to write this by a series of comments on a note I posted on Facebook. An American who took a bizarrely thorough interest (not romantic, just general) in me and who I fell out with/stopped talking to via the Internet a while back assumed that because I said I don't believe in waiting till marriage to have sex, that I am no longer a virgin:

'the mistaken.. version was...."I'm just saying that I don't believe in sex
before marriage"...i would be relieved.....if the contrary was not approaching
the end point....then u may say. why...to be blunt or direct as i call it... the
answer is:.because u were once a sweet virgin girl..!'

The implication being that 'once' I was 'sweet' and a 'girl' and now I'm not, apparently (Might I just say that I am so not disclosing any details of that here, it's my business and no-one else's).

That was precisely what infuriated me about such a comment. Where is the need to extrapolate from a general view of mine and then try to apply it to me? The ongoing discourse is only making me angrier and angrier, which at this time of sadness-prone-ness, is welcome.

More than anything, it made me angry because it reminded me of the wall that we South Asian feminists come up against - and will continue to come up against - when we try and deal with things like this directly. I know enough of our society to be fully aware that throwing up your hands and saying 'This is who I am, take me as I am' doesn't work. It might make you feel better, in that you'll stop living a lie, but then the bigots will regroup and bear down on you again. That's the precise problem - you can't reason with bigots whose beliefs are rooted firmly in their irrational, emotional prejudices.

I will just say that the fun didn't stop there. I replied, saying:

'.because u were once a sweet virgin girl..!'

Er, how can you presume to know about my sexual status just because I've said I no longer believe in sex before marriage? Nice jumping-to-conclusions there.

I know a lot of men, particularly those of South Asian descent, just love the idea of the virgin bride. However, knowing increasingly more about the realities of Indian marriages (at the very least), I find the thought of waiting until marriage quite terrifying, as do many women. Especially, as is usually the case, you don't know your partner very well, or even not at all.

And here is the rest of it in full. Him:

"the death of virginity at ur age begins.. when u no longer value it.."
i didnt quite pressume....i infer from the absence of a clarity...
i hope u dont find it rude...
i wonder if ur field research.. of "lot of men" and "indian marriages" reduced to ur CENSORED .."lot"

Me:

No. How did I imply that, even directly? I simply replied that my 'field of research' isn't necessarily as narrow as you seem to be assuming, and that I have based my opinions on judging for myself, things I have overheard and directly discussed, and my knowledge of what it is like trying to do things 'the traditional way.'

Him:

so are saying.. the ppl above 30 yrs of age... born and raised... in the "3rd world" have endoresed ur present view..? are including ur parents... u discussed this with them..


when did u come to ur current view point on this precious matters....?
did u include ur parents in this discussion..?

I stopped responding here, and then deleted him from my friends list. I was absolutely furious, and my ex even said 'What a dick.' I just could not believe it. A man in another country (America), who does not know me, who has no real link to me whatsoever and whom I have nothing in common with save for the fact that we both, as far as I know, 'originate' from India, policing my sexuality?

This is where anti-feminist wackjobs would leap in and say 'How is he policing it? He's simply asking if your parents are aware of what their daughter is up to, HAVING CONSIDERATION FOR THEM.'

To which I'd say: read the whole thing, fuckers. Where exactly does my stance (disapproving about waiting till marriage to have sex) cross over into my private life? At what point did I stand up and say 'YEAH, I'VE LOST MY VURGINITY AN IT WOZ GRATE TOO!!11!!'?

That's just it - I didn't, because contrary to the insulting assumptions being made here, this isn't another story you can write off as 'Oh, she met somebody she wanted to sleep with. Just another slut then!'

See, my 'skinny friend' who I haven't mentioned for ages took it personally when he found out that I'd kissed TL and said 'I thought you were different.' Trans: you turned out to be just another slapper. Note how the same assumption is being made about me by this man, ALSO of Indian extraction. Why, despite my affirming that the two things are not linked, does he persist in asserting that I must have had sex before marriage just because I said I don't believe in waiting? And furthermore, what business of his is it anyway?

Witnessing the break-up of a marriage, being aware of the lack of sex education that women of South Asian descent receive (South Asians in general, but it's worse for women since the obsession with our being 'pure' and 'innocent' means we don't get to participate in the same kind of consequence-free fucking and hence experience-gaining that the males frequently do...!) and considering the things that will be expected of me when I'm married, as well as a comment on Pickled Politics by the commenter Jai (which I won't link to because I have no idea where it was now)... all these things made me think. A big part of my sister's break-up was the fact that the guy didn't want children with her.

I began to think about that. I am a fairly sensual person and I knew I'd want to have sex for more than just procreation, but given my lack of knowledge how was I supposed to know what to do? I will tell you totally honestly that despite receiving some sex ed at school, I wasn't even sure where in me it was meant to go. Yes, I was that clueless. I did research on this (Internet, talking to friends) and was told that in order for it to go in, I'd have to be 'wet and slippery.' 'How does that happen though?' I asked. 'You have to be relaxed and turned on,' I was told.

I thought of a woman shipped over from India, to meet her husband for the first time, or my sister, married to a man she had known for a matter of months, a man who enjoyed slighting her and trying to control her. I thought of the prescriptiveness of our culture that treats sensuality, but female sensuality in particular, with huge doses of guilt and shame, preventing women from being able to understand their bodies and use them effectively. Jai's comment had been that for many women, the wedding night is effectively rape (I think he was talking about arranged marriages in particular though). I thought about it, and hang on, he was right. The 'consent' given was highly dubious - not really given by the woman within the couple, but applied from outside by society, in the form of the marriage ritual.

Far from 'consent,' it was rather submission - a submission which her female relatives, more often than not would groom her for. The patriarchy would make her understand that this was expected of her, because it is a husband's and his family's right to expect an heir. Many women want stability and want children, and then are implanted with so much fear and such low expectations, that they yield. It is a general submission. Learning to live with it is Stockholm Syndrome, not love (though that's not to say that love can't happen in the course of the marriage). When you have to sleep with a man at the start, when you don't know him well enough to be safe OR you do know him but he doesn't understand/appreciate your needs, it ends up becoming rape, does it not? The 'consent' is extracted, not offered freely.

Although, I bet that in many modern couples, the 'wedding night' doesn't happen at that time, because they are probably both too exhausted by the day's events. Ironic really - I criticise the excess of Indian weddings, but I suppose in a way, it's almost doing brides a favour in some instances...

I must say here again that I haven't touched on all the things that have drawn me to think this. Meeting a long-lost friend who had put her daughter's husband and in-laws in jail for their rampant mistreatment of her (including violently buggering her, which my friend only learnt of via the police report, which she couldn't bring herself to finish, understandably), the idea of marriage as prostitution... (I know it's Bindel, but swallow down the horror and just read the interview - she doesn't interject! Thankfully. I think she's probably too overcome with hero-worship, or something...).

Both that American and my ex-friend can fuck right off, because they are just more dull, unthinking collaborators with the patriarchy. Who gives you the right to police my sexuality, ey? It's MY BODY, not yours, and not really my parents' either. To be crude, if I have sex or not, it's MY BODY PARTS that are interacting with another's, not my mum's and not my dad's. Ergo it is only a matter for my parents if I were to get pregnant (H to the E double L no) and have to rely on them financially - because that would directly affect them.

I find it outrageous too that my virginity is assigned a value and deemed as the marker of my becoming an adult. How fucking patronising is that? I'm an adult upon reaching the legal age, though I could emotionally be an adult beforehand. Engaging in a physical act, while undoubtedly a milestone, is not THE milestone for me, thank you. I must ask as well: why is my sex life or lack thereof so 'precious' to you? Is it a heap of gold in which you have a stake invested? Did you 'give' part or all of it to me? No, you did not. So, mind your own business and piss off, if you please.

It really does bewilder me why people do this though. Is it because I am fair-skinned and relatively pretty? Not just that, but I look younger than I am and sort of innocent, which is probably why the weirdos seem to flock to me. I'm also relatively open, friendly and polite, which no doubt encourages them. It infuriates me though, because my parents have always tried to imply that such behaviour is 'weak' and that made me only more determined to stick to it. How dare you think I'm weak? I'm strong enough to admit my own ignorance on many topics, and I'm strong enough to have carried the emotional weight of someone 10 years my senior. It's my body; butt out.

(I just wish I could be one of the Save The Earth Foundation members beating up the Sri Ram Sena wankers who attacked women for daring to go to the pub in Mangalore). This is why I want to make sure I do SOME SORT of women's rights-based work this summer, even if it's only for two weeks. A girl's gotta fight.

THANK YOU to my four subscribed readers by the way, I appreciate the fact that you think I'm worthwhile enough to subscribe to and I am sorry for my general shittiness. I'm really not good with people. :D As to lurkers or random readers - I hope you find something educative here. If not - well, tough titties.

Slumdog Millionaire: A Review...

Now, on to that incredibly hyped piece of populism Bollywood-goes-Irish feel-good number Slumdog Millionaire. No doubt you will have seen the poster on the side of a bus, if you haven't heard various cultural critics raving about how it is so good without really ever explaining too much why. I shan't give you THE review - various sites and papers have done that already. Instead, I shall give you a review.

Basically, the clichéd underdog-does-good storyline was nice and reassuring and all that, and left me feeling vaguely warm. However, as I've just hinted, it is nothing new and the structure of the film is set up to make it more affecting than it actually is. The film opens with our plucky hero being beaten up by the police for having apparently cheated - a great way to galvanise us immediately into the sort of viewer that Boyle expects us to be. This paves the way for a deluge of affecting flashbacks, which only supplement the underdog-loving gut-instinct in us that was born with the early scenes of torture. Not only was he innocent, but he's suffered too! Compound the sense of injustice with outrage!

The visual appeal of the film - as critics have already pointed out, it's quite arty-looking, all bright sharp colours and beautiful cinematography (can you tell I don't really know what the fuck I'm on about?) and the soundtrack pumped with M.I.A and A.R. Rahman doing a nice line in urgency - work with the structuring to help deliver a satisfying cinema experience (that sounds very wanky, I know).

However, I do have to agree that the characters really are pathetically underdeveloped (at times I really thought Dev Patel made Jamal come across as simply brain-damaged rather than shy-but-silently-driven). Freida Pinto, while pretty, doesn't really have to do much other than stare sorrowfully out of her pretty eyes and look small and delicate and (again), pretty. The character of Jamal's brother Salim comes across as so downright psychotic at times that it's hard to take his 'good' moments seriously, even though they're instrumental to the plot. Ahhh, the plot. Moments of serious social commentary leap suddenly out (at the vigilant viewer, that is), otherwise jostling uneasily with the highly improbable love story. I'm somebody who likes romance and really does believe in love, but... come on. In some respects, the film looks like it's trying very hard to be 'authentic' or 'realistic', in others it heads into Disney territory. Make up yer minds!

The moments of social commentary - whether intentional or inadvertent - were what really caught me. I emptied a whole week's worth of under-eye luggage weeping at a particular moment in the film which, beautifully and concisely, illustrates the brutal, horrifying futility of sectarian violence. *SPOILER ALERT* When we see Muslims being set upon like dogs and thrashed to death for no other reason than: 'They're Muslims, get them,' it is painfully, hopelessly STUPID and DISGUSTING. We don't know what this particular attack is in aid of, what provoked it - and that's what's so good about this short bit of the film. There is no bullshit justification or intellectualisation of what is nowt but bigoted hatred - we are simply and sharply reminded of the consequences of letting ideology override humanity. Families are destroyed, children are orphaned, lives are ruined.

I thought that I would offer that in itself as a recommendation for why you might want to go see Slumdog in the cinema now; what with the ridiculous loyalties that always re-emerge, smarting like an old wound that's lost its scab with every discussion of Israel/Palestine, here is a film about people trying to get beyond the religious hatred and snobbery which has hampered the beginnings of their lives.

Although it'll make me unpopular for saying it, I also found the disturbing sections showing what often happens to homeless, orphaned kiddies in India (not just in Mumbai) offered a valuable sense of perspective as we here in Britain gripe incessantly about the recession. Though people losing their jobs isn't exactly a positive result ever, at least most of us will be able to return to our families if times really get that hard, and many of us, even if we were to end up starving to death due to lack of employment, bills etc., would have somebody to look into our deaths and enquire after us once we were gone. We still have poverty in this country, undoubtedly, but many people get, at the very least, a chance at life at a young age. Virtually everyone gets schooling, for example.

Seeing the children who are lured and then bound into begging for the rest of their lives, effectively the property of their pimps and masters - seeing the prostitutes forced to keep their crying children alongside them because they have nowhere else to send them while they 'work'... I'm not going to be lame and say 'It was a wake-up call' like some bleeding-heart liberal. I knew of this before - but it was a timely reminder. Maybe, like Jamal, we in Britain need to stop trying to 'keep up with the Joneses' (say what you want, it was our terrible spending habits and sense of entitlement that created the 'recession culture', not just the banks) and think long and hard about the place money and material goods occupy - and should occupy - in our lives.


Recommended Reading.

Also, Pickled Politics is hot to trot at the moment, with a new 'Speakers' Corner Sundays' feature where Sundays are for guest writers' articles - so if you feel like sounding off about ANYTHING, go for it! I hope to at some point...

The obligatory music video so as not to head towards Monday feeling like the apocalypse is coming. Watch it, it's uplifting and happygood!

'Bankish' Behaviour - Sexism at the BoE

As regards the title of this post, just follow the link and READ THIS STORY. READ IT.

I am really quite angry. I didn't think such ridiculous things could irritate me that much, but no, the feminist tiger has been roused and she'd like to rip the head off the 'image consultants' who ran this thing, if nothing else. Though REALLY, what she'd like to do is get some choice 'alone time' with the fuckers at the Bank of England who arranged this. Don't shoot the messenger, etc. etc. etc.

I mean, FUCK YOU. The word 'bankers' has become Cockney rhyming slang for 'wankers' and I tell you, it's feeling like a pretty fitting epithet right now. Although of course, that's hardly fair because not all bankers are, and not even everyone at the Bank of England is.

We're going to use an extreme comparison now to attack what is occurring here. Y'know how, (as anyone who's read/watched Persepolis will know?) the 'Vice Squad' in Tehran roam around policing women's clothes so that they show the acceptable amount of modesty? Well, this is just another version of that, really, but in Britain and done without religion or violence being involved. Not that that makes it any more acceptable for it.

This parallel I've just drawn may seem extreme to some of you, but let me explain:

A memo leaked from the meeting details the advice given to staff, including the warning that wearing certain accessories would make women workers look like prostitutes.

This is the bit that sent me over the edge of calm and hurtling dangerously into the lava-paved fields of rage. Firstly, my brain screamed: WHY? WHY should women not look like prostitutes if they want to? Let me elaborate.

1) By taking this decision in the first place, women are being told how to dress - just like in Tehran - and not being credited with intelligence enough to not dress like sex workers. Ruth Lea, former Centre for Policy Studies director and current economic advisor to the Arbuthnot Banking Group, had this to say:

"Surely it is up to men and women, and their peers at work to decide for themselves what is suitable to wear. If you can get a well-paid job, surely you have the nous to choose the right clothes."

Amen, sister! Seems simple, don't it? Yet this whole fiasco is not just insulting to the female employees and a sheer fucking pisstake at a time of intense economic difficulty for the whole fucking country. It's also insulting to the men who work there.

As Craig David used to popularly sing, re-re-wind:

'wearing certain accessories would make women workers look like prostitutes.'

Here we are, back in the familiar terrain of 'Oh NOOOO! Female sexuality! SHIT! Lock up your sons and fathers and brothers!'

I'd frankly be curious to know what they had in mind here. Maybe they were thinking nurses' uniforms, thigh-high stockings, kinky boots ending above the knee? Or maybe this is just supposed to cover anything that makes you look the tiniest bit attractive and not like someone's stern aunt, or Margaret Thatcher? I have to return here to saying: and what, if women look like prostitutes?

2) If you're working for the BANK OF FUCKING ENGLAND, I think you'll know better than to turn up looking like a prostitute, as observed above. I'm sorry, wanky image consultants, but a woman wearing something which is cut slightly lower/fits slightly tighter/is shorter than you might like is part of a wonderful thing called Choice. It tends to go hand in hand with a concept known as Real Life Is For Living, and although I'm sure the BoE is full of old-ish white middle-class male types, the times they are a-changin'. Plus, it's winter. You certainly wouldn't catch me dead in a PVC maid's dress in this current snowfall!

3) As to insulting the men, I'm quite sure that, er, they're able to discern that the women they have been working with all year are not prostitutes. To be honest, giving the following advice:

'wearing certain accessories would make women workers look like prostitutes.'

is firstly infuriating because it proves that, time and time again, even the merest showcase of female sexuality is a problem for some men - and despite it only being some, all the women must be suppressed accordingly, and also because it wildly insults the intelligence of their male cohorts. Having been hired by the Bank, she knows she's not a fucking prostitute; having worked with her, he knows she's not a fucking prostitute.

The 'logic' that I can see spiralling out of this idiocy runs as follows:

Women dress like prostitutes. This presents a problem for poor, helpless males who let themselves reach the point of unbearable strain. Women subsequently sexually harassed/raped/bullied - go on to take BoE to court and money stands to be lost. Unhappy faces all round!

So, the answer to the kind of bullshit institutional sexism and recycling of outdated gender stereotypes is *gasp* not trying to educate those men who can't cope with a woman wearing a slightly shorter skirt, it's to waste a load of fucking money during a recession period telling women to 'Dress For Success.' The common sense of simply crediting the men with the awareness that their fucking co-workers are evidently not sex workers - and explaining very slowly to the especially thick/bigoted ones - is lost. Do they not think men have enough self-control to avoid leaping on their colleagues at the slightest flash of thigh and humping them unconscious? Do they really think men are that utterly lacking in self-control? Jesus H. Christ.

Interestingly enough, just to dispense with this, I like how women's sexuality is being pummelled into projecting just the right sort of mother/older auntie attitude here. By all means, don't turn us on - but don't confuse us either! Tomboys and androgynes (my coinage) not welcome!

"... always wear a heel of some sort – maximum two inches; always wear some sort of makeup, even if it's just lipstick,"

(BUT WHY?!)

Identity, Culture and All Dat 'Ish

As any fule kno, the um, 'situation' with the Gaza Strip and Israel has provoked a lot of what I can only term sheer utter fucking lunacy everywhere. Pop along to Pickled Politics and scroll down a little to marvel at the sheer volume of articles on it; or if you're a rubbernecking connoisseur, wade into the brain-rotting depths of personal insults and virulent misunderstandings and misinterpretations that tend to make up the comment threads of such articles. Sheesh. I have heard several times how mental people go over I/P, but to see it in action is really something else. Some brave commenters, such as one douglas clark, ventured to say that British Jews should not be forced to shoulder the responsibility of Israel's actions and expected to 'make everything right' from a tiny island far away (I paraphrase). Now, that seems like common sense, don' it?

It got me thinking again on how so much of the danger that comes from having a religious identity (as far as I'm concerned) is in that symbolism. I'm far too timid to say anything like that the world should be rid of religion; I like to throw up my hands on these matters and say, I don't know, and if pressed, I could give you an answer, but not a simple one. I can't ever see myself becoming famous because I don't on the whole do snappy soundbites or 'big ideas' - but back to religious symbolism. It scares me because it allows, nay in many cases, demands the establishment of a connection of oneself with a much larger body of people. The way I see it, many people 'get into' religion for the community and stay for the God (forgive me if that sounds very cynical, and just to elaborate, I'm talking here about the things that keep people born within religion within it, but especially of those who leave and 'come back' or those who enter for the first time...).

Now that is all very edifying and so forth, but it becomes hugely problematic when you start to think about what this means. What it means, as I see it, is a declaration by the individual of surrender to a collective, over certain things and at certain times. In short, it's like hazing or any sort of unpleasant club membership, and even if you were BORN with those privileges, you never know when the tide of mass opinion might turn against you. Hence, though more shored-up than the new convert, you're still forever at risk of being undermined by the very fact of your 'membership', paradoxical as it sounds.

(Might I just say how painfully paradoxical this strikes me as? A significant part of the promise of religion to many is as an access of ready-made identity, culture, history, yadda yadda yadda... and instead it gets to the stage where you're always having to prove yourself. Well, I guess as the popular maxim goes, in life, nothing (but nothing) is free!).

Now, it must be averred that this risk of being undermined is not always greatly present. It tends to emerge handily with the arrival of an Other. I suppose the process works something like this: your 'identity' and 'culture' are threatened, hence you are threatened; by aggressively reasserting these, you refuse the attempt of the Other to undermine you completely. However, as we have already established, this shadowy Other (which may not be as much of a threat as imagined to be, who knows?) will then become projected unconsciously upon your fellow-believers for whom you must perform the rituals of belief. Isn't it ungracious? Isn't it undignified, how the best and brightest of us find ourselves bending the knee before those we know, know, in our hearts and minds to be stupid, ugly, and generally inferior... and yet whom the deranged reach of (oft-bigoted) zeal places on the podium, above us?

I commented disparagingly on a thread about a Sikh 'holocaust' museum, saying that I don't think the word should be bandied about quite so readily. Aye right, I fuckin' don't - the word means 'burnt sacrifice' and was applied to the full horror of the Nazi plan (need I really mention the gas chambers here...?) in light of the specificity of how this plan was implemented. I am a writer; I have the most enormous respect for words and it really annoys me when people don't use them properly, or use them out of context. Fuck you if you think that's precious - you wouldn't say the same of someone like Ben Goldacre seeking to debunk bad science now, would you? Miscommunication, apart from when it's deliberate, has a lot to do with making our lives harder than they ought to be, and the misuse of language is one of those things. Call the suffering of other minority communities 'genocide', call it 'mass murder' - but given how saturated this word has become with meaning - and that too after a prolonged effort by History not to let us forget such an awful happening - don't go bandying it about. Especially when the events in question are lacking in the same scale, type of mass-murder and specificity of evil intent.

(Rumbold helpfully intervened to explain what I was saying before I even could myself, so I have left no further comment 'pon that thread. Please head over to Charlie Brooker to see, fully and perfectly expressed, how I ultimately feel about Internet 'debates'. Ta for that Rumbold, true to form you put it rather clearer and more polite than I probably would've managed... comment threads often fill me with impotent rage, and then I feel dirty, as if I've just rubbed myself all over with The Daily Mail, and vow to do something REAL when my degree is over).

To return to the point - I can't help thinking that such things happening - such ridiculous abuses of language and over-aggressiveness - come, because with things like I/P, people's 'imagined' ancestry begins to come to the fore. Hello, trouble. The collective, baying for blood, seeks its recompense of the individual - now is the time to prove yourself, Sonny Jim! Now show your ideological colours! Lo, and so it comes to pass that people in Great Britain set about each other from the screens of their computers over something which is happening far, far away and to which they are not (short of having relatives in Gaza or Israel) directly connected. I mean, ffs, the link between Jews and Israel is imagined and symbolic, just as the link between Muslims and Muslims in Gaza is imagined and symbolic. Why do you suddenly feel the need to multiply yourself into a fucking representative of your whole religion? Because your people are being attacked here - your people, that's who! Jayzus.

I think here of all the times in the past that I have been forced to say things that I don't believe and agree with statements I find abominable in order to avoid attracting my family's negative attentions. I did it up to a certain age, and then I realised that I didn't have to any more. I could use the power of silence against them. They could infer what they wanted from it; I would not agree, and having got in serious grief on past occasions, I would not condemn either. If this was a coward's way out, I didn't care. My objective was to protect myself and to emerge intact.

My mother has made the observation in the past - very accurate, I feel - that it is only wealthy, middle-class people who have the time to dwell on these things. While this is not entirely true (I'm sure there have been some suicide bombers who weren't fairly financially stable too - or does that only fuel my mum's theory, in implying that poverty only added to ideological frenzy?), there is a LOT of truth to it. While discussing things is all very well and good, I often feel that if you are going to spit blood so, then why the heck don't you get off your arse and do something to help directly? Complain to the BBC, give money to the DEC, hell, fly out there and do something. Just spare me the bitching, and the soapbox-ing, which begin frankly to dive towards unsettling levels of moralisation and dogma, for me. A minority of disenfranchised people will, inevitably, react badly to the injustices that have befallen them - but since when was stooping to that level acceptable? What of all the other people who just want to fucking get by? Like me, they're more concerned with survival rather than ideology. Life is hard enough 'secular' as it is.

Religious fraternity and perspective is not enough when terrible things like this happen. People must remember that we are all ultimately human and that ultimately all the vitriol begets no solutions and no progress. Of course, there are always those who profit from such quarrels, but if people learn to practise a bit more forgiveness and a bit more forgetting, hopefully the planet can proceed on to the future.

Just to bore you senseless a little further, all this really churned about in my brain like clothes in the washing machine when my mum read to me a hilarious, and I fully believe, fictional account of a Sikh wedding (in two parts) from a Punjabi newspaper. Apparently in the duration of this story, some 'sensible observer' remarked how there were far too many women at weddings these days; if you went to the marriage palaces, all you would see was women, and that in the old days, women weren't even meant to be part of the baraat (the wedding procession, otherwise understood as the arrival of the groom and his party at the marriage venue). I immediately stiffened, my brain standing to attention like a guitar-string being pulled taut. My mater had not noticed this; nor did she notice the sudden, emergent incongruity of this remark peeking its ugly, goblin little head from the narrative.

As I glanced idly at the sheet she was holding out before her, a dim sort of epiphany set in. I tilted my head, casually covering the sheet with my gaze - yup. I rolled back my memory to previous glimpses of this paper (I think it must have been the Punjabi section of The Sikh times) - yup. The overwhelming majority of the participants in this production were male, bearded, turbanned and for the most part, pretty old (late 30s onwards). There were women (or there was one I knew of definitely, anyway) in the English part of the paper, but the only columnist I could think of, Rupi Gohlar, was consigned unfussily to a slim, 6cm-wide column somewhere near the entertainment section, which, if I was not looking for it, I would have likely failed to notice (first couple of times, I did miss it).

(To any Private Eye Readers, I appeal to you to recall the E.J. Thribb column. Do you see it now, in your mind? Yes, that's very much what her column resembles, in its slender insignificance. I am struggling now to recall if there are actually any female stalwarts besides Rupi).

I continued to take in what was being read to me, almost laughing at the right moments, but inside I vibrated with epiphany spreading, like the opening of a curtain admits more sunshine. Had I not, upon viewing Channel Punjab, only ever viewed the blurry outlines of women stereotypically 'dancing in the fields' (or had I imagined that too?) and consigned to women-only programmes such as Trinjhan (as far as I know it, a women's talkshow where they had writers and so forth on)? Other than that, women abounded only in the horribly cheap Star-Plus knock-off soaps, where a stereotypical mother-in-law bitch-from-hell would try to undo her stereotypically butter-wouldn't-melt daughter-in-law. Things might be complicated by the arrival of, or transformation of the latter into, a stereotypically gold-digging Westernised 'un-woman'.

I cast about in desperation, but the awareness was glaring me in the face. This was simply not me! None of these were me, and a slow, snakelike rage bubbled luxuriously in my veins. To think that all my life I had been told - had it insisted upon to me - that this was the right and the true, the tradition in which I belonged! I had grown up thinking that Punjabi culture and Sikh culture were one and the same. As I delved into Sikh history, I became much more conscious of the guiding principles of that religion, and as I began to find out more about Punjabi culture - through talking to people other than my parents - cracks began to appear. I discovered that Punjabis had a reputation for being big drinkers and loving fried chicken (that'd explain our local high street then, I tell you...) and, above all else, I began to notice the almost obsessive and deranged sense of male privilege that underscored Punjabi society. I suspect this went something like this: Punjabi men, being among the tallest, strongest and fairest-skinned in India (remember how colour-conscious India is!) were not only superior to women as it is taken for granted that men always are in Indian culture, but also superior to other Indian men! Hence they had extra entitlement!

The fact that the Punjab abounded with rich landowners whose sense of self-worth was only further pumped by laying claim to the glories of Sikh military history won't have helped. And so it came to pass that I watched Long Da Lishkara (a cult Punjabi film made the year before I was born) with my family, I think around the age of 11 or 12. I had not understood the obsession, in some films, with showing women jumping into wells. My young brain established that this must be for them to kill themselves - but why were they killing themselves? The screen soon brought me the answer.

A turbanned, well-dressed man - a man with a neat beard and moustache, and a fair complexion, almost like my own father - was holding a tumbler of whisky. I knew not the name of it, but by the shape and design of the glass, and by the colour of the liquid it housed, could discern what it was. I was horrified. Here was, to all intents and purposes, a Sikh man taking alcohol. Did he not realise it was forbidden? I was to be more horrified still, however, as he advanced upon the servant tidying the room. He seemed delighted by her; she was terrified. He continued to advance on her, I think breaking the glass, if I remember correctly to further frighten her, with his wrath. He managed to trap her on the bed somehow, her horrified shrieks and pleas for mercy only irritating him. Though the next part was obviously absent and left unelaborated upon, my precocious mind made sense of it. He had raped her, and she killed herself for having borne an illegitimate daughter.

My brain struggled. So the stereotypes were true, then? Punjabis were capable not only of drink, but of roundly disregarding the respect for women and acknowledgement of their equal status that lay at the heart of Sikhi? My world was painfully jolted. A man attired, as I said, not unlike my father, had committed a grievous crime against a woman who was, both socially and physically (I was sensitive to the former fact too!) as his female servant (and an Indian woman, thus hardly practised in self-defence) at his, the rich male landowner's, mercy. He had refused her his mercy. He had used her, and then left her to dispose of the evidence of his crime by disposing of herself altogether. Meanwhile, his wife, who had found out about it, did not leave, or punish him. Nor did she adopt the poor little girl. If anything, she began to get angry and worried as, now adults, her son fell in love with she who was technically his half-sister (eww!).

As I looked at my mum reading to me, all this came back to me. My mind whirred with the cascading visions of tiny, rectangular 'mugshots' of old, bearded, turbanned, male faces. I looked upon the writer of this 'humorous' article. His fat, round face was just about visible in black-and-white. I wanted to spit on it. More than anything, the urge to slap my mother fizzed dangerously in my arms. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I wanted to cry. 'How dare you try and sacrifice me to these people who have never had a period, never worried about leaving their family, never feared their wedding night with awful dread? OF COURSE marriages are full of women now; we all know the awful suffering that many Indian marriages entail and women turn up in sympathy and commiseration! They too remember how it felt to pin your scant hopes to this one day of grandeur, wishing for its flashy charm to rub itself off on the union forever sealed afterwards!'

However, it wasn't really that strong - gone are the days when I came anywhere near doing that. This was the merest flicker, and it gave way, as always to sadness. My mother is a compromised woman, lost in the values of the time she grew up in. She still moves within the fug of '50s India, and all I can do is cast it off. It is not me, it is not my culture, and I feel elated that at last I can express myself with a concrete example. So you say that these white club-going 'goris' aren't me? Well, those old, sanctimonious bearded twats aren't either! Nor is that overweight, high-blood-pressure-suffering housewife, who dares not even suggest things to her husband any longer for fear of provoking dispute! I'm not the virtuous bahu! I'm not a gold-digger! I don't want my children, my sisters or any of my immediate female relatives to suffer, and that is why I keep trying to take them all under my wing! I may not know my American cousin too well yet, or the daughter of my mum's 'brother' (I think he's actually her cousin?!) whom everyone discusses in low, disapproving tones for having married an older, white man. I may be estranged from my eldest female cousin, Rani - but I'll fight for them, I'll fight for them all in any way I can, just like I did for my eldest sister pre-wedding, when her husband started shouting at her over her wanting speeches. I got in trouble, but I was proud - because that, that is who I am, and for a brief, shining minute, I was no longer leading a double life. That is who I am, my 'identity', my 'culture'; that is me.