Posterous theme by Cory Watilo as adapted by Jamie Graham

What Not To Wear

written on Tuesday 10 May 2011 and filed under [attitudes] [media] [violence]

Recently, the chief of police in Toronto bemoaned in the media that women were getting raped due to what they were wearing when they went out. People rightly responded with horror to such total drivel and a new movement has appeared in response: SlutWalks, where women will wear "revealing" clothes and walk down streets en masse in protest.

This is to be applauded as a good response and it helps show up the nonsense the policeman was saying, because rape has nothing at all to do with sex. No, really. It involves something of a parody of sex, but it is actually a crime of violence and power.

Look at it this way: since when did any sort of sex involve beating a screaming, helpless person so severely that you break bones in their face? What sort of sex involves shoving jagged objects into a woman's vagina? Or biting the nipples off a man whose arms you've previously snapped? What sort of sex involves killing a woman in her 80s or a schoolboy? What sort of sex involves hypnotic or sedative drugs? Answer: none. That's not sex, that's violence. And it is perpetrated by inadequate people - inadequate men, most of the time - who feel the need to take their power by taking power away from someone else.

What a victim of rape wears is nothing to do with getting raped. It's to do with being in the wrong place in the wrong time, with being, horribly, a random victim or a chosen victim: being a victim of rape is the same of being a victim of anything else - bad luck, at the hands of an inadequate fellow member of the human race.

This doesn't suit the media. For them, rape is something women make up, or something they actually, secretly want. It's actually very sexual, downright sexy. Therefore, if you wear something "sexy", as they define it, you're bringing rape on yourself. You are, and the phrase burns my eyes, "asking for it". Yeah, because people are often "asking" to have a knife jammed up their anus.

Most people will never be raped, just like most people will never be a victim of any other crime. That also has nothing to do with what they are or are not wearing. So "dressing as a slut" has no statistical effect on rape whatsoever. Why would it? The problem here is actually in attitudes, and the media and lawmakers' belief that someone, somewhere should be regulating what women wear.

This is one of those famous slippery slopes. In Europe recently the media and lawmakers have been debating restricting women's right to wear the burkha. This garment bothers me: it is so easily a tool of a male desire to dominate women. But the next step from there is the debate the Canadians are now having: should women be prevented from wearing clothes at the other end of the spectrum? From there, the next slide down this terrible path is moving from restricting what women can't wear to restricting what women can wear. This all won't do - women should wear what they fucking well want to wear. As should men. It's nothing if not downright obvious that what you wear makes many statements, but "rape me" is not one of them. Ever.

Some corner of a foreign field

written on Sunday 8 May 2011 and filed under [belgium] [book] [world war one] [writing]

(download)

A few years ago, the ball-and-chain and I went to visit our friends Paul and Robert in Belgium. It was a flying visit, and my first trip abroad for about 5 years.

I fell in love with the country (I'm bound by the Laws of Journalism to refer to it as "that troubled and divided country", although the people of Belgium are the last to identify with that soubriquet) instantly. Belgium has everything I want in life: busy cities, quiet countryside, is mostly flat so hiking is a breeze and the most dense railway network in the world. I need nothing more to be happy. Since then, we've been back to Belgium 3 or 4 times a year every year - to the point that we had to note that on the census in March, since it came to over a month away every year visiting the same place.

On our first trip, we had a day out to visit Ieper (Ypres that was), which is where the major powers decided to hold World War One, and this has become our second home. It's a beautiful town, with a wonderful secular cathedral in the Cloth Hall, a busy town square and lots of buildings that look like they date from a pre-Victorian era but actually were built after 1918, due to the Germans having flattened the place.

A short walk out on any of the radial roads will take you to places of singular beauty and calm: the hundreds of Commonwealth War Graves Commission burial grounds. Each of these are different, each of them the same - spiders' webs is a good analogy. They are places of contemplation, of remembrance; a reminder that all wars are an exercise in futility but one particular war - the Great War - was particularly futile. It was fought for not very clear reasons, in a not very clear way, with a complete disregard for the lives of the boys fighting it. It was a bloodbath.

Out of the strong came forth sweetness, says the bible and the Golden Syrup tins. Out of this pointless massacre came forth beauty, and I developed a new, unusual hobby: I started to "collect" the burial grounds, taking hundreds of photographs, ticking off the Major and Mrs Holt's list of sites and researching the history of each place. I wasn't sure quite what I'd do with the results, although I did build some useful articles in Wikipedia (an up-hill battle in itself) and get a huge collection of images held on Flickr under a usefully free licence for others to use.

Then I started on writing a book in my spare time, of which I always seem to have so little (with nothing to show for the rest). Five years later, I've just sent it to the printers this morning.

It's really only for my own amusement, a book I want to have on my shelf - the subject matter makes it quite a hard sell, so I'm unlikely to bother trying to push it. But I'm proud of it, despite the stupid amount of time it has taken.

We're off to Ieper at the end of the month, and I'll bag some more sites while I'm there. It's a weird hobby, collecting war cemeteries. And I'm nowhere near visiting all the ones in the Salient, let alone across the entire Western Front. But it's worth doing, for the lads I'm visiting as well as for myself.

Preview (and buy) the book here.

Little men, what now?

written on Saturday 7 May 2011 and filed under [politics]

Partytime

So, it was "no" after all. It wasn't a surprise, although it was a disappointment. And the post-mortems begin now, with the media busy asking "what now for the Left?".

On the face of it, a good question. But the question we should be asking is "what now for the Right?". It's not being asked by anyone and attempts to ask the question directly to the Tories in the aftermath of the elections and referendum have been answered with one line: "it's a major defeat for Labour". They've said this so often that even the left-wing press have bought this lie. The BBC, trying so hard to be neutral that it tipped over into being anti-AV, have also bought the lie; as the AV result came in, a stupid (but sadly off-camera so I don't know who she was) BBC reporter poked a microphone at Ed Miliband and said "You've staked your reputation on this result, haven't you?". Well, the Tories have been saying that - Ed hasn't. He never staked his reputation on it. But the BBC have bought the lie.

Make no mistake, Labour could have done better at the elections - but only if the Tories had done worse. The collapse of the Liberal vote benefited the SNP in Scotland (Labour's share held, but the swing from the Liberals to the Nats overwhelmed them); it benefited Labour in Wales and the north of England; and it benefited the Tories in the south of England. This is all pretty normal and is exactly what happened when voters deserted the SDP/Liberal Alliance during the damaging and protracted merger negotiations of the late 1980s.

We don't really need to worry about Labour - they're holding their own, given it's just over a year since they lost power nationally (it took them 18 years to be in this position last time; it took the Tories 13; a year and 'holding your own'? Not bad at all). We do need to worry about the Tories: the collapse of the Liberal vote and their victory in the AV referendum has convinced them they have a mandate for what they plan to do next. The Liberals, in disarray, won't be willing or able to stop them, either.

So, what's next for the right? Well, first up, AV is gone, but the other half of the Act is still there and in law - the gerrymandering of the constituencies. On the face of it, making all constituencies equal sounds a very good idea. In practice, it's impossible as natural boundaries prevent it. The way round that is to ignore the natural boundaries, creating weird constituencies with nothing in common, like the proposed Mersey Riverside cross-river constituency taking in areas of Wallasey and Liverpool, two towns that hate each other. To make this work, the Boundary Commission has been told to stop the in-depth, neutral public enquiries it makes and to start rubber-stamping constituencies with equal electorates as proposed by the local parties. The party with the strongest local organisation will get to choose. And that party is always the Conservative Party. This means that, barring a miracle, the Tories will win the next election.

Next is the long-promised reform of local government (an unrepresentative mess) and the House of Lords (ditto). This is being presented as the Tories' gift to Nick Clegg, something for him to do to while away the long, long hours alone in his office. The problem is that most of the Tories are perfectly happy with local government and the Lords, especially since Cameron flooded the upper chamber with Tory peers last year. Already, the Taxpayers' Alliance-run NO2AV campaign have said that the "no" vote is not only "a ringing endorsement of First Past The Post" (it isn't) but also the vote was "a rejection of Lords and local government reform" (how could it possibly be?). Reform simply isn't going to happen.

Then, the Right owe Rupert Murdoch a favour. He has been allowed to takeover BSkyB, creating a media monolith that will be competition-proof. After the next election, the BBC is doomed (so the sucking-up to the present government was pointless, Mr Thompson), as another favour to Cameron's preferred Christmas dining partner.

Often mooted in private is a cherished Tory goal of further trades union 'reform'. The plan, so far as it has spread outside of the pages of the Sunday Telegraph, is throw so many hurdles in the way of any strike - principally by making it punishingly expensive for the union involved - as to make them impossible. Couple that with a rollback of working conditions improvements, a hold on the minimum wage (plus new exemptions for any industry that calls for them loudly enough) and a drastic cutback in the workplace powers of the Health and Safety Executive and we're soon to lose most of our rights as workers.

Finally, there will be a slow drift back to the regressive, repressive social legislation of the 1980s. Already the Tories have let Nadine "Nutjub" Dorries test the water with a Ten Minute Rule Bill designed to stop girls getting useful sex education and instead be taught to keep their knickers on. This is the start of something; whilst pressure groups have been seeking to make sex education inclusive of gay and lesbian interests (coz, like, we're born gay, we don't develop it like back acne in our late teens), the Tories are looking at cutting it back. They've accepted that we shouldn't see same-sex kisses before the watershed. We have bigoted 'faith' schools decrying homosexuality to their impressionable charges and a growing trend of young gay people killing themselves. These things are all inter-related. And the Right is seeking to make it worse.

This is a centre-left country. We've been a centre-left country since the Second World War. The British people have always been fundamentally 'conservative' when it comes to public social matters, but they've started getting more liberal - indeed libertarian - over the past 15 years. The Brits have a sense of fair play and like seeing that everyone gets an equal go. This is what the Tories want to change, not least so that everyone will properly know their place.

This is what the Right will do next. And what will you do to stop it?