Taking the Epistle - Part 1: Romans

My NIV Study Bible (the version I've been reading in general) explains that St Paul had never visited the church in Rome at the time of writing the letter recorded in the Bible. The letter itself makes reference of Paul's ambition to visit Rome and the church there, but also records that he has been kept busy with other errands. Consequently, it is much more theoretical than the other letters, and my remark when I introduced this series of posts that Paul's letters represent the first working-out of what it means to be Christian is particularly relevant to Romans above the other Epistles. The NIV Study Bible points out that a lot of what later became standard doctrine in the Church is outlined in Romans.

So what did I make of it?

St Paul is very much keen on criticising "sexual immorality", and seems to reference it even where there is no need to do so to make his point. In Romans this is all very much theoretical but in 1 Corinthians more of the explanation is given (as noted in my intro post, Corinth was a city with a lot of prostitution and other randy goings-on, so it was more directly relevant to the pressures on the church there). The first part of Romans concerns the basic idea of sin, in that it discusses that sin happens when men turn away from God, becoming selfish and self-seeking Paul writes that God "gives them over" to "evil" deeds, and the inevitable consequences of those deeds.

One interesting element is that Paul frames his sexual morality in terms of "natural" and "unnatural" relations. He speaks directly to homosexuality in these terms as "unnatural".

Romans 1:26-27

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

However, the thought that comes to my mind is that there is some question about whether homosexuality is indeed "unnatural" (that is "against (our) nature"). A number of pre-natal conditions have been found to correlate strongly with homosexuality (the "hormonal wash" and the number of older male siblings relate to male homosexuality at least). Modern anti-gay Christians assume that because Paul says it's unnatural, it is. But it is not impossible that Paul uses "unnatural" not as a descriptor but as a qualifier: that is, only those homosexual acts that are unnatural are the product of sinful hearts; those homosexual acts that come from a person's true nature may not be covered. I will cover some more thoughts about Paul's anti-gay statements in Corinthians. Suffice to say for now, I am NOT with Paul on this one.

Another of the major themes that the study notes highlight about Romans is that the church in Rome was made up of both Jews and Gentiles, and there was a certain amount of friction between the Jews and the non-Jews within the church. Paul's letter was therefore written to ease those frictions and guide the two sides into accepting one another's customs. Paul therefore effectively writes that the Mosaic Law is not binding any more, although it is a guiding example. (Incidentally, people who cheer Josiah Bartlet's takedown of Dr. Jacobs as a takedown of Christianity should realise that he only won because she didn't know her New Testament as well as her Old Testament.) Paul does not dismiss the Mosaic law entirely (Romans 3:20 - "no-one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law, we become conscious of sin"). Instead, it is by faith in Christ that we find righteousness; not through blind adherence to the old Law. Just as the Old Testament prophets criticised people for following the appearances of the Law, but ignoring it in their hearts, so St Paul makes the same distinction, but this time shows that because "circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code" (Romans 2:29) then the outward appearances can be laid aside, because Christ brought the Spirit.

Paul spends a lot of time elaborating on these themes: the relationship of the OT law to the NT Spirit (in Romans ch. 7 he draws the analogy of a woman whose husband dies, and is then free to marry another man; through Christ, says Paul, we have "died to the law... that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead" [7:4] and writes, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code" [7:6]).

Another theme, developed again in 1 Corinthians in more detail (although it is reckoned that Romans was written later that 1 Corinthians) is the idea of the Church being made up of many members, who have different gifts to bring - like a human body being made of many different organs and limbs.

Romans 13 is one of the most famous passages in Romans, beloved of atheists for the fact that it seems to tell Christians to accept meekly whatever tyranny is perpetrated by those in charge. However, Paul is much more equivocal than the obvious reading. Because the authorities are instituted by God, then we should obey them, but equally, if they betray the position of power that God has given them, then they are not doing God's work, but their own. Paul here outlines what a ruler's job should be, and the reasons why God places people in positions of authority. In its way, it is a reworking of the social contract theory of government (in terms of the reasons why government is instituted) but attributes to God rather than the consent of the governed the creation of the authority. I get the sense, however, that St Paul actually struggled with this issue. His natural inclination seems to have been towards believing the very best of authority; he liked people being in charge. But at the same time, those same people were persecuting people, including Christians. How could Paul marry his natural respect for authority (and his belief that it is there by God's will) with this persecution? In all honesty, in Romans I don't think he does very well at it, and the result is the (mis)perception that Christians are just supposed to suck it up when governments do bad shit.

Before Paul closes with various salutations and his desire to visit Rome, he revisits the need for unity within the Church, and asks peope to be accomodating of others' expressions of faith. He does so, in part, by talking about vegetarianism versus meat-eating: "One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man , whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted both." (Romans 14:3). Paul's reason for calling the vegetarian in this as having "weak" faith ties in to his arguments earlier concerning the Jew/Gentile rift within the Roman church, where he accepts that some people do not feel comfortable breaking with the old law (see my comment on ch. 7); in Paul's reasoning this was due to a weakness in terms of relying on faith (the Spirit) alone to guide one's actions. Here he is asking people not to condemn or crticise others for having different approaches but to accept that different people deal with these issues differently, and that both ways are okay with God. It is an appeal for plurality and diversity to be welcomed within the Church. He also says that the man who eats everything should be willing to forgo eating meat in his brother's company if it troubles his brother in the church who's a veggie.

Several of the themes I've picked up here will continue in other posts. One reason I am writing these posts is so that I can come back and see how each book's ideas and themes relate to those in the other books (as I've already started in on 1 Corinthians, I've already spotted some continuity, as mentioned in this post).

Sexist Wimbledon (so what else is new?)

The F-Word Blog has highlighted an article in (of all newspapers!) the Daily Mail that highlights a most disgusting practice being carried out by the All England Lawn Tennis Club during this year's Wimbledon Championship:

In the men’s tournament, five-times winner Roger Federer and British hope Andy Murray invariably play on Centre.

But on Friday, after Federer left the court, the next match was Victoria Azarenka of Belarus against Romania’s Sorana Cirstea.

While both 19-year-olds have top form in the glamour department, Miss Cirstea was seeded 28 while Miss Azarenka, who won, is ranked and seeded eighth.

That same day, second seed Serena Williams was relegated to the new No 2 Court for her win over Italian Roberta Vinci

Apparently, their spokesman admitted it outright, saying that looks "are a factor".

Here is the letter that I have just sent to the All England Lawn Tennis Club:

The All England Lawn Tennis Club,
Church Road,
Wimbledon,
London
SW19 5AE

Dear Sir or Madam,

Scheduling of women's matches on Centre Court

I am writing to you today because I have read an article by the Daily Mail suggesting that lower-seeded women players are being scheduled on Centre Court in preference to more talented players, and I believe that this is inappropriate for a prestigious sporting event such as the Wimbledon Championship.

According to quotations in the Daily Mail's article, the reason for these less accomplished players being promoted to the tournament's brightest spotlight is because they are felt to have better looks than other players. The Daily Mail quotes spokesman Johnny Perkins as saying, "Good looks are a factor." The article suggests that this is also a factor in the BBC's coverage of the Wimbledon Championship, but does not name its sources for that conclusion.

I am an avid fan of many women's sports, and I always expect to see the best athletes and sportswomen to be given the spotlight so that fans of the sport can appreciate it being played at the very highest level. I expect the same from the Wimbledon Championship. It is demeaning and dismissive of these professional athletes and their abilities to reduce their value to your tournament to a puerile assessment of their physical attractiveness. It is also demeaning and dismissive towards your sport's spectators to assume that their only interest in women's sport is based on sexualising the players' bodies, rather than an appreciation of their skills and fitness.

This type of blatant sexism and discrimination is not acceptable in the modern world, and it is appalling that it still occurs from such illustrious organisations as the AELTC.

I look forwards with hope to your reply, and to seeing women's tennis players treated with the respect they deserve for their skill and talent on the court.

Yours Faithfully,

I encourage everyone else who reads this blog to write to the AELTC at the address above (adding "UK" or "England" to the address, obviously, if you're not from the UK). Wimbledon is one of the most prestigious tournaments in the world, and I see no reason why non-Brits should stay silent about this matter when Wimbledon has such a global reputation. (NB the wimbledon.org website says that they don't always read or reply to emails, so sending by post is much more effective).

For the record, the top-seed playing each day on centre court has thus far been:

Day 1: 2
Day 2: 3
Day 3: 24 (2nd seed playing on court 1, 4th seed playing on court 2)
Day 4: 9 (3rd seed playing on court 1, 1st seed playing on court 2)
Day 5: 8 (4th seed on court 1, 2nd seed on court 2)
Day 6: 3 (lst seed on court 2)
Day 7: 1

By comparison, in the men's games it has been:

Day 1: 2 (Roger Federer)
Day 2: 3 (Andy Murray)
Day 3: 2
Day 4: 3
Day 5: 2
Day 6: 3
Day 7: 2

There have been two games on centre court each day in the men's tournament (only one each day for the women); the lowest "high seed" in a men's game on centre court has been 11 - the only one outside the top 8. Only 4 men's matches on centre court saw the highest seed being outside the top 4. Compare that to the scheduling of the women's games and you can see that there really is a problem.

St Paul - Taking the Epistle

Having now worked my way all the way through the Old Testament, and having read the Gospels and Acts more than once over the years (and read Revelation for the lulz), the only part of the Bible I haven't yet read is the Letters in the New Testament, most of which are commonly attributed to St Paul, and are the basis of what is termed "Pauline Doctrine" - I bet you always thought that was the name of a professional Dominatrix! (Dammit - now I'm getting some ideas about Biblical spoof BDSM porn stories starring Mistress Pauline Doctrine, and I already have too many creative ideas on the go at once!)

Anyway, I've finished Romans and am about halfway through 1 Corinthians right now, and it occurs to me that this is some pretty complex and interesting stuff. Perfect fodder for blog posting! So I'm going to have a go with each of the Letters at writing down my impressions of what Paul was writing about, and what it might mean in the modern age.

St Paul was basically the first person to address (Christian) theology in a systematic way. His writings form the first attempts to work out what it actually means in the really-real, physical, day-to-day imperfect world of right-now, to be a Christian. He was also working very hard to establish unity between the various churches around the Mediterranean, and unity within each church as well. Although Christ described St Peter as "the Rock on which I will build my church", by the same metaphor, Paul could be seen as the cement that held it all together in those early days.

This makes the Letters incredibly important as historical documents concerning the Church (in much the same way that letters sent by Union leaders would be important documents concerning the history of the labour movement and trades union activism). I did once have dream that was slightly strange, in which someone had found all the other letters sent by the early church leaders - Paul, the Apostles, etc - that were just the gossip-y chitchat between them: "You'll never guess what Paul's gone and done now!" "That Peter, he's a bit stuck up, isn't he? 'the Rock', he calls himself, I think he should take himself less seriously" and so on. Very entertaining reading, but then I woke up and it wasn't true.

Anyway, so over the next few weeks I shall be posting about the letters as I read them. Today I should get a quick look at Romans written up for you, and then either this evening or tomorrow I will have finished 1 Corinthians (lots of juicy stuff there - Corinth was a city of vice and depravity in them olden days, apparently!)

I haz hai romants

I signed up to Tarot.com for the free 3-card tarot card readings, but the website serves as a sales portal for several other forms of divination, and several of them are presented in dreadfully "New Age" fashion. It also means they think they can sell these things to me because I signed up once. usually, their advert emails get sorted into the spambox automatically. The latest was no exception, but I was curious and it turned out they were giving a free sample of the new numerology service, focussing on the querant's "romance trait".

I told it my real name, and then for "current name" I told it Snowdrop Explodes (because that's the name most people in the world know me by).

Here's what it said about me:

Your total score for the Romance trait is high

You give your love fully and without restraint. You have probably experienced many a painful, disappointing encounter as you tend to be very passionate and not as discriminating as you should be. Once you find a partner, however, you are able to show loyalty and commitment for years. In a long-term relationship, you may experience a sudden flare of that old passion -- make sure it's not for someone who's not your partner! Do your best to bring back the initial spark in the relationship, and you will be able to maintain it for years to come.

I think that's a good analysis of me, actually - but then, how many people would not see themselves in such a description?

Sex and the Slutty Sim

[NB the term "slut" is used frequently in this post; it is not meant a a pejorative, but in the celebratory sense of embracing one's sexuality with abandon. Although the use may occasionally seem pejorative, that is only because I am dealing with a mindset that is not my own but imposed by the creators of The Sims 2 which makes sexuality much more problematic.]

I have recently had a spell of playing Sims 2 like an addict. this partly came about because I finally got around to downloading the patches to remove the censorship pixellation, and add some slightly more anatomically-correct skins to my sims.

However, my basic interests haven't changed (although you can guess what they were already from the fact that I wanted those particular add-ons!) One thing especially, though - being interested in the sex-lives of my sims, and with my politics being what they are, I started out from the very beginning to explore how sexual politics work in the Sims. yes, since Sims 3 has just been released, I know that I'm probably well behind the times and there may well be other femnist analyses like this already out there. This is just what I've got.

After I had figured out how to create a family, by creating a basic het nuclear family, the very second family I created, I wanted to see if it was possible to create a family with a gay couple defined as "married". To my delight, this was indeed possible. I haven't yet experimented with having a gay couple propose and get married in the gameplay, but I think it's possible. As far as same-sex marriage goes, the world of the Sims is very progressive.

The natural thing to do then, it seemed to me, was to try to create a polyamorous household. Would the game allow me to create a family in which more than two people were defined as married to one another? Would polyandry or polygyny be accepted? I quickly discovered that the create family function was defined so that whenever you tried to add a third person to the marriage, the previous bond would be cancelled in favour of the new one. A marriage, it seemed, was between no more than 2 sims joined in wedlock.

Still, you could have another person defined as "roomie" of a married person, so I tried that to see what would happen, and set about creating a polyamorous household full of people with the "romantic aspiration" path (for which read: "slut-to-the-core" personality!) and get them all happily fucking one another.

In the Sims the term for fucking is to "do WooHoo!" Obviously, this is a euphemism designed to make the game acceptable to conserative-minded parents who might worry about their children if anything more honest were included. However, any adult playing the game will identify a "WooHoo!" as a fuck by any other name. Although the graphics are admirably PG-rated, any adult who knows the cultural language with which we talk about orgasm will recognise what's going on!

Anyway, to reach the point where two sims will fuck, you have to go through a process of getting their mutual attraction to a high level. This is done by having them talk, then "admire", then flirt and maybe perform a back massage for each other. Then the level of flirting and kissing becomes more and more lust-laden until eventually you get them both in the same bed or hottub and find the option highlighted to 'WooHoo!". And they do. To create a poly relationship, you want to have three people in the household each of whom is highly attracted to the other two. Then you get them taking turns to fuck.

What I hadn't reckoned with is the almost pathological level of jealousy with which the Sim race is endowed by their creators. It is very difficult to get three people who all fuck each other to live harmoniously together in The Sims 2. If we have three sims - A, B and C - then if A and B have a high mutual attraction and are described by the game as having a crush on each other, or being in love, then if A flirts even in the most mld possible way with C, and B happens to catch them doing so, then B flies into a rage with them both. It is then recorded as a "bad memory" for A and B alike, with A having a memory of "got caught cheating by B" and B having a memory of "caught A cheating". I found this hugely frustrating for many reasons.

Firstly, as I said before, I was trying to create poly relationships. In my mind there was no reason for anyone to be jealous. It's a poly relationship, all three of them are in love with one another. What's the matter? Why can't they enjoy each other's pleasure?

2/. Also stemming from the poly thing, and the fact that I was working on having everyone attracted to everyone else: that means that B is also "cheating" with C, just as much as "A" is. And both A and B are "cheating" on C with one another! So B has no moral grounds on which to stand when zie flies into a rage at A.

3/. The "aspirations" that go with the "romantic" aspiration path are, as I already said, "slut-to-the-core" ideals. You start off pretty tamely, with "kiss {sim X}" or "flirt with {sim X}". But as you progress through these, and the mutual attraction grows, you start having more and more filthy desies come up. When you finally satisfy the ambition of fucking sim X, almost always the next aspiration to appear as a key goal is "WooHoo! with 3 different sims". Male or female, if your sim's aspiration is "romantic", zie is a slut who wants to fuck as many other sims as possible. So, when I create a family of three adult sims who are all sluts, it seems to me to be hugely hypocritical of them for one sim to get cross with another for following through on exactly the same aspirations as the cross sim has!

4/. The flirts often seem extremely mild - the sort of thing that a normal, well-adjusted monogamous couple easily reads as just playful and not in any way indicative of infidelity. The level of jealousy in The Sims 2 looks to me like borderline stalker/domestic abuse behaviour! Seriously, it freaks me out! The reaction is always immediate and violent by the "wronged" sim, who then goes away and cries while frequently the victim of this abuse is shown as being much less affected. The way the game works, it is almost then the responsibility of the abuse victim to cheer up the "wronged" sim! Way to program in violent and emotional abuse!

Now, in a way, I can see why they've done this. It does make for an interesting logistical challenge to arrange to get each sim-pairing alone with potentially jealous sims out of the house or busy in other rooms. However, that's not the sort of challenge I want when I'm playing the Sims. I want my sims to be happy loving and fucking each other so they can concentrate on getting better jobs, feeding themselves and each other, getting to the toilet on time, and all that good stuff. I want to play dolls' house with them, tell my own stories, and not worry about the morality being imposed from on high by the programmers.

Big in a small way

This is the cover art I designed for the latest mix CD I put together for my sister.

But I thought people who read my blog might also enjoy it, so I'll share it here too.



The title comes from the Eric Bogle song "Big (In A Small Way)" which rounded off the mix (I'd link to the lyrics, but it seems they're only available in PDF format).

The cat is the Unchanging One, the rocks are some West Country seaside place that my aprents went to, and the volleyball figure is "Victoria 4" from DazStudio. She might be playing basketball instead, it's hard to decide.

Anyway, I'm really chuffed with how well it worked out that both the cat and the player look fixated on the ball.

Thought-experiment - the time travel tear

I'd really appreciate people posting their ideas about the questions raised by this, because this is something that deeply puzzles me as a person interested in physics (and science fiction!)

It's basically aimed at elucidating some of the ideas surrounding the famous "grandfather paradox", but also looking more closely at claims that one can "change the past". As far as I know, this is entirely my own invention and I don't know of a similar thought-experiment composed by anyone else. I have constructed it deliberately to avoid the "restricted action resolution" being used, and to try to fix the "memory" issue so that the altered-past (of receiving message 'A') is empirically recorded as well as subjectively recalled by the time-traveller.

For the purposes of this experiment, we have a timeline stretching from T minus 11 minutes to T+1 minute, where "T" is the moment in time at which the time traveller activates his machine to travel backwards in time. To all intents and purposes, everything before T (that is, all negative times) are "the Past", and times later than T are "the Future".

At T minus 11 minutes, the time-traveller decides, "In eleven minutes' time, I will write "cabbage" on a piece of paper, then travel back ten minutes and give the paper to a passer-by, whom I will ask to give the paper back to me a minute before I activate the time machine." To prove that the piece of paper is the same when the passer-by gives it back, the time-traveller tears a piece of paper in half, forming a ragged edge that is very difficult to duplicate. The traveller decides to write on the right-hand side of the paper, and keep the left-hand side for reference, and puts each piece in a different pocket.

Ten minutes later, at T minus 1 minute, a person whom the time-traveller doesn't recognise approaches and hands hir a torn piece of paper with the word "cabbage" written on it (call this "message 'A'") in the time-traveller's handwriting. The time-traveller pulls the left-hand piece of paper out of hir pocket and checks that the torn edges match up perfectly: it is indeed the same piece of paper.

The time-traveller then puts the piece of paper saying "cabbage" into an envelope and seals it. Zie also puts the left-hand torn edge into another envelope and seals that.

The time-traveller then takes out hir pen and writes on the remaining right-hand torn piece of paper. However, the traveller writes "lettuce" instead (message 'B'). The time traveller puts the sealed envelopes in a safe place and at T activates the time machine taking the piece of paper with message 'B' back into the past, to T minus 10 minutes.

There, the traveller meets the passer-by who in the future gave (or "will give", since it's the future!) hir the piece of paper with message 'A' written on it, and hands the passer-by the piece of paper with message 'B' written on it and arranges to have the paper handed back at the time T minus 1 minute.

A T minus 9 minutes, the traveller travels forwards to T plus 1 minute.


It should be noted that the torn halves of the piece of paper in the envelopes at the end are the same piece of paper as was originally torn in half, so there is no ontological paradox involved, unless the time-traveller's change to message 'B' is presumed to have been caused by reading the paper with message 'A' on it.

Here are my questions raised by this experiment:

• Given that there is only one piece of paper, and we know that the torn edges match up in both cases, which message - 'A' (cabbage) or 'B' (lettuce) - will be written on the right-hand piece of the torn paper when the traveller arrives back in the future, at T+1 minute?
• Given that when the paper was put into the envelope, it read "cabbage", if it now reads "lettuce", at what point did it change? Was it when the time-traveller set off to the past, was it when the time traveller wrote message 'B' after sealing the envelope, or was it when the time traveller returned from the past? Was it at some other point? Does it make a difference if the time traveller took the sealed envelopes back in time with hir?
• Does it make a difference if the time traveller doesn't tear the paper in half until after receiving the torn paper with message 'A' on it?
• Would the piece of paper handed to the time-traveller still have message 'A' on it if the time-traveller only forms hir time-travelling intention after receiving the piece of paper, and the intention is to write message 'B'? What if the time-traveller only changes hir mind and writes message 'B' after travelling back in time?
  

Answers on a postcard, please, to the usual address! (or failing that, post them in comments...)

Michael Jackson has had fatal heart attack

I've just heard this news. I checked it on news websites, and it's true.

Michael Jackson, the fabled pop singer, has died aged 50, of a heart attack.

It's always sad news when someone dies, famous or not. But I've been caught by surprise by just how much this news has affected me. I cared very little for Jackson at any time in his career, didn't like his music much, didn't think he was that great of a human being, wasn't interested in him. And yet, I feel tearful, shocked, empty-pit-ness, as though this was a performer whose work I admired.

The only thing I can figure is that it's because Jackson has been there as a part of the fabric of my life's backdrop, for as long as I have a memory of being aware of music. There was a time when Jackson was the only pop star I'd ever heard of, even though I didn't like him or his music.

As I grew up, Michael Jackson was always somewhere around, in the charts, in the news, or just in everyone else's conversations about what was "cool" or not.

I was 4 when "Thriller" came out. I remember all the hype around "Bad". I remember Jarvis Cocker at the Brit Awards wandering onto Jackson's stage during a performance of his Messianic song (I can't even remember what it was called!) and the whole uproar about that. So many times through my lifetime, there was something to do with Michael Jackson in the background.

So for him to die, it feels like a piece of my life has come to an end, in a way that just doesn't make sense from any rational connection I might have to the man or his work. I suppose this must be some shadow of what some people felt about Princess Diana or the Queen Mother (neither of which I understood).

RIP Michael Jackson - you brought many people a lot of happiness.

Meme: "Words!"

Via Ren:

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your blog and explain what they mean to you.

My "Word!" from Renegade Evolution:

Fun-loving

Despite suffering from depression, I do celebrate life quite a lot, and I take a fun-loving, irreverent approach to just about everything. If there's a pun or wordplay to be had out of it, I'll probably go there, even when I shouldn't! Good, old-fashioned, Anglo-Saxon filthy humour ("It's not that I have a one-track mind, it's just, all the tracks lead to the same place" ©SnowdropExplodes 2009), a proper engagement in the physicality of life, a willingness to make nonsense and be silly or childish. These are the qualities of my fun-loving nature.

Thoughtful

I don't know whether Ren meant the sense of thoughtfulness as in "considerate of others", or as in "has the tendency to ponder things". Both meanings are kind of covered by the other words she's given me. I certainly think a lot about all sorts of things! But to me, the word always conjures the sense of "thoughtfulness" meaning "considerate", and this is supposed to about what the word means to me. For me, I have struggled with thoughtfulness. Things that seem to come naturally to others about it are hard work for me to spot in human interactions. In a way, thoughtfulness requires me, personally, to think about it quite hard (which makes me thoughtful in the other sense!) so it means a lot to me. I have never wanted to be inconsiderate or to hurt people, but too often found myself doing so without inetnding to do so. So I worked (and work) hard at avoiding and eliminating those inadvertent errors. I still make plenty of them, and have got very good over the years at apologising unreservedly! Developing as a BDSM Top, thoughtfulness has been a key area in which I have grown better - you simply can't afford to be thoughtless or inconsiderate when a loved one (or anyone else, for that matter) is at your mercy.

Introspective

This is another "tendency to ponder" word for me, and yup - it's true. I ponder things. I ponder things about the world around me, and I ponder deeply about things in myself as well. You know that ever-present radfem cry of "examine your desires!"? I'm ALWAYS examining my self in some way or another. That's my introspection at work, I can't help it. Of all the puzzles in this universe that engage me, the puzzle of figuring out my own mind and what goes on there is sometimes the most complex and incomprehensible of all (and yes, I would even occasionally count it above the quest for a Grand Theory of Everything to unite quantum theory and relativity; the conundrum of, "Is there a God?" and all the rest - it's that big of a puzzle to me). I like to claim I know myself, but I usually just mean that I know myself better than a lot of others seem to know themselves.

Introspection, for me, is also about taking the time to be able to express my thoughts and ideas in the best way I can. If I pause while speaking, it's because I'm coming up with the right word, "le mot juste", to express precisely what I mean. If I am quiet, it doesn't always mean that I have no thoughts on a matter: maybe someone else already said what I think; maybe my thoughts aren't yet coalesced into a coherent form; maybe I feel that what I have to say is not actually all that helpful; or maybe I just feel like engaging is not good for me for any of all sorts of reasons. I'm introspective, but equally, will speak when I have something worth saying!

Open

This word means a lot of things to me. Some good, some maybe not so good in some ways. The first meaning I have is simple honesty. I am open in the sense of being honest, if someone asks me things I'll answer truthfully if I can. Iw won't lie, and on one or two things I will close the door, but yes - honesty with people is a big part of my openness.

On the other hand, openness means to me vulnerability - being open to attack. This is also something that is true of me, I find myself emotionally very vulnerable in some ways, and without a doubt I have been hurt sometimes. I take this vulnerability as a necessary price for being open in other ways, and I cannot bring myself to be closed even if it would mean less pain.

Another meaning of being open for me is related to the first. I do not hide who I am, it's all out there (either here or at The Other Place) in one way or another, and I don't shy away from it - the good, the bad and the downright ugly, I share it all. About the only thing I hide is my real name and my exact postal address (and hey, they're not hard to find out either if you know how to look). Heh - maybe for me another synonym for "open" should be "dumb". Like I said already, being open also means to me vulnerability, but I don't know how not to be open sufficiently as to not be vulnerable. It's the biggest problem I have in terms of my desires to be a supervillain with a volcano hideout!

I already spoke about emotional openness in the paragraph on vulnerability. I don't think I am as open as I seem to be emotionally. I will let people get inside my shell, but there's usually another gatekeeper before you get to my heart. After the openness I spoke about in the last paragraph, there's more steps. The thing is, if you get through the barriers, then there is nothing held back. Everything is at your mercy. in that sense, I am totally open. When I love, it is with my whole self; I will bleed when betrayed. My only saving grace is that I heal quickly; but every wound has left its scars. As I said - the price of being open. For me, the only defence is not to love. And if I do that, I lose. Heck, XKCD even has a cartoon for that, too! (the hover-over message is "Wait, no, that one also loses" - also, how many of my readers get the film reference in the cartoon?)

So yeah - openness is a double-edged sword, but I'd rather have it than a shield.

Polite

What can I say? I was brought up proper-like! I have impressed people with my ability to send incredibly polite "fuck you!"s to people in authority. I am a mild-mannered man most of the time, and I am sure people will have noted that I reserve as my highest term of disgust and anger for something, "that is Not Okay". I have a wide range of Anglo-Saxon words in my vocabulary, and use them happily and without shame, but I still come across as polite, because that's the manner I have. I may talk about arse, slut, fuck, shit and all that, but never to insult, demean or anything, so yeah - polite. I think my politeness (as well as having had parents who instilled it in me) comes from the same source as my introspective nature. That same thing of wanting to express myself well means that when I take the time to consider my words, it means I'm dealing with the arguments, and not the rage-y feelings. I put my insults into my arguments as proper arguments; instead of calling someone stupid, I try to prove them so!

Another side to politeness is what might be termed "courtesy" or "etiquette". This goes back to the "thoughtfulness" or "consideraton" that I discussed in the first section. I will hold the door for other people, not out of chivalry or "romantic" notions (which are sexist) but out of a desire to assist others - so men as well as women will be the beneficiaries of my door-holding. As I said in the piece on "thoughtful", I have to think about it, but some of the behaviours are sufficiently in grained in me that I just do them automatically (like door holding). Others, I take some time over. Indeed, it frustrates me sometimes when I see a situation walking on the pavement, and I plot a course through the people ahead of me assuming everyone else is also going to try to minimise the inconvenience to one another, just as I am. And then they just walk on, oblicious to their surroundings so my cleverly plotted route is completely messed up! Not to mention, everyone (including themselves!) ends up taking that much longer to get wherever they're going.

Politeness for me definitely comes from my Christian faith; the love that Christ teaches we should feel for our neighbours has been described as "compassionate concern" for others. It seems to me that this concern for others must require the courtesy of which I speak; it also calls me to be careful of how I speak to or about others. By respecting them (in the Quaker terminology, "That of God in everyone") I serve God. That doesn't mean I should allow them to go unchallenged, if they're misguided or just plain wrong; but it does mean that hurling insults is not acceptable, and if ever I do that, then you'll know that someone somewhere has seriously pissed me off to the point that my self-control has been broken. That takes some doing!

***

Okay, over to you - if you want my words for you, just post a comment!

Guardian cricket columnist likes women's cricket.

As he explains in this article.

My favourite parts:

I cannot say that I was a women's cricket agnostic, but perhaps a reluctance born from uninformed scepticism kept me away. I was familiar with many of the players, mixed with them at functions and so forth, but never had I seen them play. So to watch them perform with such vivacity and skill was an absolute revelation. It seems unfair to single out individuals, but by the end of the tournament, I can say truthfully that in my opinion, Claire Taylor is not only a very fine pugnacious batter but has incredible drive, a cricket brain to die for, and a rounded view of life. Further, I saw no wicketkeeper in either men's or women's tournament to better Sarah Taylor, a wonderfully gifted youngster.

...

Personally I hope it is one in the eye for the naysayers who belittle women's cricket. They don't bowl as fast as men, don't hit it as hard. It is a puerile argument. Of course they don't. Neither does Becky Adlington swim as fast as Michael Phelps, nor Lorena Ochoa hit the ball like Tiger Woods. Venus Williams would not take a game from Roger Federer. Would Victoria Pendleton outsprint Chris Hoy? We do not deride or patronise any of these brilliant females yet women cricketers have been patronised and sneered at. It is all about context.

Finally, I have to second Mr. Selvey's call for the International Cricket Council to pour funding into the women's game in every test-playing nation (and ideally, a lot of other nations as well). The ECB has found a way to make women's cricket at the very least semi-professional, and this has at least partly accounted for the amazing standards reached by England's cricketers in the women's game. The ICC needs to make it possible in the other countries as well.

Racist political party is racist - official!

This is just a quick note to let everyone know that the BNP has been threatened with legal action for breaching the Race Relations Act.

Apparently, the BNP spokesman said: "We were expecting something like this but we are not too bothered. We are quite happy with our position."

Well of course you are, chuckie egg - but that's not really the point, is it? The point is whether the law is happy about your position, and with any luck, it won't be.

Dreaming of Ren

I have just woken up from a very strange dream (the only kind I ever seem to have) that involved Renegade Evolution and me going on what amounted to a road trip together.

We didn't start off together in the dream, but rather we met up on an aeroplane when we were going places for our own reasons, and we recognised each other from our pictures and blogs on the internet, and decided to team up for the trip, which quickly evolved into a tour of the world.

Early on, there was a moment when Ren spoke Mongolian to me, as we were flying over a part of the world that was, if not Mongolia, then close to it. I knew it was Mongolian because in real life a friend of mine once wrote a translation for comic purposes of a song into Mongolian, and I recognised the words as being the same as one of the Mongolian lyrics (these lyrics ave been floating round my head the last couple of days in real life, so I guess it's not surprising they were in the dream somehow). I'm guessing that Ren knew Mongolian in the dream because there's a weird (and, let's face it, probably racist) connection in my brain between the people of Mongolia and the people of Eastern/South-Eastern Europe where I gather part of Ren's family tree originates. Anyway, the fact that i recognised the Mongolian (even though I didn't know what it meant) was a moment of bonding as we flew on in the aeroplane. Which eventually became a high-speed train as we went on to new destinations (in the dream there was then a map of Asia, which looked bizarrely like a map of South East England, showing our continuing travels).

Because the map was somewhat like the map of SE England, there was also a town analogous to Brighton, England in the dream, and spookily, it also had a beach and a pier just like Brighton's. Ren and I decided to visit this on our tour, and when we got there there was a film festival with a big cinema screen suspended from the pier and lots of people on the beach watching. The films being shown were firstly an art-y sex movie shot in black-and-white, then an old black-and-white comedy short, and finally a French and Saunders spoof of the Marquis de Sade. I seem to recall that F&S did actually do such a spoof in a sitcom series about 18th Century French aristocracy, but this was more a spoof of his writings rather than his reputation/lifestyle, so it wasn't the same film as the real one. Although this compilation ought not have lasted longer than a couple of hours, and we'd arrived early in the morning, somehow by the time the last film ended, it was nightfall, and so Ren and I unrolled our sleeping bags and everyone on the beach did the same, and we all tried to find space to sleep on the beach (this suggests that it wasn't a very tidal region!) and settled down. There were some sexual suggestions going on, but nothing actually happened.

At some point in the night as we tried to sleep on the stony beach, it became an enormous meadow by a German autobahn. In the dream, this seemed perfectly logical - one moment in Asia by the sea, the next in the middle of Europe by a big high speed road. Anyway, I was now able to find a comfortable spot by sleeping slightly closer to the road than anyone else, although someone in the dream kicked me a bit and blamed me for being willing to take stupid risks because "what if there's a high-speed crash". Except that there was nothing to protect anyone else from the consequences of the crash!

In the dream, I woke up at about 9am, but everyone else had already had breakfast and now Ren and I were part of some kind of package holiday tour. Everyone was now heading off on a nature walk around the countryside near the meadow where we'd all slept in our sleeping bags. Ren said to me, "I've been awake for 100 minutes already. Too much time is wasted on sleep." and we set off together, observing with bemusement in the dream the antics of the other, "normal", people we were with.

Then a trampled part of grass started to emit a high-pitched whistle or hiss, and even as Ren and I speculated that it was likely to be a venomous snake or something else dangerous, the "normal" people were bending closer to try to get a better look, which Ren and I thought was a surefire way of getting bitten and dying, if it was a snake. Then the tour guide announced that he believed it was a cane toad (which I'm fairly sure aren't found in Germany, and certainly not commonly enough that a nature guide would immediately assume that a non-visible creature might be one!) and there was a brief lecture about what to do if your dog catches one, because of the poisonous skin of the toad.

Then I woke up out of the dream.

At which point I decided that it was weird enough to record and share with my followers (especially Ren, who appears in the dream) and see if any armchair/internet dream analysts want to have a go at explaining what it means?

Killing time until I die

Well, fall asleep anyway. But then, as the Prince of Denmark muses in Billy Shakespeare's play: "to die, to sleep, perchance to dream".

Anyway, this is just kind of a filler post I feel like just typing wha's on my mind without any purpose or collected order or anything really. I'm listening to random shuffle on iTunes, which currently has REM "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" playing. Before that it was Feuer Frei by Rammstein.

Earlier today I was working on a post about what my "type" is the sense of the physical characteristics that I find hawt, and all kinds of analytical stuff to do with that, but my brain refuses to work that deeply right now, so here I am just waffling on.

I have two books on the go that I'm reading right now. one I've almost finished was publised in 1987 by the Women's Press and covers 4 generations and the history from the early working class suffragettes up until the Miners' Strike of 1984, from the point of view of a family with some unusual characteristics (mainly that many of them were lesbians). The book is Caeia March's "The Hide and Seek Files". The other is a fairly standard thriller-type by David Baldacci called "The Collectors". Both of them came from charity shops in the town.

Now the tune playing is The Lonely Shepherd by Gheorghe Zamfir, which is on my iTunes because I bought the soundtrack to Kill Bill vol. 1, in which (if I remember rightly) it forms the backing music to the katana fight between "Back Mamba" and Oren Ishii. It is a haunting piece of music that lent the scene a completely different sense from what might have been expected.

...And following it is one of my favourite anthems, "Great Things" by Echobelly, with the fabulous chorus line: "I wanna do great things, don't wanna compromise, I wanna know what life is, is it something I do to myself?" It was roughly contemporary to Oasis' second album, which I think makes it 1996, and I have strong memories relating to this song, as a defiant cry that I felt as I started at university and (though I didn't know it then) was sinking gradually into another period of depression. I guess my spirit still fought back against it through that music!

Tomorrow I'm going to get my t-shirt printed with my watercolour design for "all the tracks lead to the same place". Last week I bought a couple of plain t-shirts (special offer - 2 for £5) and some sparkly fabric pens to write slogans on them. I haven't yet decided which ones I'm going to choose, I have quite a few! Among the options are "As near as I can figure, I did it with my mind"; "You, my ex-wife, all my therapists - YOU'RE ALL THE SAME" (both of which came from Malcolm in the Middle); "I'm a pacifist - except when you're a fascist" and "If the government could read my mind, they'd ban it". I have to put the shirts through the wash first before the pens will work properly, or so the pens' packaging says. Then I'm going to try to find a job. I've heard that there's literally hundreds of applicants for just about every job advertised these days (bloody credit crunch!) so I don't have much hope, but as ever whenever unemployment rises, it's the people who are out of work get the blame - and the punishments.

I also need to go and pay some rent. I'm very lucky that the letting agency who manage this property are very understanding about difficulties with cashflow; right now, I'm about a week behind (but, oddly enough, catching up - and cashflow is actually quite healthy for once!).

I've got a kind of serious post about the Sims 2 which I've been playing a lot recently (I may or may not get Sims 3 now that it's out) and the way that although gay relationships are cool in Sims 2, poly ones aren't, and how annoying that can be. It's probably old hat for most feminist bloggers, but hey, I only just got around to playing this game!

Recent tracks included "Relax (Take it Easy)" by Mika, and "Love You Like a Reptile" by Motorhead.

Me sleepy am now, me sign off now.

UK citizens: petition on Iranian elections

I submitted a similar petition, but the moderators at the 10 Downing Street website chose this one instead:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to call on the Iranian government to have a re-election.

If we in the West truly stand for democracy and want to see it take root in the Middle East, this is the moment when it matters - when action should be taken. We have a clear and obvious popular resistance, that has had its democratic voice silenced and is still, in the face of government violence, making itself heard. If this is not a time to say, "This is what we stand for", then what is?

"Sexual Healing" Guardian column on "feminist man worried about his subbie GF"

The article is here.

The answer given by the "sexpert" is fairly good, but obviously for reasons of space only covers the very basics of BDSM and feminism overlap. I posted a comment pointing to the SM-feminists blog, and also suggested looking for a local munch as a way to find others who may have their own experiences of such conflicts (and even if there aren't people like that, there will be plenty of help to see how it all works).

Depressing stats on South African rape

In other news tonight, the Guardian reports that 1/4 of South African men admit rape when allowed to answer anonymously.

The story is full of shocking and hideous statistics of that sort.

For instance:

• A report published by the trade union Solidarity earlier this month said that one child is raped in South Africa every three minutes, with 88% of rapes going unreported. It found that levels of child abuse in South Africa are increasing rapidly.
• Only 7% of reported rapes are estimated to lead to a conviction. [NB - and yet, that's still better than Britain's 5.8%...]
• 73% (of those admitting rape) say they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20.
• Any woman raped by a man over the age of 25 has a one in four chance of her attacker being HIV-positive.

Right now I don't know what to say. But I do know that the cult of masculinity is not confined to Africa, but exists in every social class and every race within every developed nation too; and if it leads to rape in South Africa, then it leads to rape in our countries too. That is what is meant by rape culture, and that is what has to be challenged at every turn if rape is ever to become a rarity, let alone eradicated.

It's a rare occasion...

when I have something good to say about Metro newspaper, but today is that rare occasion.

Firstly, for printing a story about homosexual behaviour in the animal kingdom.

The gist of the story is covered by this short segment:

Same-sex coupling in animals is ten per cent - the same proportion suggested in humans. But it is not the same across species.

'Male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between sexes,' added Dr Bailey, of California University.

'But male bottlenose dolphins engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding.'

Homosexuality for group bonding, huh? That's what the Spartans did, too!

(I am sure if I were to suggest that the Miami Dolphins do that, I'd get sued - but I swear American Football is full of homoeroticism!)

Another story - not so laudable in the reporting (but not actually bad, as far as I can see) concerns a Jewish couple suing over automatic lights in their home. This has a great line for those who love bashing "fundamentalist" Christians:

...they are not allowed to turn on lights during the holy period as it violates the Biblical rule against igniting a fire. [on the Sabbath]

My feeling is that the management company should have consulted and asked if anyone had any strong objections before they made the installation, and since they didn't it's really their own fault that they're being sued. While I think the Orthodox Jewish interpretation of the law is a bit odd, there's no way I'd argue the point with the rabbis who developed this ruling, and if this couple believe that it is the way they should behave, then they have indeed been put in an intolerable position. So I am on their side (especially as they already offered a compromise set-up).

Finally, for once they have a cartoon that has a properly feminist message (although the dumb male comment as the punchline weakens the effect): Nemi. This is not the misogynist strip (called "This Life", which was just as bad as usual today) but the other regular comic strip featured. It usually tries to be feminist-ish, but fails miserably; this time it at least gets to the "-ish" part, by highlighting why strict gender roles are really not a good idea for anyone.

I guess this post is really just giving out one of these, but hey, I don't think they were even trying here, and they are good stories.

UK judge: bloggers have "no reasonable expectation of privacy"

In what seems like the latest of a very long line of setbacks for freedom of speech and privacy, Mr Justice Eady has ruled that blogger NightJack, who was a police officer writing on his blog about what actually happens inside the police force, had no reasonable expectation of privacy, due to having published his thoughts on the internet, even though he did so under a pseudonym.

I am actually in two minds about this. Obviously, with some of the things I've written on this blog and at And You Thought I Was Sweet, I have something of a vested interest in wanting to remain anonymous. On the other hand, as I believe I've stated before, I take the view that the moment you start living an online life, that anonymity becomes harder and harder to maintain. I have always assumed that if anyone wanted to find out who I am, then with enough effort they probably could. That's why I haven't been shy about putting face pics on my blog either. Part of it is also that I feel I shouldn't have to be afraid of being found out, and by standing up to that fear, then maybe I can help to change attitudes.

It appears from the comments by NightJack's barrister, that this is precisely what happened for the blogger's identity to be discovered by the Times newspaper. The reporter simply put in enough effort to find out his real identity by legitimate means.

For this reason, the ruling that there is no "reasonable expectation" actually makes sense to me. However, the effect of this ruling is very damaging in other ways, and in fact I think that NightJack argued the case on the wrong principle, which should have been on a public interest case.

Although Eady argued that "I do not accept that it is part of the court's function to protect police officers who are, or think they may be, acting in breach of police disciplinary regulations from coming to the attention of their superiors," it seems to me that it is part of the court's function to prevent people's identities being widely published unless it is in the public interest to do so. I do not know the details of the case, but if a reporter can do the detective work to find out who NightJack was, then it should not be beyond the ability of actual detectives (of whom one would expect to find a fair number working in the Lancashire constabulary!) to be able to find out for themselves if their superiors honestly believed that NightJack's comments required action to prevent his breach of regulations. But for the Times newspaper to publish the information seems to me to be contrary to the public interest. In other words, for Eady to support the privacy of bloggers except in cases of the public interest, does nothing to protect NightJack from his superiors finding out (although it does make it harder for them to find him out) but it does serve the interests of the public at large.

This ruling instead serves as a stifling of public dissent. The only interests it serves are the interests of those in authority who have something to hide about the way they do business, and who wish to escape scrutiny. If the police authorities are such an organisation, then we have aqall got reason to be afraid! This ruling will present a serious barrier to whistleblowers who want to raise awareness of practices that are genuinely against the public interest. Absurdly, it appears that Eady sees it the other way:

Ruling in favour of the right of the press to report details in the public interest, Eady stated his decision was in part informed by "a growing trend towards openness and transparency in such matters".

My thoughts turn to the case of Salam Pax, the famous "Baghdad Blogger", who wrote about the experience of living in Baghdad during the 2003 war, and the build-up to it. Under this ruling, there would have been nothing to prevent Salam Pax's real identity being made known even while Saddam Hussein was still in power, and we can all imagine the consequences of that! I do not want to be deemed guilty of a Godwin breach, nor of a slippery-slope fallacy, so I want to be clear that the reason I make this point is because what is good for freedom elsewhere is often good for freedom here. Bloggers like NightJack are the next generation of investigative journalism, and of journalistic sources. If the press and the law treat them in this way, then freedom, openness and transparency will not be served, but will be eroded.

Random hot night ramblings and stuff.

I have no idea where this post is going, because it is late at night, the weather is still hot and I am tired and not really able to sleep. It's starting with something I watched tonight on BBC iPlayer, apparently it was originally broadcast on Thursday (but I thought it was Friday, so it took me ages to find it when I was actually ready to watch it, but anyway).

A spoof of fantasy-fiction TV series of the Robin Hood/Zena/Hercules/whatever genre, it's called "Kröd Mäldoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire". With Matt Lucas in the "Sheriff of Nottingham"/Evil Overlord role as my initial "main attraction", I soon found some distinctly sex-pos/feminist values in the chief character list on the "goodie" side, too.

In the merrie band, there's a polyamorous pagan warrior woman, for whom Kröd has "emotions". She is strong-willed, owns her own sexuality, and defines her body and the way she uses it on her own terms and no one else's. Kröd has issues with her promiscuity and polyamorous attitudes, and tries (unsuccessfully, obviously) to impose patriarchal norms of a woman's sexual and social place.

In the opening episode, a new member joins the band: the gay lover of Kröd's mentor, General Arcadius (or "Archie" to Bruce, his lover). The General, alas, does not survive, sacrificing himself to save Kröd's life, and because of this, Bruce joins the band.

Slightly less positive are the roles of the sorcerer (POC role - African-American accent, playing on traditional "foreign mystic" vibes; the twist is that the sorcerer is a fake, a simple conjurer) and the "dim fatty" (who is a member of a humanoid slave-race - however, Kröd keeps trying to free his "slave", because of the "PR nightmare" that arises from a freedom-fighter having a slave...)

***

The women continue to show the men how it's done in the Twenty20 Cricket World Cup: in the final 8 stage of each competition, the women have put on far more exciting matches (judging by the scorecard updates) yet they do not receive nearly as much attention or coverage as the men. The England women are earning honours (Charlotte Edwards literally so - awarded the MBE in today's "Birthday Honours" list) while their male counterparts flounder somewhat. The New Zealand women have been sweeping all before them!

***

I've now read through the entire Old Testament, and have started in on the Letters in the New Testament (on the grounds that I'm fairly familiar with the Gospels and Acts already but have never read any of the Letters before).

***

There's all sorts of family type things happening around me - Grim and Squeeze are expecting a second baby; Squeeze is in the second month apparently! Also, my sister and her betrothed have just moved into a new flat together today.

***

I watched one of the worst films ever made last night - seriously, at times it resembled not so much a direct-to-video release as a direct-to-home-movie release. "Grim Weekend" - if you ever have the chance to see it, DON'T!

***

On my BT/Yahoo email account I keep getting advert banners saying "win free laser eye surgery". I really think they should be more careful about stuff like that - I mean, even before the current ban on handguns, to get a firearms licence you had to undergo all kinds of personality tests and stuff. So just giving out free laser eye surgery seems a bit reckless to me. I mean, if I had free laser eyes the world would not be safe, man! And I'm a good guy! Although, just how good would really be put to the test if I got them... I mean, I always had more of an interest in being a Bond-style supervillain, than in being a Bond-style hero.

***

Ren Ev apparently identifies me as one of "the sisters", whom she identifies as "us freak pervs who should put down the hot wax and be responsible womyn". Considering who's making this identification of me, I think this is a high honour indeed. Somehow, I honestly think I identify more with the label "sister" than "brother" anyway (except when it comes to, like, actual blood family relations). I vaguely remember seeing a television documentary about the "Greek System" in US colleges - you know, the fraternities and sororities. Oddly, I felt myself much more drawn to the culture that this documentary identified in sororities than the culture surrounding fraternities. Although ultimately, the whole thing strikes me as being a little bit sordid really. Anyway, so yeah, me more sister than brother? Dunno, but a weird thought I had.

***

I've got about 3 different pieces of music that I need to finish composing/recording, and not sure when I'm going to do so. I really should get on with writing my novel - oddly enough, the bit that has me stuck is the BDSM sex scene, and normally I think I'm quite good at writing BDSM sex scenes in literature form. I'm also struggling to get back to the Midnight Isles tales. I have a long story arc planned out in my head, with several of the tales on that arc already sketched out, but getting the chronology filled in so that I can have the right details fitted in is giving me headaches. Still, I have until I'm about 70 to finish it so there's no rush. There's also the ukulele concerto for which I have the 2nd movement, and most of the first movement, but only the vaguest of themes for the 3rd movement; I also have done very little work on the dynamics for the first movement so far. Ideally, I would have about three or four different lifetimes to do all this stuff in!

"There are so many things I could have been, if I could only choose between them..."

(Oh crap, that's actually a lyric from another song I haven't finished writing!)

***

Hmm, it seems my tiredness is reaching the "maudlin" stage, and I think that should be my cue to head to bed before it gets any worse. I've dumped the contents of my mind in this post, almost like a landfill of the soul; now all you gannets can swoop down and see if you can find something worth commenting on in amongst the refuse!

A Poverty-Sink Theory of Capitalism

[I introduce several terms here; as well as defining what I mean in the text, I have added a brief summary as a glossary at the bottom of this post]

As a child, one thing about economics always puzzled me, and that was how you could possibly make a profit and everyone be able to live. In my youthful ignorance, I was unaware of inflation, Marx's theory of surplus value, of production lines or any other systems that might have revealed the source of my confusion. I simply approached the matter with a basic question:

If an employee makes a product and is paid £40 for making it, but the product is sold at £50, then the employee can't afford that product. So there must be someone who is making a product that is sold at £40 (or less) that that person can buy. But that person is presumably paid less than that - let's say £30. So what does this person buy? It must be a cheaper product, made by someone earning still less (let's say £20). But what happens when we get to the last person in the chain, someone who is paid only £0.01p to make the very cheapest product? That person can't afford to buy anything! So how does profit happen, and how do people not starve because of it?

As I said, I didn't know at the time that prices and wages are not static, but tend to increase over time (inflation). I didn't know about Marx's explanation that a worker is not paid for the item she makes, but is paid for her time (and therefore produces more than she is paid for producing). I didn't know about production lines, whereby no individual is responsible for the creation of a finished article but only one step in the process of making that product. And yet, the central question still remains: how can profit be made without leaving some sections of society in poverty?

That this is indeed a problem should be self-evident from the fact that, if the British or US minimum wage were made globally applicable, then the economy would grind to a halt - or else, inflation would quickly make it irrelevant as many products considered to be "essential" for life in the West would suddenly become massively more expensive to produce. Since wages form a part of the cost of production, if wages increase to meet the minimum wage, then the cost of production also increases. This is the standard argument against applying a minimum wage in the West. The minimum wage in the US or Britain can be as much as 25 times that of countries where our goods are produced. Either profits would disappear, or prices would have to go up.

At this point, I am sure that the objection occurs that, in terms of cost of living, the minimum wage of $6.55 per hour in the USA would go a lot further in, say, India, than it does in the USA itself. Indeed, 2/3 of Indians live on less than $2 a day and in rural areas that is adequate to cover basic needs (source: Brian Palmer, "Slate"). However, the same source also notes that in urban (i.e. more capitalist-involved) settings, the same wage would barely cover the living costs of a slum dwelling.

The key to understanding this is that those items considered "essential" by families in the West are not present in the lives of our Indian urban worker or rural family. Poverty is defined differently in different nations, because of different considerations about needs and relative value. As Friedrich Engels demonstrated in 1881, "a fair day's wages for a fair day's work" translates under capitalist economics as "the sum required to procure to the labourer the means of existence necessary, according to the standard of life of his station and his country, to keep himself in working order and to propagate his race." (The Labour Standard, 7 May 1881).

If there is no appreciable difference in the cost of producing the basic needs of food, water and shelter, between one place and another, why should one place have so much higher costs of living? Indeed, in countries in Africa or tropical Asia, it could easily be argued that the costs of producing food and water would be higher, and that housing of an equal standard would cost the same to produce - so the cost of living should be higher in these economies, and not lower! What, then, makes the difference to the cost of "standard of life of his station and country" and "keeping himself in working order"? Do the nutritional requirements of a human being change when he moves from one part of the world to another? Surely not! And a person doing the same level of job would not have any change in his or her station in life. So that means that the difference can only be in the "standard of life of his... country". Why would the standard of life differ from one country to another? It can only be because standrads that are considered essential in one country are not considered essential in another; that is, they appear as luxury rather than necessary items. In extreme cases this can lead to deaths, since an earthquake in Los Angeles might kill only a few hundred, while a similar force earthquake in the third world might kill thousands.

So, what happens if those Indians received the US minimum wage? What if they started buying the products that Westerners rely on? Economic theory involves the "law of supply and demand", which says that when demand is high, or supply is low, prices rise. If "third world" workers had the buying power to access products the way Westerners do, then demand would rise. Prices would rise accordingly, businesses would presumably seek to hire new workers to make the new products to meet the demand. However, other businesses in the West would find, due to the massively increased cost of the other "essential" items, that they are now deprived of customers with the spare income to buy their products. Capitalism would begin to stagnate as rising costs of production deprive some companies of their profit margins, while others are deprived of customers.

This demonstrates that capitalism requires that there be at the very least a relative poverty gap (by which I mean the condition that items that are deemed essential in one economy are seen as luxuries in another economy, giving rise to a difference in the "cost of living"). There must be a difference in the levels of "demand capacity" (that is, the ability to acquire and consume goods) between one economy and the other, and there must be a difference in wages that can be exploited to produce profit.

The (artificial) "cost of living" gap is the driving force in the engine of capitalism, just as the potential difference between the negative and positive electrodes of a battery is the driving force of electrical current. But where current flows from high potential to low potential, in capitalism wealth flows from the low cost-of-living terminal to the higher cost-of-living terminal. This is demonstrated not only in the continued existence of the cost-of-living gap, but in the fact that the means of living involve more wealth encapsulated in material possessions and usage (what Marx termed "frozen capital"); it is also indicated by the fact that within the consuming economy, there are ever-higher tiers of consumers. {possibly mention surplus value here relating point to it}

Marx's theory of surplus value (which I mentioned at the start of this essay) also relates to this phenomenon. The workers will be paid only for their cost of living - as Engels wrote, "to keep himself in working order and to propagate his race." The produce of their labour may represent far more wealth than that which they are paid. (That's why sometimes, in contradiction to my childhood question, it is still possible for a worker to buy the thing he produces - but he and his fellow workers can never buy all of what is produced.) As long as there is an economy where those products can be sold, then that is translated as profit. The cost of living gap makes this difference greater, and also makes it easier to sell the items produced, thus guaranteeing the surplus value being converted into profit.

I speak in this essay of two different economies as part of the capitalist system; these can be described as a "generating economy" and a "consuming economy", where a "generating economy" is an economy where goods are being produced for sale elsewhere and a "consuming economy" is an economy where those goods are being bought. This is because within the capitalist system, although the engine of capitalism is dependent upon the existence of poverty, must also be insulated from it. In the same way that an internal combustion engine requires and produces heat in order to function, but must at the same time be protected from the effects of that heat by a radiator that takes the heat away from the engine. In computer engineering, too, to prevent the system from overheating, a fan or other ventilation system must be used to keep the processor cool. This is called a "heatsink". Some engineering systems produce heat sufficiently slowly that it can radiate away without the need for special assistance, but it is a universal fact about mechanical systems that heat is produced and is generally antithetical to the system's operation (this is the law of entropy). In capitalist economics, poverty is heat to the capitalist engine. Thus, the supply economy must be kept separate and be used as a "dump" for as much of poverty as is possible. It is, in effect, a "poverty-sink". (NB: In terms of the electrical current analogy used above, the heatsink/poverty-sink is the equivalent of an earth lead).

The poverty-sink works by ensuring that low demand capacity is prevented from feeding back into the consuming economy, where it will disrupt the ability of the capitalist to sell his or her commodities. This would be as if, instead of raising the minimum wage in the third world, wages were cut in the West to match those of India. People would no longer be able to afford items previously considered essential, demand capacity would fall and the capitalist engine would seize up. Instead, the tendency of capitalism (especially, but not solely, free-market capitalism) to drive wages to the lowest possible value (that is, to the definition provided by Engels, again) is displaced towards an economy outside of the consuming economy. By finding economies with ever-lower perceived cost of living, capitalism can continue to push wages down further without endangering the market in which products are sold for profit.

In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot demonstrated precisely this mechanism at work in the past 300 years of British colonial rule:

The social unrest that might have transformed our politics was instead outsourced to our colonies and unwilling trading partners. The rebellions in Ireland, India, China, the Caribbean, Egypt, South Africa, Malaya, Kenya, Iran and other places we subjugated were the price of political peace in Britain. After decolonisation, our plunder of other nations was sustained by the banks. Now, for the first time in three centuries, they can no longer deliver, and we must at last confront our problems.

There will probably never be a full account of the robbery this country organised, but there are a few snapshots. In his book Capitalism and Colonial Production, Hamza Alavi estimates that the resource flow from India to Britain between 1793 and 1803 was in the order of £2m a year, the equivalent of many billions today. The economic drain from India, he notes, "has not only been a major factor in India's impoverishment … it has also been a very significant factor in the industrial revolution in Britain".

If a car engine is allowed to overheat, eventually it will break down. Can a similar phenomenon be observed in the way that capitalism works? We have seen that if poverty ceases to exist, then the flow of capital ceases. If poverty is allowed to feed back or build up in a capitalist economy, does it lead to a breakdown in that economy?

As demonstrated above, if costs rise in the consuming economy so that the basics of life consume more of the consumers' income than usual, then it leads to a stagnation and collapse of the capitalist system. Similarly, if income levels fall so that no more than the basics of life can be afforded, then the same thing happens. This is a case of poverty building up in the engine of capitalism and causing the engine to break down.

In recent times, the most dramatic example of poverty feeding back into the capitalist system has been the "sub-prime mortgage" credit-crunch. Effectively, the sub-prime mortgages fed the existence of poverty straight into the heart of the US banking system, with predictable results. On a standard British three-pin plug, it was like wiring the earth cable straight to the live pin!

Because sub-prime mortgages were marketed to the people at the bottom of the financial ladder within the USA, and promised "essentials" that those people could not actually afford, this was the same effect as creating negative demand capacity. Not only that, but it fed that negative capacity directly into the economic system. Because future payments were being treated as already existing capital, when those payments failed to appear (the equivalent of making a product and then finding no one can afford to buy it) the poverty that is normally sent elsewhere was now right at the heart of the system. Instead of having a radiator fitted to their car engine, the US banks had instead fitted a 3-bar electric heater. It was just a matter of time until the pistons seized up.

In all of the examples of capitalist crises in history, the cost-of-living gap has never been fully closed. Very often, the solutions to the major crises have involved opening up a new poverty-sink by introducing wage-capitalism to a new society, thus creating a new "generating economy", and enabling the recruiting of a previous generating economy as a consuming economy instead. The need to develop more consuming economies, and the role of demand in the poverty-sink theory, is a separate issue about capitalism that I will need to discuss at another time.

Some people talk about mitigating the harmful effects of capitalism by some form of regulation, control or "balance". However, no amount of regulation can rid capitalism of the need to keep one population in relative poverty compared to another, and by association, capitalism's dependence upon the relative disempowerment of that population with respect to the other.

***

Glossary

Cost of living gap - the apparent difference between one economy and another of the cost of basic necessities; this difference is produced by having one economy's culture hold more (and more expensive) things as "necessary".

Demand capacity - the ability to acquire and use items (beyond the basic necessities of "cost of living").

Generating economy - an economy where goods are being produced for sale elsewhere (e.g. where sugar cane is grown for sale in the West, instead of growing food for one's own consumption)

Consuming economy - an economy where goods produced elsewhere are consumed. This is not the same as having a trade deficit, since the sale value of goods exported from a consuming economy may be greater than the purchase value of imported goods, while imported goods are actually greater. This effect is a product of the cost of living gap.

Job Titles from "The Other Side"!

Going through the job papers this morning, I noticed two adverts from Tunbridge Wells Borough Council that seemed to me to confirm that we are, indeed, heading towards Stalinist Britain.

The first job title was:

Street Scene Enforcement Officer

...

I dunno about you guys, but to me this conjures images of forcing people at gunpoint to perform Broadway musical song-and-dance routines!

(The first one that uses "Jazz Hands", is sent to SIBERIA!!!)

But that was nothing compared to the implications of...

Graffiti Hit Squad Operative

!!!

I mean, alright, some of the lewd drawings or mindless tags are a bit annoying, but gunning down the artists!!?? Jeez, TWBC don't fuck about when they want to clean up their town! And the advert says you'll be working with dangerous dogs as well... I mean, shit, I am never even going to THINK about BUYING a spraycan in Tunbridge Wells after seeing that advert!

***

NB Actual job descriptions may differ from those imagined by SnowdropExplodes

Charting the Issues of SM - really?

This is a response to some of the ideas in an essay written by Claudia Card, which forms a chapter in a book called Lesbian Choices. The chapter is called "Consensual Sadomasochism - Charting the Issues". I was made aware of this when TrinityVA posted about it at SM-feminists.

Obviously, not being a lesbian myself, I am not the direct subject of this writing. However, the terms in which Ms Card constructs her arguments are for the most part completely gender-neutral, and we may assume can be applied equally to heterosexual as well as lesbian relationships (it feels harder to know whether gay relationships can be approached in the same way, but I would hazard that they can; the essay only touches very briefly on gay relationships compared to the attention given to lesbian and straight relationships).

I am not going to touch on every point I found questionable, but pick out (if I can) the main threads that I found to be flawed.

Ms Card starts by saying that masochism is confusing, but sadism is "ethically more troubling". She concedes that modern SM "...refers to a contractual relationship between two (or more) parties." She also defines her terms of reference thus:

"Sadomasochism" in this chapter refers to certain pleasures of erotic or sexual desire and erotic or sexual behavior, not to general hostility or self-destructiveness. I have elected to treat lesbian sadomasochism not as an example of horizontal hostility but as a puzzling set of practices whose participants generally wish each other well and respect each other's choices.

This far, I have no quarrel with these statements of simple definitions of terms (one or two other passages, including a quoted passage, felt to me to be somewhat questionable). I suppose I might take exception to SM being described as "puzzling" (after all, some people might describe lesbianism itself as "puzzling", and I am sure lesbians would object to that quite vociferously) but other than that I have no particular challenges to make. If we accept these terms of reference, then, where does that lead?

Well, it immediately answers Ms Card's very next sentence after the passage quoted above: "It is a matter of concern, however, that the only things distinguishing the behavior of an S from battery and other abuse may be the motivations of the parties and the consent of the M." (NB - S here and in all quoted passages from the essay refers to Sadist, and M to Masochist; not, as is the usual custom in BDSM culture, to "Slave" and "Master/Mistress")

The answer is given by this element of Ms Card's definition: "participants generally wish each other well." While at first glance, that looks like "motivations of the parties", I think it carries key differences for the manner in which activities are carried out. When the intention is to cause harm, control is much less required, and this is evident in a person's behaviour. Similarly, when there is an imperative from one's own desires, not to cause harm, control and care are required and must be exhibited in the ways in which activities are carried out. While to outside observers, the activities might look the same, that does not mean that either participant conducts hirself in the same way as they would in a situation of battery or assault.

Ms Card provides an incomplete discussion of masochism, looking first at the endorphin theory of pleasure-from-pain, and then looking at the "service-sub" theory of masochism (which to my mind is not masochism, but part of submission). Not mentioned are the "endurance" theory (e.g. "hey, I survived that, yay me!") or the sense-stimulation theory (e.g. "feeling pain proves I'm alive, maaan!") or any of the other explanations that various masochists have expounded over the years. My only real problem with this is the incompleteness of the analysis, but an interesting discussion of "higher' and "lower" level desires to explain how pain or humiliation can also be desired is presented:

Wanting to be humiliated or violated in ways that do not involve physical pain can be understood analogously to desiring pain. To value being humiliated is to value (higher order) a thwarting of one's (relatively lower order) self-esteem. To choose to be violated is a higher order choice to allow certain of one's lower order choices to be violated or to allow certain of one's boundaries to be crossed without one's lower order consent.

A sadomasochistic sexual contract expresses higher order choices. Mutually agreed upon "safe words" (to be discussed more below) used by an M to signal an S to stop or cease escalating activity, make possible further higher order choices. So understood, masochism is conceptually no more paradoxical than legislation or the idea of a social contract.

Which is all very nice and neatly wraps up Ms Card's "confusion", but feels a bit cold compared to what I actually experience when enjoying pain.

Ms Card spends most of her essay on discussing sadism, and why really, honesty, it is wrong, honest!

She starts by asking, "How can it be right to cause unnecessary suffering deliberately? The fact that someone is unnecessarily being made to suffer creates a presumption that the person is being wronged." Generally, I would like for the person themselves to determine whether or not they feel "wronged", and in what sense, and by whom. Again, the term "unnecessarily" seems to be slightly loaded. For those who are "orientationally" masochist, the "suffering" is entirely necessary to the desired aim of sexual pleasure! Even for the non-orientational masochist, for certain types of pleasure, certain types of stimulus are "necessary". While we might argue that the desired outcome is "unnecessary", by this point in the discussion we have drifted away from the rightness or wrongness of the sadist's actions, and into the rightness or wrongness of the masochist's desired objectives.

There follows a short discussion of the "service top" role within BDSM (although it is not identified as such), and even here Ms Card offers no succour: "...the sadist is not off the hook simply by claiming that she aims only to please. Her aim to cause suffering is no more incidental to her aim to please than the masochist's aim to submit to suffering is incidental to hers."

After this, Ms Card starts to blur her definitions, and starts bringing in the realm of power, rather than pain, as a motivating force. As good BDSMers know, D/s and SM are two different dimensions. However, Ms Card makes it clear that she is talking about bondage rather than D/s (but again, bondage is another dimension distinct from D/s or SM).

To start with, we are given a definition of terms concerning two different ways of using the word "power":

"Power" is ambiguous between a more general sense and a narrower sense. For evaluating the sadism of sadomasochism, it matters what happens with power in each of these senses. In the most abstract sense, power is potency, the ability to act. "Energy" and "vitality" are near synonyms of "power" in this sense. In a narrower sense, power refers to "control," the more specific abilities to determine or check the flow of energy or to determine its direction toward various goals.

The discussion that follows this definition of terms is frustrating, however, because it becomes rather mechanical.

Abdication of lower level choice by an M need not be disempowering. Carrying out another's orders may require considerable energy. However, some classic activities of sadomasochism, such as bondage, do curb agency, not simply control, at least temporarily. Being tied and gagged with a hood over one's head severely impedes communication.

While this refers to physical power, it ignores the "near synonyms" mentioned above; the experience of being restrained or subjected to sensory deprivation (e.g. a blindfold) can stimulate the senses and can be experienced as energising and invigorating; while physical power may be lost, one's sense of one's own power on a mental or even spiritual level can be enhanced. One reason it feels good can be because of that ethereal power sensation.

Because the S is supposed to submit to the M's safe words, and because the M often writes the script, some maintain that the M has more power. However, that is not obvious, either. Who can best protect herself when things go wrong? When the other party, through anger, frustration, or ineptitude, violates the contract? Aside from withholding information, who is in the best position to violate it?

This is one of the most frustrating elements of Ms Card's piece, because it carries the tacit assumption that only strangers play and SM/bondage games. The golden thread of trust is completely absent from this line of questioning. Ms Card continues to reason, "Where a particular kind of sadomasochistic activity diminishes a lesbian M's agency, placing her at the mercy of the S's scruples and competence, the exchange is critically unequal", as though there are no other circumstances in which it might be the case that one puts oneself at the mercy of another's "scruples and competence". Instantly springing to mind are things like rock climbing, diving, parachuting... I am sure my readers can come up with their own suggestions of leisure activities that involve risk of a similar nature. Perhaps, then, Ms Card believes the key element is "scruples", because after all, causing suffering is the pleasurable element for a sadist, so might not a sadist be tempted to continue even when a safeword has been used? And indeed, we see that Ms Card does indeed doubt the safeword's effectiveness: "As long as a lesbian M can rely on the safe word convention, she has its power at her disposal. But what makes that convention reliable? What power backs it?"

In her discussion on this matter, she writes, "The usual response of lesbian sadomasochists has been that an S who does not respect an M's limits soon finds herself partnerless (which may be cold comfort to an individual M)." and goes on to reason that this provides scant protection to the individual masochist, but provides some collective protection to masochists in general. This is a misleading and heavily economics-based argument, it seems to me. It ignores that one cannot easily replace one masochist with another. That BDSM is about relationships between loving individuals, for the most part.

Thus, we can understand that what makes the safeword convention reliable in most cases is that the sadist does not want to cause harm to someone zie loves or has a powerfully bonded relationship with. As the Doctor says in the episode Battlefield, "Exotic alien swords are easy to come by; Aces are few and far between." ("Ace" being the name of his travelling companion in that episode). Ultimately, this is no different from the reason that people trust lovers in non-SM relationships, and taken to its logical conclusion, Ms Card's argument could equally apply to non-SM relationships. They trust them because they believe that the shared emotions are strong enough to prevent impulses that would cause them harm. As in vanilla life, there are a few who do not behave in this way, but in both vanilla and SM life, they are called psychopaths; the thing about BDSM is that we tend to be much more alert to the risks involved. It is normal to take one's time before submitting oneself to the mercy of another.

Ms Card's final section deals with what she calls "social consequences". It starts with a very questionable statement, which I present here with my immediate reaction:

From a contract to undergo surgery, the expected consequence is the patient's improved health (and a sizeable fee for the surgeon). The expected consequences of sadomasochism, however, other than sexual pleasure, are a subject of much dispute. - But... why should there be assumed to be any other consequences!?

Ms Card's analysis instead looks at two competing, and inaccurate (or incomplete), models to assess these putative other "expected consequences". These are the "catharsis" and "addiction" models.

On the catharsis view, sadomasochistic desires are thought to have sources external to the sadomasochistic drama itself--for example, in mistreatment suffered or witnessed involuntarily by the agent early in life--and sadomasochistic play is said to be a way to get rid of hostility safely.

While it is true that some people engage in SM play for cathartic reasons, it is neither true that all SM practitioners have suffered abuse or trauma in the past, nor that all those SM practitioners who have suffered such trauma participate in SM for those reasons. BDSM folks tend to be very aware of their own backgrounds, often more so than comparable folks not into BDSM; the constant barrage of demands to "examine" mean that many of us already have some understanding of where it all comes from, at least for our own personal instance. Furthermore, it is self-evidently not true that all victims of trauma or abuse end up as SM practitioners or similar.

The addiction hypothesis, on the contrary, holds that sadomasochistic play itself gives rise to sadomasochistic desires, intensifying those enacted with a frightening potential to reinforce real hostility.

This is such an absurd claim. The suggestion appears to be that any sexual practice outside the norm could be an "addiction" that could somehow spill over into everyday life. While the brain chemical dopamine is in fact associated both with sex and with addiction, and while there are indeed some people who are termed "sex addicts", there is no correlation of sex addiction with deviant sexualities, and there is no wild spate of BDSM-inspired crimes - although those crimes that do happen are widely reported, they are few and far between; most sexual crimes are far more prosaic (if such a word could legitimately be used about rape!) The BDSM serial killer is far more a character from fiction than he (it is almost always a he, though there are female BDSM killers in fiction as well) is in real life.

The cathartic view may be valid for a small subsection of the BDSM community; the addiction model to almost none (where it appears to be valid seems to be only when attempted suppression of deep-rooted desires causes a pathological psychic structure to form, leading to compulsive and destructive behaviours). Various models to explain where BDSM "comes from" work for various groups of people within BDSM, but no one explanation can cover the whole of BDSM.

Ms Card continues:

Thinking of sadomasochism as a sexual preference suggests the liberal view that participants have only the responsibility not to visit unwanted harm on others, that the exercise of their preferences is otherwise a matter of individual liberty, nothing for others to be concerned about, as long as participants are consenting adults acting in private. Thus the liberal view encourages a nonjudgmental attitude or toleration within limits. It also assumes that participants can keep from visiting unwanted harm on others, an assumption that seems unwarranted as long as the sources of such desires are not understood.

Assumption, you say? Perhaps it is more of the order of an observed fact! This statement by Ms Card is a completely dishonest presentation of sadomasochism (and sadism in particular in the BDSM culture), deliberately casting doubt upon the self-control of people purely because their sexuality differs from the norm. Ms Card claims, "I have not participated in sadomasochist culture. My knowledge of it comes from participants' writings." If this is true, then she would surely know that there is a clear, qualitative, difference in the minds of sadists between the willing partner and the unwilling victim. They are simply not alike in terms of a sadist's pleasure. Only to the small subcategory of criminal, psychopathic, sadists is the distinction lacking. Ms Card's argument depends upon denying to sadomasochists the same socialisation and controls that other human beings share - that is, to a certain degree, it relies upon denying our humanity.

Ms Card's final criticism of BDSM is that it somehow makes participants more politically pliable or willing to accept subjugation. From her "addiction view", she ponders, "Will they find themselves enjoying real domination or subordination in oppressive societies, domination and subordination without consent? Will sadomasochistic play foster make-believe with respect to real power imbalances and oppression, encouraging indulgence of the fantasy that the power of others is held by consent of the dominated?" Later, quoting an argument from Sarah Hoagland, she writes, "[sadomasochism is] an irresponsible illusion whereby we get to play at having power over each other instead of seeking the real political power needed to end oppression. If [Hoagland] is right, sadomasochism can sublimate desires for real political power."

To me, this almost seems like clutching at straws to say, "SM must be bad for people somehow, and I've tried everything else!" Certainly, it bears no relationship to what I find as the political aspirations and attitudes of kinky folks of my acquaintance.

Firstly, I think we should observe that the majority of folks in the 'nilla world are not particularly politically active. For sure there are plenty who are, but as a percentage it's quite small. I don't think there is any difference in that regard between BDSM and non-BDSM folks. But most of the politically motivated BDSM folks I know are libertarian of one sort or another. Whether expressed as leftwing or rightwing, concepts of freedom, informed consent and choice are the key elements of BDSM values that spill out into their political lives; if anything, BDSM energises and activates people's desire to fight oppression wherever it is found.