I'll Be In My Bunk

[this is too long and I vaguely wish I could elllljaaaycut it here, but I dunno how, so whatever. tl;dr at will]

A lot of feminists like Joss Whedon. He's been honoured by Equality Now, which he calls his 'favourite charity'; he's spoken out against violence against women; and he really has done more to put women in the spotlight than any other male sci-fi filmmaker I could offhand name. He's a feminist in every way that matters. But I have this petty desire to explain where I feel his feminism is lacking. I don't think, in a storytelling sense, he's got his head around feminist sexuality.

Two initial caveats about this round of pettiness;
-I've not seen Buffy or anything else by him - this is going to be all about the Firefly.
-Yes, I'm going to spoiler stuff if I feel it will help me get my point across. OMR, for instance. If that bothers you, go watch it first and then come back to this. C'mon, it'll only take you twelve or so hours. Get going. Now.
-a brief note on names; while I think it's cute of Whedon to give one of his menfolk a generally female name (Jayne) and one of his womenfolk a generally male name (River), he still stuck fast to that quaint Anglo rule that, while men can roam about the alphabet as they please, all female names end in A, E, Y, I, N, L, H, R, S or T, with M and D as occasional bold outliers, or sometimes O or U in fantasy fiction. It does sound like a lot of letters, but common male names end just about anywhere except Q. Another respect in which he seems to be trying, but not hard enough for my tastes.


So let's take these women and their sexualities one at a time.

Zoe - the wife. Much of the criticism of female sexual stereotypes concerns the virgin/whore dichotomy; I feel that this analysis neglects a certain third category which happens to contain more women than either of the two aforementioned groups. Wives can fuck. They can have as much sex as they please, and can enjoy it as much as they like, so long as they do not stray from good, old-fashioned monogamy. Some people even think that wives are the only women who should be permitted to have sex for pleasure rather than for procreation.

Zoe is far more sexually assertive than any of the other female crewers - in fact, only one of the male cast (Jayne) has any edge over her in that regard. Her assertiveness isn't just about saying yes when she wants to say yes ("I need this man to tear all my clothes off."), but also about saying no when she wants to say no ("Remember that sex we were going to have, ever again?") When I was first whining about this whole Firefly-sex-is-crap thing to my darling Matthew, he pointed out that Zoe somewhat echoes the stereotype of the wife who uses sex to control her husband. (Furthermore - as far as I can recall - on every occasion in which they disagree the plot later proves Zoe to have been in the right.)

The lovely people at Feminist SF have hacked at another stereotype she embodies;

Zoe, as a kick-ass warrior woman, I adore. But I am not blind to the fact that a lot of white boys like to have a Black Warrior Woman in their work to demonstrate how cool they are with the race thing. The weird thing to me is that it’s so deeply problematic and emblematic of white boy issues, at the exact same time that it is hugely empowering and exciting. Typical of these difficult issues, maybe. Having a Black Warrior be a woman is less threatening to white people. Making the warrior woman Black further exoticizes her and taps into stereotypes of Blackness as wild, primitive, fierce, and stereotypes of Black women as butch. These are general issues with stereotyped exotic characters, and not necessarily appropriate to each instance of those characters, of course; Zoe is her own character, because Joss is actually really good with characterization in terms of personality (just not so much with figuring out characterization in terms of social aspects of race/class).

Her marriage does, for the most part, avoid traditional gender clichés; her husband, Wash (who is white), is a mild-mannered spaceship pilot whose physique and martial prowess is notably inferior to her; it's her who makes her way in the world with physical strength and he who gets by with cheerful chatter and 'nimble fingers'.

This is the bit where I ought to write something about War Stories but I don't know where to begin. It's a send-up of male jealousy, and of the idea that non-sexual bonding can't occur between a heterosexual woman and a male friend, but...it's like there's something getting at me about it that I can't even pin down. Maybe the simple fact that two men so intensely disputed the sexuality of a woman who didn't contribute a word - only actions - to their conversation. Maybe just because the plot allowed Wash to be a crazy jealous asshole who was trying to control his wife (sexually and in other ways) in the first place, even if he did get extreme comeuppance for it. Maybe it was the foul domesticity of the last few minutes - personal issues there I guess, but I found Wash's attitude in the 'wife soup' scene pretty disturbing and insulting. (See, personally I don't have much of a problem with keeping patriarchy out of the bedroom - it's the kitchen where I keep finding it crop up unexpectedly, hiding in the smelly crack behind the cooker. And I know it's not just me.) So if nothing else, War Stories portrays Zoe as a victim of misogyny in spite of her otherwise near-immunity to the most demeaning aspects of gender dynamics. It's not a comfy move - there's a bit of hopelessness about it. As there is to this whole general idea that the only woman who can have the sex she wants, when she wants it, is the wife.


Inara - the sex worker. Now here's a clusterfuck. Just as there's an abundance of variety among real-life sex workers, so there are in fantasy fiction. I've heard it said among geeks that Inara represents a challenge to the popular stereotype of prostitution; she's classy, educated, physically natural if overly adorned, comes from a higher social class than almost all of the other characters (and unlike the fugitives Simon and River she retains all the perks of her class status), and is one of only two outwardly religious major characters. She also has sex with both men and women, but I'll come back to that later. She's also part of a powerful organised group of prostitutes who all share these characteristics. (Organised groups of prostitutes are exceedingly common in male-authored fantasy; see Pratchett, Mieville, and ahahaha aahahaaa Frank Miller, among others. No offence to the sex workers, but I feel that these male fantasy writers are overdoing this, and not out of the goodness of their bleeding liberal hearts. But I will save Pratchett/gender & Mieville/gender for another day, and Miller/gender for the point-and-laughing it deserves. I'm working on Gibson/gender too, but my teenage brother stole my copy of Neuromancer, blah.)

My first problem with the praising of Inara is that people tend to assume Whedon made this situation up. I'd suggest that he didn't. She bears a remarkable resemblance to the historical shuyu - the high-status prostitutes of 19th-century Shanghai, who shared not only Inara's social status, silk outfits and provision of services that did not start or end simply with sex (Inara, like the shuyu, is in demand at social occasions as well as in the bedroom), but also minor details. Shuyu were examined every year (not for health reasons, as seems to be the case for Inara, but for their singing and storytelling skills); they also tended to live in small boats on the Huangpu River.

(I first read about this stuff in a book called Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai by Christian Henriot - I can't find anything snappy about the topic online, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it.)

While there's nothing particularly wrong with being inspired by history, if Whedon really is writing about a futuristic shuya, he's taken out the genuinely ugly part of the shuyu culture and replaced it with more present concerns about sex work; firstly, that the prostitute's profession reduces her worth to her genitalia, in the eyes of her ever-misogynistic clients (see Shindig, also bits of Jaynestown). Whedon is clearly attempting to allay this concern. Secondly, that prostitutes lack sexual agency and can't have normal romantic/sexual relationships ("So what's the policy on dating?" "It's complicated.") - which Whedon explores in several ways, but ultimately doesn't debunk in the least. (Why does it have to be complicated? Do real sex workers find it complicated? From what I've read around the blogosphere, some do and some don't - those that do tending to be those who conceal their profession closely, which Inara does not.) Inara is the object of Mal's romantic desire, which she returns, but this leads only to angst and teariness rather than any actual cute scenes.

I'd like to wheel the bisexuality back in now; in War Stories, Inara entertains a powerful female politician. I'm going to quote here from the episode script, as hosted by FireflyWiki;

INT. INARA'S SHUTTLE - DAY

Inara massages oil onto the naked back of the Councilor, who's lying on her stomach on Inara's bed, eyes closed with pleasure. Filmy sheets cover what needs to be covered. Inara's in an off-the-shoulder silky dress, tied at the shoulder with a ribbon.

COUNCILOR
That feels amazing. Oh, right there.
Perfect.
(sighs)
I should've done this weeks ago.

INARA
(flirty)
I wouldn't have been here weeks ago.

COUNCILOR
And that would've been a shame.

INARA
For me as well... you have such
beautiful skin...

The Councilor turns on her side, looks at Inara.

COUNCILOR
There's no need for the show, Inara.
I just need to relax with someone
who's making no demands on me.

The Councilor starts to lay back down again. Inara stops her with a hand on her shoulder. The Councilor sits up, facing Inara, curious.

INARA
Most of my clientele is male, do you
know that?

COUNCILOR
No...

INARA
If I choose a woman, she tends to be
extraordinary in some way. And the
fact is, I occasionally have the
exact same need you do. One cannot
always be one's self in the company
of men.

COUNCILOR
Never, actually.

INARA
So no show. Let's just enjoy
ourselves.


While it never got to the screen, it's established fanon that there was originally intended to be a scene involving the Councillor's husband and family, so we can assume both these women are being portrayed as - in terms of behaviour if not identity - bisexual. Now. Apart from the general impression that this scene just exists to pander to the male audience, I have a huge problem with this portrayal of bisexual desire. See that word? Desire. These women are not talking about what they desire, what they lust for - they're talking about how wonderful it is to escape from teh evilz male gaze (by feeling each other up in front of a million zillion horny fanboys). They're talking about there being 'no demands' and 'being oneself'. Heaven forbid any woman would just want to fuck another woman because fucking women is good, hot fun. Of every Inara scene in the whole canon, it's here that I most keenly hear that Inara does not have any sexual, or romantic agency. She does not have sex out of a desire to have sex; it's a job, or a way to relax, or a semi-religious process. The only woman who gets to fuck for the sake of lust and enjoyment is the wife.


Kaylee - the girl next door. On the face of it, Kaylee looks like the most sexually assertive one of all. She pursues Simon while he remains very coy towards her. She waves Inara off by saying "Have good sex," which, as I've already demonstrated, is more consideration than Inara gives to the topic. She delivered that fanboy-slaying line "Goin' on a year now I ain't had nothin' twixt my nethers weren't run on batteries," which I think epitomises the Kaylee problem. She wants it. But she doesn't get it.

This really sticks out early on in Heart Of Gold; the crew are, for plot reasons, in a brothel, and Jayne and Kaylee are both enthusiastically eyeing up the prostitutes (mostly female, but some male). Jayne subsequently spends a lot of time with one of them. Does Kaylee? Hell no. In spite of her stated desire to have sex with a male prostitute, nothing of the sort is mentioned again.

So Jayne has casual, no-strings sex in Heart Of Gold, in Jaynestown, and he expresses a clear interest in the same in Our Mrs Reynolds. Kaylee never does. Unlike Jayne, Kaylee has a canonical romantic interest within the main cast; Simon, intelligent, bumbling, coy, shy, high-class, fugitive Simon, who has far more physical contact with his younger sister than he does with her. In spite of the lack of progress in their relationship, she only considers straying once, in The Message, and the plot makes sure that that's a bad idea. (Mal, by contrast, does sleep with someone else as well as attempting to romance Inara; of course that plot strand doesn't end well, but the fact remains that he did it and Kaylee didn't, in spite of Kaylee generally being more vocal about her sex drive than Mal is). In the entire canon, this vocally lustful woman has sex only twice; the second time is within a long-running, monogamous plotline. The first time is, hoorah, my least favourite Kaylee script extract, from Out Of Gas. It's a flashback scene that shows us how Kaylee got her job on Serenity;

INT. SERENITY - ENGINE ROOM

--Mal's looking for his mechanic (the handsome mechanic we saw earlier.)

MAL
What's this I been hearin' 'bout
yet another delay?

As Mal moves closer to the engine room, we can make out BESTER'S ARMY BOOTS sticking out from under the engine. Presumably doing his grease monkey thing.

MAL
You were supposed to have that engine
fixed and us up and...
(as he sees:)
What in the name of < all that's proper..? >
[suo-yo duh doh shr-dang]

Bester's shorts are... well, down around his army boots. He's having the sex with an unseen FEMALE. There is energetic humpage. Mal's a bit scandalized. Casts his glance away from the action. Might clear his throat.

MAL
Bester.

Much with the dirty humping. Mal gives it a beat.

MAL
Bester.

They seem to be, uh, finishing.

MAL
BESTER!

Bester climbs out, mostly still naked, yanking up his shorts.

BESTER
What?

Bester just looks to Mal. Innocently inquisitive. There is some dead pan staring on Mal's part. Oh, yes there is. Then:

MAL
You do realize we been parked on this
rock near a week longer'n we planned?

BESTER
Yeah, but... there's stuff to do.

MAL
As for example that job we got waitin'
for us on Paquin. When we landed here you
said you just needed a few days before we were
space worthy again and is there somethin' wrong
with your bunk?

BESTER
What?

More impatient staring, then Bester gets it finally: right. The naked girl behind the engine. Bester laughs.

BESTER
Oh! No. Cap!
(leans forward "confidentially")
She like engines. They make her hot.

MAL
Bester. Get your prairie harpy off my
boat and put us back in the air.

BESTER
'kay. But... can't.

MAL
Whaddya mean "can't."

BESTER
No can do, cap. Secondary grav boot's shot.

KAYLEE (O.S.)
No it ain't.

Kaylee pops up, getting dressed. The men look at her.

KAYLEE
Ain't nothing wrong with your grav boot.
Grav boot's just fine.
(to Mal)
Hello.

She drops down again, out of view. Mal glances at Bester. Bester's a bit flustered.

BESTER
(to Mal)
She don't... that's not...
(to Kaylee)
No it ain't!

KAYLEE
(reappearing)
Sure it is. Grav boot ain't your trouble.
I seen the trouble plain as day when I's down
there on my back. Your reg couple's bad.

BESTER
(clueless)
The... the what?

KAYLEE
Reg couple. Right here. See?

BESTER
No.

KAYLEE
This.
(Bester is still of the blank expression)
I'm pointin' right at it.

She rolls her eyes, sighs, reaches in, breaks off a part of the engine.

BESTER
Hey!

KAYLEE
Here.

She plunks the part in Bester's hand. She reaches back in, tinkers.

KAYLEE
Don't really serve much of a purpose, anyway.
Just tends to gum up the works when it gets tacked.
(re: a nearby wrench)
Hand me that, will ya?
(he does)
So I figure, why even have it? Better to just plug
your g-line straight into the port-pin-lock and that
should...

She's done. WHIRRR the turbine starts to turn.

KAYLEE
There.

She shoves it in Bester's hand. Fiddles with the engine.

BESTER
What'd you do?

MAL
She fixed it.

KAYLEE
Well, it wasn't really broke.

Bester looks at the part in his hand.

MAL
Where'd you learn to do that, miss?

KAYLEE
(shrugs)
Just do it, that's all. My daddy says I got
a natural talent.

MAL
I'd say you do at that.

BESTER
(re: the part)
We don't need this?

KAYLEE
Not 'specially.

MAL
You work for your daddy, do you?

KAYLEE
When he's got work. Which lately ain't
been too often.

MAL
And have you had much experience on a
vessel like this?

KAYLEE
Never even been up in one before.

MAL
You never been... how'd you like to?

KAYLEE
(points skyward)
You mean...?

MAL
Sure.

KAYLEE
For how long?

MAL
Long as you like. Long as you can keep
her in the sky.

KAYLEE
(getting it now)
You offering me a job?

BESTER
What?

MAL
Believe I just did.

KAYLEE
Just gotta ask my folks!

She pulls her hastily assembled wardrobe about her, pushes past Mal and a stunned Bester.

KAYLEE
Don't leave without me!

Mal watches Kaylee go, tickled. Bester just blinks, stunned.

BESTER
Mal. Whaddya need two mechanics for?

MAL
I really don't. Pack your things.
(then)
She got a name?

Oh dear god, where to start? Kaylee is indeed having pretty casual sex, even apparently exhibiting a fetish, but it's not about the sex. "I seen the trouble plain as day when I's down there on my back." - she wasn't thinking about the sex while she was having sex, she was considering how to use her professional skills. Perhaps Whedon was trying to imply that Bester isn't sexually competent, but what he's given us is a girl who lies back and thinks of...Serenity. It's not the guy she's into, it's the landscape. Considering what a great career move this encounter was for her, you could even tag her to the 'office slut' stereotype - the girl who fucks for a promotion rather than for pleasure. For all she talks about simple sexual enjoyment, Kaylee never actually gets it.


River - the witch-child. She's lovely. She's the second character, after Inara, to be shown naked. But sexually, River doesn't do a lot, either for herself or anyone else. She has a mental disability caused by damage to the brain, and everyone knows that people with mental disabilities aren't sexual, or sexy. They can have relatives and make friends and do srs MacGuffin plot stuff, be intelligent, be dangerous, be artistic, but no sex pls. (The only other celibate main character, Book, is a priest. Jayne queries his celibacy in a bout of smalltalk at the start of the last episode, and he said he'd deliberately chosen to join an order that did not allow priests to marry. I don't know how much I can, or should, read into this difference between the only celibate woman and the only celibate man.)

I think I should leave that right there - River doesn't add anything more to the topic of this rant, namely sex, though she is worthy of many other gender-rants in her own right.


Saffron - the temptress. Not a crewer, but a recurring villain, and how did that happen? Sex, sort of. She's another on the long list of Characters That Appear Naked, in this case in the process of pretending she wanted to have sex with Mal, not having sex with Mal, pretending she wanted to have sex with Wash, then leading the poor heroes into an awful trap before running away, oh noez! But no one can bear to kill her, so she comes back later, with more naughty lies and vile scheming. The point here is that her sexuality, which she usually puts over as being a very earthy, natural thing (she's generally simply dressed and not made up, is pleasantly ample-bodied, more so than Inara and maybe a little more so than Kaylee, I'm not certain) - is a lie. She implies - "You're assuming the payoff is the point" - that she gets off on the sexual deceptions she employs, one way or another. She appears in only two episodes, and heavily comes on to five characters, all of them in deceptive situations; she is known by three different names, none of which is really hers; she has had many brief marriages.

In a way, she resembles Kaylee - making clear sexual overtures but with no follow-up. In Saffron's case, the lack of action is clearly intentional. Now, you could see this as a ratings issue - if Saffron was doing all the stuff she appears to want to do, the story would be a mite less primetime - it would also have a very different chemistry, as teasing the characters romantically but not delivering until very late on in the story, or not at all, is part of the allure. There are reasonable not-specifically-gender-related reasons for Saffron to be the sweet cocktease she is. But next to Kaylee and Inara, seeing another woman who doesn't really act on her sexual desire is a tad suspicious. She'll talk of it, maybe do it offscreen a time or two, but it's not about wanting sex, it's really all for the sake of something else. And it's not that way for Jayne, or for Mal, or for the married couple.

So, conclusion; Firefly women do sex if they're married, or sex if they have some non-sex goal in mind, or sex if one of the male leads wants to fuck them and we're not even going to remember the girl's name after the end of the episode. (Honourable exception for Nandi, who goes in category 2 rather than category 3). This is feminism in sci-fi. Enjoy it.

dark dreamers.

Forgive me for doing yet more recycling of yesterday's news, but; I think this guy sounds pretty normal. No, really. He would've fit in with my social circle just fine. Just look at the social violations he's accused of there;

-CSI and TV crime dramas - doesn't everyone love those? (Well, except me, I don't watch TV, but that's by the by - everyone else likes them...)

-Violent computer games - I've written about that one already.

-No, really, why the hell is it even mentioning he kept condoms in his room? That's just sensible. (I use the IUS, but I tend to pick up free condoms from sexual health dropins and pass them on to my teenage brother, so often have them around - I seriously can't imagine why the article bothers mentioning this, and furthermore, I'm disturbed as to what message they're trying to send out by doing so).

-reading Wiki pages on serial killers? I did that not long ago - got linked to it from something else. I'm sad, I read about a lot of things on Wikipedia - it's great for getting a general idea of what interested people think about a subject.

-planning massacres, coups, and other atrocities? Check. It's an impulse - whenever I'm made subject to any security procedure, I think about how I'd go about getting around it. I know lots of people do this. I've even done it with friends in airports and railway stations - spoken in detail about how we'd go about sneaking bombs or weapons through scanners or physical searches - which probably constitutes conspiracy, but what the hell. Apart from being a world champion at sneaking water bottles into nightclubs, I've never acted on any of these plots and likely never will. The specific example - planning a coup led by a small number of people in Equatorial Guinea - pinged two parts of my geek radar; there's a Leslie Charteris short story about three people staging a coup in a small South American country; and the flag of Equatorial Guinea is flown by Hagbard Celine, the iconic anarchist and drug dealer who ILLUMINATUS! centres on.

-sword with a 39-inch blade? Check. Hella check. Mine's a WW2 ceremonial army thingy, recently restored to shiny beauty as part of a scurrilous insurance claim, and it's sexy as hell. It's propped up against the dead piano in my bedroom. I use it for killing wasps, mostly, but it makes a great dream-prop too. My partner has a replica broadsword too, and seriously, once you've got metalwork why the heck shouldn't it be a feature of your sexual landscape? (A very small feature, in our case, but like the whole girls-with-guns kink, it's a great arena for playing with power and agency.)

-books about crime and weapons? It's not clear whether this means fiction or nonfiction, but either way you'll find a large section devoted to it at your local bookshop. You'll also find zillions of people glued to Crimewatch etc. The world we live in is obsessed with crime, with media coverage of it only rising as actual instances are falling. Being obsessed with lurking villains is not at all unusual. Honestly, I'm far more creeped out by weirdo SAS obsessives, and I've known several of those.

-then there's this oft-used phrase 'he lived in a fantasy world'; check, but, do you know what? So do you. Everyone sees the world through a filter of dreams and expectations, and these can be wildly divergent even between people who live in close physical proximity; many people see God behind every feature of the world; others have ridiculous, fantastical fears about being targeted by criminals or paedophiles; even the mildest of us sees the world in a way heavily influenced by our habits and memories. We accept the dictates of unseeable forces like money, the law, our perceived society. I keep a ceremonial sword around for handling my near-phobia of wasps, and I barely take care when crossing the road; that's life in a fantasy world. In a more purely geeky sense, I know a lot of people who pay more attention to their fantasy lives than to the day-to-day world around them; sometimes because that day-to-day world is nonexistent, like mine, or mediocre, or fails to satisfy someone's dreams and expectations, or because they simply find more joy in their life as a reader, writer, or gamer than in their life as a worker, student or parent. I think the general cause is that the real world sucks, and a large number of people get through it on a sort of spiritual autopilot while their soul is really dwelling elsewhere.


So, yeah, I find this shock-horror-profile-of-killer not horribly far from home. I'm trying to figure out what that's meant to say about me, or anyone else, and coming up blank. Dissecting the habits and possessions of a killer, trying to discern the shape of his dreamworld and classify it as intrinsically harmful, is a futile exercise. I don't think there's such a thing as an incorrect thought, dream or emotion - even the darkest of such things are true, genuine, and in and of themselves do no harm. What I think is really revealed here is that the line between dark dreamings and evil doings is - while not a fine one, not in the least, it's a very clear and wide stripe in the sand there - alarmingly easy to cross if you want to. This, dadada, is also not news.

alkomahol, yes, that stuff

The smoking ban is soon upon us; this will be to my benefit, and will make many places I like to go seem more pleasant, but I was ambivalent to it in a sledgehammer-nut/civil liberties kinda way and now I read this; the ban includes shisha. This makes me sad, and I suspect that some small parts of the world as I know it may be at an end. I've never used shisha - I've never been part of a gathering that was collectively up for it - but I spent a lot of my student days lurking in shisha cafes with newspapers, for all the reasons the article mentions, plus I've found them to be sources of very tasty, very cheap food. The cultural mingling got to me in the usual petty ways; it was shisha cafes that got me hooked on mint tea, though I more often make it at home now; aubergines also, which I could never abide before; the odd bit of cheesy Algerian pop music has made its way to my hard drive. If there's no last-minute fix, then - well, the world will move on and I will feel a little eroded.

I never used shisha, but I never minded being around it; it smells pleasant, and doesn't change how people treat each other. It's also minor and innocuous enough that it can be banned. These things are generally not true of alcohol.

That alcohol dominates communal life in the UK isn't exactly news. Though it was in the news not long ago. Older non-news has it that a third of A&E admissions have been drinking, though that could, rather than being causal, simply indicate that a huge proportion of the population is drinking at any given time.

Quite apart from cycles of harm and violence, alcohol is a filter that excludes a lot of people from the rest of their communities; the young; those who fear violence; those who can't drink for medical reasons (including addiction); Mormons, Muslims and others who abstain for religious reasons; those who can't get to their homes without a car; those who really can't afford it. I guess the whole thing chugs on because, durhur, of the economy; substance use is a capitalist's dream, a self-reinforcing social habit that gets people spending, spending, spending; places that provide alcohol will always outcompete those that do not.

I'm not particularly anti-drinking, just anti-cultural-obsessions, and this one is a cultural obsession. Drifting off at a slight tangent here, I love this table;



It represents a study commissioned by the Science Select Committee; I'm not sure how the heck they worked out the numerical harm scale, but you get the general idea. Contributing experts included senior policemen as well as doctors and scientists. (Here is where I stole it from). Both the laws governing substance use, and the practise of substance use, has nothing to do with rationality; we're in something driven by economics and acquired habit (social behaviour and foreign policies both), and no one's holding the reins.

My aunt, a dear gentle Christian lady roughly three times my age, told me yesterday that cannabis should be legalised and heroin should be prescribed because so much progress has been made in fighting tobacco smoking while keeping it legal. I think it's a pretty good approach, if misplaced; alcohol users likely do far more harm to non-users than smokers do. Would health warnings and billboards change drug use, or drinking habits? And if they did, what would become of the economic machinery behind those substances? Hmm.

more about dead people

I wrote this in my Deadjournal a few days ago, locked it, and felt it would go nicely here too, because I don't want to lock all the stuff I want to say about dead people. ho di hum.


-have been talking to my aunt (she's not really my aunt) about my mother. She says she feels guilty about drifting out of touch with us in the few years immediately after my mother died. I didn't know til now that Kathie had cancer at that point; she says it was but a scratch (?, if she says so) and shouldn't've been a reason not to call. I told her it didn't matter, because it doesn't; we're all still alive and more or less dealing with shit, and I don't believe she has anything to reproach herself for. But. Life could have been a lot different.

I love knowing Kathie. She's a different corner of the world, a reminder that I won't always mean what I mean now. Like all people three times my age, she knows a lot, and she shares it softly and wisely. (She talks like she writes.) She's my only connection to my mother, and reveals as many mysteries as truths - neither of us even know why she died, how it started, if it's hereditary, anything. She blames the Pill, in its high-dose 1970s incarnation; I'm pretty sure that's not possible, but it's still weird that neither of us have any real clue. I'd ask my father but I don't want him to know that I want to know. I may ask my brother to snoop for me - I know where her death certificate is.

-writing things like this does give me a distinct tremor. I do not think of it often; usually my brain kinda skips over the whole thing, pretends that I'm like everyone else (unlike these poor kids, who I always felt pretty sorry for in that respect), but lately it's been on my mind a lot - even before I started seeing Kath again. Part of me thinks it's a stupid defensive thing - hey, here's something that's not my fault, let's pretend this is why I can't do anything, mm - but mostly I think it's just one of those things. It is death; never far away, always worth a moment of your time, always bleak and impossible, able to raise a shiver of hurt.

I think I haunt Kath a little; she says I look like my mother - and beyond that, she's kept in touch with us for a reason, waited for us to be adults, then spoken, shared. I remember the letter she wrote to us just after my mother died; it was a (retrospectively, predictable) attempt to grasp meaning in our disaster, but she said then that she intended to stay close to us (you may add the words 'meant' and 'wanted' as you choose), and one way or another, it's happened. (In my case, I went several years without seeing her then dropped by her flat unannounced one Friday afternoon and wound up staying almost all night.) Mostly it's because she's a damn fantastic person, and knew exactly how to bribe us as children and seemingly still does. But I imagine we're all still in touch because she needs us as much as we (I) need her. There's something about the way she looks at me sometimes; [here followed an aside about some of the imaginary friends I write stories about]. Damnit, I think I'm dreaming far from home but I'm not, I'm just not looking at it straight.

Throat getting distinctly tight and cloudy now. I'm not in an emotional place right now, I'm just adrift on thoughts and these occasional intruding physical sensations (teeth tickling, ribs the wrong shape); this is physical, a literal heartbreak. It doesn't hurt, not in the sense of doing harm to anyone - it's just there, telling me it's there, that I've lost someone, that I'm still here.

Sony vs Jesus

Yeah, I am going to indulge myself by writing a list of reasons why this is hilarious.

It was the TV news version that was particularly hilarious; my sister and I both laughed aloud at the soft-voiced bishops and the obligatory 'zomgz, you's offending meee!' wheelout - a woman whose son had been murdered in Manchester eight years ago. Yes, eight years ago. Sad, yes, but can you name a place where there hasn't been a murder in the last eight years? There have been more recent gun killings in Manchester, but their choice of coverage reeked of emotional manipulation.

That's just superficial, really. The whole damn thing is hilarious. Hilarious because of the claim that a religious building is not an appropriate setting for violence. Hilarious because it's an old world colliding with a new one, and asking all sorts of crazy questions; do you need permission to animate a nameless replica of an eight hundred year old building? Is fiction still just fiction if you're directing the actions of the protagonist? Does the passive-aggressive bleat of 'zomgz, they's only getting away with it because we're christians!!1' have any connection to reality? And is it appropriate to whine about 'copyright infringement' when you openly admit that you watched the game on YouTube?

One two-headed thing that keeps being alluded to; apparently a) our collective fantasy life is becoming more violent, and b) our society is becoming more violent. Um, whatnow? I'm not sure it's possible to quantify such things, but if you compare animated aliens in an animated cathedral to, say, public hangings, I know which one is outside my comfort zone. Crime is falling, and violence and oppression are far less acceptable than ever they were. War makes us more uncomfortable than it used to. There are places, cultures, where violence is raging out of control - Rio, Iraq - but to say that we live in one of them is untrue and perhaps unhelpful to those places that really do suffer so. Fiction has always featured violence - now, there are many things which have consistently occurred throughout human history that are presently seen as unenlightened or misguided, but I think I've never even heard an argument against all fictional violence. People pick at the edges a lot, saying 'this one is gratuitous', 'this one is glamorised', 'this one is not for kids', but for all the railing against specific articles, I've never heard it said that it is wrong in all circumstances to tell stories about violence.

I feel crusades against fictional violence are generational in nature, seemingly more suspicious of the medium than the message; no one is worried about Shakespeare or Agatha Christie (no, seriously, I've been wondering about this one for a while now; why is fictional murder so much less taboo than fictional rape?); the war on the TV news is censored, but not utterly so, and no one argues that nightly reports of how much money our government is spending on killing people constitute glorification or incitement. Black-and-white war films fondly escape censure; concerns about fictional violence all centre on new media, or on trends that exist below the notice of our governing elite. The Anglicans are mad at the game makers because they don't know why so many people are doing this shared cultural thing of shooting up aliens in an imaginary version of their property. I think they've not twigged that it's all just a story, a new story that they're not part of.

Perhaps violence in gaming is just laziness - violence is an easy way to create a game story, and gamers are accustomed to it and enjoy its intricacies (lol 2nd ed). I get bored of violent stories if they don't give me something else for my head, or my heart, to chew on. Many years ago - I think it may have been 1999, just after the Columbine massacre - I read a newspaper article about these oh so nasty videogames that had chosen a still from Final Fantasy VII as illustration; now, quite apart from the tame nature of that pick, it's one of the relatively few games I can think of in which the characters vocally question whether their violent actions are justifiable. I think that, as with sex, it's easier to have a dialogue about violence if you don't censor its portrayal.

One article about this round of batshit insanity states; When asked if the church was opposed to violent video games, [David Marshall, a spokesman for the Diocese of Manchester] said: "One of the important things parents of victims of gun crime have said to us is that they understand the link. After the shootings at Virginia Tech there was massive discussion about the fact that the person who committed the crimes was a very keen player of these games."

...except, of course, that he didn't play videogames at all. The 'massive discussion' was just empty speculation of the same variety that's playing out here. No, Cho himself claimed his killing spree was inspired by...Jesus. Whaddyaknow?

small outbreaks of sanity

[I am sleep-deprived and waffling]

Related to the whole Livejournal malarkey; The New Witch Hunt. My sister and I wound up talking about this while watching the news earlier; we suspected the negative tone of said news was fuelled by pure DailyMaleitis. (Oh, and this is months old, but god, PA, +PA news). I can't help but wonder who benefits from the witch-hunt, and who suffers. It seems like another of those attempts to divide the entire world into 'trusted friends' and 'monstrous strangers'. Most child molesters are in the former group, so why pretend that crazy freaks on Livejournal are that scary? (There's no line there, just many overlapping waves; I first heard about the whole Strikethrough mess from a friend who's both an abuse survivor and a cheerful shipper of incest, twincest and jailbait-slash.)

On women-only spaces; I blogged about this on Deadjournal in relation to Ladyfest. My personal inclination is generally that there are good ethoses of communication and bad ethoses of communication, rather than good or bad gendered spaces. I loved this line and may come back to it later; "Important point to note, that one - feeling aggravated, annoyed, pissed off etc is not the same as feeling physically threatened."

Whole other questions about family structures. This is a family issue I have verry little experience of, as my relatives have this habit of dying young, but I think I feel its currents; vicious cycles of noncommunication, generations sitting in separate rooms, unsure how to interact. (I'm sure it's just me who's altogether confused about what blood ties mean anyway, so I'll avoid projecting that onto the world at large.)

Reading this was a great saving in time and effort, because if I hadn't, I would have had to write it myself. Like anorexia, it's a subject that warrants consideration in a way that doesn't assume all the victims are female.

In which I conflate two unrelated issues, yay!

I've spent a lot of today reading about the 'LJ Strikethrough', with rapidly-rising disgust. The short version of the wank is thus; Livejournal has, seemingly due to complaints made by a (perhaps dubious) pressure group, been deleting journals that have unsavoury activities listed under 'interests' - regardless of whether the journal in question was a paedophile ring, an abuse survivor's journal, a literary discussion group, a fanfiction archive or even an RP villain's blog that expressed the foul personality of someone who does not even exist. This explanation was given as part of one support request on the topic - it happened to pertain to a blogger who'd been running an RP that had lost two journals pertaining to the latter group, fictional villains;

Material which can be interpreted as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity places LiveJournal at considerable legal risk. When journals that contain such material are reported to us, we must suspend them. Because LiveJournal's interests list serves as a search function, and because listing an interest enables other people also interested in a similar topic to gather and/or congregate, we have been advised that listing an interest in an illegal activity must be viewed as using LiveJournal to solicit that illegal activity.

In particular, the interests that you had listed on your two journals' profiles that qualify as expressing interest in, soliciting, or encouraging illegal activity were: child abuse, human sacrifice, kidnapping, killing, murder, paedophiles, paedophilia, rape, and beating people up.

Now, better bloggers than I have already torn this statement into itty bitty pieces, and also noted that it's both ripped holes in fandom and left real abusers underground and unscathed. What I'd like to add to the collective ranting is an observation; it reminds me quite a lot of the discussion that first sucked me into this part of the blogosphere, a discussion that began over here (but which soon migrated elsewhere because it's hard to discuss stuff when people are refusing to publish comments that don't support their side of the story. The tenth comment on that thread has to be one of my favourite internets evar.) The message being put out strikes me as being mighty similar; we've decided already, talking about it would be an incitement to abuse, you can't have this discussion in our conversation-space, it's not safe to say that here because you might hurt someone/get into trouble, so shut up about the difficult stuff, you can't form a group about that, anyone who wants to talk about it in this space must be wrong and evil, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up.

I'm making a mental list of books I love that couldn't be hosted on Livejournal right now. But that's by the by. A few days ago I read Trinity's post questioning the wisdom of alliances between feminists fighting against abuse and the far-right. She asked; 'What does that do for us?' Well, here's a presently exploding example of what well-meaning right-leaning men have to say to women who speak out about abuse, whether real or imaginary; shut up. Don't discuss books, or your own past, put walls up in your imagination and your memory, don't go there, stay home at night, good girls can't go to that part of town, shut up.

on surnames;

This was originally an LJ comment; a friend had posted a poll on the matter of surnames, and much conversation ensued. My original rant (which seems more bitter than I had intended);


I've been seriously thinking about this lately because I'm getting married sometime this autumn/winter. It's not a momentous occasion; we're very much in love, and as neither of us have much regard for marriage customs, we're not getting too worked up about it. We're getting married for our own reasons, and we're not too phased by the decision. But the surname has been a problem. On the one hand, I regard the custom of wives taking their husbands name as barbaric; on the other, the surname I have now is my father's, and I despise my father and would like to have as little to do with him as possible. I've seriously considered adopting my mother's maiden name, or even my mother's mother or my mother's mother's mother's maiden name, but however far you go back, you still just get names that belong to men. The great-grandmother's maiden name is quite fetching, and my mother's is both fetching and Scottish, but still.

I love my partner, and his name is pleasing in sound, metre, meaning and stature...but to make things even more of a mess, it's an Arabic name, and I seriously worry if lily-white me would be exposed to racial profiling if I took it. (He's been known to get it in the neck at airports, and he's barely swarthier than I am.) One other issue is that his name is very rare in the USA and far more common in the UK...and in the UK it's pronounced differently to the way his family say it, so I can't stop myself pronouncing it differently to how they do (none of his living relatives have any connections to Lebanon any more, so I'd maybe bet on me being 'right' :P)

So I've still not settled on an answer. I've considered hybrids of both my father's name and his, and my mother's name and his, but none of roll off the tongue. A hyphenated surname would have five syllables; urgh. He's absolutely willing to take my name if I wish it, but I dislike both the name and the man I got it off, so what on earth would that accomplish? Really, I'd be 100% keen on taking his name, were it not for the political context of that decision. I don't believe that women are just torchbearers for masculinity (you speak of a name that 'connects them to the rest of their family', but I'd question whether the 'family' is an institution worth supporting in that manner. I personally feel no ties to any of my family members excepting my two siblings, one of whom has also toyed with a name-change). I think most people who know me would be very surprised that I'm inclined to abandon my name, but I am. I'd rather choose the name of someone I care for than keep the name of someone who never cared for me.

Really, I feel like it's a messy decision because I'm starting from a total shipwreck. I have no name of my own, just a father's father's father's name that I never wanted in the first place. There's no level playing field here.


Soon after writing that rant, I came across a Grauniad article on the same topic, which applied a lovely description to a woman's surname; 'temporary label'. It's a knotty one. I doubt there's a non-sexist surname option other than making up an entirely new name. (I do know one couple - very new-age - who did just that, but I don't know if gender played any part in that decision).

The OP (Kelbesque) went further, and questioned whether we really need surnames at all; Surnames exist entirely to convey origination information. If that information is important, neither spouse should need to give that up; and yet their children should have that in their names; and if it isn't, then what the hell are we doing with surnames? ... I have to be honest, I feel surnames are a pretty stupid conduit for origination data anyway. They reflect an ancient and idiotic tradition that has been abandoned for long stretches of history without issue. I would as soon be [first name] [middle name] and not [first name] [middle name] [surname] were it not for the fact that a surname is legally required of me.

Here we seem to come up against changing demographics; in even the recent past, single-person households and even childless couples were considerably rarer than they are now, and the extended family was far stronger. I once heard it said (on Radio 4, no less) that the bicycle was most important development in human evolution in the last thousand years; before bicycles, almost all reproductive partnerships necessarily involved two people born less than 20 miles apart; the faster we've learned to move, the more the family disintegrates. The surname, which would once have likely indicated a discrete geographical and cultural origin, no longer carries enough data to be relevant.

So, origination is bunk. Why surnames, then? I'm inclined to regard them as indicators not of origin, but of a shared responsibility; a united group of creators and created that have a burden of care towards each other. Not necessary, but a snappy way to indicate who's responsible for caring for Baby, (or for Granny, who, unlike Baby, has been pushed to the outer shell of the nuclear family and is expected to form an ionic bond elsewhere). It's making an identity out of care. Can we do that without mindlessly replicating a sexist tradition?

Destroying The Family.

The Mother's War, which I saw when it was MSTed by Punkass Blog.

Now, I read this new PWOT about atheists and Christians a couple of days ago; being neither, it was more amusing than enlightening for me, but it made the very sensible point that focusing on negative examples makes you stupid. He was speaking of a considerably fouler extremist, Fred Phelps, but I think the point stands;

Smearing all Christians with Phelps' bile is a cheap shot, like saying all atheist schoolkids are potential Columbine shooters. At worst, that kind of stereotyping is dehumanizing and divisive. At best, it's a recipe for mediocrity. I compare myself to the worst so that I don't have to try to be the best. I can spend all day on my sofa, playing Wii Boxing and helping no one, and I'll still be a better man than Phelps. But I think we've got to shoot higher here.

So yes, Vox Day is an extremist, and I won't seek to compare all those who abuse the word 'family' for political purposes to him. However, he is trying to compare all his enemies to me. That traditional nuclear family thing he's talking about, the thing all we foul Europeans (wtf?) hate so very much? I hate it. I don't want to be part of one ever again, and reading such praises of the system made me quite upset. Not because I think it's got some nebulous potential to do harm, but because I know it does harm; it neglects me, excludes me, silences me and forces me to fend for myself. What he says - that children without mothers exist outside civilisation - is hurtful not because it's outright false, but because it's generally true and it's fucking unnecessary and, contrary to his characterisation of things, this championing of the status quo, the wonderful ever-caring mother, causes deep harm to certain children, of which I am one.

Even - I recall this quite distinctly - the evening it happened, I was aware that losing your mother was an extreme anomaly - something that got fetishised in storybooks, not something that actually happened to real children, not something that a family has to be prepared to adapt to, to get on with. I didn't truly believe it for most of the next week; no one had told me that she wasn't getting better, that her immune problems were terminal and she only had at most a couple of years before leukaemia set in anyway. It was a Friday, and I went back to school on Tuesday, where my form tutor told me he was surprised to see me back so soon; I remember telling two older acquaintances who had not heard the news - the way their mouths opened, the tones of voice. I was internalising other people's expressions of horror; my own feelings were a silent clamouring that I didn't know what to do with, no matter how many people tried to offer me a shoulder. (Someone - a friend of my parents' - even gave me a notebook specially, but I wrote stories in it instead, because that was emotionally safer.)

That's not important, that - just me wallowing, which isn't something I do often but reading all this Mother's Day claptrap kinda invites it. Up til then, I'm sure our family would have made Vox Day proud; a mother who ran the household, a father who worked long hours far from home and didn't involve himself other than in providing money and laying down the law, and three pretty well looked-after kids. Is it just me, or is there something inherently unstable about this structure?

I recently (awful timing, the thing had been sitting about waiting to be read for months) read The Cement Garden by Iain McEwan. It's a story about four children who lose their mother, and then enter a dreamlike lifestyle of little responsibility, much secrecy and lots of incest.

Like Vox Day, he gets just enough right to be hurtful without being in the least productive.


-The sheer banality; the fact that the important questions are about who's going to put food on the table, who cares for the youngest, who cleans up after everyone. The fact that 'mother' is such an ingrained answer to this question that when that option is not available, what you get instead is passive-aggressive confusion. I remember the first time our father cooked a meal for us - he became furious at our differing tastes, and has only cooked for us a handful of times since. He didn't dump every chore on his daughters; he did the laundry and some of the washing up, but when you're fixing buttons on your father's shirts when you're behind on your GCSE coursework, and cooking nine meals a week, you get resentful about the things your mother used to do. And you really can wind up aggressively not caring about caring about yourself.

-truancy. Losing someone who's absolutely central to your life crushes every thought you ever had about the future - the places she said she'd take you, the wanting to succeed and to celebrate success with her, even her hoping aloud that she'd have grandchildren one day. You don't just lose what you've got, you lose your future. Why not skip school, especially if you're still getting straight As? What's to lose? That said, we three were occasionally skipping from soon after she began her last hospital stay, about three months before she died. But even then we seemed to feel accountable - we'd tell her, even if we'd avoided letting our father know. After she died there was no stopping us; our father didn't know, or care, so long as we kept pulling the grades. He was always furious when he found out, but that was just another thing to hide from, so it merely fuelled the trend. And my school? It was one of those 'good' state schools, which means they hushed up, did their best to avoid letting it get on the records (straight As kids who go to 'good' schools do not play truant, everyone knows that), asked all the wrong questions, tried to make me scared. Children that rely solely on a mother's care very easily sidestep responsibilities without her; there's no reason not to slide down the path of least resistance. And now? I'm in London, halfheartedly jobhunting, and I feel like a truant again.

-the power struggles and blame games. A father who's always left the family in the hands of his wife while he does more important things has no authority over you, but an awful lot of power. He doesn't know you, and you're not accountable to him - he's just judge, jury and executioner, and every so often he gets drunk and tells you that he never wanted a family anyway, that that 'Let's have another baby!' thing Vox Day harps on about is just woman stuff. I honestly tried to relate to him, to be fond of him, for a while. I can't say he ever returned the gesture. And now he's old and infirm and polite to me, and I feel all kinds of cruel for disliking him so much, but ultimately, I remember why I do. Nemesis and Mnemosyne, m? Anyway; McEwan's grotty kitchen hit a nerve, as did the arguments about whose word was law, the arguments about money and material objects (our mother had always been over-generous with random presents, while our father never offered such kindnesses at all). Our clothes wore out; we never had pocket money, but if we asked infrequently enough, we'd get given spending money for more. We lived in a small village in the Pennines, so accessing anything we needed, material or human, was an awkward process that had to be mediated by our father. I won't live outside cities now.

-the fear of outsiders. My father once, drunkenly, told me his madcap story about how social services wanted to take me and my younger brother away (my sister was too old for that) because they'd noticed the truancy; I've no doubt that this was 99% conspiracy theorising on his part; perhaps it was due to his paranoia that we never received any practical or mental health help over it all, which goes to show what a responsible head of household a non-carer father can be. But the process happens; someone clumsily reaches out, you find reason to push them away. Too-perfect relatives, well-meaning schoolteachers, the church... They make you self-conscious. They make you feel like your problems are the wrong problems, and your feelings and wants are the wrong feelings and wants. Besides, they assume you get over it, which in a limited fashion is true; after a year or so, the crushing grey feeling in your chest fades away, and I think most people know that so they forget to keep being kind. But the other part of it, the having no mother part, is still happening, day in day out. It's there when you're hitchhiking to exams because the public transport is shit and there's no one you dare ask for a lift. It's there when you give up your hobby, don't do your coursework, when you get on a train to Scotland, alone, because you want to see your sister and it doesn't matter if you don't get there in one piece. Strangers are easy compared to acquaintances; being alone is even easier. So you push the outside world away.


So yes, McEwan managed to get in a lot of things that touched on my feelings, but I still felt distinctly uneasy about his writing. I felt exploited, though I had no right to; I felt like someone was digging into lives like mine for salacious details that would sell lots of books, making up the perviest bits out of whole cloth, ignoring the meat and bones of it all. It did get me down that he let his family structure dissolve into incest, because there's a real radical distortion of the family happening there, and it's like he's saying it's not juicy enough to interest him and he'd rather use this opportunity for airing unpleasant truths to talk about sexual oddities instead. (He also demonstrated the traditional literary disdain for the resilience and strong identity of small boys; I don't doubt my brother will find he has troubles to trip over, but he's by far the most emotionally and socially healthy of the three of us, and seems to be more mature and stable than the majority of his peers. Look, writerguys, you can poke at my screwiness as much as you like, but call my kid brother a freak and I'll deck you.)

Now, I have huge issues about family life. I already said, I hate - hate, you know, the cold but irrational stuff that you just cannot put up with? - family structures that place a unique burden on a female caregiver. I hate seeing women referred to as somehow having more responsibility to their families than men do. My relationships are a domestic minefield; I once dumped a boy partly because I made dinner for him and he thanked me in a way I disliked. And god, I feel utterly out of my depth around other people's parents anyway, and with SO's parents I'm even more confused. I don't know what parents are for, why they're necessary for people my age, and I'm dismissive in some ways, jealous in others. I know several people much older than me who have parents, and that just mystifies me entirely...but at the same time, I'm keenly aware that it's me who's the weird one. (I even get told so from time to time, though not by anyone worth speaking to). I probably shouldn't have children myself, if I do, it may well be an unpleasant experience for both me and them.

So I have issues about relationships, huge ones; I also have a bond with my siblings that I believe is unusual, but the paperback writers do not want to know. I felt exploited. Now, I've no right to feel like that; if I want books to reflect my experiences I ought to go write them myself, which I am I'm kinda sorta every-so-often trying in roundabout ways to actually do, but I still felt like this McEwan guy was calling me a freak in order to make himself a large stack of money. I'm sure it's not like that for him really. (Vox Day, however, really is paid for telling children without mothers that they're barbarous and futureless, so I feel justified in pointing and laughing at him and describing the sort of family his good Christian stay-at-home mums are actually creating.).

My sister and I both write (she a lot, I a little) and we both seem to dig into family matters a fair bit; she writes about close but dysfunctional extended clans, people for whom family ties are often painful but ultimately matter. The majority of my characters have no regular family structures at all, and those who do tend to be very distant from them. I don't know what that difference says about us. She's almost five years older than me, and perhaps has a better set of memories. We never talk about it, never talk about our mother at all; the only person I talk about my mother to is my 'aunt' (her best friend). In fact, I think I just decided to not tell the sister about this blog, because I am a coward. I want to talk about it, hence why I just wrote a couple of thousand words about it, but I do not feel able to talk about it with her.

I've never written on the subject at such length before, so it's not much wonder that my original point is getting drowned in a puddle of wangst. (It's been a little over ten years, which is a long time in stored-up whining). I believe I was attempting to say that tilting a burden of responsibility entirely onto only one parent is not a safe way to bring up children, and idolising such a model without discussing its attrition rate is an incitement to neglect. I don't think you need to be one of us evil European feminists to see that (but oh, the badge!) I'd genuinely like to know what Vox Day would say ought to happen to motherless children whose father does not seek to remarry. Iain McEwan was a bit more clear on the point of where he expects uncared-for children to wind up.