It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

Representation matters.  It matters to me and, I'm gradually proving in my doctoral research, it matters an enormous amount for a complex collection of reasons to a lot of other people too.

In itself 'representation matters' will seem fairly uncontroversial to my mostly leftie readers.  But some left leaning, centre left, centre types, will agree it matters, pay lip service to that idea, support it in principle, not put any road blocks in the way to things changing, but the moment you point out that diversity of representation is missing? They get pissed off.  The moment you ask why people are missing in the representations they make? They get angry, they ask why it makes any difference.

I complained aloud, to nobody in particular, the other day that every single chef shown in the Morrisons' Christmas claymation/animated advert was white and male.  "Does it matter?!" exclaimed my Mum as she passed through the living room, more than a little exasperated.

Does it matter who is shown on tv? Let's, for a minute, say it doesn't.  Let's start by stating it doesn't matter who is represented in television adverts.

If it doesn't matter, why did the animator create 11 little white male chefs? Wouldn't it have been as easy, given the characters differ slightly from one another, to have made some of them female? Surely the computer filled in their skin colour? It would have been just as easy, would it not, to colour some of them in a darker shade of peach? Perhaps even break out the brown colour palette?  If it doesn't matter whether they are white or black, male or female or genderqueer, then why are they all white and male?  Someone made that decision, someone designed that, someone animated that, someone signed off on that.  Lot's of someone's.  All of them.  

But perhaps the animator could only find the peach felt tip that day.  Perhaps the character designer can't draw long hair, or boobs.  Perhaps they don't know how to illustrate any gender markers for women, or for anyone other than men.

Tesco's Christmas advert this year compressed decades of Christmases observed by one family into a minute and a half.  Parents, children, grandchildren.  Tesco's don't feature their products in their advert like Morrisons do, instead they seem to say 'if you share the same emotions around Christmas as these people, maybe you should share a supermarket. Come to Tesco and buy a lifetime's Christmases!'  But the Christmas you have to share, the identification of 'just like us' to make?  All [apparently] white, all [rigorously shown to be] heterosexual.  But of course, we're arguing the representation doesn't matter right? So what we're buying from Tesco is not just Christmas cheer and food and drink and trees, but we're buying being white, and we're buying making our parents happy by having children ourselves (or our children are making us happy by having children). And we're buying being straight.  Come to Tesco this year! Get a better sexuality! Get a better turkey! Get a better ethnicity!

Someone hired those actors.  Every person was dressed and directed.  That advert was scripted and edited. There were choices made about what to represent.  

But perhaps it's a coincidence!  Perhaps only white actors turned up for an audition that day.  Perhaps the people who wrote the script have never met a gay or lesbian person, or a genderqueer or nonbinary or just plain androgynous person, so they couldn't even imagine that couples may not be made up of rigidly gendered men and women!  Perhaps they 'wrote what they knew' and not a single person involved in the casting, costuming, producing, filming, directing, editing, or release of that advert was anything other than straight and white and cis with only white straight cis friends.

Aldi managed to find one black person to put in their Christmas ad. And a parrot.  They don't say much about family, or sexuality.  John Lewis also went for animals (although in previous years they've been lovers of the white hetero, rigidly normatively gendered family at Christmas) Asda had snowmen. No, I'm not going to suggest they should have been snow people.  Debenhams' had what might have been a lesbian ball, but it was the girl and the guy gazing into each other's eyes and skating off together that we 'wished for'. M&S had a bad trip but they have at least been consistent for some years now in using Black and minority ethnic models in every advertising campaign, even if they do, inevitably, play the small roles in this ad.

If who is represented on television adverts doesn't matter, why is it, so often it's white, hetero, cis gendered people being represented? It's either an enormous coincidence that this keeps happening or perhaps...

Perhaps, then, representation does matter! [the unsurprising conclusion - aha! here it is].  And perhaps it matters to the people who get to pick which representations we see, who pick which ideals we are supposed to buy into.  Perhaps we should be surprised that in 2013, in the United Kingdom most of the major brands are still dreaming of white, straight, cis Christmases.

Unfortunately, my Mum didn't hang around long enough for me to give her this answer to her exasperated question.

 There was a show on channel 4 tonight and I have more thoughts about it than I expected - particularly as I'd resolved not to watch based on the adverts - and certainly more than fit on twitter.

My main objection is to the basic premise of the show; disclosing a mental health problem to colleagues.  I'm not a big believer of mixing home life with work life.  I think they *do* mix, but you shouldn't push it to.  The biggest question is why; why open up a private matter to the scrutiny of colleagues - people who are frequently not people you would be friends with or even come into contact with outside of work.

The stated aim of the show is to breakdown stigma by asking people to do this.  I disagree that this is the way to break stigma.  I'm not sure the natural response to receiving this information is to go "oh, huh, now I will revise my views about what having a mental health problem means" it is to say "how should I relate to this person from now on?" and, later, it will result in the actions of the discloser being judged through the lens of the symptoms of the condition they've disclosed.  

I know what it means to have a disorder on the bipolar spectrum but if a colleague told me they were bipolar - by way of an announcement to all and sundry and not in confidence/as a friend - I guarantee I would begin to privately interpret their behaviour in relation to my knowledge of bipolar symptoms.  I know that at certain times of my mood cycle it's possible to really clearly identify something is 'off' about me but I would much rather people think I'm being annoying/loud or a 'moody cow' and treat me as such for two reasons. 1) trying to hide it and being forced to deal with negativity from colleagues pushes me to do everything I can to behave 'normally' which helps me keep myself together.  2) Sympathy smiles/understanding/sickly sweet fake responses to me being an arse is patronising and harms relations between colleagues - nobody enjoys making special allowances for people.

By way of comparison of what we're talking about here; there are many invisible illnesses which affect people's day-to-day lives.  Do we need to know about them? Is it relevant to know that your colleague has IBS? It may affect how they behave (time away from desk) and cause higher than normal levels of abseentism. A friend of mine has childhood onset diabetes, she tells me she gets a lot of crap from people who think they know better than her what she can and can't eat/feel it is within their rights to lecture her on what she eats and when. That's diabetes, something that is relevant to share with colleagues in case of medical emergencies.

This is what it comes down to; take away the stigma and you're left with arrogance.  One piece of personal information leads so many people believe they not only know *everything* about your illness or disability, but that they can and should tell you how to deal with it and inform you of how you are going wrong.

I think the show left me mostly feeling a bit judged; "you want stigma to end? Tell your colleagues your medical history, or shut up complaining".  Well actually, hai, I want my personal life to be personal in all the places I choose.  I don't want knowing nods and patronising smiles just because I, like everyone else does, am having a grumpy Monday.

Cyclothymia is not a gift.  It is not a tool that allows me to see the world as it 'really' is.  It is not something that should be nurtured or cultivated.  

Years back, when I was tentatively living with a diagnosis of depression I met a girl who told me we were special - that we saw the world more clearly, lived more honestly and thought more deeply.  I was 17, she was 19, and I believed her.  We sat, watched our classmates and we pitied their naivety.  A year on from this, I was on my third anti-depressant at a much higher dose than either of the first two, I'd taken my first overdose and I was merrily cutting my arms to ribbons every night.  She was voluntarily in psychiatric hospital for an indefinite stay.  Our classmates? They were happily, 'naively' getting on with their lives.  

There is no secret to see, there is no truth to discover, there is just living your life and you get to do that the hard way or the easy way - your choice.

There can be advantages to living with cyclothymia - highs which breed productivity, confidence and inspiration are certainly enviable.  But given that thousands - nay, millions - of people get through their lives without such chemically unbalanced highs and still manage to create works of great beauty I suspect that I could live without them.  Indeed, those same millions feel quite satisfied with a life which does not include manic highs - a relatively small proportion of them seek out artificial means to create those moments of pure ecstasy and confidence; cocaine is popular, but it's not every-single-person-in-the-world-popular.

I am accepting of my brain chemistry - it is counter productive to be anything else - so I make allowances in my life to cope with mood swings which I choose not to control with medication.  I am not being sold a lie by the psychiatric profession - you probably aren't either - I know this to be true primarily because I got a diagnosis and a suggested treatment regimen after I sought out help for the unbearable mental unease I found myself experiencing.  Unless you were forcibly hospitalised and medicated by court order it is unlikely that you fall into the camp of the maliciously medicalised outsider - indeed even if you were forcibly hospitalised and medicated, that is still no guarantee that going without medical intervention at that point in your life would have resulted in brilliance, creativity and continued existence.  In fact, it tends to result in death. 

Increasingly I believe that mental illness is less delineated than the discourses of medicine and society would have us believe - we are all born with a genetic code which will determine our brain chemistry and whilst substances can alter that chemistry both temporarily and permanently there is a degree of pre determination.  Life experiences and situations leave two people with the same brain chemical balances in different positions - one might work in an office and take anti depressants and be in and out of hospital whilst the other lives a life which permits great periods of inactivity without loss of earnings - as a writer or musician perhaps - or lives in a close and well developed social group where a style of communication as open and honest as therapy is typical can help them through bad periods without turning to outside agencies.  The second hypothetical person here may never come into contact with a mental health professional - is their depression any less real than the first person? No.  Is the decision of the first person not to dedicate their life to 'cultivating' their depression in order to avoid reliance on pharmaceuticals and allow for a realisation of the true potential of their misery the wrong one? I'd say categorically not, but apparently that is not a universal view.  Moreover, whilst I'd say this example merely shows that 'madness' is a sliding scale applicable to all of society which is only labelled when it becomes a problem, certain factions would prefer to believe that yes, there is a clear line be 'mad' and 'sane' but that, contrary to what modern medicine says, the 'mad' should not be cured but raised up as desirable and enviable.

There are, undoubtedly, thousands of people walking around with thought processes who engage in activities which could see them easily diagnosed with mental health problems - I've met them. But the existence of unmedicated cyclothymics/depressives/whatever does not mean that those diagnosed have been sold a lie/tricked into selling their magic beans for an incontinent cow.  Primarily, this is because they didn't have magic beans to start with - they just had erratic moods which impacted on their ability to live life in the way they wanted to, unlike the undiagnosed cyclothymic on the street, whose moods have not infringed on the fulfilment of their lifestyle.  Organisations and individuals who point to the increase of diagnosis rates of mental illness as support for the argument the medical establishment have gone power MAD and are attempting to homogenize the world are equally mistaken.  The reports which suggest there have been a 43% rise in the prescribing of anti-depressants in the last 5 years seem to me to merely suggest that the de-stigmatising of mental health difficulties, as a result of the hard work of organisations such as Mind, has been successful and people are now daring to approach their GP with problems they previously thought would see them laughed out of the doctors office.

I have shared that infamous habit of many mental health patients of concluding I WAS NEVER ILL when medication and therapy get me to a point I feel 'normal' and subsequently rejecting all the methods employed to normalise my brain chemistry.  Funnily enough, I got ill again.  A lot of people would argue that sort of hypothesis-test-proof loop was enough to support the psychiatrist who made the original diagnosis.  Few people would argue that my returning to a state I call 'ill' is merely the internalisation of an oppressive narrative when in fact I was 'realising the mad gift' the universe has given me.  Fewer still would go further set up an online community propagating this opinion as a valid medical alternative.  

The opposition to pro-ana and pro-mia sites is well established - I'm scared by how little opposition there is to pro-psychosis websites.  I feel as though the mental health lobbies have been so busy (quite rightly) fighting stigma in wider society they have been completely blind-sided by those who want to share faulty thinking - who want to rubbish a system which helps more people than it hurts.  How much more good work could they do as patient advocates working within the system as it stands? How much more good work could they do by having a dialogue with the medical profession about not becoming a factory and treating mental health patients like a simple machine to be inspected, repaired and pushed back out into the world all shiny and new?  Yes there are problems in healthcare as it stands but it is still a whole lot better than nurturing mental instability into bigger and more monstrous things.  I think the NHS could save itself money by offering stricter guidance on how GPs respond to first presentation of mild depression and anxiety in patients, I think they should offer more training to their senior employees - consultants for example - on alternative lifestyle so they can recognise the difference between 'alternative', 'abnormal' and 'problematic' so that they only offer corrective steps for the latter.  I think money should go back into health promotion campaigns and I think we need more patient advocates and advisers - such as those provided by Mind - to ensure the medical establishment doesn't lose sight of the individual in favour of 'cured' statistics linked directly to pharmaceuticals.  

I am all for self determination in mental health care - I practice it; I worked out a way to get off medication and live without too much unpleasantness a year ago.  But I'm also for informed choices - telling people you are an advocacy and advice organisation aiming to end stigma and help people overcome the alienating effects of mental health labels is all well and good, but when, in reality, you are pushing a non negotiable model for living without medical intervention you are deceiving and misleading those you claim you aim to protect.  On the face of it, the Icarus Project sounds great - offering hope of 'normality' through inaction rather than the world of hit and miss drug therapy offered by the medical profession for example - in reality they are pushing an unproven, potentially dangerous anti-cure on vulnerable and often desperate people whose judgement is impaired by mental instability.  This is the blind leading the blind.

Also, just a final thought - Icarus crashed to earth after ignoring advice not to fly so close to the sun, and died.  For the shining moment he was soaring up to the sun he certainly was glorious, but his ignorance and arrogance killed him.  Did The Icarus Project chose him as their namesake with an awareness of that irony or did they stop reading after bit when his ambition took him up into the sky?

With things like this, I rarely write in the heat of the moment, I prefer to check my sources and reference thoroughly. But today? You don't need references. Turn on the tv, have a look at news sites. It's happening.


The Lib Dems have betrayed us. The promise they made - the reason so many of us voted for them - is that they said they would not introduce higher top up fees, they promised us they would protect the right of every young person in this country to be able to go to University no matter what their income.

The current fees are expensive, difficult but not impossible. I campaigned, along with my fellow students back in 2004/2005, against the introduction of top up fees - they should not have happened but here we are. However, they are manageable; whether that be through grants or savings or loans. The new fees will literally make it impossible for everyone who wants to go to University to go.

Yes, the rich will still go. Yes, the poor may well get full assistance; but that pot of money is not unlimited so there will be stiff competition and firm cut off points - cut off points which will leave a gulf between the have lots and have not-so-muchs/have-littles. I got full financial assistance from my Local Education Authority to go to university but I still had to have a student loan in order to pay rent and bills. As such, I came out of university with a £12,000 debt.

Contrary to the government's claims that student loans are interest free, I am charged a phenomenal amount of interest every year on a loan I have yet to start paying back (I have, 4 years after graduating, still not attracted a large enough salary to meet the minimum threshold for repayments). The idea that these debts do not worry graduates, the idea that this is not a burden IS A NONSENSE. The question of whether I would have gone to Lancaster with a £9,000 charge for learning seems an easy one; without a full scholarship? definitely not. How could I? The resources my parents had to help me through university would have been laughable in the face of fees of that size.

Police Commisioner just said "any right minded person will condemn the violence, if they saw it, they will condemn it". I saw the violence, I don't condemn it - not with a broad sweep I don't. I feel that anger; and I wasn't standing amongst a group of protesters, contained by police and charged by police horses - provoked and scared - I wasn't there and I still completely understand the anger that led to this violence.

I agree wholeheartedly that the protest was hijacked by trouble makers- in particular the later pictures from the protest show people who seem to fit certain profiles associated with violnce for violence's sake - but to say all the violence was the result of that is a sweeping dismissal of the anger and chaos which the government and police caused.

Video of mounted police charging the crowd and clearly trampling some protesters who simply couldn't move out of the way fast enough was available at the top of this article on the BBC website for several hours today, it has since evaporated. [ETA: And been reposted here]

Protesters report, on twitter, that those who were smashing windows and doors at the Treasury were shouting "we want our money back". The police say it was criminal damage and not protest. I think it was both.

I'm disgusted that the majority of news stories are now leading with the fact the Prince of Wales and Camilla had the car they were travelling in were attacked. This is not an indictment of the incorrect expression of the protest, but of the uncontrollable, justifiable and absolutely AVOIDABLE rage of protesters. A friend just said the following of this incident;
"The living embodiment of inherited privilege gets hassled by people who just had their futures taken away. He's just lucky this aint France"

The police stated "protesters have failed to stick to the agreed route", one twitter user quipped "to be fair, so did the Lib Dems". How horribly true.



I cannot imagine a country in which I will ever vote Lib Dem again.

I'm sitting here crying over what we have become, what our government is doing to our education system and absolutely sobbing for the anger I feel at the betrayal of the Lib Dems and my empathy for the angry chants and actions of the protesters today.

To whom it may concern

During the reporting of an attack on an armoured van and the injuring of the security guard driver (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-11636785), the report on East Midlands today consistently refereed to the injured person as "woman security guard"

Aside from the grammatical unpleasantness of that phrase ("female security guard" is surely preferable) I simply cannot understand why the presumption was that 'security guard' was such an inherently gendered term that we needed to be reminded at least 5 times that this particular security guard was a woman.

Furthermore, the result of repeating this person's gender was to imply that the attack was somehow of greater significance/violence because it was perpetrated against a woman! All violent crime of this type is to be regretted and condemned, we - society - and you - the BBC - should not be straying into such value judgements, much less the sensationalism of "woman hurt! woman hurt whilst in man's job!"

Non biased, non discriminatory language is easy to employ. Until all reports on male security guards start referring to "man security guard" it is wholly unnecessary, offensive and erroneous (I am quite sure her job title merely reads 'security guard') to describe a person as a "woman security guard"

Day 4: Your favourite song.
My god, this is a hard one. I think it's probably wrong to pick a cover so I won't put Red Sleeping Beauty - which, vocally, is one of James' best - but, err....

You're Tender and You're Tired.

Unexpected? Maybe. I think it is understated and quite, quite beautiful.  And frankly, I never get tired of hearing it.  It isn't a hit-you-round-the-head sort of song, and the emotions it elicits are slow burning and subtle.  But somehow, to me, it's all the grander for it.

______________________________________________


Drama seems at hand over on twitter this evening. Alan Davies just posted that;
"My wife,despite her FlyBe EconomyPlus ticket,has been turned away from the lounge at Cardiff Airport because she's carrying a baby..." (here)
and goes on to say;
"Cardiff Airport said my wife could go in the lounge but the 7 month old baby in her arms could not..." (here)

At which point Cardiff Airport apparently set up a twitter account and responded thusly;
"@alandavies1 We regret your wife’s disappointment but no children under 10yrs are allowed in the executive lounge" (here)

Responses? What you'd expect, lots of people puffing and spluttering in outrage. And me, and a minority of others;
Frankly, I'm behind @Cardiff_Airport's ban on kids under 10 in the Exec lounge. Why should everything be geared to families?
I mean it's bad enough being on a plane with screaming child,much worse them being in th relaxing pre-boarding environment you pay extra for
Just because you think little johnny's screeching, vomiting, defecating & dribbling is charming doesn't mean I should have to put up with it
As far as I'm concerned there should be child-free parks, restaurants, buses, trains, lifts and beaches.Everywhere.Carry on @Cardiff_Airport
(Those are all me)

And the others I've found so far;
@Lufferov @alandavies1 Not allowing children in the executive lounge seems perfectly reasonable to me. I agree with @Cardiff_Airport! (here)
@IanSDavidson @alandavies1 Can you not just accept that it's impossible for @Cardiff_Airport to please everyone. Many of us appreciate a child free lounge (here)

I genuinely don't understand what is so offensive about an airport, who charge for a specific service, which is sold on the basis of it being relaxing and conducive to doing work - in short, an executive lounge - enforcing specific rules to ensure that service remains all the things it is expected to be by the majority of the service users. I am constantly enraged by the unending pandering to families and making what would otherwise be communal or adult spaces into an anarchic crèche (oxymoron?).

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate kids, AT ALL. I adore volunteering with the Brownies and my nephew even changed my opinions on babies from unadulterated hatred to occasional adoration when he was born back in 1997. What I do hate is the idea that opining that "screaming children impede my enjoyment of the cinema/restaurant/flight/bus or train journey" is somehow a sin worse than murder and you are treated as though you just defecated on the coffee table over which you're having the conversation. Ironic really given the child(ren) you are complaining about may well defecate on a coffee table but instead that act would be received in a circle of doting, insane mothers*.

Adult space matters. Why has protecting that become synonymous with destroying The Family, Society and The World?

I'm going to go and read Edelman's No Future/my dissertation again.


* Who are absolutely different from some mothers I know to be out there who do not lose control of their intellect the moment their child first pees in their face.

 It’s odd, sometimes, the ways you end up thinking about queer identity and queer spaces.

Tonight bipboppingdays  introduced me to ‘The Aquarium’, a cabaret theatre bar.  It is populated entirely by ageing gay men who enjoy a good show tune.  Last night it also opened its doors to me, a young pansexual girl who enjoys show tunes.

My first and overriding impression was that it shared a lot in common with Kampus, the one, and only, gay bar in Lancaster.  It effectively operated a closed door policy – heavy curtains at the windows, no advertising and an attitude which meant you could only hope to be served if you were known to the bar staff as a gay, or accompanied by a regular – who must, be definition, be gay. 

One of the things Ali and I most liked about Brighton when we moved down here was that Brighton seemed to dispense with the ‘we know you as a gay therefore you may enter’ but pretty soon we learnt the elitist door policies which made Lancaster and Manchester rather tiresome in the end still existed in Brighton.  The PV and the Marlborough did not readily open their doors of their bar to the likes of us – both Ali and I were easily read as not dykes.  What we were  was irrelevant, if you’re not a dyke you’re not welcome.

Being bi, or pansexual puts you in an undefined non-space, and god forbid you are a bi or pansexual person in what is read as a heterosexual relationship because you can kiss goodbye to your identity – you are not welcome in queer spaces.

The trouble of course is that queer culture has spent centuries being repressed and appropriated by the hetero-insiders so the automatic response to anything that is other to the gay/dyke/lesbian/bear/et al status quo is hostility, rejection, distance.  And, history considered, that’s fair, but when you are a 25 year old queer woman going into a bar which just happens to feature show tune karaoke sung by 50+ gay men the instant feeling you have is defence (I whispered to bipboppingdays that I wished I was wearing a “I’m gay too!” t-shirt) and the immediate reaction you get from the regulars in said bar is suspicion.  bipboppingdays  tells me she has become relatively well known in there by frequenting it with her boyfriend, I quipped that the same positive reaction would not be due to me had I frequented it with a female partner.  A male accompaniment allows for many gestures of inclusion in such a bar.

In Manchester there was a lesbian bar which only admitted women .  The unwritten but well acknowledged modifier being that women who the door staff deemed to be straight would also be turned away.  Ali and I would always have a moment of worry at the point of admittance because despite being in a relationship we were frequently read as heterosexual, indeed on more than one occasion we split up and accompanied dyke-identified single friends in order to ensure smooth admittance to the bar.  In Lancaster, Kampus, and it’s dark cornered clientele would actively attack those who appeared not to be gay – once I had two of my good friends visiting me from home and Ali and I sat at the other end of the pub talking with friends whilst they played pool, after about 10 minutes they hit problems as locals tried to get them off the table, and then out of the pub by making up “in this establishment x is the rule” rules, in the end the barman stepped in and told the locals to leave them alone but by that time they felt uncomfortable and unwelcome and surrendered the pool table mid-game to come and join us, and our group of queer friends sitting and drinking.  We left about 10 minutes later.  There was also a big dyke circle in Lancaster, despite Ali and I being in a publicly monogamous, long term relationship we were absolutely not invited to join certain alliances and social groups.  Indeed one of the key players in the small Lancaster dyke scene explicitly asked me whether I was a lesbian and then interacted with me a significantly less after I answered in the negative.

I think the main issue for me is that such exclusivity only really works to further marginalise an outsider group.   I never get read as gay – except by other bi/pansexual women and so I never get a blanket invitation to gay culture.  Indeed, since I have been single I tend to avoid gay clubs and bars, when I go with my male friends I get labelled a faghag and when I go with my female gay friends I get suspicious looks.   Brighton, happily, offers a range of alternative ‘attitude free’ bars and clubs where sexuality is ignored and in-betweeness is actively celebrated (please see Dynamite Boogaloo and PopKraft) but what I really want is for people to stop imposing a certain reading of my sexuality on me and to be welcomed as an ally or a friend in any of the many exclusive or closed clubs and bars.  I have several good friends who are straight who I absolutely want with me in the queer scene – they are allies and friends, and why should they be excluded from a bar because the clientele have been excluded from ‘their’ bars?

I’ve always flirted with the idea I’m non-scene, but in all honesty that is inaccurate.  I love gay culture, I adore the nuances of it and I like the sense of belonging and history one can gain from it in an often hostile world.  What I really mean by non-scene is that I don’t wish to exclude our heterosexual friends and I see no advantage of dismissing anyone who crosses categories – like a bisexual girl who likes show tunes – simply because they cannot be safely assigned a box.  Why fight prejudice with prejudice? Why turn homophobia on its head to combat it? Why scowl at girls who might be straight? Why dismiss boys who aren’t camp, or flamboyant? Why demand all girls who love girls wear a uniform of cropped hair and jeans? Why dismiss a person who identifies as queer the moment they enter a heteronormative relationship?

What are we gaining with those attitudes?  Or, more compellingly, what are we losing?  I think the answer to that is too much.

So, as the interwebz is well aware, Janet Street Porter is a class A prick. Her article in the Daily Mail (aka the Daily Hate, Nazi Daily and Toilet Paper) today is entitled 'Depression? It's Just the New Trendy Illness!'. Personally, I prefer to call it I'm Janet Street Porter and I'm a massive knob

It's hard to know where to begin when responding to an article so utterly motivated by ignorance, intolerance and downright stupidity, but I'm going to try.*

My family isn't so much 'touched' by mental illness as saturated in it. I try and count up the number of grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents, siblings and cousins afflicted with anxiety, stress, depression or any of the myriad of other mental health issues and I very quickly run out of fingers. It's pretty much all of us.

Janet Street Porter may be interested to hear, however, that my family are working class. They *are* shelf stackers, cleaners, care workers, caretakers, administration staff or simply terminally unemployable. Is their experience of depression, anxiety or stress any different to that of the middle class Street-Porter so doggedly condemns? No. Or, in the longer answer, yes. They don't have the ear of the media inclined towards them. They do not have the education of the people who write books (what's that, Janet Street Porter, you've written two books? Goodness, aren't you clever!) that sell thousands, they do not have the high flying careers that afford them the opportunity to talk about their depression/anxiety/stress on tv, radio and in the paper, but they do have the shared experience of insurmountable despair, blackest depressions, unmanageable stress and ultimately, the horrific isolation that is being diagnosed with one or all of these conditions and having to work through it; speaking to as few people as possible in order to minimise the outpouring of intolerance those words provoke.

I was delighted to read that depression didn't exist until just a few years ago. Presumably what I, and my relatives had been suffering until then was some sort of general malaise, perhaps a touch of ennui. Indeed I found it remarkable to discover, from Janet Street Porter's article, that depression didn't exist at all in the sixties. I'm sure my Mother, whose first husband killed himself at the end of the sixties, will be most relieved to learn he wasn't suffering from depression as it didn't exist, no doubt he was just testing the strength of the tree branch with the rope he tied around it.

It's also been a delight to learn that 15 years ago that when my Father was forced to retire from the Police force - a job he had aspired to throughout his teens and was passionate about during it's execution, due to stress which he simply couldn't recover from whilst continuing to do the same job - it wasn't in fact stress that forced him to leave. No, as that particular condition is only an invention of the last 5 years he was in fact suffering from hypochondria! The wife and child under 10 who he placed in financial straights by his 'illness' were in fact callously endangered! If only he'd decided not to be friends with the people who were upsetting him, that would have fixed everything.

Finally, it has been reassuring to see that had my eldest older brother been successful in his suicide attempt Janet Street Porter would have attended his funeral encouraging us, his mourning family to laugh! Because the world being rid of yet another misogynist bastard, another 'man [who has been] in charge of everything'. After all, the miserable mental state he was in, the continued non-existent self esteem that frequently prevents him leaving the house for days on end? All of that is, in her words, "karmic revenge" on mankind.

But of course, my brother is gentle, and kind, and loving and, unfortunately, deeply unhappy. He is not a misogynist, he has never been in charge of anything, on account of being working class. He deserves none of the things the world has thrown at him. He does not deserve the chemical imbalance in his brain that foils his every endeavour. He does not deserve to die by his own hand.

And yet Janet Street Porter believes he does. And she believes I should be happy about it, she believes I should laugh.

The thing that perplexes me is why stop with a critique of depression, anxiety and stress? What about the incidence of OCD? Are all those sufferers just being pathologised for being a good housewife! What about schizophrenia? It's nothing if not an attention seeking wilful neglect of reality! Indeed, if we're going to argue that every disease that doesn't have the same rate of occurrence as a Brazilian slum isn't real then we better add anorexia to the list. Those skeletal boys and girls are just a bit too keen on exercise and attention seeking in their rejection of food aren't they!

It's perhaps rather reflective of my intrinsic belief in human compassion that I thought ‘articles’ like this were a thing of the past. I’m so, so unhappy to learn that they aren’t. Indeed the only positive I can seem to find is that I wish I was as lucky as Street Porter that neither I, nor my family or friends had been touched by depression, anxiety or stress and I could be so ignorant of it all that I could simply write it off as the new yuppie malaise.

*There have been lots of responses already in the blogsphere and in the press, all of them condemning Street-Porter as far as I can see, with this in mind I have decided not to tackle her on the 'facts' she presents, but rather the reasons the article enraged and saddened me, on a personal level

A very dear friend just blogged about his response to heteronormativity and the heteronormative male ideal. It was a jolly good post, which you should read. Being just that kind of person I took one comment and blew it out of proportion, because it interested me. Instead of hijacking his blog, I decided to post it here. Apologies if this is a little jumbled, I wrote it in a remarkably short space of time and only had the ideas I express as my fingers were hitting keys, I intend to revisit some of what I've said at a later date.


To say one wishes to avoid a certain, stereotypical way of being implies that there is a clear and well defined 'other'. And if that is lacking, there is at least a clear way of knowing what it is one is distancing oneself from. Whilst heteronormative gender performance and relationship forms are common, and in being common feel easy to deconstruct, there are nuances which can be erased by the broad stroke of a queer agenda.

Common is often synonymous with unthinking. Understandably so when you look at the most vocal proponents of the status quo; the [hated] Daily Mail and it's readers is an example which rushed to the forefront of my mind. One also cannot neglect to mention the culture of the 'lad' and the associated press of lads' mags, the page three girl and football related sponsorship and advertising. In short, we glance at a culture which evolves without moving forward and grows via the insidious ooze of repetition and we feel we know it, absolutely. The moment we see the dragon for what it is, we believe we have seen the route to slaying it; produce a counter-culture founded on the same principles of social interaction and familial structures but subvert each of these on the individual and group level. In short, we try to queer it.

The logic behind this seems sound at first glance: why are heteronormative relationships and gender roles so common? Because the model of heteronormative relationships and gender are baked right into our culture and society, they are numerous, they are supported by every fibre of society. One of the most common, if not the most common narratives in our culture is boy meets girl. Boy meets girl. Not boy meets boy, not girl meets girl, not boy meets girl and they then meet another girl. Not any other permutation.

The effect of this narrative on the individual level is shocking when you pause and look at your own life. At the moments of uncertainty, the moments when you feel like a social retard and cling onto whatever model of social interaction you can find, you will most likely find that model is a heteronormative one. Years and years of repetition mean that heteronormativity is not just common, it just *is*. We do it because....because we do it. Heteronormativity is self legitimating; if we follow those rules things will work out. Recently, when I found myself single and entering intimate relationships with men for the first time in 6 years I reverted to what I knew; there exists, in my head and I'm sure yours, a complex list of dos and donts for interactions with the opposite sex. We may reject them, we may belittle and ridicule them, but we can all identify and perhaps describe some cardinal rules for romantic interaction. They are there, baked right in.

So, the little voice of dissent suggests, reject them! Turn them on their head. Ignore that prudish voice which tells you girls should be girly, shouldn't be assertive, shouldn't....do. But where does that leave us? Rejecting heteronormativity surely only achieves one thing: we aren't being heteronormative. But the relationship to heteronormative remains a dichotomous one: we either do, or we don't. Furthermore, by prescribing that gender roles should be delineated, as the front line of queering culture often does, we run into language which starts boxing people up again - yes there are now more than two boxes, but are the boxes still there? It's hard to fight against a system unless you propose an alternative, it's easy to get people on side when you show them an alternative which is clearly expressed; "don't expect everyone to fit into a girl/boy binary! Let people choose their own gender identity, like bigender, or intersex, or trans, or cis, or fluid!" People can understand that, we're presenting our argument in an contained and quantifiable manner. It seems to be a step in the right direction to say "don't say two genders, say many! And here are some examples" but are we in fact aiming for the middle ground before we've tried to achieve the ideal?

To me, the place we should be going, the place where heteronormativity does not exert influence is comparable to anarchy. To present queer family models as an antidote to heteronormative family models is still to present a model. Whilst making our campaign intelligible to those we are attempting to liberate is important, we need a clearer sense of purpose. Why aim to remove heteronormative models of being only to replace them with more delineated, but still fairly concrete ones?

We need to view heteronormativity as continuous with non-heteronormative behaviours and identities. The binary of queer/heteosexual was established by a heteronormative society, why are we still playing on their terms? Let me elucidate my point of view with an example: my brother is in a heteronormative relationship, but his performance of gender is sometimes very queer. Is he playing at being non-heteronormative or is he non-heteronormative? This seems like a logical question, and one which encourages us to question what it means to be a heteronormative male. But what I propose is we don't question whether someone's behaviour is inherently heteronormative or queer, rather we ask 'why ask?' Am I a heteronormative woman? In some respects; yes, in others; no. A better question is "am I compelled to act in a certain way depending on my surroundings?" And the answer to that is 'sometimes'. In this way we can identify the places where a prescriptive, restrictive force suppresses a natural expression - and there we can target society.

In short, what if we were to fight it, not flying the opposing standards of 'heteronormative' and 'queer' but by proposing absolute freedom of expression and creating narratives about the instinctive and impulsive expression of ways of relating to each other. With a broad stroke we sweep away the dichotomy and create through imaginative desire the new system in which there is only a spectrum. Instead of the deification of the twin pillars of 'heteronormative' and 'queer' we level the ground. We don't distance ourselves from heteronormative as though it were an infectious, terminal condition but we embrace it and engage with it, forcing it to look in the mirror and see that whilst we can choose to live that way, we can choose to live slightly differently to it, or dramatically differently to it. As long as heteronormative ways of being do not continue to hold unchallenged power then there is surely no harm in associating with it, we can resist it's normalising force without needing to demolish every single brick of its edifice.

So Caster Semenya is making headlines and the internet seems to be abuzz with chatter about whether 'she is a he'.

What a horrific way of phrasing it.  In itself it immediately reveals the bias which most of the news stories seem to have baked right in.  A quick google reveals prolific use of the word 'real' and a near universal tag line beneath Semenya's name of "Man or Woman?".  The sensationalism simply oozes from the screen.

Let's talk about the real issue here: international athletics officials demands an athlete take a 'gender test' (inaccurate in itself, her gender is evidently female, what we're talking about is a test to verify whether her chromosomes are xx, xy or xxy) because she is very good at her sport and, more importantly, does not 'look' female by a heteronormative standard of femininity (A key argument in many of the articles springing up this evening).

One blog rails about the South African Athletics Federation 'failing' in its duty to verify whether Semenya was 'really' a woman.  The SAAF, however, states confidently that they were "'completely sure' that the 18-year-old Semenya is a female."[1]  'Ross' states that as the SAAF did not do a genetic test/examine Semenya's chromosomes it is "laughable" to say they were completely sure of her sex.  This argument can only ever be partially successful on the grounds that 'Ross' is not also accusing the Athletics Federation of every other country with athletes in this competition of being lax in their duty to verify the 'real gender' of their athletes. 

Athletics does not require routine chromosonal screening of all competitors.  Given the high incidence of intersex it is not impossible to imagine that there are currently, and have been in the past, many intersex athletes.  That only some are 'discovered' (and by 'discovered' I mean dragged through the papers with offensive and life changing judgements passed down on them) is not down to a fair and universal ruling of international athletics bodies but oppressively heteronormative, reactionary and deeply flawed value judgements of the 'appropriateness' of the physical appearance of individuals in relation to their gender.

This is not a blog about whether Caster Semenya is 'really' a woman or a man.  It is a blog how this particular story has revealed the broader failure of athletics in failing to include comprehensive and inclusive rules on the verification of biological sex for all competitors and the deeply flawed system (underpining this as a necessary investigation) which effectively denies intersex individuals from competing in sex segregated competitions.


[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/athletics/8210471.stm