Some Reading Matter

It's ages since I've made a post of links, but I seem to have seen several I really want to share.

Wheelchair Dancer has been writing about a revamp of Ironside, the (originally 70s, I guess) American TV series with a wheelchair-using detective. WD's posts on this have been phenomenal and she's promised a fourth. So far we have:

• Ironside I: The Non-disabled Role/ Roll again about the justifications used to cast a non-disabled actor as the leading disabled character, descriptions of the actor trying to master acting disabled etc..
• Ironside II: The Rough Rider Condom Chair about the intersection of straight masculinity and disability in the character of Ironside and his impractical wheelchair.
• Ironside III: Criminal Minds, Luther about the casting of a black man as Ironside and the intersection of race and disability.

Read them all.  Read the fourth one when its published. Okay? Good.

Also:

Biphobia is not (only) an LBGT issue, on how straight folk can't blame queer folk for biphobia.

Disability in Kidlit: A new blog providing "reviews, guest posts and discussions about the portrayal of disabilities in MG/ YA fiction".  I know YA is Young Adult. Apparently MG, in this context, is Middle-Grade.

This is really old, but I first saw it this summer: Why Film Schools Teach Screenwriters Not To Pass The Bechdel Test - infuriating and insightful.
.
I read this after I posted this blog, but it needs to be here: A geek against Gok
- Zoe Burgess on the manipulation and humiliation of a TV show and the triumph of a geek over adversity.

Some powerful personal posts:

One Classroom, Two Genders - The experiences of a trans woman when identified as a man, then as a woman, by her students.

Peeling Back The Layers of Shame: Talking About My Mother - Rachel describes the shame she has felt for not loving her mother, and how that continues to effect her years after her mother's death.

My Mother-in-law and Me - Lucy tells the story of a mother-in-law, who has always disapproved of Lucy because of her impairments.

This is What You're Missing: An American Love Story - A deeply moving story of sisterly love and grief.

On Being An Auntie (again). NTE watches her new nephew come into the world.


I'm sure there were other things, but usefully, my reader has just been closed for maintenance.

Since I'm here, I'm guest-blogging at the F-Word this month.  So far, I've written about women abusers and sex tips.

On Hamlet and Hip Hop

Oh dear! Tory Conference: Hip-hop Hamlet "racist and evil"

Curiously-bearded Lindsay Johnson has been speaking at the Conservative Party Conference about a strawman school production of Hamlet with a Hip Hop soundtrack.

"Hamlet doesn't need a hip-hop sound track for young people to enjoy it." 

Mr Johns added: "It's been doing just fine for the last 400 years." 

Same production, same costumes, same accents, same set.  All the women played by men in dresses. As Tara tweeted, "we know exactly how it was staged due to Shakespeare’s excellent notes." Johnson goes on:

"It's not only incredibly patronising, but also viciously racist to think that black and brown kids in the inner cities will only 'get Shakespeare' if it's set to a hip-hop beat and presented in three-minute, MTV-Base-style chunks." 

"It is positively evil to deny inner city kids access to the manifold joys of hearing their national poet's true voice, in essence their birthright, simply because of a culture of low expectations."

Presumably, our national poet's true voice had a Midlands accent. Lawrence Olivier could never pull it off.

Right. There are reasons for teaching Shakespeare in school other than it's always been that way. Shakespeare is a major part of our metatext. Shakespeare's plots are much older than Shakespeare, but they're still present in our books and movies. Shakespeare's language is not ours, but it is familiar. Learning Shakespeare teaches us a lot about the effective and expressive use of language.

If all of this is being taught, however it's being taught, then everything is fine.

Next. Johnson, who looks about my age, accuses teaches of "genuflecting at the alter of youth."

I'm thirty two - old enough to have a kid in high school, plenty old enough to be a high school teacher and yet younger than Hip Hop. As a white kid writing poems in primary school, I called them raps. Teachers liked poems, but raps had credibility. I wrote a rap about my class and it was, by popular demand, blue-tacked to the classroom door. Everyone was impressed. Oddly, the kids in the other classes said I couldn't have written it because I was girl and girls didn't rap.

Okay, so, I didn't - I had to ask a boy to perform it. I always had a slow calm voice, more suited to recite Tennyson than 2 Pak. But rap is no more removed from the modern grammatically-correct British English I express myself in than Shakespeare. In fact, rap is much closer to Shakespeare because of adhering to meter and the fact it often rhymes. For example:

I pour a sip on the concrete for the deceased
But no, don't weep. Wyclef's in a state of sleep
Thinking 'bout the robbery that I did last week.
Money in the bag; banker looked like a drag
I want to play with pellet guns from here to Baghdad.
Gun blast, think fast - I think I'm hit.
My girl pinched my hips to see if I still exist
I think not. I'll send a letter to my friends
A born again hooligan, only to be king again.

 Ready or Not - The Fugees. 

This is not Shakespeare, but it has much in common with Shakespeare. And like Hamlet, Wyclef Jean, who in this context speaks with the indifference and self-centredness of youth, considers the violence of his world, his desire to be in charge and the eternal sleep of death. Now, my heart has an indie beat, but if I can think of that off the top of my head, someone who actually knows this music could come up with much better evidence.

If you can't connect Shakespeare with Hip Hop, the poetry of all our pop music, movies plots, soap opera or something that exists in 2013, then what is the point?  Hamlet is not about a prince in medieval Denmark, it is a play about young angry masculinity. Some kind of pop music soundtrack is entirely apt, but perhaps especially Hip Hop; Hamlet's world is absorbed in a violent power struggle, he has a love/hate relationship with the women in his life, all the people he respects are in show-business and he believes that the arts - in this case, the dramatic arts - have the power to retrieve the truth and finally set him free.

I loved Hamlet as a young person because it seemed to be about teenage angst.  I felt as miserable and misunderstood as the next person, but noticed that this was an irritating quality, taken to extreme in some of the boys around me. I had a massive crush on an older boy who became suddenly ridiculous in my eyes when he stated he would kill himself before he turned twenty, because after that, what was the point of going on?  It seemed to me that Hamlet was the story of such young men, who didn't want to die at all, but indulged themselves in petty jealousies and rage towards their parents, and wore self-pity like a beat up leather trench coat. Hamlet moved me deeply, because it is a tragedy; Hamlet is a twit, and his failure to pull himself together (learn guitar, put it down in writing, join the Elsinore Amateur Dramatic Society) results in his destruction.

There's plenty else going on of course, but the point is I saw that it was relevant to my life. Of course, I wasn't typical. We never studied Hamlet - I read Shakespeare for fun. It was on at the local theatre with a bloke in from The Bill and I asked to my Mum to take me to see it. If other kids need a few extra pointers, then hand them over. We were studying Romeo and Juliet for GCSE and saw two theatrical productions; one in a converted warehouse in Norwich, one by the RSC at the Barbican, with lavish sets and Elizabethan Costume. We chatted, fidgeted and sniggered at the Barbican: Juliet was an eminent actor, but she was thirty-five and had the voice of a cut-glass chain-smoker. In Norwich, with younger actors, looser annunciation, plain costumes and minimal sets, we were transfixed. Had we seen Baz Lurman's Romeo + Juliet, which came out at the cinema around this time, "Do you bite your thumb at me?" would have replaced "What're you staring at?" in form-room fracas.

Shakespeare lies dead and decomposing in the adolescent memories of so many adults, because it didn't seem relevant and was never presented as relevant. If we truly believe in its relevance to the modern world, as opposed to a mere source for quotations and self-congratulations, we need to show the kids. A Hip Hop soundtrack doesn't sound like a gimmick, but the placing of a play in a living context.

Who does nuance belong to?

In Roman Polanski and the sin of simplification our beloved Victoria Coren Mitchell discusses a new book by Samantha Geimer (the woman that Polanski drugged and raped as a thirteen year old girl). Much as I adore VCM, she confuses a fact about child sex abuse, and abuse generally, and a despicable lie that regularly gets in the way of reporting and justice:

  Fact: Abusers are human beings and thus are very complex, possibly with talents, virtues, their own pain, strengths and weaknesses like the rest of us. Victims are often well aware of this.

  Lie: If someone has talents, or has suffered in some way, the wrongness of their crimes somehow becomes more complicated.

Child abusers are rarely terrible people in every aspect of their lives. Victims will be particularly aware of this because usually, a victim knows their abuser; these are their parents, their family friends, their priests, teachers and mentors. What's more, victims are heavily invested in the idea that their abusers were not monsters because, from their point of view;

• If he were a monster, I wouldn't have liked or trusted him. 
• If he were a monster, other people who cared for me would not have let him alone with me. 
• If he were a monster, what he did to me is without meaning or explanation.

None of this is irrational.  Abusers are human beings. Victims (and the people who care for them) are not stupid, careless creatures who wander naked into caves past signs reading, "Rapist Troll Lives Here". Unless you look at the fundamental humanity of abusers, then you can't understand why this happens or how this happens. The idea that rapists and sexual abusers are monsters is one of the chief reasons that victims are so often met with disbelief; this nice family man has no horns, this talented sportsmen has no forked tail.  

And VCM would have done very well to write an article about that - to say that Roman Polanski is a man who has suffered in his life and he is very talented (though honestly, he's no Kubrick) and yet he still committed this monstrous crime. We need to see that and take note; people who are virtuous in some respects are monstrous in others. But she loses her way. Any article which discusses a rape and has the line 

"A second complicating factor is that Polanski's work is filled with beauty and humanity."

is going to boil a lot of blood. Gandhi beat his wife at least once - we don't think that was okay, and he was Gandhi, for goodness' sake. Polanski is just a film director, whose reputation has been elevated beyond his talent by his history of personal suffering. I think story-telling is nearly the most important thing on Earth, but there's nothing he could ever do in the creation of a movie that would somehow mitigate the rape of a child. VCM talks about Geimer's book:

"She says that the police investigation, hospital exams and reporting of the case were more traumatic than the attack itself. She says: "I did something wrong, I was stupid… To pose topless, and to drink and to take the [sleeping] pill." 

"It is so easy and tempting to knock this into a pigeonhole: the misguided self-blame and denial of the victim."

Only, this is not self-blame or denial.  I was abused as a young adult, so I can tell you about all kinds of foolish things I did, positions I put myself in, misplaced trust and loyalty, and I don't get to wipe that all away with, but I was a child; children are daft and don't know any better. However, none of those things make me responsible for what was done to me. None of those things make what my abuser did less serious because I made a few bad choices.

Geimer was a thirteen year old girl, who chose to pose topless, drink and take a pill she was offered. Some might judge that as stupid (I have very little context). But to think that could be read as self-blame suggests that a thirteen year old girl can do stupid things that make her to blame for her rape. She can't. Rape just isn't that complicated.

"It is the complication that we need. People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes."

But deeds can and should be divided in this way. I like yarn-bombing. I dislike child-rape. For all I know some yarn-bombers are complete bastards and I'm sure that there are some lovely child-rapists. Except for, you know, the raping children thing, which I struggled to see past.

"So what is to be done with Samantha Geimer's story? She does not condemn Polanski nor exonerate him. She does not blame herself nor refuse to examine herself. Her voice is strong and complicated. You cannot simplify her, or him."

No we can't. But we can simplify the crime he committed towards her - which Geimer does herself. She describes it as "rape, in every sense of the word" because that's what it was. Roman Polanski is a rapist. However complicated he is as a human being, this crime was not and our response to that needs no nuance whatsoever.

Geimer's reaction is nuanced. Like all victims, Geimer is a human being who has reacted, coped with and confronted her experience in a unique and personal way. She's done it bravely, and has written a book that people say is well-written.

But the nuance of what happened to her belongs entirely to Geimer.  It doesn't belong to anyone else. 

10 Reasons A Marriage Tax Break is a Dreadful Idea

1. People have and always did marry for silly reasons. The proposed marriage tax break provides another very silly reason. People who marry for silly reasons don't tend to stay happy or married for long.

2. There's a mixed message about childcare here. Impoverished lone parents are under greater pressure than ever to find full-time work as soon as their children are on solid food. The principle beneficiaries for the planned tax break will be married couples where one partner stays at home or works part time. If you're into social engineering (and there is no other term), then you at least need to be consistent.

3. It's quite complicated. It's to do with transferring part of your unused tax allowance to your spouse. I'm not sure I even know what that means or how it will work, and I'm guessing there'll be eligible people who never see a penny.

4. As with all political moralising about the merits of marriage, rhetoric around the tax break fails to understand why people who aren't married aren't married. There are perhaps four categories of people who aren't married:

(a) Single people.  Single people may or may not like to be married, they may or may not have been married in the past, they may believe that marriage is the bedrock of civilisation, but marriage is not a reasonable lifestyle option open to a single person. Because there's only one of them.
(b) Committed couples who can't or don't want to get married just now or perhaps ever. Reasons may include a conscientious objection to marriage (see point 10 below), deeply personal reasons, legal or financial obstacles, an uncomplicated disinterest in the subject and, very often, plans to marry in the future. Unmarried couples are not necessarily unmarrying; most married couples were once cohabitees.
(c) Groups of more than two people who are in love and can't have a legal marriage that includes all parties.
(d) (Much more commonly) Couples who aren't entirely committed to each other. 

The elevation of coupledom as the place we all want to be, the first class arrival lounge of adulthood, means that a fair few people are in relationships which aren't really working too well. People in these relationships may be restless, discontented or they may be desperately unhappy but afraid to leave. Such couples should, under no circumstances, be encouraged to marry. The trouble is that some people do think fairy dust is sprinkled over couples at marriage - as with having a child (which is worse), some people believe that a wedding is just what a struggling couple needs to sort themselves out.

The rhetoric around this tax break encourages unhappy couples to marry. The message is that married relationships are better, which can easily sound like your relationships would be better if you were married. It won't be.  It will be roughly like it is now, only harder to get out of. 

5. £3.85 a week is not a great deal of money to most working people. The scheme is expected to cost the state £550 million and not make a great deal of different to the lives or incomes of anyone. 

6. In fact, the administrative cost of marriage is just over £100.  If you want to wear fancy clothes, invite your family and have a nice meal, it's going to cost a few hundred more.  At £200 a year (the maximum tax break), a marriage will take between six months and several years to pay for itself. 

7. Cameron says, "Love is love, commitment is commitment." but marriage is a not a necessary or sufficient condition for love or commitment. For example, former MSP Bill Walker, on his forth marriage having violently abused his first three wives, would still be theoretically eligible for this tax break (if he was working and not in prison). Meanwhile, the most conservative-friendly hard-working jam-making war widow one can imagine would not. 

8. It is very much cheaper to be part of a couple than it is to be single. This is especially the case for couples or single people with children. It is therefore ridiculous to give any kind of subsidy to a group of people who - presuming married people generally live, sleep, eat and socialise together - are already blessed with lower living expenses that many other people.  

9. This policy really feels like it is about making certain people, those lucky enough to have found someone they love, those privileged enough to have been able to afford marriage, those where one person earns enough for another not to have to work full time, to feel superior and smug about a lifestyle that landed in their lap.

10. One of the chief reasons people object to marriage is the idea that it is an institution that belongs to conservative moralisers and religious zealots. The sort of people who say that marriage makes for superior relationships. The sort of people who grit their teeth through decades of domestic conflict, sexual frustration and deception just so they can call their marriages successful.

It strikes me that policies like this are exactly what gives marriage an image problem.

People Are Strange #3897

A woodland path in late summer; leaves slightly yellowing,
sun low in the trees.

So Stephen and I were on honeymoon in West Wales, coming out from the woodland path, both of us on mobility scooters. A slim anoraked woman in her mid-forties was walking down the road and, although we were moving at casual walking pace, she startled and stepped back. Then she said, "I thought you were a rat!"

Most people in the world might respond to this with a mixture of bafflement and offense.  But we're English. We apologised.

"I just saw a rat up the road," she went on to explain. "I thought you were another one, about to jump out at me. It was dead and everything!"

Of course; two tall adults using mobility scooters could easily resemble a rat. Particularly a dead rat. Just like the dead rats that often jump out at people on country lanes in broad daylight.

I have no clue whether the scooters were a factor in our rat-like appearance - we may have been mistaken for a rat by this eccentric person whilst on foot. In fact, had we been standing up, the sight of all six foot of us on our hind legs may have caused the woman to scream and run back up the road.

We had a wonderful honeymoon; exciting, relaxing and productive in equal measures. I got a great deal of writing done, we watched in wonder as this little story took the East Anglian press by storm and Stephen went a little bit wild:

Video description: Stephen (a handsome young white man with dark hair, dark glasses and a funky hat) zooms down a steep slope on his mobility scooter, holding a bubble sword (a plastic loop) that creates a modest cloud of bubbles in his wake. 

On Love, Stationery & Law Enforcement.

When I was 8 years old, I wanted to be a detective.

Television had taught me that children could achieve almost anything by writing letters, so I wrote to Suffolk Police offering my services as a detective. I thought I could help out - that really is how I phrased it. I also offered the services of my older cousin because crime-fighters generally come in pairs.

A Police Range Rover with my nine year old self
at the wheel. 

The police were unable to find a position for me at that time, but they did take my cousin, myself and a boy who'd had the same idea, for a day at the Suffolk Police Headquarters at Martlesham, at the end of the Christmas Holidays, in January 1990. I had just turned nine.

This was amazing. They picked us up in a police car. They shows us the control room where they receive emergency calls. They took our fingerprints. I got to sit on a police motorbike. I got to sit in a police Range Rover. They showed us a private museum of criminal paraphernalia; weird weapons, benign-looking objects with secret compartments for smuggling drugs.

The best bit was sitting in the back of an ordinary-looking car while the driver demonstrated advanced driving skills; speeding around and skidding all over the place. Scary and brilliant in equal measure.

That day was one of the most exciting days of my young life and it influenced me in two significant ways:

1. Unsurprisingly, I carried on wanting to be a detective, right up until an adolescent need for attention and self-expression beckoned me onto the stage. Thus, I kept looking at the world with a view to solving its mysteries. I noticed curious behaviour. I watched people. And I've never really stopped that - I still notice people who don't quite fit and briefly fantasise about their criminal story.

I always wrote stories, as soon as I could spell enough words (or at least, I could spell some words, and build a story around them). However, I'm not sure I've ever written any piece of fiction which wasn't about some kind of mystery. This is, apparently, what I do.

2. I basically trust the police. I report crimes and encourage others to do the same. When asked for information, I've always been forthcoming (except once, when I had the most inappropriate fit of the giggles*).

Three children and a police officer in front of an ordinary
looking white car which can go faster than you'd think.

I know some people can't trust the police and I understand that; if you've been dismissed or belittled in your most vulnerable moment, if you have been repeatedly treated with suspicion because of your race, impairment or the place you live, then trust would be an unnatural response. I also know that some people enter the police force (together with certain other professions) because they enjoy wielding power over others.

However, that day at the Suffolk Police Headquarters established a fundamental trust in the police which has remained largely unshaken by adult experience.

Anyway, my most beloved souvenir from my day with the Suffolk Police was my Suffolk Police pencil. Well, obviously - you use it to write things down!  I used to write stories, but also to collect the number plates of suspicious (or at least unfamiliar) vehicles, to note the strange comings and goings at Number 52 and to record general observations in the hope that one day, one of my neighbours would be brutally murdered, and I'd be able to work out who'd done it.

Then one fateful day, I was on a school trip to West Stow Anglo Saxon Village. I was dressed as an Anglo Saxon, casing out one of these reconstructed Anglo Saxon dwellings for signs of underhand Viking activity (why no Anglo Saxon literary sleuths? We've got Falco, a Roman, then no detectives until medieval Cadfael?).

I dropped the pencil.

I don't recall my visit to the Anglo Saxon village as well as I do my trip to the police headquarters, but I can tell you that when Anglo Saxons built a house, they first dug a deep hole for foundations. I know this because I watched helplessly as my pencil rolled through the gap between the floorboards (no tongue and groove for those Saxons) and fall down to the floor of the pit the house was built over.

I could see my pencil, but there was no way I could reach it. Also, it was really going to confuse future archaeologists if the settlement got buried again by the sands of time, only to be dug up again, featuring authentic Anglo Saxon buildings and artifacts and one graphite pencil with Suffolk Police printed on it.

I don't generally get too attached to objects, but I was fairly gutted about the pencil.

My nephew has been to West Stow himself a few times and has always brought back a pencil. "It's to replace your Police pencil!" he declares (he knows the story but being six, he may have forgotten the fact he'd bought me a pencil on previous visit. After all, when I asked him what year he thought the Anglo Saxons lived at West Stow, given that it had to be a very long time ago it was, his guess was 1998).

Anyway, fast forward to our wedding day, last Monday. Stephen gives me a long velvet box, the sort you might display a bracelet in, or perhaps a fountain pen, or perhaps... a Suffolk Police Pencil! Exactly the same pencil!

Me holding a white pencil with an eraser on one end and
"Suffolk Police" printed in blue on it.

I am stunned. Delighted. Curious. Surely they're not selling these things on eBay now?

In May, Stephen wrote to Suffolk Police - sent an e-mail entitled "NON-EMERGENCY - a request" and told this story. He used what he had learned of the language of policing from TV and Films, referring to Suffolk Police as Suffolk's Finest (like New York's Finest, only with many more incidents involving pigs). He even concluded the story with "Can you see where this is going?" just like on The Wire when they've presented incriminating evidence to a hoodlum.

This e-mail traveled through departments at Suffolk Police over a period of some weeks before landing with a public relations officer. They no longer have pencils (they probably give away USB pens these days) but they had a rummage in their stock rooms and found two. Two Suffolk Police pencils. And they sent them to Stephen, along with a compliments slip congratulating us on our wedding. Suffolk Police congratulated us on our wedding.

A man and a woman in fairly fancy clothes:
Mr Goldfish & myself on our wedding day.

And so, now you know. Now you know why I still think the police are basically a good bunch who will be there for anyone in their time of need. And now you have a tiny taste of why I married Stephen.


[The school liaison officer who took us around the Police HQ that day was a PC Howlett, who also came into our primary school to advise us against playing on railway lines and the like. He was an engaging speaker and some of the stories he told (fun stories about feckless criminals, rather than stories about children getting hurt) stuck in my mind, regardless of everything else. Just saying on the unlikely chance he should google himself. ]

* They were door-to-dooring following a very serious crime on the street where I was living (this was the North Yorkshire police, or the NYPD as I'm sure they prefer). Anyway, the officer handed me two sheets of paper, one of which had an outline of a car, the other the outline of a man - a person, I suppose, but definitely a mannish figure. The idea was to draw or write in any details you remembered. The whole situation was so serious, but this outline of a man struck me as very funny - there were just so many silly thing you could - and people probably would - do with it. So I had the giggles. I expect the police are used to that. I expect they have gigglers even when folk are identifying bodies. Especially if someone has died in a comical way.

Heat, Bodies & Disgust

In the last few weeks of weather, so hot that even I have noticed, there seems to have been a lot of column inches dedicated to the acceptability or not of baring flesh. For the benefit of foreign readers, British people have no problem with near-nudity, in the context of a Friday night in the depths of winter - a sequinned garment the size of a tea-towel, attached to one's person via a series of spaghetti straps is entirely appropriate when you've had already had a drink and are queuing in the freezing rain, outside a crowded nightclub. Since the end of Empire, this is the only way Britain has left to demonstrate her considerable pluck. 

What concerns us now are much more confusing matters such as, is it ever appropriate to wear open-toed shoes in a workplace, during a heatwave? And what if you go to a beach and are not a professional swimwear model - is it okay to show a little thigh?  Professional representatives of feminism have come along to argue about what feminists do and don't look like in the summer months and Armpits4August are inviting women to let their underarm hair grow to raise money and awareness for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

In all these discussions, something stands out. Sometimes in the articles themselves, but invariably in the comments section, there are people who have important information about what they personally find sexually unattractive. After all, when you're getting dressed in the morning, it's useful to know that some overpaid journalist finds thick ankles a turn-off and Anonymous of Northampton couldn't stand to kiss a woman with a hairy upper lip.

It's almost entirely straight men who do this - at least when it comes to physical appearance. Occasionally, straight women do it by proxy, "My husband wouldn't like it if..." or "I've never met a man who fancied..." etc..  And with the men, it's not just only some men, it is very particular kind of man. He believes that:

• His sexuality is much more important than other people's.
• What he has to say is very useful to women, whose purpose in life is to look pretty for him.
• Being a macho masculine manly man, his preferences are broadly representative of those of all straight men everywhere.

There have been many comments by men under articles about Armpits4August. One that particularly amused me was (I paraphrase so I don't have to hunt it down, but this is very close):

"It's all very well if you don't want to shave your armpit hair to raise money for charity, but don't expect me to want to sleep with you!" 

Now this must cause a lot of inner-turmoil for those women hoping to raise money for PCOS charities. A month of unshaven armpits may be no big deal, but if that means no sex from a random man on the internet at any time throughout August... It puts a debilitating medical condition into perspective.

You'd think such a man lives quite a happy life. After all, he thinks that all women are concerned with their attractiveness to him. If I felt that every painted nail or shiny shoe was there for my benefit, I'd be very flattered. All day I'd be thanking people for looking so nice just for me.

The trouble is, the poor creature can't look at a woman - not a single one - without thinking about having sex with her. Inevitably, this results in a great deal of disgust. After all, however sexually-frustrated we may be, most of us are discriminating to some extent. Imagine if every time a politician came on the telly, you were condemned to picture them naked in the throes of passion (or, you know, literally coming on the telly).  You'd either have to give up Question Time or get campaigning fast for better looking politicians. 

For this reason, this kind of man has lists of the kinds of women who he can't really stand to look at and he must take to comments sections - or his professional career - to implore such women to cover up, stay indoors and preferably stop existing. And unfortunately, he's sometimes paid to do it and to some extent, our culture supports him all the way.

After all, the tone of beauty and fashion advice, especially for hot weather, isn't so much about looking good, but avoiding the innumerable faux pas of showing too much of the way nature made you - too many lumps and bumps, too much pale, rough, spotty or wrinkly skin, any body hair, too much untoned muscle, fat, cellulite as well as nonsense physical flaws dictated largely by age and genetics such as saddle-bags, cankles or bingo wings. Advice for weather of these temperatures - at least for us unaccustomed Brits - should all be about practicality. Instead, it is if the main dilemma is to avoid disgusting a certain kind of man. 

I've lost the wise tweet I saw last week (I'm struggling to keep track of most things just now) which said something along the lines of

"I know it's hot out there, but I can see your opinion about other people's bodies flapping about. For all our sakes, cover that up!" 

I'm sometimes frustrated when, in social justice circles, there's discussion of whether someone's sexual attraction can be racist, disablist, ageist and so forth. I think that discussion is largely unhelpful, because most people can't consciously control who they want or don't want sexually. What does matter is how these things are expressed, and what they're used to justify. 

It's unacceptable to talk about any body in terms of disgust. The way people clothe and ornament themselves can be strange, funny and occasionally offensive, but their bodies are just bodies, however much or little we can see of them. We all started out as roly-poly babies and we'll all end up corpses. In between times, we should get on and enjoy our physical nature, and leave others alone to enjoy theirs. 

In every sense of the word, stay cool. 

(I know I implied that politician's bodies might be disgusting, but only if I was to think about having sex with them. I've not followed through on this exercise, so I could be wrong. At this time, I don't find them disgusting, but I think I might if I thought about them in that way. Good. Glad that's sorted.)