Feminism eats itself

Once upon a time in the West, it was thought that protecting women and children was a jolly good idea and people were taught accordingly, especially men and boys. Now, not so much. In fact the reverse now holds true, as has been shown by online pornography, and is encapsulated by current controversies regarding mass migration and transgender toilet use. The toilet use issue is ridiculously small in scope compared to the ongoing misery caused by claims that Europe welcomes all comers from disadvantaged countries, but that is another matter. For the moment, let's just say that both have an impact on women and children. Where the 'bathroom bill' is concerned, the result is that for the sake of perhaps 0.3% of a given Western population we destroy the separation between men and women in public toilets, changing rooms etc. This is a good idea? No, it isn't. Single sex facilities are places of refuge in a mixed society and one of the prized assets that allows that mixed society to maintain itself. Trashing this separation is potentially as psychologically destabilising to women as allowing women in front line combat would be to men. It means putting the vast majority at risk for the sake of the rare and particular. It means everyone always having to watch their back instead of others 'having your back'. It's the end of implicit trust, or in other words, a form of social suicide. What about the huge, epoch-making problem of EU migration? In the recent Munk debate in Toronto, Mark Steyn was scorned  to laughter by his two opponents for focusing on the sexual crimes visited on women and children in Europe by alleged refugees. Steyn magisterially took down one of these opponents (Simon Schama), while being more restrained towards the other, the lawyer and former UN human rights commissioner Louise Arbour. Madame Arbour's jibe was the lesser of the two, so Steyn's focus on Schama was understandable as well as gallant, especially as he had very little time to object to their comments. But let's have a closer look at Arbour's comment, to wit: that Steyn, and fellow debater Nigel Farage, were 'newborn feminists'. That is, by implication that conservative men are only interested in crimes against women and children in order to score a political point. Furthermore that only feminists care about what happens to women (no mention of children). So men concerned about sex crimes against women and children are either pathologically obsessed with sex (said Schama) or frauds (said Arbour). Have we got that? Well maybe that's why, after 40+ years of feminism, no Western men seem to have been on hand to defend the women and children when these crimes occurred. Feminism has been so ideologically focused on rights, and bewitched by an ideal of 'equality', that practical morality has become vilified and women and children are left to bear the brunt of these two most recent PC goals (loos and large-scale migration), no objections allowed. Feminism has in effect eaten itself. In the clip from the Munk debate that I saw, Arbour also stated that in the last few decades feminism had gone about achieving its noble aims without harming anyone, all cosy and fluffy and non-discriminatory. I was reminded of Naomi Wolf in the 1990s claiming that feminism had been a 'bloodless revolution', apparently forgetting that the abortion practices feminism is built on are always, by definition, bloody. We could just as well think that meat and fish somehow get bloodlessly packaged for consumption. The problem with 'rights' as currently understood, is that they are human inventions, and therefore finite. One right must expand at the expense of another. Always. In a closed room you can sweep one corner clean but the dust has to be heaped in another corner. Feminism, by scorning the goodwill and the enlightened interest of men, has become as oppressive to women as its own notion of a malign old patriarchy.

Prayer v trolling, and waspish wit

I found out yesterday that a few days after my last post, Richard Dawkins had a stroke and this news caused the Church of England to post a tweet requesting prayer for him, which in turn caused a hoohaa in the Twittersphere, as if such a call to prayer were somehow the equivalent of trolling the dear Prof - as if asking people to call Godly blessing on this man was the same as grotesquely revelling in his plight and wishing him harm. Really? Is that where religious illiteracy has led us at last, to rank ignorance of what Christian prayer is for? Ironically, the people misinterpreting the C of E's request would probably defend to the death the right of Islamic calls to prayer, maybe even of having them broadcast across English cities.And would those prayers include a fervent wish for good to come to unbelievers, let alone those who vocally hate God and His Word? Doubtful, isn't it. Praying for 'enemies' of the faith and of the faithful is a Christian thing, people, and a good one. The allegation of trolling was still almost fresh when poor Stephen Fry apparently got lambasted on Twitter for his joke about the top costume designer who collected a Bafta award dressed, as he quipped at the time, like a bag lady. Except when this was reported, Fry was the victim of bone-headed users who failed to see the joke, and his impatience with such ignorance something to be commiserated with. In contrast, where the C of E was concerned, it was the bone-headed 'trolling' charge that was affirmed and the Church put on the back foot, having to somehow prove it was no such thing. See the difference? For the secularly-sainted ('national treasure') Fry, the knee-jerk, unthinking reactions are seen as precisely that; for the beleaguered National Church, the ignorant reactions are seen as potentially genuine.In a further irony, Fry's off-the-cuff, bitchy wit - and it was funny, I was watching - is exactly the kind of thing he was hired to deliver. That his target in this instance was an unprepossing older woman (even if a friend of his), was entirely in keeping with the gay-influenced culture that rates women primarily on glam and grooming. Anyone paying him to MC their gig will know this. Job done.

Richard Dawkins, Entertainer

Richard Dawkins ought to be on the stage as a solo comedy act. Seriously, I am so grateful to him for his entertainment value. Take a recent two-page interview in The Times, for example (Saturday January 30 2016). It was headlined with what was no doubt deemed to be his most provocative statement ('It's time feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam') but contained some pure Dawkins gems.The best of these, in my opinion, was the summation of his brief disussion on how everything, including evolution, is a 'continuum': "If you go back, take your great great great grandfather and add a couple of hundred greats you've got a fish." Did his two interviewers keep a straight face? I laughed out loud as I was reading this in a public place. Earlier in the piece, the dear Professor trashed Adam and Eve as one of the 'idiotic non-facts' allegedly taught to children in faith schools. Well, the story of Adam and Eve makes complete sense in terms of understanding the fissures of the human predicament, whereas a seemless line to a fish ancestry really, you know, does not. What makes the story of the Fish more probable that the story of the Fall? It does have the advantage of not requiring us to grapple with the awkward question of why we human beings are beautiful and complex yet so false and vile, I suppose. Another Dawkins gem is his lament for the decline of Christianity and Christian education in Britain - very proper, well done - almost in the same breath as his fierce denunciation of Christian education as something 'wicked'. His dogmatic insistence on the completeness of science is also comic. Why does no one call him up on this when he spends so much energy denouncing dogmatism elsewhere? Why does no one also point out that, by the way, he's wrong? Science cannot explain everything. Even where it does a good job at addressing 'how' it cannot explain 'why'. This Dawkins is blind to: "It's staggering that we can understand why life exists, why we have plants and animals, carnivores and herbivores", he says. It would be staggering indeed if it were true, but it isn't. Dawkins fudges this issue so he can express his sense of wonder at the marvel of Creation without having to refer to a Creator, let alone bow to Him. Moreover he complains that children - those alleged victims of faith schools - are denied this wonder by not being taught the absoluteness of evolution. Leaving aside that Dawkins's view of what gets taught in schools seems more supposition than reality, Christianity (and Judaism) are precisely the go-to educations to foster wonder at the world, and therefore poetry, music etc, which he himself ackowledges as influences for good in his life. Yet another Dawkins gem is his assumption that children should learn things dispassionately, scientifically, multi-laterally, and then make up their own minds about what they want to believe. On the one hand, that is simply not how children learn. Their minds feed on values. They will have values of one sort or another, they must have them, they ascribe value to everything that goes on around them, whether they're consciously aware of it or not at the time. That is the rationale for teaching them those values we think are good, and proven by long usage to be good (like Christian ones). Later on, of course they can choose for themselves, and indeed they will - as Dawkins himself did. To think they are not taught how to think, while they are being encouraged as to what to think, is nonsense. After all, did religious education blight Dawkins's mind? He is still praising it , even though he wants to deprive others of the same advantage. On the other hand, is the dear Professor himself dispassionate and scientific? Not a bit of it! Especiallly not when engaged in his war against religion. Altogether, I'd say that Dawkins's sloppiness in language and intent makes him the most unscientific of prominent scientists. But he is funny.

A Ban on God

http://www.christian.org.uk/news/downton-abbey-banned-god-for-fear-of-alienating-viewers/
 So now we know why God does not feature in Downton Abbey: He was banned from it. For all those years! All those hours of filming! All those times when we didn't quite notice that we never saw the beginning of a meal, only its middle or end, so as to avoid the potentially offensive matter of saying Grace. The actors knew it, inevitably; did not one of them object to such a systematic distortion of history? This Downton development is not as silly as one might think. One could say it's a sign of our times, and ties in grimly with recent events in this sense: that the glaring absence, in the reaction to the Paris massacre, has been the absence of any clerical figure either commenting or praying or advising. Not a single one. A desert of Christianity has descended on Western Europe. It's as if these outrageous, terroristic attacks have outed the West as a full-on secular society. And to see the rest of the world projecting the Tricolore blue, white and red as a mark of solidarity, or singing La Marseillaise, is almost surreally ironic. For of course France did declare itself a secular state in the late 18th century - not with peace and love, but with the streets of Paris awash with blood - in that instance, the blood of royals, nobles and priests. This secular West is also very sad. Confronted with young men who are all too eager to die in the cause of their version of Allah, all we can muster are small public gestures (flowers, candles), improvised symbols (Eiffel peace sign) and hashtag declarations. I doubt the ones who hate the West with a passion are trembling at this. They know that not one cafe patron is going to give up his life for the ideology of having a cup of coffee, or of eating dinner on a rickety outdoor table - which is what these 'values' everyone is talking about seem to amount to. 

Bake-Off and Motherhood

As the dust has settled a bit on the 2015 Great British Bake-off victory of Nadiya Hussein, let's highlight something else than her headscarf, to wit: that Bake-Off is that rarest of environments in contemporary Britain, one where it's ok to be a full-time mother. Hussein's pivotal role in her family passed largely without comment. Everyone, understandably, was excited about her throrough-going Britishness, as it was reflected in her general demeanour as well as in her bakes. Presumably though, religious observance had something to do with her decision to be at home, and all power to her. Assuming that is the case, I can't help wondering how viewers would have reacted if a contestant with Nadiya's winsom appeal had been equally obviously seen to be a Christian rather than a Muslim. (And I don't mean just by a cross worn around the neck, as that's often a mere fashion statement - except where it does it mean something and therefore must be visited with wrath by Health and Safety or Equality commissars.) Would there have been as much jubilation over a Christian Nadiya's win? Or would people have taken to social media to criticise her choice of work as privileged or elitist or, on the other hand - because one can't win at this - to denounce her oppressed status of wifey-at-home? Just a thought.

John Inverdale v Clare Balding

In its own strange wisdom, the BBC has decided to replace the "Today at Wimbledon" evening highlights programme with a new-fangled 'Wimbledon 2Day' show in front of a live audience. This means replacing John Inverdale with Clare Balding, and altogether getting rid of the cool and mellow daily recollections of previous years in order to bring in a 'fresh' take - so said the BBC representative who handled my complaint at this news. The representative also said the new format would be a sort of Balding 'brand', modelled on her evening highlights show at the Sochi Winter Olympics. Now of course Calre Balding is excellent in her way (mainly horses, or non-highlights Olympics presenting) - but so is John Inverdale excellent in his way. Inverdale was exactly right for "Today at Wimbledon" and so, incidentally, was its title (whereas "Wimbledon 2Day" is just desperate to be relevant and therefore risible). Those Sochi highlights were unwatcheable: bitty, noisy, over-active and yet overly personal and emotional. A very bad combination, and one would have thought they are totally unsuited to the Wimbledon vibe. And that thing Inverdale said about Marion Bartoli two years ago? She wasn' fussed at all, so why should we be? Now that was genuinely fresh: a refreshingly unguarded utterance in an age of Taking Offence.

Bert and Ernie as poster boys

Bert and Ernie - what could be more innocent? Sweet, implausible pair of friends who manage to get on despite their differences of outlook (one sunny, one grumpy), staples of Sesame Street, cherished TV companions to countless children. But no! They're both male, they live together, therefore they must be gay. Thus, in the far-reaching culture grab of the rights movement, Bert and Ernie have been co-opted as poster boys for a form of confrontation that is alien to their purpose of amusingly educating pre-schoolers in the art of forebearance. In the Ashers bakery case about the 'queer space' slogan cake (not a wedding cake, as far as I know), much has been made of the company's refusal to write the 'Support Gay Marriage' slogan. Those who agree with them on this point might want to commend them for also, therefore, declining to produce the requested image of Bert and Ernie as a jolly married couple. Sesame Street has more than once refuted the idea of Bert and Ernie as a couple in the sexual sense, notably with the the charming and unanswerable observation that 'they are puppets, they do not exist below the waist'. Wouldn't it be amazing if Sesame Street were to issue a public statement to say they were grateful for the Ashers' bakery stance? Children - or their blameless entertainment - should not be dragged into adult strivings.

Dog on tightropes

That kerfuffle about which dog was walking the tightropes in the final of BGT: can we just agree that training any dog to walk on tightropes is just plain wrong? Did that dog look in any way happy while he was performing this pointless and dangerous trick? I think not.

Our Father

So an organisation called 'Watch' - Women and the Church - wants 'inclusive terminology' i.e. female pronouns and indeed nouns, to signal God's genderlessness and to make women feel more in the loop when in church. The organisation's hashtag rallying cry is that though 'we' now have women bishops, we're only 'just getting started'. This is such a daft an instance of wanting to saw off the branch you're sitting on that it's almost funny. 'Watch' may just be getting started but there will be nowhere to go: there will be no church left to transform when it is gutted of its gendered structure. The gender of the pronouns in the Bible - and from there, in church tradition - is not optional, let alone meaningless. On the contrary, maleness expresses fundamental truths about how the world is made, about who we are as human beings, and most of all about the nature of the triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Fatherhood of God is the bedrock of the universe. No amount of campaigning can alter that fact. All that gender reforms can accomplish is to sever the intuitive and poetic connection between Our Father and His creation by making the church a place of desolation. This is not progress.

50 Shades Too Many

I confess to having been left utterly cold by the tedious over-publicity surrounding the novels. The only heat they generated for me was the energy to write in protest when I found them casually for sale next to the 'wholesome foods' section of our local Waitrose. I further confess to having no interest in seeing the movie beyond the trailer and the unavoidable stills on show everywhere: too clean, too pretty, considering the subject matter. Anyone wanting that subject matter might prefer the 2002 film "Secretary" - as I'm sure has been pointed out before - an adaptation of a short story by the edgy American writer Mary Gaitskill, from her début collection Bad Behavior (1988). In "Secretary" you find a Mr Grey (really, that's his name) who doesn't do abs or model-like looks. He's just a schmuck with love and commitment issues who finds his match in a troubled, self-harming young woman and grows, in his own way, to love her and she him. Of course, it also does pretty where it shouldn't - a white dress that should be obviously soiled, bare skin that should be obviously scarred - and even changes the lyrics of a key song, from 'what a fool am I' into 'what a grace have I', but it also shows the silliness and tawdriness of the anti-vanilla thing generally, and doesn't indulge so much in what could be called money porn. The reason it works, and "50 Shades" works, for all I know, is that it taps into the very simple answer to the allegedly unanswerable question: what does woman want? Well, is that so difficult? Woman wants to be The One. We want to be the beloved, the Princess, the Queen, the one and only one. This goes right back to Woman (Eve) being presented to Man (Adam) as The One Made For Him and he, very appropriately,  rejoicing mightily and reverently. Let's not be fooled by the fact that the working out of marriage in this Fallen world too often falls short of that perfect beginning. The original impulse remains. It's simple, straightforward; no shades of anything come even close to satisfying this desire. The problem is that all contemporary mores claim that being the beloved is no longer a legitimate aim for a woman, and claim this quite intolerantly. Is it any wonder that this fundamental desire hits a huge mainstream nerve for women when sneaked in under cover of deviance?

Judith Woods and the wunderkind

This line from columnist Judith Woods has recently been widely quoted: ' "every time a friend's child succeeds, I feel something so unpleasant that there isn't an actual word for it, not even in German".' It's a funny line, and just about everyone knows what she's talking about, so of course it was taken out of context.To me though it's even more fun in context. It's from a Daily Telegraph piece (15 November 2014) entitled 'Teach our children well - but not too well'. Woods starts by listing examples of wunderkind achievements, with due praise all around. But there do seem to be awful lot of these amazing children nowadays, she feels and, what's worse, they're always 'other people's kids'. These children who-are-not-one's own are a such a contrast to life 'in the real world', she writes, that 'it's hard not to feel a jolt of envy, shot through with irritation and wrapped up in a bin-liner of self-reproach.'  Then comes the quoted line. The context reveal it to be, in fact, a comic spin on a famously  pusillanimous line from Gore Vidal: Woods fears that if these 'pint-sized high achievers' are indeed 'proliferating at an unnatural rate', then 'Gore Vidal's "every time a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies" should be updated to "every time a friend's child [etc]." ' The quoted line from Woods is a parody rather than a straight confession, and all the cleverer for it. Beyond that though, for anyone who's curious about language, the question arises: is there such a word? The 'even in German' quip suggests Woods is thinking of Schadenfreude, a delight in someone else's misfortune. Is there a word for a double antonym of Schadenfreude that would mean 'irritation' or worse at someone else's good fortune or achievement? A quick internet search reveals other people have asked the same question, and that apparently there is one: Glückschmerz (pain/sorrow at someone's good luck). Maybe the clue as to why Woods feels there's no word for this even in German is in the 'envy' she mentions earlier. Envy puts the matter squarely under the heading of the tenth Commandment, 'You shall not covet' (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). But the further details of the tenth do not mention children - you shall not covet 'your neighbour's house, wife, field, male servant, female servant, ox, donkey, or anything that is your neighbour's' - no children. It's as if being covetous of anything to do with your neighbour's ('or 'friend's') children is so beyond the pale it's not even worth recording in Scripture as a likely possibility. And yet, who hasn't been tempted by this envy, even fleetingly? Obviously the thing to do is give any such fleeting temptation a good old kick in the pants, and remain grateful in every way for the children you've been entrusted to bring up. It does show, however, how disturbing sin is, really. The reason God could distill the main Commandments to just ten is not because there are so few that matter, but because, as Jesus so often taught, each of those Commandments encompasses far more that we care to look at too closely.

Oxford Yobs

Despite its unfair swipe at Puritanism, I'm thankful for this article by historian and blogger Tim Stanley for highlighting a turn of events for the worst at Oxford University.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11239437/Oxford-students-shut-down-abortion-debate.-Free-speech-is-under-assault-on-campus.html

Ironically, these elite students lose the moral high ground with their bad language and intransigeant views - the moral high ground as they see it. And of course foul language does indeed short-circuit sane and civilised discussion, every time. What is happening to us as a culture if even Oxford is a hotbed of yobbery? On the other hand, these students don't seem to be aware of what they're reacting to on a deeper level. As far as I can tell, they're not enraged by the suject of the proposed debate so much as by the lingering Christian values the suject of abortion culture arises from. If so, their behaviour is even more troubling, for it touches something more visceral than the failure of education, and of the social climate generally, to nurture thinking minds and generous hearts. Rage against a perceived threat to the right to abortion does not stop to consider the multitude of defenceless ones that abortion kills every day. What's more, as in this case, it violently resents the mere suggestion that these invisible victims affect us, whether we acknowledge them or not..

Benedict's Match

But of course Mr Cumberbatch is engaged to an English rose called Sophie. How perfect! Miss Hunter is as fagrant as they come, with a sleek and slightly quirky beauty very similar to Mrs Cameron's, a distinguished family and an Oxford education. From her accomplishments as a theatre director we can be fairly certain her understanding of the power of words and language is a match for that of her mellifluously-voiced fiancé. Best of all, for those who delight in such things, Mr Cumberbatch comes home to roost in the sort of understated English poshness he has often denied having, albeit nowadays the poshness involves boasting right-on credentials as much as anything else. We must therefore assume Miss Hunter shares his views on social matters. Mr Cumberbatch is also to be commended for a) committing to marry before the age of forty, and b) choosing a woman his own age. Such a refreshing change from celebrity bachelors who can and do play the field for a very long time and then marry someone markedly younger. So onwards and upwards, the future Mrs Cumberbatch! Maybe she will prevent her husband from participating in ill-informed stunts like the 'This is what a feminist looks like' t-shirt débâcle, where the t-shirts worn by the liberal bien-pensants of England in widely published photographs turned out to have been made by poor women trapped in poor conditions halfway around the world. Mr Cameron refused to wear the t-shirt and was predictably vilified by many commentators before the embarrassing detail of the origin of the pricey slogan rags was made public. For once, I was able to rejoice at the PM's action (or non-action). I still cling to the tiny hope that his refusal stemmed from something about the dignity of office; if that wasn't the case, I'd prefer to think it was due to Mrs Cameron's influence and sense of dignity, rather than to some convoluted PR calculation. I wonder if Mr Cumberbatch's choice of a woman so similar to Mrs Cameron suggests that, beyond Miss Hunter's obvious suitability as his bride, he might have an interest in some level of political life in the future?

The Ageing Gap

It's very often the case that women age more quickly than men. That is to say, that the process of ageing affects women's appearance sooner and more injuriously than it affects the appearance of men. As a general observation, of course, not counting the exceptions. It's why age-gap relationships where the man is older are seldom seen as age-gap relationships (Brangelina, for example), whereas in couples where the woman is older, the age-gap gets mentioned  - oh, pretty much all the time (Demi Moore and her chap when they were married, Hugh Jackman and his wife etc). Now that women are wise to this phenomenon they are taking steps to prevent it, whether by taking better care of their skin, nutrition, fitness and so on, and/or getting a little help from outside sources, whether obvious - like poor, picked-on Renée Zellweger (see previous posts) - or subtly like Julia Roberts or anyone else who can claim to have a natural look. Now it's the men who tend to age prematurely, if fine actors like James Nesbitt, Robson Green and the daddy of them all, George Clooney, are anything to go by. Clooney now looks old, there are no two ways about it. Even the glamour of his beautiful and much younger bride cannot lift him. In fact the new Mrs Clooney makes him look even older. But granted that in the normal course of things the gap in the ageing process between men and women does remain, why is it even there? Rationally, there shouldn't be a discrepancy: a year is a year, a decade is a decade, whatever the gonads. Then again, is it a rational phenomenon? Here's a little flight of fancy, my offer of a non-rational explanation for the ageing gap: it's because of the dual nature of time. Men and women are subject to the linear nature of time (a year is a year and so on), but within that linearity women are also subject to the cyclical nature of time. As seasons come and go cyclically every year, so women's fertility cycles come and go every month, twelve times a year, every year. By the time a few decades of linear time have elapsed, women have gone through maybe 450 life-and-death hormonal cycles. By the time we are released into simple linearity at the end of our fertility we have matured in a way that is disproportionate to our calendar years. And whereas there is a lot to be said for that on personal, emotional and social levels, the physical aspect of this maturity is not so welcome by us and doesn't go down well in terms of how we are perceived. In fact the non-physical aspects of this maturity traditionally haven't gone down very well either. This is why there is so much scorn, unease and even fear that greets the ordinary (non-famous) post-fertility woman. It's why we'll never be rid of the age-old spectre of the 'crone', 'a withered, witchlike old woman', so says the dictionary, from a root word meaning 'old ewe'. A few words further down the dictionary column, in contrast, we get the neutral notion of the 'crony'. It applies primarily to men and merely means 'a close friend or associate', even though it's derived from the Greek word for time (chronos).So even in terms of words the ageing process is not rational.

You all right there?

This phrase has suddenly become ubiquitous in and around Oxford. 'You all right there?' or the snappier 'You all right?' is what everyone in a position of customer assistance seems to be asking. The phrase is disconcerting because it sounds like 'How are you?' when it pointedly isn't. The question is disconcerting because it implies that though you've approached a member of staff in a shop or other site of customer service in order to ask for service, the fact that you are doing so comes to them as a surprise. Sometimes the situation is nothing less than funny. You can be standing there for some time, patiently waiting to be attended to while the staff member is busy with someone else, even exchanging smiles of understanding with the staff member whose help you are waiting for, and then when they're free to help you they start doing something else then ask, as if they've just noticed you as if for the first time, 'You all right there?' It has happened that I've had to stop myself from laughing at the silliness of it all, because I suspect this reaction of innocent delight in absurdity might be misinterpreted as snarkiness. Maybe the clue to this current phrase craze lies in this curious fact: the person asking the question always, but always, makes a point of showing that they are doing something else, that they are busy. They attend to you not because it's why they're there in the first place, but because they have manners enough not to ignore someone who temporarily interrupts their busy-ness though they are too cool to make a show of their kindness with 'Can I help you?' Could this be an unforeseen effect of smartphones, of the new pressure to be always connected somewhere else or to always have to seem occupied with private matters while in public?

Verbal ejaculations

Is there a word for 'prone to stubbing one's toe'? I am very much prone to stubbing my toe, any toe, and therefore could use such a word. And every time it happens I'm reminded of a brief chat I had at a sports centre with a friendly acquaintance who lamented her experience of being in the sauna with men who could not speak without swearing. In the instance she was referring to the men had not only disregarded her presence in the sauna (whatever happened to minding your language when women are present?), they had been swearing while talking about daughters and about family life in general, in a way that was not particularly hostile or angry. My interlocutrice could not understand this, and I sympathised, although she made a point of saying she could well understand the use of swearing in other circumstances, for example when stubbing one's toe. And for all that I was nodding sympathetically before, I found I couldn't nod in agreement to that point. I mean, why? If you swear when you stub your toe, it's because you're angry: either at the pain, or at the unfairness of how much it hurts compared the the smallness of the injury, at fate altogether, the state of the world, the universe and beyond, or all of the preceding. Or, in the case of people like me, you could be angry at how often it happens. But how can you be angry at something that just happens (even if often)? There's nothing to be angry at, and no one to blame. Consequently I keep my mouth shut until the pain begins to subside and then say 'Ow, that hurt!', or its equivalent. Nevertheless I'm guessing that many people would agree that it's acceptable to ejaculate, under those circumstances, i.e. when provoked by toe stubbings or other shocks, even if the ejaculation is foul-mouthed - and I say this according to the definition of 'ejaculation' which, as those who read dictionaries can tell you, simply means 'something thrown out'. So the big strong man from a Catholic background who is terrified on a roller coaster and utters 'Mother of God!'is ejaculating, albeit in a non-sweary though debatably profane way. This use of the word ejaculation and its derivatives often crops up in non-contemporary novels, and blameless though it may be, I find it always takes a second or two  to get over the shift in meaning between then and now. Agatha Christie is particularly fond of it, especially in her younger days as a writer. I'm only a third of the way through the early stories of Poirot Investigates (1924) and she's already notched up five of them, the first one straightaway in the opening story, "The Adventure of the 'Western Star' ": 'That's queer,' I ejaculated suddenly beneath my breath', says Captain Hastings (thereby showcasing another blameless word whose meaning has become specialised). Similarly, there is a runnnig gag in the underrated rom-com "Kate & Leopold" about the use of of the word 'erection', which in a more innocent age merely referred to something made straight or built up, as in a building or, in the film, the Brooklyn Bridge. Anyway, all this to say, that verbally ejaculating when provoked is a much more serious question than the snigger effect would suggest. Firstly there is the question of which word or phrase gets thrown out of you, and what effect it will have. Regarding this question many of us could say, with the prophet Isaiah:' "Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips" '. (Isaiah 6: 5) Then, even more importantly, there is the question of what any unclean verbal reaction says about the heart. On this point Jesus was firm, not to say salutarily insulting: ' "You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil." '(Matthew 12: 34,35; also Luke 6: 45) One of my favourite preachers says that on this subject the heart can be likened to a full cup: when the cup gets disturbed by any sort of provocation the nature of what we say shows what our hearts are made of. Though I don't swear when I stub my toe, there are circumstances when my disturbed heart does not seem very nice at all. It's very humbling, as I believe it's meant to be. It's a reminder of our weakness and of the fact that though God expects much from us, nay expects everything, He is patient with us as we try to get it right. He knows perfectly well we are a work in progress, and that it's only by His grace that we are.

Woman's Work

No woman, we've been told recently, should have to sacrifice her career in order to have a family. It sounds good and thoughtful, but what does it mean exactly? There are surely many women who work for pay who cannot be said to have a career, with what that implies of choice and fulfillment. Conversely not all women who have careers necessarily get paid for their work - for example women who want to provide high-level support to a husband's or a relative's career and are happy and fulfilled in doing so. It takes all sorts and there are all sorts. And then the word 'sacrifice' carries a heavy emotional charge, but only in one direction. No one wants to say that a woman may be sacrificing her children in order to have the sort of career she could expect to have if she'd remained childless. So un-PC to even think in that way! And yet it must happen. An enlightened approach to women and paid work should be able to take into account that mothers come in all shapes and sizes, figuratively speaking, as much as women come in all shapes and sizes physically. Some of us can combine career and children, some of us can't. Some of us have careers to start with, some of us don't. Some of us want to work but can't. Some of us want to stay at home but can't. An  enlightened approach to women and work should have no problem in positing that a woman bringing up her own children is in fact working. Moreover, that a woman bringing up her own children is not necessarily doing so because she is privileged enough to do this as a lifestyle choice. For some of us, especially those who are doing this work alone, multitasking is just not possible. Not everyone has plentiful reserves of energy, not everyone is strong. Furthermore - and further down the line - an enlightened approach to women and paid work should be able to recognise that mothers who've put in a decade or two of child-rearing can have a lot to contribute to society, business etc. Why not make a point of understanding the resources that returning mothers could bring to the table? Then those of us who are ready to return to paid work need not be greeted like the unwelcome ghost at the banquet, or at the quickly snatched desk-top lunch*
*Which is a lunch 'al desko':  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-29725013

Still on Renée

Here's something to ponder: someone choosing to make fundamental changes to their whole body, as in gender reassignment surgery, would be praised, and praised whatever the aesthetic merits of the outcome might be. A woman chooses (at her own expense) to modify aspects of her face in response to the inevitability of ageing, and the metaphorical knives and pens are out, gleefully sharpened. Public opinion, like the contemporary notion of rights, is finite. Leeway given in one direction corresponds with censure in another.

The Face of Renée

Poor Renée Zellweger, scrutinised and commented on by all and sundry for daring to come out of hiding at a shiny public occasion with a rather different-looking face. Good for her, if nesting with her hirsute companion has made her into a new and happier woman. Good for her, especially, for countering all this impertinent attention by using the word 'nefarious': 'It seems the folks who come digging around for some nefarious truth, which doesn't exist, won't get off my porch until I answer the door', as she is reported to have said. I hope she flummoxed at least a few people with 'nefarious', and may she flummox even more when they realise it means something which is 'extremely wicked or villainous', according to my old Random House Webster's College Dictionary (subtitled 'The right word every time'), and furthermore that it derives from a Latin root meaning an 'offense against divine law' (it's a North American dictionary, hence the spelling of 'offense'). I particularly like the way this kick-ass word leaps out from the folksiness of 'folks', on one side, and the porch-and-door imagery on the other. Go Renée!