Why? Why would you like this man?

Update: Fry has been tweeting his anger at the way he was quoted in both Attitude and The Observer, saying that comments he made in jest have been taken in all seriousness. While the hilarity of what he said escapes me, I suppose it is possible that he was attempting to be satirical – if that is the case further explanation than a 140 character outburst may be warranted. Having said that, Fry speaks in such a way that anything he says could be claimed as just a joke should it backfire at some time in the future. Then again, it is possible that wires were crossed and where the interviewer believed he was conducting a serious interview, Fry thought the complete opposite. To really get to the bottom of it we’d need a recording of the original interview, which I doubt will ever be available. My jury is still out on this one. What do you all think?

I realise I should be outraged by comments made by Stephen Fry in an interview in the upcoming November issue of Attitude magazine, but really it just leaves me with a powerful feeling of relief that I already dislike the man and all his pompously false posturing and attempts to inherit the crown of the infinitely more talented Oscar Wilde intensely. I dislike him almost as much, in fact, as the bizarre media consensus that has developed that he is some kind of “national treasure” for whom we are obliged to coo over every dull and inconsequential comment that comes out of his mouth or spews forth on Twitter. Granted I dislike him in the sort of way that your Grandmother might develop a sudden and irrational dislike for Eamonn Holmes far out of proportion to any crimes against humanity he has actually committed, but that doesn’t make the dislike any less real to me. I therefore don’t have to deal with the accompanying and crushing disappointment I always experience when people I respect come out with similarly stupid and misogynistic comments. Well, I say that. I may not be outraged, but I am pretty pissed off – if for no other reason that it annoys me that he is considered an authority on anything at all beyond “how to fake being a 21st century 19th century wit when you have nothing of any great significance to say about anything by doing nothing more than speaking in a particular tone of voice at all times and widening your eyes in a charmingly arch way.”

For those that don’t know, Fry has claimed that “The only reason women will have sex with (straight men) is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want.”

I admit, it’s hard to argue with his logic. Really, who wasn’t told by our mothers growing up that “yes, obviously men are disgusting and the very thought of being anywhere near their putrid flesh makes us want to vomit on our baking aprons, but if you want a husband for some reason other than that you fancy them, since that is obviously impossible, you better just bite your lip and get on with it, because it’s damn certain they don’t want you for anything else.”

And let’s just ignore the fact that many of us, like most teenage boys, discovered the joys of masturbation the moment we hit puberty and realised it was a wonderfully distracting way to avoid doing homework or tidying our rooms. Let’s forget the fact that the reason any of us didn’t do this is because the notion of female masturbation is still something regarded as fundamentally gross, pathetic and embarrassing and is rarely portrayed with the sort of satirical affection you see in films like American Pie with regard to the male equivalent. A lot of my girl friends have told me that they didn’t actually know that female masturbation existed until they reached adulthood, by which time they felt too embarrassed to try.

Let’s also ignore the booming trade in erotic fiction designed to cater to women’s various, apparently non-existent, sexual fantasies, in which women are tended to by men of all shapes and sizes, though of course Fry tells us women are disgusted by the lot of them, in locations from exotic beaches to the workplace, and yes, even in parks, although granted women never, ever go to them.

But really, I’m being unfair. Fry, with his undeniably vast experience of having sex and relationships with women, has obviously considered all these factors and dismissed them as irrelevant in the face of his own overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And that evidence is that…*drumroll*…

Women don’t go cottaging on Hampstead Heath.

No, really, that’s his logic. He can’t understand why, if women like sex as much as gay men, and in fact men in general, do, they don’t hang around in the freezing cold looking for a stranger to pick up in the dark unless they’re a prostitute desperate for their next heroin fix and are willing to blast through their complete lack of sexual desire and revulsion towards men in order to stave off cold turkey for another despair-filled night.

Rosie Boycott has reasonably suggested that “Cottaging on Hampstead Heath is presumably a hangover from the days when, sadly, [homosexuality] was illegal”, but really, I would have thought that the reason women don’t head out to an unlit park in the middle of the night to get laid would be obvious. I would never do it because I would be terrified of being violently raped. And, of course, if I tried to report it to the police, being told I was “asking for it” for being there in the first place. Women’s sexuality plays out in an environment with men who are physically stronger than us, and where several of them have little regard for our wishes or dignity; in a society where our sexuality is seen as dirty and ridiculous, where to go out independently looking for sex makes us sluts who deserve every bit of mistreatment and disrespect we receive. If we went out to a park at night looking for sex, we would not stand on an equal footing with the men we encountered. In status terms, they may well feel more entitled than us to what they want, and physically they are generally in a position to get it. You would have to be mad (or at least horny to the point of insanity), extremely brave, or fully trained in martial arts and possibly armed to even consider it.

Is it worth me really getting cross and arguing the whys and wherefores of Fry’s comments? Well, I believe in sexual liberation. To me this means that people who want to have a lot of sex should be free to do so with any consenting partners they choose, and people who don’t want to have a lot of sex shouldn’t feel there is any expectation on them to do so. Fry’s comments rejects both of these positions when it comes to women. The fundamental message is that women are asexual shrews who use sex as a tool to reel men in and get them to do what they want. It should be considered outdated, except apparently a lot of modern men still cling on to it with everything they have.

I admit it’s clear he hadn’t really thought hard about what he was saying, but then perhaps that’s the point. Lots of men make statements like this. Straight men make jokes about women witholding sex as a punishment. It’s a staple of every gag-based US sitcom of the last 15 years – as if we can use our total absence of desire as a weapon to beat men with whenever we feel like it. The fact that he hasn’t given his comments a lot of thought only expose a latent and complacent sexism that is both depressing and infuriating.

To be clear, I have heard people say, people that I generally respect, that gay men hate women. I don’t believe that is true. True, I have heard a gay, male friend of mine say with glittering insight that he thinks lesbians are pointless, but then I’ve heard a lot of straight men say far worse about gay women. What I do think is that gay men, unlike straight men, are often in a position to isolate themselves from the emotional and personal concerns of women, and so may find it easier to cling on to the deep-set prejudices that exist in all of our society. Several gay male friends of mine tell me that they find the very idea of a woman’s genitals revolting. Naturally, I found the fact that they felt they could tell me this openly and cheerfully incredibly insulting and it bothers me that they believe that being gay gives them free reign to come out with such a gob-smackingly mean statement, but I also think that it is a symptom of a society that is still very uncomfortable with the notion of female sexuality – I know of several straight men who still cannot bring themselves to perform oral sex on women. Personally, I knew what a blow job was by the time I left primary school having had it described to me in gleeful and unecessary detail by my male classmates. Needless to say it was many years before I heard tell that the female equivalent even existed. Equally, gay men I know who have given even the slightest consideration to this issue speak just as intelligently as any straight, feminist, man or any feminist woman may do, and describe with distaste the comments made to them about women by some of the other men they know.

I suppose that the point that I am rather nervously heading towards is that, while Stephen Fry does not put himself forward (thank God) as any kind of representative of the gay community, I do feel that his comments should provoke some kind of dialogue about some of the easy misogyny that exists among many gay men today – and how that may be a distillation of the general and sometimes extreme distaste and disbelief that still exists among many men regarding women’s sexual desires. Well, it’s what I’d like, anyway. God knows I can’t untangle all the threads and roots of it myself. Frankly, I wish someone else would just bloody do it for me so I can go and have a shag in peace.

I won’t mince my words. The photoshoot was utterly gross in every sense of the word. The fact that Monteith was just standing gormlessly around while Agron and Michele pouted, preened and displayed their bras only heightened the essential message of the shoot, which was “how awesome that a guy gets to hang around with these hot girls all day. Yes, that’s right. They’re HOT. What more could you possibly need to know about them?” In addition, as has already been pointed out by some, it is deeply depressing that Glee is a show about inclusiveness and being proud to be different, yet the only actors who seem to be getting the celebrity treatment are the skinny white pretty ones who are willing to adhere to all the boring old Playboy gender stereotypes in order to move forward. To note, though, for this I don’t so much blame the actors as their agents and the members of the press who daily insist that they are only giving the public what they want, and refuse to change.

Ick

Not only this, but, and I don’t think this has been mentioned enough, on a fashion level the styling of the girls was actually abysmal. The photo quality was bad too. Both of them looked terrible. And trashy.

It’s not surprising then, that Agron decided to try to find a way to tactfully distance herself from the shoot and the questionable artistic decisions surrounding it. In her blog post, I think she’s done a very good job of measuring her own uncertainty about taking part against her equal desire to try new things and do what’s right for her career. Her clear desire now is to move on and put it behind her, though to me it is frustrating that she still emerges as rather ambivalent about the appropriateness of the shoot as a whole. Nevertheless, it was a respectable, and honest, attempt to explain her feelings on the matter. Regardless of my opinion on the shoot, I recognise that actresses are under an immense amount of pressure to do what they’re told and encourage the boys to go ga-ga over them as often as possible and for as long as possible. Once you tap into the pop culture zeitgeist, everyone with a camera or an editorship is going to be asking you to get your kit off and spread your legs for the good of your career and fanbase. It’s a shame that, in this case, Agron and Michele caved, but it’s not a shock, and they shouldn’t be despised for it.

I would say this though. Like Agron, I am not convinced by the argument that the potential for children to see distressing images is a reason not to create them. However, I do not agree with the arguments by many that, as 20-something year old stars in a show aimed at teenagers, they are under no obligation to represent the ideas of the programme in their public lives while the show is still running. This is a show that has launched their careers in the most incredible way, and the message at the centre of Glee - to be yourself, have self-respect, and not conform to the expectations of others - is not exactly an unpalatable one. They should respect the viewers, the show, the message, and the exposure it has given them. And I’m not just talking about Lea Michele and Dianna Agron here. It’s easy to forget that Cory Monteith was also a willing, and fully-clothed, participant in this shoot. His role in the photo represented every ogling boy hitting puberty who are going to gawp at the bodies of his colleagues. His innocent little grin tells them that it’s okay to stare. Now, if any of these three have come to the conclusion that the ideals of Glee simply cannot find a place in today’s media and celebrity world, they should do the respectable thing, bow out of the show and move on with their careers. Except, of course, that Glee is currently such a fame juggernaut that that would be career suicide, in which case they should stop trying to have their cake and eat it, accept that they have bought into an idea as well as a TV show, and see the distance to the end of their run on the programme.

Too much to hope for? I suspect it probably is. No doubt at least one of them will be eaten up by the Fame Monster and they’ll be heading off to Hollywood without looking back within a few years. And then who’s going to care about the integrity of a shoot like this? Probably no one. And there will be other zeitgeist-tingling teen shows and other pretty white girls who are told to bare their thighs and lose some weight and that it’s just a bit of fun and even that its empowering. And everyone will forget that that was exactly the trend that Glee was trying to reverse. And instead in all those nostalgia trips and show reunions everyone will just talk about what a crush they had on Lea Michele, and how they fantasised about Dianna Agron at night, and how damn cute Cory Monteith was.

Sigh.

Really? No one has thought to put a santa hat on this image? No one at all?

Post 1:
Oh for goodness sake, how can you tell us we are denying this guy his “lap of honour” by not allowing him to get to number one? There is no law of nature saying that we must all bow down to the will of a TV show that none of us missed before it existed. Where is there a rulebook that says the winner of the X Factor is automatically entitled to have their first single win the chart for Christmas? If you care about the Christmas number one, then you accept that it is representative of the importance of the market in music and that market forces should be listened to, and if RATM win the chart, then the market has dictated that they don’t want the winner of the X Factor to dominate the charts at Christmas anymore. If you just think the Christmas number one is a fun tradition, then you should be pleased that this year a bit of genuine tension and uncertainty has been injected into the proceedings.

And apart from everything else, it’s just a bit of fun. Of course Cowell et al that would like us to believe otherwise, it’s good for business. And if they have convinced McElderry that that isn’t the case as well, or that he is the heir to some glorious tradition and has some right to the number one spot, that is their mess to clean up, not ours.

Post 2 (written immediately after Post 1):

I’ve just noticed that I completely contradict myself in the third paragraph. What I was trying to say was that the X Factor thrives on us becoming emotional and sentimental about the winner getting to number one – attaching to it a meaning that it simply doesn’t have, and really that is what this campaign is all about. What is depressing is that Cowell and co. have been so successful in sucking the actual fun out of buying and listening to pop music that what should have been an amusing and lighthearted Christmas chart battle has devolved into tedious whining and handwrining about how mean it is to poor Joe. The fact is that having a seventeen year old rap metal protest song at number one for Christmas is about as novelty as it gets in this postmodern age, and so perfectly fitting for the seasonal tradition, and for the first time in years it’s given popwatchers something to get excited about when they tune in to hear the chart on Sunday. Yet somehow this is supposed to be a bad thing.

So there you have it. My intensely emotional outburst about all the people getting to emotional about this whole Xmas no. 1 malarkey. Do you agree? Disagree? Are you a Guardian reader who wants to tell me I’ve used a straw man? (apparently the urge is irrestistible…) Tired of hearing about the whole thing and feel no inclination to comment on yet another anonymous blog post about it? Feel so overwhelmed by the meanness of it all that you wish you could handwrite your response so that the tearstains smudged tragically across the page would be there for all to see, for all time?

I suspect option 4.

However, that is not what I really want to discuss. Before the broadcast of last night’s opening installment of Strictly my Mum, my sister and many that I know were having fits of excitement about its return, yet I remained curiously numb about the whole affair. Why was this? Because I love watching dancing. I love watching good dancing, and watching people who have never danced before stumbling around the floor before advancing slowly through the weeks to the point of glittering competence just doesn’t hold that much excitement for me any more.

After so many series, many people will, these days, be tuning in for their favourite professionals, and their emotional ups and downs as the series goes on has taken on more resonance as we have observed their hard work, victories and disappointments on the show over several years. But an obvious add-on to this fact is that they are simply much better dancers than the actual contestants. Watching the professional showcases is, for me, the most exhilarating part of any episode. Seeing Vincent and Flavia glide around the floor with their singularly self-contained passion never fails to send chills down my spine. Lilia cheekily eyeing the audience or Matthew throwing himself into every dance like a 1950s showrunner hold equal thrills.

*sizzle sizzle*

Which is why, year on year, I have expected the BBC to yield to the inevitable and start broadcasting professional dance championships. I cannot understand why they have not taken advantage of Britain’s reawakened joy for dance by showing us how it should really be done, by letting us see the cream of the crop really fight it out without burdening us with endless and irrelevant talk of the contestants’ “journeys”. Getting the support of the BBC would give these championships the benefit of new funding and sponsorship, driving them to new heights of glamour and excitement. Besides, if the BBC claims to be a public service broadcaster, I can’t help but see it as their duty to take the public’s enthusiasm for an entertainment show and take us on to its natural conclusion – a display of real professionalism.

On top of this, it was not exactly difficult to see what was wrong with the various amateurs’ performances last night. We knew what the judges were going to say about their shoulders, or their stompiness, or their lack of performance before it was said. We are outgrowing amateurism. It’s time that we see real competition, where the differences in skill are infinitesimal, where one tiny slip up in footwork can mean the difference between winning and losing, where commentary by Len and Craig could guide us through the intricacies of professional dance judging, giving us a deeper understanding of how it all works and what constitutes really great dance.

And what have we had so far? The Eurovision Dance Contest, which purported to show us the best of Europe, but simply constituted a showcase of popular contestants on the Strictlys around the continent. It was all entertaining enough, but I didn’t really see the point.

Certainly, the ratings for a tournament like this would be nowhere near that achieved by Strictly Come Dancing but the fact that everything to do with dance will not push BBC ratings into the stratosphere should never be a reason not to broadcast. Professional dance is something that will hold a tight sway over a significant portion of people and therefore deserves to be shown on a channel where it can be freely accessed. It strikes me as a perfect fit for BBC3, which is still struggling to find a foothold with its declared audience. So come on, BBC, do the right thing. Follow your remit, and give us real dance.

Bit late to be coming over the innocent now, D-Dawg

Well, I won’t be the first to say this, but Friday night’s Derren Brown’s How to Win the Lottery (Channel 4, 9pm) was a massive disappointment, and I say this as someone who spent the two days preceding telling everyone who scoffed at the lottery trick to stop being such a killjoy. Lots of reasons have been put forward as to why it was so disappointing – the fact that, while elaborate, Brown’s explanation of “Deep Maths” and “the wisdom of crowds” for how he was able to predict Wednesday night’s lottery numbers had been discredited by Maths Professors across the country within minutes of the programme’s broadcast being the chief one, the other one being that his explanation was simply confusing. It was certainly incoherent. The idea that people become more suggestible when they are afraid sounds plausible and is probably true. It is a fact that Brown has utilised repeatedly in previous programmes. The ability of large numbers of people to make more accurate estimations than a single individual is also plausible, and also probably true. However, his attempt to link this emotional suggestibility to his lottery challenge – that the emotions of greed and ambition get in the way of our ability to make predictions of random numbers, or the fact that he equated “estimation” of an animal’s weight with “prediction” or more accurately “guessing” of a random sequence of numbers just didn’t make any sense. And frankly, the idea that we would accept this nonsense wholesale just plain insulted our intelligence.

So no wonder so many people were confused, as the responses on Twitter will attest. However, this confusion and frustration arises out of something more than the fact that it just wasn’t a very good trick. I mean, if any other magician had performed that trick on Wednesday, we would have thought little more of it. There were too many caveats, too many get-out-of-jail-free clauses, too many patent untruths: he couldn’t show the numbers before they were announced on the BBC for legal reasons; Channel 4 had banned him from buying a lottery ticket; there was no studio audience, so no one to stand up and announce that the emperor had no clothes when the split screen came into play (or whatever they did) and someone starting pulling the balls out a bag as the numbers were announced. More than that, it just wasn’t very exciting. Brown stood in an empty warehouse for a while pretending to be nervous while the numbers were read out, then showed the numbers and, lo and behold, they all matched. And that was it. Who cares?

But we did care. And we cared because it was Derren Brown. And because we expected more. People who have known and enjoyed Brown’s work know that only a relatively small amount of both his programmes and his live shows are given over to simple illusion. A lot of what he does is an intriguing exposé of the craft of the conman, the advertiser, the interrogator. If more of it is trickery than we think, then he has always done a very good job of hiding this fact behind believable and more exciting explanations. We also respect him because he has never pretended that what he is doing is magic. He has always admitted that what fascinates him is the ability of people to believe in magic even when more logical explanations present themselves, and he has shared that fascination with us, especially as the more he insists that there is a perfectly rational explanation for what he can do, the more we find ourselves at a loss to find one. In the end, we enjoy being bamboozled by him. The fact that he always seems to be right and displays the wisdom of rationality gives us the sort of certainty and security that most of us lost the day we realised our parents weren’t infallible. It lets us be children again. And as a result we laugh like children having a chocolate bar pulled from our ear by our father, not because he just did something magical, but because he did something we could not do, even once he tells us how he managed it or, more often than not, doesn’t tell us at all. It was interesting to me that one thing Brown didn’t mention about the man who willingly stamped on a set of polystyrene cups, fully believing that there was a knife pointing upwards underneath one of them, was that he probably only did this because he absolutely trusted that Brown would never let him actually stamp on the knife. Fear may have made him suggestible, but when there were only six left and Brown suggested that he continue treading on them until only one remained, I am sure he only agreed because he really believed that Brown had influenced him not to step on the knife. I mean, you wouldn’t do it if your mate told you to, no matter how many times they insisted that they knew which one you wouldn’t step on. Brown gave viewers a sense of safety in their own powerlessness. He presented to us a kind of benign paternalism, and we lapped it right up. He was the perfect showman, the perfect illusionist.

In this sense, he is better than traditional magicians who, in general, talk little or, when they do talk, say as little as possible about the actual trick they are performing, at best feeding us cod explanations about spending years learning to catch a bullet with their teeth. In letting the tricks speak for themselves, true, we may not know how they did it, but all we are left with is the weary sense that a lot of levers were just pulled in the background and, no, that girl didn’t really just disappear from the box. But well done anyway. In his live shows, Brown provided us with a running commentary, offering just enough information about the kind of intricate misdirection involved in a good magic trick to make us admire the trick all the more, without actually ever giving the game away. It was always interesting to me that the tricks with the most outlandish explanations – one in which he pretended to cut off the circulation to his brain in order to walk on glass springs to mind – fell the most flat. The ones we most enjoyed were the ones in which we knew that we, or members of the public, were being utterly fooled, because we knew there was a science and a psychology to it, and we were being invited by Brown to share in his fascination with it – like our father letting us hold the tools while he fixed the car and, in some inexplicable way, made it run.

This time, though, it was different. Let’s be honest, we watched that ten minute live lottery reveal like hawks, trying to spot the man in the gorilla suit who walked across the background, or the point at which Brown swapped with a body double and did something to the balls. Hey, when he walked over to the balls and the camera followed him, was he walking over to an entirely different set of balls? That would have been classic Derren Brown. Him brazenly fooling us right in front of our eyes, and us gleefully letting him. So. What did we miss? That’s what we were waiting to find out on Friday. How did he pull it off again? Despite all we know about his methods, how did he get one over on us this time?

And then what did we get? A 45 minute spiel of the calibre that you would get from any half-cocked end-of-the-pier magician trying to distract us from the not particularly impressive nature of the original trick, that ended with a kind of disclaimer in which he suggested he could have rigged the machine and finishing by saying that maybe ‘it was just a trick’. Which left us with what? The rather tedious notion that we had just watched an hour of television based on little more than modern technology’s ability to obscure what’s going on on a screen, or maybe to write numbers on a ball without having to move them. Magical in itself, perhaps, but not really a trick, per se. No doubt Brown would like us to believe that he did something far more elaborate to get away with the trick, and perhaps he did, but the fatal flaw there is that if we know it could be done relatively simply, we don’t care about whatever labyrinthine plot he cooked up to pull it off. It’s not a good trick if everyone is so convinced they know how it was done that they cease to wonder about it, even if we’re all entirely wrong. Even the real tricks within the programme involved the sort of power-of-suggestion manipulation that we have already seen a thousand times from him. I mean, even though it wasn’t up to Brown’s usual standards, I wouldn’t have minded quite so much if Wednesday’s trick had seemed really really good, but with so much potential to muck about with the cameras, it just didn’t. It was CGI magic, and it left me as cold as the Transformers movies battles did. Eurgh.

This wasn’t the worse thing about it, though. For me, the most disappointing thing was the sense that Brown has become so convinced of his ability to make us take anything he says as read, that he barely even tried to humour us. Previously, by letting us in on a little bit of the secret, he had suggested that he knew we were intelligent enough to see through the smoke and mirrors, and that acknowledgement created a kind of camaraderie, even as we bowed down to his skill, that made his tricks irresistible. He was the cosummate host. This time, Brown had a party, but we weren’t invited. He clearly joyed in his ability to spend an hour feeding us gobbledygook and assuming we would just take everything he came out with at face value. His hunger for illusion and misdirection was sated, but ours was never even indulged. Everything about it felt lazy, even the jokes, of which the best he could muster was a comment that the bonus ball was just ‘for women and gays’. Not exactly the dry charm we’ve come to expect from him. So, we weren’t entertained. We weren’t charmed. And we weren’t tricked. All we got was cheated. And not even very well. Very poor fare indeed.

Next week, Derren claims that he’ll show a video that will make viewers at home stick to our chairs. This is much more familiar territory for Brown, and provided faith in his abilities hasn’t been completely crushed by this week’s jump-the-shark moment, it may work. Let’s hope so. I miss the certainty.

While I was at university, for my first year, my two closest friends were male. I was very, very fond of both of them. They were witty, intelligent and silly. The three of us would stay up and talk all night, joking around and chatting about our lives. We’d play practical jokes on each other, cook together and go to each other when things went wrong.

But as the year went on, I started to feel more and more alienated from them. In the halls, we spent all our time together, but they only went out with their male friends. They told me I was their closest friend, but I was never invited into their social group. I was expected only to go out with other women. I was not of their tribe. The jokes started to take on an edge, too. They started ganging up on me with their practical jokes. A couple of times one of them even hit me when he was drunk – all in the name of fun, of course. When we would sit and talk conversations started to consist of long protracted put-downs of me, in which I would sit silently listening and hurting at the onslaught. I remember waking up one morning and seeing that someone had written ‘CUNT’ by sticking sanitary towels on the wall at the foot of the bed. When I tried to challenge them they would listen silently, resentfully. They would nod, agree, apologise. Once they even bought me flowers, but then they went and complained to our other friends at how unreasonable I was being. They repeatedly told me that they loved me, that I was their favourite ‘girl’ in college – but not favourite person, never favourite person. They would make sexist jokes and I would refuse to join in – and they would tell me it was okay because of course they didn’t really mean it. Other friends told me I was being a prude. No one seemed to see that having my closest friends constantly insult my gender was deeply hurtful and was shattering my self esteem.

It was a pattern I saw constantly. A woman who tended to befriend men at university started out with their surprised but grudging respect. Everyone would talk about how they weren’t like other girls, how they were so funny, how they were game for anything. But in the end, the men seemed to feel challenged and threatened. They would pick her up and physically manhandle her – as a joke, always as a joke – to show their physical superiority. They would wake her up in the middle of the night by throwing things at her bedroom door, leave obscene messages on her facebook account, go on her computer when she wasn’t in the room, hide things in her draws and send messages to men she was interested in. They tested her, they pushed her to the limits of her patience and then went further, and she was expected to laugh. I was expected to laugh, gamely, along to whatever they threw at me. This was apparently the price I paid for equality. If I accepted the abuse with laughter, I was allowed to make jokes like the men and not be expected to constantly sexualise myself around them. If I didn’t challenge them when they insulted other women, I was one of the fortunate few who wasn’t “like other girls”. Some women could do that. Sometimes I did, too. When cunt was written on my wall I laughed. I genuinely thought it was funny. Sometimes I just wasn’t strong enough to go against the tide. Sometimes I just wanted to be liked. And being someone who enjoys the company of men, both as friends and lovers, I felt that maybe this was a fact of life that I would have to come to terms with – that men liked me but could not cope with my ability to challenge their shallow stereotypes about women.

But in the end, I couldn’t cope any more, and when I returned to university in my second year, I barely saw them at all. I barely spent any time in the places they usually went, because I couldn’t bear to be around them. I got over it, but it was desperately hurtful, as someone who does not trust easily, that two people I had forced myself to believe in had let me down so fundamentally. I have, of course, met men who both like and respect women, and have never given me reason to feel offence and, believe it or not, they are not always gay. Then again, those two are certainly not the only men I have known to behave this way. I have a friend who furiously attacked me for being PC when I asked him not to call women with short hair ‘dykes’. An ex-boyfriend once wrinkled his nose and said ‘you’re not a feminist are you?’ because I used the phrase ‘women’s rights’. (I wish now I had thought of this zinger from Joss Whedon: ‘Of course I’m a feminist. It’s crazy that there even needs to be a word for it. I mean, come on.’) I am repeatedly called frigid by male friends when I ask them not to pinch my arse, or grope me, resolutely insensitive to the fact that years of experience has taught me not to trust this sort of ‘affectionate’ contact and to be fiercely protective of my personal space. But those two, they are the ones who affected me the most. I like to think if they had read McEwan’s article that they would have understood what they were doing, but I know that wouldn’t have been the case. Whatever happens, they will always believe that the hurt they caused me was utterly and totally my own fault. And that is what hurts the most.

For those that don’t know, which, obviously, is none of you, the Pendet dance is a traditional Balinese dance that can be performed by anyone, and in which offerings of incense, cakes, flowers and other items are made to a temple. (Alas, Wikipedia has little more than a stub, but you can get a bit more information here). The outrage has come about because the dance has been used in a tourism advert for Malaysia, with many Indonesians feeling that they are misleadingly appropriating an integral part of their culture.

Hmmmm, to British twitterers this will be starting to sound strangely familiar. Anyone who had a look on the #welovethenhs topic in the last few days will know that, when it comes to Twitter, there is no fury like a society faced by a rival nation making spurious claims about their institutions. To me, it marks this week out as an interesting chapter in the development of Twitter as a broadcast phenomenon. While its political importance was marked during the protests in Iran and China, when tweeters in both countries were able to broadcast their experiences to the world, the NHS and Pendet Dance phenomenons mark out something more understated. While these perceived wrongs to a country’s national identity have no concretely negative impact on its inhabitants, Twitter is clearly acting as an outlet for people’s feelings of powerlessness and a way to create a sense of public unity in the face of enemies with advertising space. Its immediacy is far more effective in achieving catharsis for individuals than the act of joining a Facebook group, and the more that others are posting, the more people feel satisfied that their frustrations are being heard.

Still, none of this good-natured solidarity has quite the peculiarly moving togetherness of the major trending topic of a few hours ago, which I noticed said simply “Goodnight”. Awwww.

And to finish, here’s a clip of a young woman performing the pendet dance (though I think it is normally danced in groups). It is strangely hypnotic and the music is lovely, but I’m finding her eyes a bit unnerving. From watching youtube clips, they all do that. Brrrr.

Pretty vacant. Like father, like son.

However, like many, I was wildly disappointed by the final scene, which featured angel-like creatures looking archly at our twenty-first century world, followed by a montage of various forms of robotics and artificial intelligence in modern society. Was that it? Was that all that these years of Battlestar Galactica was supposed to be? A cautionary tale about the dangers of getting ahead of ourselves technologically?

This made me furious because, to me, it negated all of the allegorical relevance of the cylons as the Other that wealthy and imperialist societies have a hand in exploiting and creating and the circle of violence and paranoia that stems from such arrogance and lack of foresight. It erased from memory all the many episodes that dealt with the impossibility of state building rapidly for a traumatised, overcrowded and impoverished people by claiming that the show was never really about that, anyway. So what were those episodes? Filler? Because Battlestar Galactica was all about using robots like slaves. It did what so many other unsophisticated science fiction shows had done before it. It played into vague, ill-defined fears about technology without delving into the genuine progress that scientists have made in that field and the existing debate about the risks of artificial intelligence already going on within the scientific community, and it built itself on the pretence of offering something more profound.

The conclusion that Caprica Six was some sort of quasi-spiritual force of nature was equally irritating. While not religious myself, I could live with the fact that Ronald D. Moore allowed many things to happen that seemed so incredible as to not possibly be coincidence, but to explicitly say that a creator had a knowing hand in the events of the last four seasons just didn’t work. Now, in the last episode, these ‘angel’ characters offered some fairly optimistic ideas about individuals’ and societies’ ability to learn and get better. Wonderful. Dialectical angels. I admit, that is interesting and it also suggests that those angels could simply be an idea made manifest for the purposes of a television series. That would have been truly brilliant. It could also have worked that they sought to hone in on this idea by looking closely at the redemption of the most irredeemable character in the series. Unfortunately, this also didn’t really work because Caprica Six had become so tied up in some vague event that she was preparing Baltar for, that turned out to be saving a little girl who was apparently vital to the human race (because no other humans and cylons were ever going to have children with each other, ever) in a way that was so convoluted and forgettable that, when Baltar asked ‘Is that it?’ I was asking it with him. It was preposterous. It felt contrived and forced. It felt like the writers had introduced this mystery character in the pilot without having actually decided what she was doing there, and now they had to figure out what they were supposed to do with her. It was all very disappointing.

Ah, the weight of expectations and crushing disappointment

So, when I heard word that they were devising the spin-off, Caprica, that would be set in the past, back on the 12 colonies, I was really excited. All those political difficulties between the colonies that had only been hinted at could finally be explored. This could be some real, grown-up science fiction that, because it was set in a modern, relatively comfortable society, wouldn’t have to throw in pretensions to grandeur that sometimes made BSG feel just a little self-important. Watching the pilot, I became even more intrigued at the beginning by the way that they presented internet social networking as a series of covert, virtual reality nightclubs that allowed teenagers to act out their worst excesses without their parents ever finding out. So, we can throw teenage alienation and isolation into the mix – this is an aspect of technological development I’m genuinely interested in.

But then, they started talking about artificial intelligence again, and I yawned. Oh, I know, it was inevitable given that this was a show about the creation of cylons but I just don’t believe that artificially intelligent robots are ever going to rise up and kill us all for using them as toasters for so many years, so I find it impossible to engage with a drama that principally explores this. It’s just boys and their boring toys all over again. And all this religious debate about whether to believe in many gods or one – oh I don’t know. Of course, it depends on how its handled, but after the intellectual mash that was the BSG finale, I’m just not convinced that Ronald D. Moore is sophisticated enough to handle it. He knows how to dress up his drama as smart, but I don’t think he knows how to follow through on that promise.

Still, with the announcement that James Marsters has been cast as a recurring character in the show my interest has been piqued again, and from the internet chatter lots of people feel the same. His swaggering charisma can fill up 10 screens. I’ll watch him in anything.

He’s playing a terrorist, and my hope is that Caprica will delve into the genuine ways that terrorism is cultivated – that mixture of political disenfranchisement, social alienation, thwarted ambition and cultish manipulation, in that sci-fi way that makes it feel escapist enough not to seem like homework. With Marsters in the driving seat I believe that this may be realised. God forbid they make the entire root of terrorism a simple question of religious intolerance.

I also hope that they clean up what they are trying to say about the lives of women in the twelve colonies. Obviously I liked that in one respect they wished to be optimistic about future societies. They wanted to present a world in which gender roles did not exist and everyone could follow whatever path they wanted. Starbuck was completely unhampered by her gender, and yet still a brilliantly messed up human being for at least the first two seasons. I lived with the fact that they still made the female President a schoolteacher, that classic default profession for educated women, who had had no political ambitions (though Lord knows she grew into them). They also never explained how they could present a world in which women were fully liberated and yet there was still prostitution and sections of society that forbade abortion. Because of these contradictions, by erasing the difficulty of being female from Caprican society without removing the concrete problems that women face every day, it simply felt like they were refusing to engage with women’s troubled position in society. They did not present an alternative to the way women live now. Everything was exactly the same as it is now, except in some indefinable way, it was better. Unlike the manner in which they explored terrorism and warfare, no one’s preconceptions were challenged. I accept that they went into this theme on women’s freedom with the best of intentions, but like many of the ideas on BSG I simply don’t believe they understood the complexities of the issue clearly enough to follow through.

I am truly hoping that they realise this potential on Caprica, partly because it would mean that intelligent, challenging science fiction is here to stay on our screens and partly because I cannot spend another few years being told how great and clever it is while I’m secretly thinking that, for all that Ronald D. Moore wears his profundity on his sleeve, Joss Whedon has always quietly, modestly, and with a sense of humour, done it better. (Yes, I believe Firefly was better than Battlestar Galactica. More on that some other time) Now if they can just keep Dollhouse in check, we’re set…

Seriously, as pleased as I am that Barney Frank confronted this silly woman, I can’t help thinking that it should not be considered a big deal for a Democrat to show a bit of conviction and stand up to someone calling Obama a Nazi. The real and shocking news should be that people are calling Obama a Nazi. Yet elected Democrats have so roundly failed to react properly to the slurs being cast on their leader that it is starting to be considered as a perfectly acceptable part of the cut and thrust of political debate.

So the real question is, why are the rest of them so intent on responding to every cynical, false challenge to healthcare reform by looking like children trying to explain to their parents why drawing on the fridge in permanent marker is so vital to their plans for becoming a pirate captain? Yes, there are different sides to every argument. The point at which you are trying to push through a vital, historical and highly controversial piece of legislation is not the time to acknowledge them. Michael Tomasky of The Guardian makes a similar point here.

Then of course he starred in Wimbledon, and my brain did the sensible thing by immediately erasing any traces of my crush rather than subject me to watching that yawnfest in the cinema. So that was the end of that.

But the fact remains that Bettany is a brilliant actor, and so it is getting quite annoying that he has been stuck in the niche that so many grave but attractive British actors get sucked into in Hollywood. Over and over, he just seems to play the villain/morally ambiguous one in film after film after film. Unfortunately for Paulie, Hollywood seems to be a little swamped with these types, so Bettany’s corner of the market is quite bizarrely specific. Where Sean Bean got to stretch his muscles from tortured nonconformist in Equilibrium to tortured megalomaniac in The Lord of the Rings to mildly troubled fellow in Flightplan (alongside fellow creepoid nichemonger Peter Sarsgaard), and the truly awesome Alan Rickman gets to play baddies in big budget fight fest after big budget fight fest, Bettany’s grand prize is…the religious ones! Yes, the religious ones. Well, at least the ostensibly subversive excuses for lots of blood and violence and chasing with a dash of religious overtones thrown in to give pretty low budget fare a nonetheless “epic” feel. Granted we are peculiarly well-served with that sub-genre at the moment, for reasons that I cannot fathom, but this latest installment, Legion, hardly looks set to break the box office. Check out the trailer below and see for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of trashy “look at us making God out not to be that great a bloke after all, har har har” action fare, and who doesn’t want to see what would happen if you crossed From Dusk Till Dawn with Constantine? If you ask me, the best movie mashups always happen when you take two disappointingly incoherent/ill-conceived good ideas and jam them together into a film that wouldn’t have had the budget or commitment to realise even half of the originals’ special effects. In other words, I. Can’t. Wait.

Am I being sarcastic? I have no idea. But my real point is, why, Paul, whyyyy? Sure I want to see this film, I inevitably will, but I’d rather see, you know, a good film with him in it and I’m sure there must be enough people feeling this way that it’d get a decent chunk of box office just from people hoping that the film will magically turn out to be a sequel of Master and Commander alone (teasing us with that subtitle and then not following through really is the cruellest form of torture).

And if he’s just doing films where he gets to be a psychotic member of a Catholic cult, or he gets to kill God (I am totally lovefilming that one…oh okay fine. It’s about Charles Darwin. No it doesn’t fit the pattern. Shut up, okay, shut up! The Guardian lied!), or fight God, who’s bad, in order to protect the Second Coming of God, which is good (that last one’s Legion. Can I get a “huh?”) because he thinks they’re fun, then frankly, what the hell is he thinking? Being a famous, attractive, talented, wealthy actor isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a long hard slog of giving us, the slavishly adoring consumers, exactly what we want. And what we want is to see him in the midst of the 1920s sauntering through parties looking debonair and seducing women who look exactly. Like. Me.

I assume that everyone else feels more or less completely the same way that I do on this matter, so let’s leave this discussion at that, and hope that Bettany takes our suggestions on board. Points for effort Paul, but frankly, could do better.

Addendum: I’ve just discovered via Popwatch that Paul Bettany is doing yet another religiously themed movie in 2010, playing a vampire-hunting (yes, you heard me right. Those critters are taking over. Someone needs to fumigate) priest. Umm, quel le crap?