Modest Outrage

McCain-mania

2008-04-16T04:09:00.000-07:00

As a foretaste of how nauseating American media coverage is going to become once the Democrat nominee is decided, take a look at this month's Harper's Index:

Number of times that U.S. media have called John McCain a “maverick” since 1995: 6,757

Percentage change between 2001 and 2007 in the number of instances per year: +76

Rank of John McCain among the most conservative-voting senators in 2001 and 2007, respectively: 45, 8

In light of all the really important issues like whether Obama's bowling is sufficiently masculine and whether Clinton was nicknamed "Miss Frigidaire" in school, I get the feeling there will be precious little airtime devoted to detailing how he:

contrary to all the hype, has close political ties with lobbyists,

has no idea who's who in the Middle East, and once sang that American should bomb Iran,

called his wife a cunt in public, uses racial epithets (yes, he was tortured by the Vietnamese - but if he has an insurmountable animus against East Asians on that basis he should not be president), has been publicly nasty to political opponents' children, and has sought political support off the back of homophobia,

has an almost entirely unmitigatedly anti-choice record (which includes consistently voting against health initiatives which prevent unplanned pregnancies, lest you think this is all about abortion), and

hardly most significantly, but extraordinarily egregiously, feigned ignorance about whether condoms prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, while professing support for the current presidential policy of funding abstinence-only programmes in Africa that discourage condom use (leading directly to increased deaths from AIDS). (Colour me unconvinced McCain eschew(ed)/(s) condoms in his own extramarital affairs, which means he's a lying douchebag who would like to be a lying, murdering douchebag. The more charitable interpretation of events is that he's just too pig ignorant to be president.)

So it's facts versus spin. Why am I not optimistic?

Power Points

2008-04-15T15:30:00.000-07:00

This month's Harper's contains a transcription of a Powerpoint presentation that has made the rounds of the U.S. army. It's so bizarre, I don't know how to begin commenting: you have to read it yourself to do it justice.

Stick figure wearing gear. This is American soldier Joe. He wants to win in Al Anbar, but sometimes it seems like other people don't share that idea.

Stick figure with mustache wearing gear. This is Mohammed. He's in the Iraqi Army. He has a lot of the same problems as Joe has fighting in Anbar, except that everyone there hates him.

Stick figure with mustache wearing a kaffiyeh. This is a sheikh. Sheikhs have been leading the people in Iraq for almost 1,400 years, in spite of attempts by many armies to remove him.

Joe, carrying a piece of paper, speaks to Sheikh. What's that in Joe's hand? A transitional authority law! It was written by the Coalition Provisional Authority (twenty-five-year-olds from Texas and Paul Bremer), and it says NO SHEIKHS! ONLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT! "That's okay," says Sheikh. "Can I have some contract work?"

On Modesty, and Also Outrage

2008-04-15T12:14:00.000-07:00

Navigating gendered expectations of behaviour is difficult. I refer specifically to modesty and to outrage. Women are conditioned from birth to want to be liked rather than respected. We are not supposed to ask for what we want, least of all if that involves someone else higher up the pecking order changing their behaviour to give it to us. We are supposed to take the expectations and desires of our social superiors - our elders, and males - for granted, and work around them as constraints. So expressions of dissatisfaction - requests for change - are written off as random, irrational anger unwarranted by substantive fuel. Nobody is supposed to imagine anyone changing for our benefit, so what else could such expressions be but empty venting? Ah, women. So emotional.

Some people buckle under this conditioning more than others, and some feel it subjectively more than others regardless of whether and to what degree they conform, but the forces trying to push the conditioning in those directions are undeniably thick in the air.

(It's also true that in Singapore this is modulated through the social requirement that everyone, generically, shut up and baa. It does, however, have an unavoidably gendered component. Try being a woman with a loud voice and an unfeminine manner, and who tends to think aloud about stuff, for a day; you'll understand.)

I used to think the solution was to be "one of the guys" - if nobody would mind if a guy did it, then nobody should mind if I did it, and anybody who thought otherwise was a sexist asshole whose views could safely be ignored. This solution doesn't actually "work" in the sense that my dismissal of such a person as an asshole doesn't count for much in terms of my navigating the situation socially, if others continue to subscribe to such notions. But the ineffectiveness of the solution in that sense, for me has always been for practical purposes neither here nor there. Some kinds of assholery I just cannot compromise with. I have a bottom line for resistance. This bottom line has sometimes shifted - e.g. I did go through a phase of wearing stupid, uncomfortable clothing - but the basic concept is there.

No, there's a more fundamental principled objection to the "one of the guys" approach, viz, who made men the default anyway? Wanting to be an honorary man is just misogyny. My positive traits or laudable or attractive behaviour, such as they may (or may not...) be, should not be judged in conformity to narrow notions of girlishness, it's true; but why associate them with masculinity? I'm a woman, therefore, if I do it, it's something women do. It's within the range of womanliness. End of fucking story. This makes womanliness elastic to the point of meaninglessness? Goo-oo-ood!

One reason for the association with masculinity: because men are not subject to the mucky conditioning that women are. Okay, fair cop. But men are subject to conditioning of their own, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They also respond to women they encounter where said women have been conditioned in a particular way. In other words, they are not free of sexist taint. In other words, there exist common social dynamics which grant men the opportunity to be assholes more readily than they grant women such opportunities (just as there are common social dynamics that grant women the opportunity to be passive aggressive more readily than they grant men such opportunities). (For what it's worth, I think being an asshole tends to have more material advantages than passive aggressiveness, but let's leave that aside for now, on the to my mind fairly sound assumption that in principle neither is a desirable guideline to personal behaviour.)

For instance, it is more socially acceptable for men to talk over women and dominate conversations than vice versa. People don't formulate this expressly, of course, the way they formulate the "guys should pay on dates" sort of garbage, but experiments recording volunteers' perceptions of the amount of time for which people speak indicate, fairly reliably, that this is true. And this is kind of shitty, not only because it's formally unequal ("sauce for the goose..."), but also because maybe nobody should get to talk over anybody else to begin with. Men's ability to do so exists only because of women's disadvantages. Take away sexism, and you don't have everybody behaving "neutrally" where "neutrally" is defined as "like men". Take away sexism and everything changes.

In such a case, applying the "one of the guys" model would lead to me talking over women more than I should, not because I transgress the lower, "female" threshold for when you get to talk over other people (I mean, I do, but fuck that), but because I also transgress some idealised threshold that would exist in a some fantasy world where sexism hasn't already coloured perceptions of how both men and women participate in conversation.

Where I'm trying to apply this, in a very roundabout way, is to anger and assertiveness. Modest Outrage, besides being an obvious play on an archaic colonial criminal law legacy in Singapore, is also a clash I feel in virtually every contentious interaction in which I take part. When I assert myself, if I display frustration with a view or don't show as much deference to or unending patience with another opinion as I would were I playing the proper feminine role, how do I respond to being called out? How much of the discomfort I feel is from the knowledge that I may suffer socially from not caving in, and how much is a sense that I have indeed, actually, gone too far?

You could read it as a question about exactly how sexist one's interlocutors, who are doing the calling out, are being. But this tends to be read as a question of how sexist they intend to be or consciously are, which is not useful. For the query to be productive we must first conceptualise the standard of judgment they would use were they not sexist, not just as a matter of subjective belief but as a matter of social practice - does their position rely on the attribution to men of a latitude that exists only in tandem with the norms that subjugate women?[1] Thus, our idealised gender-neutral standard cannot be based on what currently constitutes socially acceptable behaviour from "the guys", since that is in itself a function of socialised feminity (or masculinity if you like, since they are mutually co-dependent to the exclusion of simple humanity). But how do you conceptualise this standard without examining gender - thereby often shutting the conversation down, because once many people see "the gender card", they just switch off?

No doubt some people will regard this post as "overthinking things". But if I'm right about the underlying social facts, isn't that dismissal precisely what makes the situation impossible to deal with? A system that views critiques as "overthinking" is going to perpetuate its problems into infinity. We need to think through, in the sense of being clear of things, being shot of them, not think less. Think less is only a solution if all my impulses and thoughts and feelings and expressions of authentic self that are suppressed (or the actualisation of which is made more uncomfortable) by these dynamics are illegitimate. If they are only bratty desires that should be annihilated. Doesn't know how good she has it. Making problems out of nothing to "make things more interesting". In translation: that bottom line of resistance should vanish. Do as we tell you.

My outrage can never be modest enough; but without appropriate outrage, all modesty is, is a tangled trap. I mean, look, how's about a pact: you stop being sexist and I'll stop "shoving it in your faces". Okay?

--

[1] This is, by the way, analogous to my response to those who claim that employers have no responsibility for providing flexible parenting policies, and that it's completely out of their control that men just so happen to find it easier to have stay-at-home spouses that are willing to take care of the little sprogs. Employers benefit from the gender norm that reliably requires one party to thus sprog-tend: by and large, men want families as much as women do, and a family that a wife looks after for free makes the man in question a cheaper and more productive worker. The upshot is there is direct profit from gender discrimination: the very reason that employers give for the attractiveness of men simply could not operate without social pressure on women to be primary caregivers. That the employer may not personally want to keep uppity bitches in our place, or might ruefully muse upon the intellectual merits of hypothetical women who want no family, while blithely ignoring the reliance of their male workers on their families, is neither here nor there. They derive material advantages from unpaid female labour resulting not from free aspirations but from social pressure. It is not clear to me that they should be unrestricted in so doing.

Stornonews

2008-04-11T04:18:00.000-07:00

Those who are familiar with Modest Outrage's previous incarnation may remember, likely with some weariness, that my favourite band is Oxford-based outfit Stornoway. Stornoway play "hatpop": a mix of defiantly unfashionable folk ballads and impossibly melodic tweepop, with a faint gospel twinge. I love their seamless extended mixed metaphors, bolstered by what I can only describe as their onomatopoeia (fr'instance, the percussion on Boats and Trains clearly chugs along on rails, and Zorbing, named after the activity of rolling downhill in a giant plastic ball, somehow sounds circular). They also have the endearing habit of giving out random facts, usually but not always about the animal kingdom, during gigs.

Anyway, after much breath-holding, I have finally received their latest EP, On the Rocks, in the mail. It didn't hold any surprises for me (the songs are all on the Myspace site, and I've heard four of them live some gazillion times now), but it's still lovely to finally have it in my iPod. Today I also received the news that their two earlier EPs, The Early Adventures of Stornoway and Letters from Lewis, are now available on iTunes, to be joined by On the Rocks in a week. Go forth and download! You won't regret it.

Paper Travail

2008-04-09T15:46:00.001-07:00

We take an unscheduled break from my hideous recycling of other people's complaints to bring you my hideous recycling of other people's jokes. (Baby steps and all that.)

Seen on Facebook: "You can't bring sexy back without receipt."

**

When I saw El Orfanato on the weekend, it was following the same internal struggle I face whenever some seriously scary cinematic shit surfaces. I tell myself it's stupid to hand over seven quid to frighten myself, and then I go ahead and do it anyway; and then either way I lose, because if the film is good, I stay paralytically freaked out for a couple of weeks, and if it isn't, I've wasted my time and money.

This film I think was closer to the latter than the former. Likely I'm not being wholly fair to it. Of the three in our little posse, the person who saw the most of the film because least chickenshit (she didn't hide all of the screen bar subtitles behind a sweets bag, as I did, or hide most of her face in my shoulder, as T. did), pointed out that it made some decent points about the treatment of children and the disabled with callousness and how that comes back to bite abled adults in the ass. Moreover, it was gripping and convincing throughout - none of the scenes rang false notes for me.

I dislike about it, however, the same thing I dislike about most horror movies with M Night Shyamalan-style "twists": that the scariness which is such a central point throughout the duration of the film is revealed as a rather empty response, since there was nothing malevolent to begin with; nor, really, was the misperception of malevolence a major part of the story. So that point becomes the series of thrills and starts - exciting enough at the time, but hardly memorable or meaningful when explained with hindsight as misinterpretation rather than devilry. Unchickenshit Friend disagreed on this count, pointing out that a critical theme was precisely the reading of purposeful evil into random coincidnce, but I am coloured unconvinced. The reason the kid is not found ultimately has little to do with this (it's the incompetence of the police and parents in not searching the entire premises thoroughly, not Laura's fantasies). And some of the events are just too implausibly contrived (e.g. Benigna's death).

Moreover, whatever is being illustrated about the human tendency to read pattern into coincidences, it's not terribly nuanced. Consider Ofelia's elaborate escapism in El Laberinto del Fauno (conveniently at hand, since del Toro was the executive producer for El Orfanato as well), which, in the context of the genuine bravery of the rebel struggles against the fascist regime, demonstrated both the frailty and the resilience of human fantasy - the absolute, protective necessity, but also the absolute falsehood, of fantastic dreams in the face of real social oppression. Laura's delusions seem comparatively bogus from start to finish (except, of course, in the hope of a shelter for those who have been marginalised and ignored in life and death - a hope, however, which is only extraordinarily tangentially the subject of her preoccupations and explorations, and the realisation of which is presented primarily as the chilling fruit of brokenness).

So, not terribly impressed. Which on balance, given how easily spooked I am, is maybe a good thing.

"Definitional Hell"

2008-04-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

Alison Bechdel has published a book about homosexuality which has generated some alarm amongst the American right for being "pornographic". (Parenthetically, I'd like to take the opportunity to explain that Alison Bechdel is the creator of the fantastic Bechdel Movie Measure (BMM), the application of which gives you some idea of how casually misogynist most mainstream films are. To pass the BMM, a film must have at least two named female characters, who have at least one conversation with each other, in which they discuss something other than a man. It's not a measure of how good or even feminist a film is, necessarily. But the fact that this bar is phenomenally low, and yet so rarely crossed, tells you a great deal about where women stand in the Western imagination. I mean, I can't even think of one film that doesn't pass the BMM if you apply it to men - Mean Girls, maybe?)

Anyway, Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has an interesting post on the controversy surrounding Bechdel's book, in which she alludes to the problem with radical feminist anti-pornography measures being co-opted to suppress expressions of sexuality at which they are not aimed. She cites as part of the difficulty of having a reasoned discussion of pornography the "definitional hell" that surrounds it,

with the right wingers defining porn as "any material that portrays sexuality in a way that I don’t approve of", and most everyone else in liberal land defining it as, "sexually explicit materials designed to sexually arouse the reader/viewer", and radical feminists defining it as "photos and videos where the humiliation and pain of the woman is considered an essential part of the erotic experience for the viewer". Which is, to be fair to radical feminists, the majority of the material available through your internet channels or "Girls Gone Wild" videos.

I don't really think this problem is limited to discourse on pornography: it's true of vast swathes of feminist issues, because feminism has had to create an entire new language to try to avoid the assumptions and conflations of patriarchy. As the marvellous Twisty Faster points out in her post on Harvard abstinence activist Jamie Fredell, in patriarchy, "all sex is [...] dudesex":

You can’t get out of the sex class just by saying you’re out of it. Saying "no" to uncouth boys in preparation for heterosexual marriage (heterosexual marriage is the basic unit of patriarchy) and calling it "empowering" is no different from saying "yes" to uncouth boys in preparation for a BDSM three-way and calling that "empowering." In trying to liberate themselves from what they have rationally identified as the constraints of the sex class mandate, both the virgin and the sex blogger actually capitulate by continuing to define themselves in terms of sex (Fredell even aligns herself with pornulists when she describes virginity as "extremely alluring"). Note that control of the concept of sex is not up to either of them. That pleasure falls strictly within the purview of the male-dominated social order. Thus, in a patriarchy, all sex, gay or straight, marital, pre-, or abstained-from, is dudesex.

That's the thing about patriarchy. It does the defining, not you. That's what makes it the dominant paradigm. You can abstain from sex, you can fuck your way across the universe, you can be a stone butch dyke with a utility belt, you can get your boobs amputated and your uterus ripped out, you can be sex-neutral in your own crackpot mind, you can be ugly or hawt, you can be the Democrats' presidential nominee, you can even age out of desirability, but you will always be defined in terms of, and used according to, that which the dominant culture describes as your essence: sex.

It's only because of this distortive popular understanding that you can have such oddities as an unconscious woman being described as "having sex" (don't you at least have to be awake? Otherwise, isn't the more accurate description "being raped"?!) or rape victims being told they have to describe their rape as "sex", because that's a neutral term whereas "rape" prejudices a jury, according to a judge apparently oblivious to the fact that whether the incident was "sex" or "rape" is precisely what the jury is called upon to decide. Why not ask the complainant witness in a theft trial to keep referring to the appropriation by the defendant as a "gift"?

And on a more trivial level, for instance, what do pole dancing or ads showing women's arses like so many packets of meat have to do with my sexuality? Buggered if I know, but allegedly they're "sexy", and I'm supposed to treat them and other displays of women as consumables as synonymous with "sex"; and once we've ring-fenced something off as "something that gets people off", well then, it's within the standard liberal definition, as Marcotte points out, and just not open for critique anymore. Which is why I end up in the surreal position of having to convince people I know that there just might be something wrong with the attitudes of someone who masturbates to pornography depicting rape (however fictitious). Yes, old skool repression was uncomfortable with the very fact of people getting off outside of very narrow parameters; but rejecting that shouldn't mean, conversely, that anything that ever gets anyone off becomes inviolate. Yet the "definitional hell" of common language means that this point is startlingly difficult to communicate.

Wherein I'm Naff

2008-04-07T12:03:00.001-07:00

(Tell you something new, eh?)

I've always had some hazy interest in social policy questions, while finding party politics for the most part impenetrable. This is something I attribute partly to my technocratic Singaporean upbringing, in the insane ivory tower mindset of which policy can be debated in a total vacuum and in the pretense of neutrality, rarely if ever asking cui bono? Coupled of course with my Singaporean political apathy: my "interest" expressed itself in an academic rather than a practical way, reading and pontificating (and, horribly, perhaps, co-opting the struggles of others for my own leisured pleasure) rather than taking action.

Weirdly, it was the Repeal 377A Petition which galvanised me into the deeply belated realisation that there is plenty of shit I can do. I can organise. Yes, even in relation to Singapore, even 7,000 miles away. For several days I spent almost every waking hour that was unoccupied by work canvassing, pleading, cajoling, badgering, and generally annoying the hell out of every vaguely Singapore-related person I knew, and more I didn't know. It's not like I got much done, but maybe for the first time in my life I did even something, and finally I felt like a genuine part of a collective movement. And on some level, I think I understand now that I need it.

Because the whole 377A shindig was such a revelation for me, it comes to mind whenever I read about any fight for liberation; even though, obviously, it's hardly the biggest cause in the history of humanity, and it would be wrong to treat other battles as footnotes to my parochial concerns. It's a personal touchstone is all, I suppose. For instance, I'm currently reading Samantha Power's A Problem From Hell, and encountering accounts of Raphael Lemkin's lonely fight against genocide - he introduces the word into the English language, almost single-handedly gets the UN to pass a resolution against it, and seven people attend his funeral - is both thrilling and disheartening. On an extraordinarily miniature scale, I feel like I can see why that life, though so isolating, can feel so necessary.

Another mental echo recently came when I was reading Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail. I couldn't help but reflect on what disgruntled me most about some responses in the 377A business. Not the out-and-out homophobia so much, but the irritatingly ubiquitous claims to a "moderate" position that was nothing less than abandonment: "I sympathise with your aims, but I disagree with your means / won't there be a backlash / time will do it all for you, why make a fuss / what's the big deal about having your emotional life branded criminal anyway / and aren't there more important things to worry about." People pretending to stand as allies, while throwing their brothers under a bus.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Blah and the Real Girl

2008-04-01T14:45:00.001-07:00

Given it's been described as "precious" and "twee", words which may as well (for better or worse) be tattooed on my forehead, you'dve thought I'dve liked Lars and the Real Girl. But I didn't, really. It had funny moments, and it had its clevernesses, but in its overall construction, it was rather gloppy: cloying, and of dubious shape and consistency.

A major problem for me is the film's incoherence as to what, exactly, Lars' problem is. There's no reason in principle why it couldn't be a composite of the manifold possibilities that the film hints at, but each leaves unresolved problems. Does he fear rejection by women? (Why, exactly, given that Margot does everything short of harpooning him and dragging him back to hers in a net?) Does he feel generally rejected and alienated? (What, exactly, would be the foundation for this, given that everyone, but everyone, goes out of their way to show him attention and affection, most notably but hardly exclusively in the way they all rally round his decision to drag a silicone parody of a woman about town?) Does he fear loss, because of his mother's death? (How, exactly, does everyone being cuddly-lovely about his giant doll help solve this?) Does he have difficulty with the open-endedness of dealing with other people, who have troublesome independent desires, as his blow-up at the, uh, blow-up, suggests? (Again, what then, exactly, is the trajectory he travels that resolves this problem? If anything, shouldn't everyone indulging him in his fantasy merely perpetuate his inability to deal with anything but fantasies, the whole point of which is their infinite malleability and his total control?)

I'm not generally keen on criticisms along the lines of "get on your bike", "get over yourself", etc., feeling very much that we all have mild mental illness of some form or another for which we must beg general indulgence. But I couldn't help but think this through most of Lars. Yes, it's laudable that everyone pulled together and put such extraordinary resources into helping someone deal with their delusions. (If wholly unrealistic that nobody in the entire town decided to be an asshole about it.) And some of it was very neatly done. Great. But amorphous as the precise contours of his problems are, the tinge of control freakery strongly hinted at by his selection of an inanimate receptable as a stand-in for an imaginary friend (no pesky agency of its own, you see) made him a pretty unattractive character. So the film consists of almost two hours of everybody bending over backwards to accommodate one (vaguely unpleasant) individual, with hardly any stories of their own except insofar as they related to helping him out or blaming themselves for his problems. They might as well all have been "anatomically correct" rubber aids to one person's huge emotional jerk-off. It's all a bit too close for comfort to what makes "Real Dolls" suspect, to my mind, to begin with.

We're All Equal Now!... Sorry, April Fool's.

2008-04-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

According to the Evening Standard, a senior BNP member has described the notion that rape is a grave crime as a “myth”:

“Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal. […] To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force-feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence.”

“Rape [when conducted without violence] is simply sex” – only if your typical sexual encounter involves no participation whatsoever from one party. If your model for sex is rapelike sex, and you consider it integral to the experience that the woman be reluctant or unenthusiastic. Doesn’t he come perilously close to conceding the selfsame critique of rape culture that “feminazis” are so keen on? (And on force-feeding chocolate cake: sorry, mate, those pesky feminists have thought of that one too.)

The BNP are just cranks without real power? Okay, let’s ignore for a moment the not-wholly-unrealistic possibility that Nick Eriksen (and his opinion of women) could become part of the London Assembly in the near future. Let’s look at the pages of the Guardian on the same day:

Their survey of more than 2,000 members of the public aged 18-69 showed people tended to blame the woman for bringing the attack on herself, see a case where the man had sex with a woman without her consent when she was drunk as not a “real rape”, and downplay the seriousness of having forced sex when the perpetrator was the woman's former partner.

The views were also found to be common when the authors outlined a range of rape scenarios to British undergraduate law students in their final year and a group of British graduates doing professional law training, the lawyers and judges of the future.

This in the context of judges exercising their discretion to allow rape complainants to be cross-examined about their sexual history, despite changes to the law in 2000 intended to prevent questioning of this nature. Their persistence on this point dismays me almost into speechlessness. I cannot even begin to construct a halfway-satisfactory explanation of why my recreational activities on one occasion have anything to do with whether I’ve been attacked on another. All that happens, when I try, is that nauseating phrases swim into my head and weave a surreal veil across my field of vision: “What’s she got to lose? It’s nothing she hasn’t had before”; “She’s a slut, so she must have liked it.”

There’s no need for feminism; women are already recognised in Western societies as fully equal to men; “patriarchy” is a conspiracy theory for crazies; “rape culture” is just a whiny way of claiming victim status (not a description of a complex of attitudes and practices that treats women badly; that is to say, victimizes a good proportion of us). If all of this is true, why do politicians and judges and law students and the British public insist on behaving otherwise – on ignoring reality in favour of conforming to whimsical radfem fantasy? Why don’t they get with the programme? Haven’t they heard? Sexism is dead!

Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny: it is the political defense of woman hating. This is because feminism is the liberation movement of women. Antifeminism, in any of its political colorations, holds that the social and sexual condition of women essentially (one way or another) embodies the nature of women, that the way women are treated in sex and in society is congruent with what women are, that the fundamental relationship between men and women – in sex, in reproduction, in social hierarchy – is both necessary and inevitable. Antifeminism defends the conviction that the male abuse of women, especially in sex, has an implicit logic, one that no program of social justice can or should eliminate; that because the male use of women originates in the distinct and opposite natures of each which converge in what is called “sex,” women are not abused when used as women – but merely used for what they are by men as men. - Andrea Dworkin

Hickory Dickory

2008-03-31T12:51:00.000-07:00

This weekend the clocks went forward for spring. It strikes me as very harsh that we lose an hour at precisely when it would be most contributory to human welfare, as part of the Sunday morning lie-in. Really, the clocks should go forward at 4 pm on Friday if anything.

**

I'm not a fan of the fat-bashing, but even allowing for that, Giles Coren's sublime review of Goodfellas is possibly the best food review not only written, but that could ever be written. Once I saw the headline ("strips of mole poached in Ovaltine") I knew I was on to a winner.

The menu is terrifying. Hundreds of choices – 14 starters, 14 chicken dishes, 15 pizzas (including “The Whop”), 13 pasta dishes as well as a do-it-yourself option, where six styles of pasta can be paired with a cream or tomato sauce and any permutation of 25 further ingredients to create millions of possibilities (if you’ve ever fancied rigatoni with smoked salmon, sweet-corn and barbecue sauce, Goodfellas is the place to get it).

Then there are ten beef dishes with ten sauce options (100 more possible combos there) including the alluring-sounding “gravy”. Half a dozen pig dishes, some specials and 24 contorni (this is an Italian restaurant, don’t forget) of which eight are potato.

Portions are massive. Waitresses struggle by with Brobdingnagian tureens of pasta and pizzas like dustbin lids (but smellier). I order a small far-falle all’ arrabiata, and then the chicken marsala – the very dish that Caroline Workman, the Irish News critic, had described as being served in a sauce so revoltingly sweet as to render the dish inedible. I nip to the loo. Two of the cubicle doors are locked but the third opens, straight into the kitchen. Most unusual. This does not happen at Le Gavroche. Perhaps I am spoilt.