Woolwich & The Words of Madness

Warning: Refers briefly to extreme violence. 

Yesterday, we watched a video of a man who, with an accomplice, had just run over, attacked and possibly decapitated another man in the street in Woolwich, South London and was now standing, addressing the crowd while he waited for the police to come and kill him. Perhaps if I was in charge of the world, this video would never have been published; the man wanted a platform and that's what he got. Then again, it does show us something of what kind of person this man is.

The killer comes across as very ordinary. He's talking like a man who has had a bad day, has shunted your car but is explaining his reasons and providing a reluctant apology. His hands are covered in blood and he is holding two blood-stained weapons, but he's not wielding them - his body language is not threatening. He is not processing what he's done because he has no time: he is explaining himself while waiting to die, naively convinced that the Metropolitan police will shoot to kill. 

So Stephen and I spoke about this and once again, despite knowing better, I found myself reaching for the words of madness. On-line and throughout the media, the language of madness is everywhere. I have written before about the difficulty of avoiding this language, far greater difficulty than with other disability terms and slurs. However, just now this seems especially important. 

The idea that violent people are necessarily mentally ill is such a huge problem and not just for those with mental ill health. Of course it does stigmatise people with mental illness, who are no more likely to commit violent offences than the rest of us. It leads to some of the very worse disability discrimination, effecting a person's job prospects, their ability to find housing and their relationships. But there are two further major problems: 

To describe a behaviour as mad is to dismiss it as impossible to understand. It's the easy way out; these guys are lunatics, nothing they do could possibly make sense, so we won't try and work out what happened. It also means, to a slightly lesser extent, that we let the bad guys off the hook; they're mad, so they can't really help it. It removes all meaning from a death with very little meaning, from the pain of the dead man's loved ones, and the trauma of everyone who was standing on that street; it was just a nasty random accident.

The language we use about these events is likely to impact on a great number of people, especially as the two attackers were black (the man in the video has a London accent) and by this morning, it was being described as an Islamic terrorist attack (here are some tweeted responses from British Muslims). Using the correct language to express our outrage is not just about protecting innocent but unconnected people who might feel offended or find life becomes a little tougher for them. It is about how we understand what has happened, whether we respond to events constructively or throw up our hands in despair.

Here's some suggestions of words we can use when we're inclined to use slurs or medical terms that relate to mental illness:

When we mean shocking:

outrageous, incredible, astounding, horrifying, sickening, breath-taking, unimaginable, staggering, impossible.

When we mean difficult to understand:

unfathomable, incomprehensible, baffling, inconceivable, absurd, preposterous, mind-boggling, unthinkable, beyond understanding.

When we mean very bad:

heinous, hideous, evil, abominable, monstrous, odious, detestable, devastating, abysmal, hateful.

When we mean that someone is making profound mistakes in their thinking:

misguided, specious, wrong, misplaced, erroneous, perverse, faulty, illogical.

Illogical or irrational thoughts are by no means the preserve of people with mental ill health.  Just earlier yesterday, Stephen's Dad had been talking about an inspirational maths teacher who would use algebra to convince the class into thinking he had proven that 1 + 1 = 3.  He'd then show them how this was done, turning maths into a kind of magic.  People who believe that extreme violence is morally justified are like students who saw the first proof, but weren't there, or weren't listening, when the trick was explained. 

The word I've seen and heard time and again is psychotic. Psychosis is a state (a symptom of illness rather than an illness itself) where a person may become so overwhelmed by their unreal experiences - hallucinations, paranoia etc. - that folk do, very occasionally, commit violence which they can't be held responsible for. I have experienced psychosis, it is a state of abject terror, but it rarely makes one dangerous to others. 

It's speculation, but the guy in the video doesn't seem psychotic. Someone who commits extreme violence during psychosis will have an extremely strange reason, if they're even cogent enough to explain; they had to slay the lizard king to stop him eating babies, they had to kill the man who had been listening in on their thoughts. This chap's reasons aren't in any way reasonable, but they don't seem grounded in a clinical delusion (Weirdly, the apparently Muslim attackers are quoted elsewhere as saying "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."). He believes that his victim is a killer of Muslims, in the much the same way that British nationalists believe that Islam is an inherently murderous religion. They're all wrong, very wrong, but their mistakes don't make them sick. 

The heartless side of me is glad this man survived, because he doesn't seem unwell. He was only prepared to do what he did because he had no intention of living with it. And now he may have to.

Here is a story some of the heroism that took place in Woolwich yesterday. It's also important to talk about heroism at these times, so we remember what courage and wisdom look like.

Butting Out of Britain's Fertility

Fortunately, most people in my life concur with what my physical health and practical circumstances tell me: I shouldn't reproduce. Well, nobody has ever told me I shouldn't, but nobody has told me I should. Okay, so two people did; one is my Gran who has dementia and has forgotten a great deal about me and the other was a family friend who suggested that pregnancy hormones could kick-start a significant improvement in my health (and if that's not worth a gamble, what is?). Point is, while many women in their early thirties find themselves subject to hints, warnings and occasionally national campaigns, I've got out of that.

An unwell and unhappy looking woman with
a poorly-placed grey wig and a pregnant belly.

I have feelings about this. They're complicated, but entirely survivable and it does mean that I often find myself thinking, "It's okay - they don't mean me."

On the same day we were presented with this fabulous infographic about the dangers of pregnancy to teenage girls across the globe, we saw this photograph of TV presenter Kate Garraway, who is neither pregnant nor 70 and had to be made-up to look like someone who is pregnant, 70 and particularly unwell, because in real life, our pregnant 70 year olds actually look a lot healthier than that. They're blooming, in fact. Or they don't exist. It's one of those, anyway.

The Get Britain Fertile campaign, run by a cosmetics company, seeks to highlight the fact that women become utterly grotesque as they age, lose their youthful good looks and no longer get any TV work - statistically, at 46, it's not only Kate Garraway's "fertility door" that's slamming shut. Getting pregnant can also damage your career chances, and while only 18% of TV presenters over 50 are women, absolutely none of them are pregnant.

I'm fed up with the idea that individual women have a completely free choice about whether to reproduce. I'm also fed up with the fact any of us should be judged, wholesale, for choices which are not entirely ours and aren't anyone else's business.

First off, and this may come as a great shock to commentators and anyone else who has ever pressured or disapproved of a woman about her reproductive choices, but human reproduction requires the fusion of a male and female gamete. There's no way round this - that's just how it must be done. Getting pregnant at any age is not a matter of placing a couple of gametes in close proximity and hoping for the best; even at peak fertility, a cis heterosexual couple will take an average of a year to conceive. Not that women can't get pregnant on the single occasion the condom splits - it happens, but it's rare.

Most women who want to have children want to have them with a partner (though not always a man, or a man who can be a father). Regardless of gender, this makes the decision to become a parent almost always a joint venture, depending not only on two people's mutual desires, but both parties feeling ready, able and not having other important things to do with their life at that particular moment. A woman who makes a unilateral decision to try for a baby within a relationship is abusive, potentially criminal depending on her methods and is unlikely to make a good mother. Certainly she compromises the other parties' chances of parenting to their best ability, since they weren't asked.

A single woman who wants children may be prepared to compromise on the partner issue, but her options are incredibly fraught. If she's wealthy, she can afford IVF and to make up the added expenses of being a single parent, otherwise the obvious method - having regular sex with a man or men who she's not partnered to - isn't going to work any faster, is potentially emotionally complicated for all concerned and is not at all socially acceptable. Single motherhood is still stigmatised, and someone seen to choose this status from the outset is likely to be judged as extremely selfish.

Selfish is a word that comes up a great deal when it comes to women and our made-up choices.

After all, women who have children very young are seen as selfish. They have not established themselves, they may be fresh from education without work experiences or wealth, and their relationships will be seen as fragile and untested (You can't expect a young man to have the maturity to be a parent!). There's the general perception that a woman who has children in her late teens or very early twenties is likely to be or become a single unemployed mother reliant on state help. Selfish.

Women who have children in their late thirties or forties are seen as selfish, because they're fertility is dwindling (so in other words, they're selfish for wanting something they have diminishing chances of getting). Rates of Down Syndrome increase (I mean, there's 750 babies born with Down Syndrome in the UK each year - it's practically pandemic). Then there's weird and stupid arguments like

• If you have a baby in your forties, your child may be teased because their mother looks different to some of the other younger mothers. It would be better not to have children at all, than to have children who might be teased because of their or their parents' physical appearance. 
• If you have a baby in your forties, you have more chance of becoming disabled before your child is an adult. Anyone who can't guarantee their physical capacity to play football with any potential grandchildren they may or may not have, thirty or forty years from now, should not reproduce.
• If you have a baby in your forties, you'll have been reduced to a strict lifestyle of wearing cardigans all year round, listening to classical music and visiting garden centers by the time your children are teenagers. What teenagers need is cool Belieber parents who want to swap clothes, attend the same parties and snog the same boys as they do.

Selfish, selfish, selfish. 

Even women who try for a baby at the right time (I guess the window between twenty-five and thirty-five, coincidentally, when most women have their children) can't get it right. Are you married?  Are you solvent? Can you afford to stop working? Can you afford appropriate childcare if you carry on working?  Not that (a) many mothers or parents generally have any choice whether they work while their children are small - most either can't afford to, or can't afford not to. Nor that (b) having enough money to choose will get you off the hook. Staying at home, idling about and living off your partner's sweat is tremendously selfish. It is only equaled by farming your children out to strangers or encumbered relatives while pursuing your own selfish career goals (goals such as, bringing in enough money to keep a roof over your family's head). 

Meanwhile, women who don't try to have children are selfish.  I've never really understood this.  Even if someone chooses to avoid pregnancy because they really love their white suede sofa and don't want to see it stained, they're not going to hurt anybody.  More often, people choose not to have children for very sound conscientious reasons, chiefly because in their particular circumstances their lives would be less happy if they had children.

Apparently it's selfish because, if we require care in old age, childless people will be looked after by others who they didn't personally bring into the world. It's selfish because childless people enjoy uninterrupted sleep and don't really know what love is. It's selfish because - despite the haphazard mess that is human fertility - it's somehow going against nature.

See this young woman, who is enjoying her life too much as it is (her real problem is difficulty communicating with her husband, but that's entirely glossed over). "I know I'm selfish," she writes to Mariella Frostrup (in her capacity as Worst Agony Aunt Ever) and Frostrup concurs:

I'm anxious about the absence of profundity in your decision-making. You give me no indication of the "things you love", but they appear to centre on disposable income. Deciding whether or not to have kids is, happily, your prerogative. But to treat it so lightly, to squander the extraordinary gift women alone have been given, because you're enjoying your present "lifestyle" seems a hollow victory for those aforementioned campaigners for women's dignity and rights.

I suppose that's one up from drawing a picture of a particularly ugly woman and saying, "This could be you! Somehow! If a dramatic make-up artist really went to town on you!"

Then there's folks who want children, or are ambivalent, but simply don't have the option. There's medical things - sometimes a very slight, mysterious and unseen obstacle that all the reproductive tech in the world can't fix, other times major issues like chronic illness or major injury. But there's also myriad legitimate reasons that folks who could potentially reproduce and would like to feel that that's just not possible - that to do so, would be utterly wrong.

There is no big fertility crisis in the UK just now. The population is increasing. Globally, population growth has to slow down for the quality of life of our species to continue to rise. What we need to fight for is for better sexual and reproductive health for everyone, to learn to respect one another's choices whilst also respecting the limits of personal choice and to recognise that reproduction is not something that women ever do alone.

Now go and read two much better posts: Infertility, patriarchy, profit and me or "KERCHING!" - Infertility and woman blaming, woman shaming, woman controlling. by Karen Ingala Smith and on a lighter, but not insincere not, Diane Shipley's What I think about when I think about thinking about thinking about having children.

Sexual violence & the practical presumption of innocence

Includes discussion of rape and childhood sexual abuse.

Sorry to launch back on such a subject, but this is a source of great frustration.

There's a principle in social justice that is important, but sometimes badly worded and often misunderstood. The principle is usually worded something like this:

If someone says that they have experienced rape, we should believe them.

I have written before about the importance of believing people when they talk about their experiences, unless and until you have a good reason not to. This particularly matters when it comes to sexual violence, because our trust can make the difference between a dangerous abuser being allowed to continue, committing worse and worse crimes, and that same person being brought to justice and taken out of circulation, discouraging others who would follow that path.

Yet our society is particularly bad at this. We are skeptical about rape. We are over-anxious about the idea that innocent men* may be subject to false-accusations. Sometimes, our principle is read as

If someone says that they have experienced rape, we should condemn the suspected perpetrator. 

This sits against one of the most important principles in law: a person is to be presumed innocent, until they are found to be guilty. Although this is usually a pernicious misinterpretation, some people actually word it like that. Some people do, for example, believe that we should condemn all the famous men arrested under Operation Yewtree, because they must all have been accused by someone.

There then follows an argument, which pitches the rights of a rape victim against those of a person accused of rape. This is a really big problem, a thorn in the side of any constructive discussion of justice and sexual violence, so I'm going to try and unpack it.


We've moved beyond trial by combat.

In days of yore, if a chap had been assaulted, had his cattle rustle or had someone trample a crop circle in his field on a drunken Saturday night, he would be given a big heavy stick. The person accused of these crimes would be given a similarly heavy stick and they'd be expected to decide the case by fighting it out. People knew it was a very stupid system, even at the time, but they were superstitious about lawyers and saw little alternative.

There is nothing that resembles this in UK criminal law. We have an adversarial trial system, where lawyers actively argue with each other, and sometimes with witnesses (another big issue around justice and sexual violence) but criminal cases do not pitch the accuser against the accused.  The victim of a crime (who may not be accusing anyone in particular) goes to the police. The police investigate. If they find enough evidence, they consult the Crown Prosecution Service, who may decide to take the suspect to trial. It is then the Crown that prosecutes, not on behalf of the victim but on behalf of the state, since a crime against one person is a crime against us all.

Yet so often, when rape and abuse cases are discussed, they are spoken about as if the victim and the suspect are two sides of a naturally ambiguous legal dispute. Folks argue for the anonymity for rape suspects or the removal of complainant anonymity in order to establish parity between the two parties, as if their respective positions can possibly be compared. They cannot.


Anonymity is a very simple issue, so let's clear that up. 

People who report rape and sexual abuse are given anonymity - that is, nobody is allowed to publish or broadcast their name or other personal details - for three very good reasons:

• Even if we could do away with the colossal stigma, sexual violence effects people in uniquely personal and complicated ways, and should be treated like the most private medical information. Lose anonymity and reporting would plummet.
• Rape victims are extremely vulnerable to intimidation and coercion, especially when they have been raped by people they know or by people with power and influence. Even without anonymity, many rape victims drop cases because they have been explicitly or implicitly threatened by their rapists and their allies. Lose anonymity and this would be even more commonplace.
• A rape victim who has reported a rape that didn't result in conviction is more vulnerable to experiencing rape again, and less likely to report another attack. Lose anonymity, and provide rapists with easily identifiable potential victims who are much less likely to report.  

Complainant anonymity is not about making rape victims avoid embarrassment, but is a tool for justice which helps protect fundamentally personal information, makes rape victims more likely to report and follow through the legal process, as well as helping to prevent rape happening again.

Anonymity is not awarded to adult suspects, outside exceptional circumstances (e.g. those involving state secrets), although the police and courts make decisions about releasing names to the media. It would be a particularly bad idea to award anonymity to rape or sexual abuse suspects for two very good reasons:

• Most rapists have multiple victims, each of who tend to believe that they are the only one. Especially in cases where a rapists has power and influence, evidence around a single instance may not be enough for a conviction. As soon as a name is published, other victims know they are not alone and have the opportunity to come forward and a stronger case is forged. 

(This doesn't mean the media handle such information at all well, and their mistakes can not only permanently damage the reputation of innocent people, they can jeopardise a fair trial and undermine the legal process.)

• The percentage of reported rapes that result in conviction is rather low. If suspects were granted anonymity, a rape victim would have a choice between effectively awarding their rapist lifelong anonymity on the chance he or she might be convicted, or else side-stepping the legal process and maintaining the freedom to discuss their own experiences in whatever way they saw fit.

Thus, granting suspect anonymity would result in less reporting, fewer convictions and, since rapists would feel altogether safer, a higher incidence of sexual violence.

Presumed innocent until proven guilty does not mean treated as innocent.

When someone is suspected of an offence, they will be obliged to speak to the police and they may be detained in custody whilst being questioned.  If a person is charged for an offence, a court will decide whether or not they should be allowed to be released on bail. Some people - still innocent in the eyes of the law - will be imprisoned for months awaiting trial.

Outside the criminal justice system, there are obvious steps that other people need to take when someone is suspected of a crime, whether the police are involved or not.  As human beings, we observe and listen to folks reactions, thoughts and experiences with other people all the time, and we'd be foolish if they didn't influence our behaviour.

Whether or not the police are involved, there's a big leap between treating a suspected rapist with caution - allowing their alleged victim distance from them in social settings, for example, not leaving them alone with potential victims - and organising a lynch mob.

In fact, there's a difference between believing someone when they say they have been raped and believing an accused person to be a rapist. After all...


The innocence of an accused person and the honesty of an accuser are not mutually incompatible.

Rape victims cannot always reliably identify their attackers, whether it is because they are complete strangers or because alcohol, other drugs or head trauma are involved.  In such cases (when they are taken seriously), the police are likely to question many innocent people; people who drive certain vehicles, people who were at a particular party, people who look a little like the attacker. People are occasionally charged with rape due to straight-forward mistaken identity.

Meanwhile, and especially with childhood sexual abuse, we have issues around memory.


Someone with inconsistent memories is not necessarily a liar.

Imagine someone was abused by her uncle as a child in the 1970s.  Nobody knew at the time, so she buried it in the back of her head.  She never spoke about it, so never called it abuse, and now, forty years later, she doesn't really remember why she doesn't like the uncle she sometimes still sees at family occasions - it's just like a very strong gut feeling. She may have other PTSD symptoms, but as they have been going on since childhood, they are a normal, part of who she is.

Then the news about Jimmy Savile hits.  She reads other people's experiences of abuse which chime with her own.  She sees images and hears descriptions that remind her of that time, of her childhood, accompanied by stories of abuse. Everything she buried so thoroughly has been stirred up.  Memories begin to come back, only in a form that she can actually cope with. If she was abused by a famous man she once met, then she will be validated by a shared experience that she's heard so much about. She can get help. She can even tell her family and friends without breaking anybody's heart or splitting the family. So it comes out like that.

This is not to say that this will be happening a lot, but over hundreds of cases, it will be happening a bit (and the police know this). Many victims of child sexual abuse know exactly what was done to them and by whom, but because it is such a bloody awful thing to happen, usually committed by trusted and influential adults and often kept secret for years, many children's minds produce (or are guided towards) more palatable versions of events.

Sometimes, something like this can happen when adults are raped.

There is only room for one overarching principle for lay folk and it's not "Innocent until proven guilty"

We have no moral obligation to remain impartial - we can't police our instincts and opinions, only choose what to do about what we believe.  We have no moral obligation to presume that a person is innocent, until they are proven guilty. We have no moral obligation to believe a story which does not ring true to us. But...


We do have moral obligations around what we say and do. 

To tell someone who has been raped that they are lying about their experience is obviously a tremendous and wanton act of cruelty. It discourages reporting, it discourages victims from confiding in others, let alone pursuing justice and it makes the world a much safer and more comfortable place for rapists.

Whenever someone expresses doubt about a specific rape or reported rape in general, you run a very high risk of doing the above. In a public forum, you can guarantee that's what you're doing. This doesn't mean that folk can't defend an accused person's character (that's fine) or talk about false-reporting, but we absolutely have to take steps with language and generalisations to make sure that rape victims know you're not talking about them. These steps are rarely taken; protestations that a man is innocent almost always hinge on a defamation of the alleged victim's character and discussions of false reporting make sweeping statements where anyone but the perfect victim (nun held at knife-point by stranger) could feel discredited.

This isn't just about people's feelings, it is about justice and crime prevention.

Meanwhile, there's precisely nothing to be gained from letting a false-accuser know you're onto them. Anyone who reports a rape knows that some people will not believe them - the same must apply to those who haven't been raped.  So there's really nothing to be gained from that, and everything to be lost.

See Also: Some Things We Could Actually Do To Prevent Rape

This is too often about protecting men and masculine sexualities.

In fiction, only very evil men commit rape. Good men are often sexually forceful, but that's always somehow okay - because they're good! Men themselves cannot be raped, because sex is always a good thing for them. Our entire culture is invested in masculine sexuality - particularly heterosexuality - being a great thing, a source of both humour and pleasure, an expression of desire, love and all that is good about being a man.  And to the greatest extent, it is. It's no more magical than the sexualities of other genders, but most things most people do sexually are about pleasure for all concerned. Sex is wonderful. Sexual organs are both amusing and beautiful, according to context. Sexual desire doesn't hurt anybody, and most people's sexual behaviour is entirely positive, often loving, sometimes creative and occasionally procreative.

Unfortunately, bad behaviour is not as exceptional as our culture would like to think. Our culture is automatically skeptical about rape, and especially skeptical about the idea that a likeable man, or even a man who doesn't have any scales or horns in view, could behave monstrously in this way. Some people call this skepticism Rape Culture, and it certainly runs deep.


If a close friend or family member of mine was accused of rape, I would be instinctively skeptical.  I would need an awful lot of proof (although I wouldn't seek out the alleged victim and demand it from them). In some cases, I'd perhaps never believe it to be true.  This is not a bad position to be in.

However, if you have the same instinct about almost any story of rape, then that's probably programming.  We grow up with that.  We learnt that rape is a terrible crime and being falsely accused of such a crime is very nearly as bad.. But rape is rare and false accusations are perceived as so very common that the subject should be raised every time sexual violence is mentioned.

This is borne out by responses to Operation Yewtree. Despite the fact that the police and Crown Prosecution Services have acknowledged that Jimmy Savile was a prolific paedophile who should have been put away long ago and the confessions of Stuart Hall to various acts of child abuse, I have seen it said that:

• This is a "Celebrity Witch Hunt"
• These historic allegations are driven by compensation culture. These people just want money.
• These historic allegations are driven by attention-seeking behaviour. 
• The 1970s were a less politically correct time, when all men committed a variety of sexual crimes and nobody minded - we can't judge what happened then by the standards of today!
• Too much time has passed - if these allegations were true, we'd have heard of them by now.
• Too much time has passed for any of this to matter to anyone. Victims need to get over themselves.
• The entire inquiry is about some kind of twisted sexual purity movement that seeks to persecute any innocent rich old man who happened to molest a nine year old in his younger days. Lower the age of consent! Remove complainant anonymity! Problem solved!

(This post is just about the possibility of false accusation; we're equally programmed to seek out extenuating circumstances on behalf of a rapist: What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Was she flirtatious? This is stuff that many of us have had to unlearn.)

But this is sometimes just about power.

There is great power to be derived from treating a vulnerable person, desperate for validation, with doubt and disbelief. Way too many people get a kick out of that, whether they are expressing doubt to the face of an individual victim, or expressing doubt in a public forum or a newspaper column where they know victims will be reading.

Sometimes, people really do express disbelief because they want a slice of the power a rapist has. Sometimes, it is alarmingly obvious what they're doing.





* The reason this is mostly about men being accused of rape when women may also commit rape and be accused of it, is that we don't take women rapists seriously at all. If a woman is accused of rape, we don't worry about her reputation being damaged - in fact, when female teachers have been convicted of raping their male pupils, there are comments of "Wish she was my teacher when I was at school." and so forth. All this is terrible, and all of it is interconnected. Our terrible attitudes to rape - of whoever, by whoever - come back to our expectations of masculine and feminine sexuality.

Blogging Against Disablism Day 2013

Welcome to Blogging Against Disablism Day 2013!

Thanks very much to everyone who helped to spread the word and to everyone who is blogging against disablism, ableism and disability discrimination.

If you have a post for Blogging Against Disablism, please leave a comment including the URL (web address) of your post and the catergory your post fits best.

We'll be updating this post throughout the day to create an archive of all the posts. We'll also try to post links to every blog using the Twitter stream @BADDtweets and these will automatically be posted onto our Facebook Page.

As with the last few years, Stephen and I are sharing the work, but even with two people, there are bound to be typos, so please be patient and let us know if you notice any mistakes.

In Memory of Elizabeth McClung (1970 - 2013)

Today, we heard of the death of disability blogger and Blogging Against Disablism Day contributor Elizabeth McClung. She wrote so passionately and bravely about disability that it seems appropriate to dedicate this year's BADD to her memory. There are over a thousand posts on her blog Screw Bronze, but here are her old BADD posts, as samples of her work:

The life no one wants and the war on disabled. 

Disablism within disability

I believe... one day

Those lazy, deceiving disabled. Why won't they die?

Blogging Against Disablism 2013

Employment (Disability discrimination in the workplace, recruitment issues and unemployment).  Gilbert and Me:  Stop Doing More with Less Grace Quantock:  The stripper pole liberated me too I'm a Grad School Cautionary Tale:  Trying to get a Part Time Job Rolling with the Punches:  Can or Can't Work, a Disability Dilemma there is no should:  part-time workers are workers This Ain't Livin':  Accessible Labour Rights Education (Attitudes and practical issues effecting disabled people and the discussion of disability in education, from preschool to university and workplace training.) That Crazy Crippled Chick:  Ironic (Or, How My Entire College Career Just Blew Up In My Face) Feminist Sonar:  Facing the Academy I'm a Grad School Cautionary Tale:  Disabled Grad Students and Disability Offices Lessons from the Warrior's Chair:  Do my students see me as disabled? And should they? Rolling in the Fast Lane:  A Moment of Disablism  Urbanus Tenus Herma:  B. A. D. D. – another year older, wiser, prejudiced against... Technology and Web Accessibility Diary of Mister Goldfish: A Sticky Situation Diary of Mister Goldfish: Tech Expands the World Sharon Wachsler:  Is Your Blog Against Disablism Accessible to Disabled Bloggers (and Readers)? Visibility Fiction:  DRM=Discrimination Other Access Issues (Posts about any kind of access issue in the built environment, shops, services and various organisations. By "access issues" I mean anything which enables or disenables a person from doing what everyone else is able to do.) A Barnsley Historian's View:  Today I Travelled to Sheffield Cambriangirl:  The Ol’ Trigger Warning Switcheroo Disability Matters UK:  One Woman Went To Work! Jon Bateman  :The subtle forms of discrimination Life in Deep Water:  “Woke Up This Morning Feeling Blue, Man I’ve Got Those Blue Badge Blues” Urocyon's Jaunts:  Accessible Labour Rights Definition and Analysis of Disablism/ Ableism I ♥ [heart] the Phylum Chordata: Blogging Against Disablism Day 2013 (Also Posted Here) A Path Through the Valley:  Discrimination The Language of Disablism(Posts about the language which surrounds disability and the way that it may empower or disempower us.) Bigger on the Inside:  Labels and Lies The Phantasmagoric and Thaumaturgic Blog:  My Identitification as Disabled, Mixed With Some Queerness Disablism Interacting with Other 'Isms' (Posts about the way in which various discriminations interact; the way that the prejudice experienced as a disabled person may be compounded by race, gender, age, sexuality etc..) The Haps:  A Memory m0ndayschild88:  Disablism, Ageism, and Living with Invisible Illnesses Disablism in Literature, Culture and the Media Low Visionary:  Women, disableism and literature Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains:  Overcoming Prejudice Through Changing the Narrative The old jaw jaw:  Yes, another Twilight post: Billy Black's wheels Paul Canning:  Channel Four are idiots pseudo-living:  Belated BADD Post - What's Your Excuse? Unicorn of Doom:  Doctor Who needs to be better about disability History Anthro, Etc.:  Disability in Bioarchaeology Disability Studies, Temple U: Bad History Doesn't Help Relationships, Love and Sex Crippled, Queer, Anglo-European Ranter:  No Sex Please, We're... Disabled! Diary of Mister Goldfish: Demi-Wife Pretty Pancreas:  Reproduction While Disabled You don't look sick!:  Are we really Undateable? Sport rowrowyourboat:  Is disablism within rowing intentional?   Other Poetry against Disablism Tor-Elias:  Pain, a love letter A Writer In A Wheelchair:  Bored Art and Photography Against Disablism Angry Activist Art:  Crazy Angry Activist Art:  Glass Box Angry Activist Art:  Inside the Box

General Thoughts on Disablism Accessible Insights Blog:  The Adversity of Anything  Cracked Mirror in Shalott:  Microcosmic Multitudes Em with ME:  #BADD2013 Frida Writes:  Noli Me Tangere Funky Mango's Musings:  Growing Up Beside You  I Wish Somebody Would Steal My Shoes:  Having Disabilities is a Full-Time Job  Jennifer Fitz:  Theology of the Body for Every Body Live in, Love in, Laugh in:  I am who I am, because I'm disabled and I won't disappear because you want me to Lounalune:  At the Library Mecarta:  It Starts With Us Nightengalesknd:  Steps le pays des humains volants:  We Are Still Here!/Nous Sommes Toujours là Radical Neurodivergence Speaking:  Kickin it Old School for BADD 2013 rainbow_goddess:  You're Not Really Disabled  Restless Hands: It's Blogging Against Disableims Day! Skepchick:  Guest Post - Blog Against Disablism Day by Chris “Gonz Blinko” Hofstader Stand Tall Through Everything:  Is There Internal Prejudice? Wheelchair Dancer:  Just When You Think Wheelie Catholic: My BADD Parenting Issues(whether disabled parents or the parents of a disabled child.) Blacktelephone:  Brave In The Attempt Victoria Wright:  I'm not a monster - I'm a mummy Healthcare Issues(For example, the provision of healthcare, institutionalistaion of disabled people, reproductive ethics and euthanasia) ABC Therapeutics:  Tinfoil hat analysis - Crypto-eugenics and the autism community Accessibility NZ: Our Homes, Not Nursing Homes Ballastexistenz: Feeding tubes and weird ideas Benefit Scrounging Scum: The Right To Live And The Right To Die Diary of a Goldfish: Blamelessness Indigo Jo Blogs: Rosa Monckton, learning disabilities and independence A Room Of My Own:  Never forget where you came from Variously Awesome:  Blogging Against Disablism Day Impairment-Specific Prejudice Bad Aspergers:  Autistic Discrimination A Blind Man's Journey:  The Rarity of Multi Celtic Compliance:  Are you providing the best possible customer service to deaf and hearing impaired clients? Diary of a Benefit Scrounger:  Tube-ageddon Grimalkin:  How depression makes everything harder Journeymouse:  Living with Invisible Disability Life Decanted:  Fact-Fallacy-Photo Maijan ilmestykset:  Barrier-free food (Esteetöntä ruokaa) VisionAware:  Guest Blogger John Miller: Blogging against "Disablism" with a Dual Disability The Wandering Monster: Tic Tic, Tick Tock Personal Journeys Posts about learning experiences and realisations authors have had about the nature of disability discrimination and the impact on their lives. cherryflip:  Identifying as disabled Crip_tic:  Return of the Borg - Life on a ventilator (and other machines!) holymansam.wordpress.com:  Jemma’s Story The Mysterious Life of...:  I'm BADD Never that Easy:  “We are familiar..."  People Aren't Broken: Magic Words Restless Hands:  It's Blogging Against Disablism Day  Rolling Around In My Head:  A Day Late / Right On Time  Same Difference:  I Took My Parents To Holland Scrumptiously:  Elizabeth McClung 1970-2013 Skepchick:  Guest Post: Blog Against “Disablism” Day by Sarah Moglia Disablism and Politics (For example, the political currency of disability, anti-discrimination legislation, etc.) Cats and Chocolate:  Coming Together hofstader.com:  Rant Against Disablism: Nothing About Us Without Us! Flat Out:  Behind the Mask  Flat Out:  When Demonisation Makes Sense Jane Young:  Independent living is expensive – but its value exceeds the cost Law Geek's Blog:  Inspiring lip service? The Official Site of Lesley Smith:  The ESA50 and me #BADD Rambling Justice:  Five Ways to Support the US #CRPD Ratification Campaign!  Ramblings of a Fibro Fogged Mind:  Politics ‘V’ Political The notes which do not fit:  On Privilege and Fraud Bullying, Harassment and Hate Crime Little Miss Perception:  My First B.A.D.D.  xojane:  It's Blogging Against Disablism Day, and I'm Talking Disability Hate Crimes Yes, That Too:  Blogging Against Disablism Day Yet Another Lefty: People don't listen

List of Participating Blogs

Blogging Against Disablism 2013: Blamelessness

The first duty of a disabled person is to be blameless.

In the Ipswich Star last week, a lady called Sarah Ashford spoke about the terrible situation the UK government's Bedroom Tax has placed her in;

“It’s a vicious attack on the most vulnerable people in society, especially somebody like me who didn’t have a choice to be born disabled. I was a breech birth back in 1964. I should’ve been born by caesarean and I should’ve been a normal baby.”

It's not in any way Ashford's fault that she is forced to speak like this, invoking the events of fifty years ago to prove that she is not to blame for her impairment. So much mainstream discussion of disability - especially the effects of austerity cuts - hinges on this language, this need to demonstrate that the people effected are worthy of charitable treatment. Words like innocent, genuine and victims pepper even the language of some disabled activists, although the implication is quite clear: there are those of us who are innocent victims of circumstance and there are those who brought misfortune upon themselves.

..........

Hideous! A pale-skinned  foot with
a heavily bandaged big toe.

I'm just finishing a second course of antibiotics for gruesomely infected toe. It's not painful, but it's been disruptive and draining and as of writing, it is still infected. Before the cause was established, I was variously asked whether

• I had cut my toe nails too short.
• I had let my toe nails grow too long.
• I hadn't rinsed my toes when washing.
• I hadn't dried my toes after washing.
• I had let my feet get too hot.
• I had let my feet get too cold.

Or, most ironically, given my circumstances,

• I had been walking about in impractical ill-fitting high-heeled shoes. 

Some of these suggestions were made by family, others by medical professionals. I was so relieved when finally I saw a podiatrist, who explained in CSI-style detail that I had badly stubbed my toe (she could tell the precise angle it had happened at and everything). 

It's ridiculous I should feel such relief.  Any other cause would have been just as accidental. I struggle with washing, drying and maintaining a stable temperature, and poor co-ordination makes my nail-cutting decidedly inexpert. The podiatrist said this long winter has brought about something of a chilblain epidemic. This stuff happens to people.

But I know my responsibilities. I have to be trying my best, to be as healthy as possible. I have to do all the right things, and be seen to be doing all the right things, to avoid relapse, infection or complication. So none of it is ever my fault. Other people can afford to make themselves vulnerable in small unwitting ways, but not me. Any infections I get will be despite my very best efforts.

Other people have it even worse. Some years ago, I was awkwardly introduced to a friend of a friend who had my condition, and believed that she was improving with the help of some extremely expensive, extremely dubious alternative therapy. Her parents were paying ten thousands pounds a year - much more than my annual income - on these bizarre potions from a man who had convinced her that she was now cured but she had to keep taking the potion and seeing him regularly because her body hadn't let go of all her symptoms (or, in fact, any of them).

She was a very difficult person to speak to, as she thought everyone should be doing the same. 

She said, "You've always got to be trying something to get better. Otherwise, you've given up."

.....................

We've developed a morality around health and healthy living to rival previous generations' interest in other people's sex lives. Food, which should be all about fuel, nutrition, social activity and sensual pleasure, has acquired the language of sinfulness and virtue; this devilish chocolate cake, this goody-two-shoes salad. People sometimes boast about doing physical exercise they actually hate, in much the same way a Medieval penitent might have celebrated how very very itchy his hair shirt was.

The wages of sin are not only death, but illness and disability in the run-up.

There's a get-out clause, of course, and that's if you can stay healthy, looking healthy. You may still boast of your efforts to steer clear of those satanic carbs and to practice Zumba like Saint Francis of Assisi, but as long as you remain non-disabled and slim enough, it's all hypothetical. It's all a bit of a joke really if you eat nothing but pizza and cigarette smoke. Only if you're disabled or fat is an adult likely to get earnest advice about diet, exercise, drugs and getting enough fresh air and sunshine. And since some of that advice will contradict (carrots are a panacea; carrots are a poison), we can never get it right.

It's particularly hard for disabled people to make healthy choices, let alone be seen to make healthy choices. Pain and distress can make avoiding drink, cigarettes and drugs more difficult. Many prescription drugs are fairly bad for you, especially long term; it's just that in the balance, their effects are preferable than the alternative. Digestive problems, poor care, poverty, allergies and intolerances mean that disabled people often have diminished choices about what they eat.  Poor mobility and metabolic problems mean disabled people have less choice how much weight they carry. Physical impairment, as well as poor access to gyms and swimming pools, social anxiety and the reasonable fear of exposing one's body to a world that has declared it substandard, are all barriers to exercise.

Yet despite all this, we are under the greatest pressure to try. To try and do the right things. To be seen to be doing the right things.

...............

Obesity is a very popular subject for moral panic. It's supposedly about gluttony, an old-fashioned sin and one we're all vulnerable to, because we all have to eat and most of us enjoy it. It's also about beauty standards, or their opposite and the thrilling opportunity - so rare these days - to judge others by their appearance. And then it is about health; people not looking after their own health, which is, apparently, a sin against us all.

This, despite the fact that half of us are overweight, the population overall continues to live longer and healthier lives.

In her post Chronic Illness, Diet & Food, Em describes about how, faced with her particular collection of complex physical and mental health issues, her doctors prefer to focus on her weight:

"I've hit a point where I'm too tired to fight it any more. The crushing pressure has become too much and given my other health issues it's just too much extra for me to keep battling on against. I have grudgingly agreed to see the local "Weight Management Services". Not because I want to lose weight but because I don't want to spend over half of every appointment I attend talking about my size."

We know our responsibilities. We have to be seen to be trying our best. We have to be blameless.

.............

The focus on the innocence or responsibility of disabled people removes the need to consider the physical, social and political barriers which set artificial limitations on our lives, above and beyond the problems our impairments cause. We are either individually responsible for our limitations, for our worklessness, for our difficulty getting up stairs or staying awake. Or we are the innocent victims of shocking and terrible events to be pitied, cried over during telethon evenings and forgotten about.

I think of this when people question our numbers. The World Health Organisation says we are one in seven. Both our Prime Minister and our Minister for Disabled People have both stated their intuitive disbelief about the number of people legitimately claiming disability benefits (much much less than one in seven). Last week, Ester McVey stated;

"Only three per cent of people are born with a disability, the rest acquire it through accident or illness, but people come out of it. Thanks to medical advances, bodies heal."

Only people who see impairment as an uncomplicated individual tragedy would be so anxious about the numbers. Because great personal tragedies, unthinkable, unsolvable, life-sucking tragedies - the type where you think, How do people go on? are thankfully quite rare. Every day bad luck life events? Really common. People fall and damage their back forever. People get an infection and never recover (hopefully not a toe infection!). People have bad experiences and are left with mental scars. People's own bodies and brains rebel against them. It sucks. Folk have to grieve. But then we try and get on with life.

And then we hit fresh barriers. The built environment, systems, prejudice, media representation and public attitudes. And the responsibility, ever to show ourselves to be innocent in all this.

Because it's never anyone else's fault if the world is built for strong legs, strong sight and hearing. It's not anyone's fault if someone is stared at, sometimes shouted at, whilst going about our daily business, vulnerable to abuse, discriminated against at every turn. It's not anyone's fault if we find that people like us are demonised in the press and in fiction, and that those messages slowly but surely sink in, changing the way in which we understand ourselves, forcing us to recount our medial histories and prove ourselves blameless.

These things are all tragic accidents.

Why you can't eat healthily on £1 a day

(Don't forget Blogging Against Disablism Day!)

Arguments about the absolute minimum amount of money people need to survive on should be confined to history, but have become tragically relevant in recent years. Benefit cuts threaten to push already poor people into dire straits. This is a scandal, but BBC news approaches this like an amusing lifestyle conundrum, publishing How little money can a person live on? and today, an article that really made me cross;

How to eat healthily on £1 a day

which should be titled How to survive on £1's worth of food a day - there's a lot more than £1 being spent on food, travel and cooking and there's little evidence of the healthily bit. For example, there's nowhere near the five daily 80g portions of fruit and veg recommended to by the World Health Organisation.

This kind of article angers me because it is about poverty as a hypothetical experience, being used for entertainment. There's no practical advice here, nor is there any discussion of why anyone should be in this position and what needs to be done about that. (See also, Pippa's Pretending To Be Poor)

I am not in poverty any more - I have a low income and am having to live with parents in my thirties, but I have eaten purple flowering broccoli in the last seven days, so I am definitely not poor. Nor have I ever been so poor that I was hungry. Poor people are poorer now than they used to be. Benefits have been cut, especially housing benefit and many disabled people are having to endure periods of extreme poverty whilst appealing bad decisions on Employment and Support Allowance.

As well as using the suffering of others as an entertaining thought experiment, there are really six massive problems with the idea of eating healthily on £1 a day:


1. Poor people cannot afford to waste food. 

All the meals listed include small portions of bulk buys - for example, 1/4 courgette which was bought as part of a six pack. You can't say you're eating on £1 a day, if you're spending £1.60 on courgettes and wasting 95% of what you bought. The Oh My God Dinner actually totals a bank-breaking £8.31 unless you

(a) share your meal with the rest of the street

(b) use up all the spare ingredients in other meals

Pasta is no problem, but eating six courgettes at a rate of a quarter a day? If there's one of you, there's guaranteed wastage. Otherwise, you need to be eating these tiny portions of courgette on a near daily basis.

Or it could be you

(c) happen to have all these bits and bobs at the back of your fridge. Which you don't. 

This latter point really frustrates me. I remember reading an article which described poverty stew and included a wilting leak and some scraps of prosciutto found at the back of the fridge. I had to look up what prosciutto was (back before I rose to the heights of purple flowering broccoli consumption). Anyone who is finding perishable surprises in their food cupboards either isn't poor or is extremely new to this business.

Very quickly, you learn to plan. You don't buy anything you're not going to eat. If you do one weekly shop, you eat or at least cook the fresh stuff at the beginning of the week, and live off tinned food or things you've cooked and frozen at the end of the week. You never face old vegetables because you ate everything when it was fresh.

The only time there are leftovers is when you made a mistake (which happens), someone gave you food unexpectedly or you've been too unwell to prepare or eat the things you planned to.


2. Poor people can't shop around like that.  

All the ingredients in the meals the journalist supposedly ate came from their cheapest supermarket source, with items from Asda, Tesco, Morrisons and Sainsbury's going into the same meal.  There may be areas within the big cities where all these places are all within walking distance, but poor people are unlikely to live in those places.

Folk living on the breadline are unlikely to have their own transport and any money they spend on bus fare is money they can't spend on food and other essentials. I'd guess that most people only have access to one supermarket. Most people don't have the time, money, physical or mental energy to perform the calculations and travel between different supermarkets, buying the cheapest option for each ingredient. That would render food shopping a  near full-time occupation.

I have never lived within walking distance (let's say a mile) of  one supermarket, and I've lived in three different towns (one big, one medium, one small) and three different villages (only one of which had a supermarket). On-line grocery shopping has made most sense, since it was first available, but you're not going to pay for deliveries from more than one shop.


3. Poor people can't always eat whatever happens to be available. 

I don't consider myself to have complex dietary needs, but I can't eat the white bread and biscuit diet proposed by the article. I need a very high fibre diet, and that's when I'm already on a metric tonne of prescription laxatives. Stephen would fare even worse, being outright allergic to dairy and eggs, and intolerant to wheat and garlic, among other things. Wealthy middle-class people can afford to eat fad diets based on the idea that their extra-special bodies can't digest this or that, but some bodies really can't.

Then you have diets based on religious taboos, ethical positions and food aversions. These are not to be underestimated; it is really a huge ask to expect people to eat foods that they consider disgusting. If they were stranded on a desert island (as opposed to the dessert island I spelled originally) and it was pork scratchings or death, folks would compromise.  But such fundamental compromises should be completely unnecessary - unthinkable - as a consequence of unemployment in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century.


4. Poor people can't always cook. 

This isn't about the absence of skills - skills can be learnt and goodness knows there are enough television programs demonstrating how food can be prepared.  This is about the absence of energy or capacity through illness or impairment, the absence of time because of work or caring responsibilities and the absence of the tools and materials - hobs, an oven, a microwave, some surfaces to prepare food on, space to cook, pans, knives, chopping boards etc.. as well as everything you need to clean up afterwards.

There's also the cost of cooking in terms of gas or electric, which is another very tricky calculation - variations on jacket potato may be a very cheap, nutritious meal, but not so much if you have no microwave and have to put an aging electric oven on for an hour and a half every day.

There are many gadgets and gizmos which can help with frugal healthy eating, such as a slow cooker. But you need to be able to afford and have secure space for that stuff in the first place.


5. In reality, calories are cheap.  Healthy food isn't.

The real reason that you don't find people starving to death in 2013 UK is that calories are cheap. It's quite easy to get 2000 calories out of £1 worth of cheap cake, pastries, biscuits, sweets, crisps or peanuts without having to put down £8 on a meal and hope to use the leftovers with equal efficiency. This is why there's a correlation between poverty and both obesity and malnutrition (which can and frequently do go together); calories keep us alive, but not necessarily in very good health.


6. Nobody should ever have to live like this, ever! 

Are poor people part of society?  What do we want to do with them?  If poor people are going to be (a) in any position to improve their situation or (b) not end up costing the state in terms of poor health and crime, they need to be able to eat decently. They need the absolute minimal level of dignity that comes from having some choice about what they eat and not having to worry about going hungry. This is especially the case for children, but applies to absolutely everyone.

We're a country recovering from a recession, but we're still the seventh richest country in the world.  We measure extreme poverty on a global scale when a person has to live on less than $1 a day. We shouldn't be talking about people on our own shores living on £1 a day ($1.55) as if that's just a sign of our times.


[Edit: Funny Grrrl wrote a similar thing on MP Helen Goodman's attempt to live as some of her constituents were being forced to in Helen Goodman, class-privilege and unrealistic expectations.]

On Loneliness

(Don't forget Blogging Against Disablism Day!)

A masculine hand and a feminine hand, holding.

I can talk about loneliness because I have passed beyond it.  It's very hard to admit to at the time, because there's something a little pathetic about the admission. Because successful loveable people have soulmate partners, plus close friends and family around them, and would never feel that way.

The loneliest period of my life was my twenties, especially my mid-twenties. I was in an abusive relationship and not the kind that's sometimes very bad and other times great. As well as the isolation of living with someone who didn't really want me to interact with other people, illness stopped me getting out and reduced my capacity to keep in touch.

....

I think I have a lot of equipment which helped me cope better with loneliness than I might have. For one thing, I was never without decent friends or family, it's just that my contact with them became complicated, muffled by physical distance, caution and dishonesty. I have always had a complex fantasy life. It's less complex, now I'm happy - and that's good: I can focus on the stories I'm writing, as opposed to being whisked off into the stories I want to live. It used to be very strange to me to think that some people, sitting on a train, walking along the street, were not imagining themselves as someone else, in a different situation, on another mission entirely. I didn't even know that you could have sex and your mind stay in the same room. When I wrote about my imaginary friend, we were still in regular contact.

Plus, it helps that I have this. I don't mean this blog, which really did help enormously (despite the fibs I used to tell). But when I have thoughts, I am inclined to write them down. I still occasionally write letters that I don't intend to send to people, just so I can clarify my own feelings.

It also helped to make things and paint things - portraiture is pretty good. Making gifts, imbuing them with love for someone elsewhere. And helping people, in some small way. Anytime I felt useful, I didn't feel lonely.

....

One way I was less well equipped than some was that I was brought up to believe that you never do anything that isn't for a purpose and there are no purposes that don't involve other people. I was criticised as a child for my story-writing because it wasn't for school, I often started epic stories which could never be finished, so never read by anyone else and no-one was interested anyway. I was wasting my time.

This made me - makes me - not so good at looking after myself or entertaining myself, outside music and my own imagination.

....

Fiction allows people to be very alone at the beginning of a story. Few adult protagonists have both parents, and unsiblinged orphans in their twenties and thirties are so commonplace it's rarely remarked upon. But here, solitude is a useful thing. As well as being character-building, it allows a person tremendous mobility - without anyone to worry about them, a lonely person can take off when they like, go where they like, interact with others on their own terms, walk into all kinds of situations of peril, responsible only to themselves. I couldn't do that.

Meanwhile, loneliness is usually temporary. The lonely protagonist has no problems interacting with people and by the end of the story, they've often found their one true love who will fulfill their every psychological need and made a few good friend-for-life along the way.

And loneliness in stories is often a false construct.  Having missed it all in my teens, Stephen introduced me to Buffy The Vampire Slayer and now we're watching the selected highlights of Angel. The character of Angel isn't just another loner PI; he knows the loneliness of immortality, of being a vampire with a conscience, hated and feared by humans but condemned to conflict with his own kind - the actor's face seems locked on constipated brooding, so it must be pretty grim.  But Angel hardly has a chance to be alone, let alone be lonely. He has good friends, he has all kinds of friendly acquaintances and almost everyone he meets appreciates and reaches out to him. He perhaps just needs to read this excellent post about bowel health.

I can't think of another fictional supposed-loner with such a vast and positive social network, but the majority of supposed loners are not, in fact, alone. Plus, they're generally men - and fairly macho men at that, isolated, in part, by emotional... well, constipation. Women are rarely placed in even the most romanticised heroic position of solitude (even Ripley, having been frozen for decades as the sole survivor of Alien, is given a child to save (Aliens), then a man to have a fling with (Alien 3), then an alien to have a weird and mucussy maternal relationship with (Alien Resurrection)).

In any case, a lonely person in a story is never truly alone, because you are there. You are with them all the time. And happily, for the duration of the story, they are there with you.
....

Of course, I was being abused. I would have been much better off had I been single and lonely, because (a) personal safety, (b) it would have freed me from the paradox of being lonely whilst "in love" and (c) I would have lived life very differently and may have been less lonely as a result. It is difficult to separate the effects of the abuse and the loneliness, but I'm sure I would still have been lonely if the marriage had been unhappy in a more banal way, or if I had been single and sick in a bad geographical location.

Two empty chair backs in silhouette.

But loneliness begets loneliness.

These days, I assume that people who talk to me like me and people who don't take much interest are either disinterested or have too much else going on.  I'm sure that I irritate or offend people once in a while, but in the absence of any clear evidence, I give us all the benefit of the doubt.  In fact, I imagine that a lot of people I interact with a little bit would like to get to to know me better, if only there were a few extra hours in the day - because that's how I feel about many people.

(It's not that I never wake up in a cold sweat, thinking, "Oh bloody hell, I said the wrong thing there!", but it's not often now. I know it doesn't matter all that much, even if I did. People are forgiving.)

Back then, I assumed that I irritated the people who talked to me and that I deeply offended people who didn't. Other people's problems were about me; if people were in a bad mood, it was because I had pissed them off. I used to think I was paranoid (and I was, a little), but I was living with someone whose every bad mood, whose clinical depression was my fault. My words, my attempts at love, made other people ill.

And this was the greatest pain of my loneliness; I had a heart swollen up with love and nowhere for it to go. So, in my mind, it fermented and oozed out, inappropriate and toxic. I held back from my friends and family, except when I gushed to them. I lied to them, putting a positive spin on my marriage to rival any Thatcher eulogy, but I was also dishonest about my health, I hid my sexuality for a long time and I wasn't very good at simply talking about my life, because my life had to be as dull as I was.

It's a dreadful New Age cliche that you can't love another person until you can love yourself, and I can't say it's true, but self-loathing is a slight obstacle. I didn't love my kith and kin as much as I could have (as much as I do now) because I felt I couldn't afford to; my love was dangerous and everything was fragile.

This is loneliness. That jagged rock in your chest, that inarticulate need for other people (What is that need even for? Love? Company? Physical contact? A sense of belonging? Just enough of the right kind of social interaction?) makes you quite bad at this stuff. You clutch at people, only to hold them at arms' length. You mistrust their intentions and you mistrust your own feelings. You lay awake thinking you must have overstepped an unseen mark, you must be feeling the wrong thing, you must be manipulating the people who bother to be nice to you. Then you fall asleep and dream about it.

...

Nobody gave me the advice, but I knew that lonely people are told to seek out the love they're missing, to find those new and brilliant people who are bound not only to exist, but to be hidden in plain sight, just around the corner, with a similar person-shaped hole in their lives. Not only are neither romantic love or friendship easily sought out, (do we, any of us, know anyone who has found a friend or partner by putting on a pith helmet, clasping a big net and hunting them down?) but the seeking, the feeling around in the dark for a profound connection, is  bruising. Because you know John isn't your soulmate, so the fact you get along so well means nothing. And Jessica is lovely but doesn't seem instantly smitten with you, so best move on. If you set about looking for friends - let alone lovers - then all social interaction becomes about desperate hope, disappointment and rejection, sometimes on both sides.

It gets hard to be charming. Your desperation may not show, but you can get defensive and snappy (I like corduroy - you got a problem with that?), or self-deprecating to outlandish adolescent degrees (I'm a terrible, terrible person and if you don't hate me already, you soon will!). You blurt out how much you like someone when your actions were happily speaking for you or, afraid to hint at your feelings, you do nothing and show nothing and nobody ever knows.

...

My happy ending was complicated and largely accidental. It wasn't about romantic love or assembling a new cast of better friends - I was and still am very lucky with friends.  It wasn't even about escaping my abusive marriage - I escaped  after I stopped being lonely.  By then, I knew I had friends, I knew I would be loved, and I had noticed the difference between how my friends made me feel and what was happening at home - the difference between conversations that concluded Go fuck yourself and Keep smiling.  It was a combination of things, which enabled me to trust myself and to trust others. I became a better friend. Less clutching. Less distance.

...

People vulnerable to loneliness, through introversion, illness, sensitivity and intellect, are my people. So I know - and love - people who express loneliness and even though I've been there, I don't know how to help. I was about to talk about a friend who described herself as having no friends, but two different people have done this in as many months. And I think, "But I am your friend." and I want to say that, but I can't.

After all, a lonely person doesn't want increased contact with just any old person, perhaps especially not someone who has noticed their loneliness - how could they trust that, even if it was, in principle, welcome?  Love is not a favour you can bestow on a person because they are in need of it, and loneliness can make even the most genuine spontaneous interest feel like that; they just feel sorry for me, or worse, they're just doing their good deed for the day to feel good about themselves and even, most shamefully if they like me, there must be something wrong with them.

We have the opportunity to be kind, to pay attention, to take an interest, to bother with the people around us, to make ourselves available for connections we might not be aching for, but would consider welcome. But loneliness is something folk need to find their own way out of - not because it is an act of will, but because it is private tangle, with cutting threads and complex knots that can't even be seen from the outside.

I suppose we can talk about it.