I am white, middle class, male, brunette, medium tall...

I keep telling myself I'm a freak.




I have been reading A Softer World, which is brilliant.


I am incredibly *normal*, according to my local culture's conditions of normality. You know, women, homosexuals, people who aren't white etc all get treated differently, all get defined by that particular aspect of themselves. People also talk about them as if the rest of their identity and personality could be discovered by merely knowing in what way they deviate from the sort of people that make up most of our MPs. Like gays are emotional and fashion conscious, girls are emotional and like chocolate but hate being fat, black people like rap and guns. Whatever. There are a lot more subtle ones as well. Oddly it tends to create a feedback loop, since people tend to become what is expected of them, to varying degrees. It takes a conscious will to defy expectations of societal norms.
Anyway, it must be annoying, to have people assume they know all about you cos they know one thing about you. I have been experiencing this a bit at my new job. I work pretty much entirely with women, and they like to say the boys are rubbish and the girls are much better. The funny thing about this is it creates lower expectations for the boys, so they don't have to try as hard... o well. Anyway, it bugged me a bit, but I can't complain. I generally don't get any persecution. Which is a bit dull really. It means I constantly have to define myself, which is a responsibility I don't always want. Can't you just stereotype me and I'll just rebel against each thing you assume of me and accuse you of being lazy? To an extent I do this anyway. I question my sexuality, my mental health, my religious views, my tastes, my practices... whatever they actually are, I always want to 'other' myself from everyone else. I guess really I just have to live with being the norm. It entails a little middle class guilt, you know? What group do I represent? The one that is excluding people from wealth and stuff. I guess this is why I became quite left wing etc. How can I stand on the outside with everyone else? O crap, I'm that guy from Avatar. I'm the self-proclaimed hero from the one side leading the other side (who couldn't have done it by themselves, apparently). Ah well, whatever, I'm broadly happy with my identity, and I can continue to tinker. 

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights forbids prejudice, unless you're gay, then you're on your own

1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

7. All are equal before the law.

10. Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

16. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

28. Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Blog review

So it's 3am and once again I can't sleep. I refuse to compile any more stats for work, so I've been blogcasting. I thought I'd share some bits that I found interesting and some comments of my own.


So for a while now Alas, a blog has been my number one source of interesting links and cultural commentary on a broad range of issues, and their current instalment is a series of links to their favourite blogs, which opened up some interesting new territory for me.


Great comment from Independent Gay Forum about this story, cutting through the superficially persuasive argument from the hospital to expose what is a frankly sickening case of double standards. Homophobia can be understandable (though perenially lamentable) when couched in a belief set made superstitious by fear of death, but doesn't the confrontation of mortality make you want to lay aside your prejudices and merely allow people to be? I ask anyone who thinks the hospital's decision was right to consider how you would feel if the person you loved most in the world were dying just a few feet away from you and all that seperated you from their sharing their final moments was someone's unsubstantiated belief.
As an individual has to be considered innocent until proven guilty, so should an action be considered legal until proven beyond reasonable doubt to be of serious, illegitimate and consistent damage to mankind. Since whenever homosexuality is considered wrong it is on wholly metaphysical grounds, I contend that there is no justification for perpetuating any legal difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Besides which, what bearing would such concerns have over the right of someone's partner in life and parenthood (and power of attorney) being allowed to visit them in their dying moments? Would any other supposed criminal or moral deviant be forbidden visitation rights? No. A straight man who regularly rapes and beats his wife would most likely still be allowed to be at her deathbed, since the hospital staff would likely be ignorant to his crimes. But where crime is gender it's all too easy to play judge.


More gay bashing bashed at Box Turtle Bulletin, and I'd draw your attention to the comments on this one. Website comments are rarely worth reading, but these are pretty funny. Personal highlights include:

"If porn made everyone gay.. well.. then we wouldn’t have to worry about equal rights any more. We’d be the VAST majority of the population!"

"I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of the Values Voters crowd share a belief system that is largely delusional and superstitious, thereby creating a reality for themselves that is mostly fabricated from Magic Truth. So, in their world it doesn’t feel bizarre when one of their leaders asserts that all porn is gay porn. Beliefs that cannot be supported by evidence/reason/logic is perfectly normal for them. Things become true through magic."

I won't bother joining in on the 'porn makes you gay' theme, since it's so very, very dumb and these guys have already demonstrated that as far as rational enquiry requires.


What I would like to discuss is the notion of masculinity, raised and barely challenged at The American Scene. Now these guys (inf. people) quite rightly undermine the suggestion that being a 'real' man is about how many girls you sleep with. I can see where the idea comes from, spreading your seed for the greatest chance of gene survival, but am amazed by how blind people can be to the counter-productivity of taking one of the fairly basic tenets of gene survival and making it a foundational belief to the detriment of the person as a whole. Ok guys, one) it makes you look and sound like a total dickhead, two) it entails a laughably simplistic understanding of human beings, three) most people extrapolate their view of humanity from their own experience, so if you think humans are superficial, simplistic humping machines with no capacity for qualitative judgement whatsoever... four) it's going to end in STDs, that's just statistical probability.
Nowhere has this dunderheaded idea been more glorified than on trashy Hollywood testostorama Entourage, where the *not-quite-but-almost* of Beverley Hills strut about like peacocks with painted tail feathers 'banging' every, *entirely* characterless, girl in town. The great part is, if a guy fucks 50 girls a day, he's a MAN, if a girl sleeps with anyone who happens to know anyone else, she's a slut. Isn't that liberating? Oo look I've come, best pout and tell someone they're an idiot ('cos that's how business works).
So what do we want a man, not a MAN, to be? Well, for my part I'd rather stay out of it thank you. Why do I have to have a gender identity? I have plenty of things from which to self-define already, and I'd rather lose them all (or at least all the ones that I was allotted by default). I don't particularly want to be defined by everyone who happens to own a pair of testicles, or for that matter anyone of my race, nationality, music taste... I understand this will happen to an extent but never understand the need for a group to assert a collective identity. It's just a fallacious concept. Men have a collective identity insofar as they share some biology, no further.
This brings me onto feminism. Now I would say I'm a feminist but one thing really grates on me, and it's something I've seen this at times on I Blame The Patriarchy and other passionate blogs: glorification of women acting like assholes in the same way men are criticised for. By this I mean things like seducing a whole load of people. In fact that was what I read about the other day, on another blog. Unfortunately I now can't find it, so I can't go into detail and this whole paragraph becomes a bit vague and unfounded, but I'd still like to make my point: guys being assholes is not good, but neither is girls being assholes. It's exactly the same as when a guy I knew once told me that he didn't see any problem in misleading the girls he slept with into thinking that he has an emotional attachment to them given that a girl once did that to him. Nevermind that each of the girls he slept with was an individual, who had different character traits and had never done him wrong. Now this may be my personality type, sexuality and prejudices bleeding into my arguments (I don't sleep with many people) but it seems to me part of a wider subtrend of feminism that I don't like. I can understand why people get angry, it's very much provoked, and it's really difficult to work out what the line ought to be now (given that it revolves around the concept of what a person should be and do, which in two millenia of serious thought we've made very little progress on), but to my mind feminism is part of a wider scheme with two aims: liberating everyone from inherent restrictive cultural frameworks and making everyone treat each other better. I don't think it's about justifying women being shitty to men on the basis of a history of oppression (in the same way black people would not be morally justified in enslaving white people, or Islamic fundamentalists are not morally justified in committing acts of terrorism, even if their motivations and their oppression can be clearly demonstrated). However, I Blame The Patriarchy is well worth reading and the sentiment which I attack here is limited.


For an uncommonly detached and empirical blog on all things oppressive, I strongly recommend Sociological Images, which does an excellent job of demonstrating the infinite array of subtleties in advertising and media which in isolation appear harmless but, as extensive reading of this blog brings home, dictate a culture in a surprisingly pervasive manner. It was this blog which really made me understand the concept of a cultural construct. If you have any serious thoughts about discrimination of any kind, read!


Ok so now it's five am and my writing has degenerated. Time for bed.


Alright, one more.


Congratulations to PJTV for excellent use of piggybacking unsound arguments onto sound arguments and putting them all under one umbrella, so either you accept both or neither, and accepting neither's dumb. Why don't us shameful liberals ever use such tactics? O yeah, cos its cheap and its tacky and it doesn't get you any nearer the truth.

Jimmy Footballboots

So the other day I’m in Dexter’s – home of the Dexter’s burger, which is apparently unique because it has cheese and chillies and other things people put in burgers – eating the disproportionately large pear & chilli chocolate ice cream sundae while my mother eats their uniquely thawed cheesecake and we’re discussing gay footballers.

He can’t be gay! He has a wife and children!

So? If you were a gay footballer you would want to do everything possible to hide that. It’s not a universally accepted combination.

That kind of thing, right? Anyhoo we banter along this speculative polemic and my mother says something rather off (I meant to write odd there but miss-keyed, off seems more appropriate in retrospect). I can’t remember the exact phrasing, which is annoying (I shouldn’t be stoned before dinner with my mum. Seriously, I got off work an hour early to smoke a joint on the common. How cool am I?), but it ran along the lines of:

Footballers are less likely to know they’re gay, as opposed to media types and whatnot who are much more likely to experiment.

Experiment? It’s not a fucking quirk! It’s not like discovering you like having the back of your heel licked or finding you have a taste for grilled olives, right? Which poncey fucking journo floundered about fucking girls for 25 years before discovering they actually preferred cock while fact finding in Soho? I mean, sure, you’re more likely to discover you’re bi if you’re open minded, but then would you get involved if you didn’t already feel inclined? You’re maybe more likely to affirm that you genuinely are bi and not just pretending to be bi to try and fuck someone else altogether. Or because it’s cool. Or because you just don’t want to offend anyone. Make them feel left out. But you’re not going to find ‘gay’, like spirituality, or dreadlocks. Unless...

Imagine the scenario: a bunch of straight guys are on a gay tour of London and their rep takes them to some secretive side road. ‘Guys, we have to go in here. You have to try their cock; it really is the best in London!’ So the guys all go in and they’re seated round a table by a pleasant, mildly camp waiter who offers them menus and drinks, presumably Lambrini or baby shams. While the swagger of straight men marvel on the novelty decor, the rep selects something appropriate and after a short wait a guy comes out with his cock out. One by one the guys all give it a good suck. Most of them find it not unpleasant but neither particularly arousing, except one of the group who has realised he’s gay. Never and inkling before now but one taste of cock and he’s not going back.

Is that how it works? No it’s just a cock and balls story.

Now I imagine that it is the case that poor old Jimmy Footballboots doesn’t want to be gay and has probably spent his adult life trying to run it off or magic cloth it away, which is the sort of thing people do. Just like I never want to confront the fact that I want to fuck Jim Davidson. Not in a shove-a-pool-cue-up-his-arse-and-snap-it way, but gently, lovingly, with caresses and everything. However, Jimmy knows he’s gay. If he’s actually gay he discovered it quite a long time ago, right?

I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea that maybe I’m actually gay when I’ve played with dildos or watched some guy jacking off on webcam from his bedroom in Leeds. I’m not, much. A little, but not really very gay at all. I’m almost disappointed. Why can’t I just find everyone sexy, like Russell Brand? That would be easy, ... *groan*. Really though? Could I be secretly gay? Have I been socially conditioned into being straight? Am I lying to myself as, to be fair, I do all the time? No. If I were gay I probably wouldn’t have drawn all those tits when I was 14. Did Jimmy Footballboots draw tits? That’s probably the test.

Now, I’ve been treating my mum’s argument with open disdain, but every genuine assertion has some morsel of truth that has convinced its speaker, or at least initiated the thought process from which the ultimate false proposition eventually arises. In this case there is a clear factual element: there are more openly gay people in the creative industries than in sport. This may be because the first industry does not require a certain public machismo, in fact it would probably just seem crude (there are of course exceptions. I’m not naming any names but he writes for a weekend driving supplement and wears jeans with a dress jacket. You know. You didn’t even need the clues.) However, I don’t think machismo is the biggest factor: for one, if you came out as a footballer you’d only be proving your balls and two, if a Keane or a Vieira or a Jones say they were gay I would not be the first one buying them village people outfits. Likewise nothing could make me less afraid of Arjen Robben. I personally blame the parents. Thing is, see, if you’re a creative industrialist, you’ve already let them down. They already think you’re a tosser. They don’t proudly tell their friends that their little darling writes all the reality TV goss in Metro. So fuck it, you might as well tell them you’re a lesbian as well and if they never talk to you again then balls to them.

Now ultimately my mum’s a very liberal minded person, a feat made all the more spectacular by her weekly dose of the Daily-hate-Mail from Sainsbury’s in I-normally-shop-at-Waitrose-you-know Beaconsfield. This is why when she said something I considered to be rather ill thought through and offensive (anyone notice the missing premise? It was the old 'everyone’s straight until...', like vampirism or bird flu) I pointed this out to her and we discussed it. You can’t always do that with your parents though. I had such trouble with my Aunt on immigration (she would welcome ANYONE to her house with the greatest warmth and kindness and hospitality but blames ALL the woes of Broken Britain on Bloody Immigrants. I’m almost tempted to sue the fucking Daily racism indoctrination journal (Mail). They should be tried for crimes against humanity, or at least humanism) that we just had to give up in the end. That’s the thing with the patently irrational, you can’t argue with it.

So imagine if your dad were an active BNP exponent with a penchant for hitting people and breaking things, who gave up smoking after someone waved a pack of cigarettes in his face saying ‘fag?’

One of my friends from school came out when he was 13 or 14. Obviously he didn’t sing and dance about it (he wasn’t Big Gay Al), he told a couple of us but it was an all boys school so it was bums against walls time for most – especially one particularly homophobic lad. I used to think he was a prick but then one day he got dumped and he carved the girl’s name into his chest with a bread knife, so he was clearly a holy fucking twat of Hollywood proportions.

So this guy’s been out for ten years now but neither of his parents knows. They’re not scary, they’re some of the least scary people I’ve met, but his mum frequently talks about how all the gays should be killed, so it’s hardly something you want to discuss over dinner. ‘O mum, by the way, you know that particular subset of people that you wish to exterminate, turns out I’m one of them! What are the chances of that, eh?”

Of course we all bullied him. We used to play in a band (I say band... two songs then it was booze and football and betting on who’d be the next person to get laid) and we’d give him shit. “Don’t sit there, Will sat there. You’ll catch gay.” “Don’t drink from that bottle. Will drank from that bottle. You’ll catch gay.” But it was ironic. It was the 90s. It was post-modern, self-aware bullying. And we didn’t do it much, it got tired. If I sound overly defensive it’s only because I know that’s not strictly defendable, the argument has the same form as the less bad Nazi interment officer – I didn’t kill many Jews... Equally it’s not equivalent to the less bad Nazi interment officer, so I don’t feel that bad.

He also faced badgering of an entirely different kind from our wonderful host: our bassist’s mum. “Will, eat some noodles! You’ll starve! Will, do you want some chips? Do you like pork, Will?” She didn’t care that he was gay. Not so when her own daughter came out though. Between that and her other daughter marrying a Saudi guy she almost white dwarfed.

I’d like to think that if I were gay I could tell my mum and it’d be fine. She is one of the most amiable, tolerant people I know – at least on a personal level. But I’ve seen enough people ripped in half by that conflict between their personal outlook and stuff they’ve read and heard enough times to believe unthinkingly to know that it’s not always that simple. In fact I used to live with a guy who clearly had something deeply troubling that he was permanently trying to cover to the world – perma-glow fake tan, pristine white teeth, super healthy, photos of himself in his graduation outfit beaming from his bedroom wall but every now and then he’d get drunk and go to say things then stop himself saying his mum would not approve. Also once he got an earring and wasn’t sure about it: “I feel like it just screams gay.” I strongly suspect he was gay but born and raised in a place where you couldn’t be gay – o and guess what he read...

In an article for the Guardian recently, Stephen Fry mentioned that a number of his gay friends wouldn’t come out but not because of the reception they’d receive from the press, public, friends and colleagues, but from their parents. Homophobia, like racism and sexism, is mostly challenged and changed over generations. Having grown up in a generation where a much greater number of people are openly gay, from friends and family to celebrities, I hope that we as parents are more approachable and more tolerant so that when our kids become the overpaid, overhyped sports celebs of the future they don’t have to marry and procreate with someone from a sex that doesn’t sexually excite them just to dampen suspicion.

Rejected Daily Mail pseudos

Daily Mailstrom

Daily Mailice

Daily Mailignant tumour

Daily Fail

Daily Shit

Fucking Haterag

Evil Fucking Lyathon

Daily Smail (smell? No, not really)

Daily Mailbomb

Daily Grail (too obtuse)

Samey Stale

Gamey Tale

Also, I hope that by the time we’re parents the Daily Mail has not only gone bankrupt (financially, not just morally) but that it’s bilious, vitriolic and consciously contra-factual segregationism is forever expunged from our journalism and humanity. The same goes for the other great vehicle of Satan: the Catholic Church. O and the Republican Party. And may Robert Kilroy-Silk all lead them on a flying fucking carpet woven from their own self fucking righteousness[*].

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[*][*] Yes, I see the hypocrisy there. No, I don’t care.