"Three Girls" and a 'sexual health worker'

The first of three episodes of the BBC series "Three Girls" was shown last night and it was very disturbing viewing indeed, in fact some scenes were literally unwatchable. So while this blog entry is not made on the basis of my having seen every minute of the episode I think the general principle remains. And the general principle, in my view, is that it's not only the police and other law enforcement officials who failed the many, many girls of Rochdale (and Oxford etc): it's also feminism. Specifically, these countless young teens have been failed by feminism's war against 'the patriarchy'. It is simply not the case that you can shame and remove the guardianship of men over their daughters, and young girls in general, and usher in an age of benevolence and freedom. What you get instead is a different kind of 'patriarchy', one that moves in swiftly to exploit the free-ranging, unprotected girls who have been to made to think by feminism that they are empowered. You remove one constraint which you make believe is a horror and you get a real horror in its place. A horror so new, moreover, that you have no weapon or recourse against it for far too long. By warring against western 'patriarchy' feminism also begat family break-down on a disastrous scale. This in turn allowed for the shocking excuse - expressed by one social worker in yesterday's episode - that it's impossible to find a way of dealing with the abused girls because their domestic lives are so "chaotic". The father at house number 141, slunk in apathy on the sofa while his sons held an endless party around him, suggested the negative impact the abolition of proper fatherhood has had on boys too.  The destruction of fatherly guardianship has also allowed a society where underage sex is a commonplace, and nobody can do anything about it except dole out condoms. So we have Sara Rowbotham, who is obviously going to emerge as the heroine of the story. And who is Sara? She is a 'sexual health worker'. She is first seen providing free condoms to nerdy youths, no questions asked except for what size. She admonishes them however not to use the condoms simply for water-filled pranks. She wants them to be genuinely used for sex. That's it. Think of those words: sexual health worker. They're really not far enough away from 'sex worker' for comfort, are they? And 'health'? Making sure young people have access to condoms is not the same thing as sexual health. Sexual health is an invented term which is meaningless in the case of underage sex which by definition should not be happening at all. And yet here are the nice sexual health workers to manage the chaos of sexual free-for-all with a few boxes of rubbers. It's wonderful that the real Sara Rowbotham stood up for the Rochdale girls. It's just that the fact that it was a 'sexual health worker' who made a difference is in itself part of the ongoing problem.

Yoga storm in a church teacup

Also from yesterday's Daily Telegraph (I love day-old news, so much easier to deal with): a hamlet on the West coast of Wales is "shocked" by the fact that its local church does not want yoga classes in its community centre, on the grounds that yoga is "non-Christian" (Thursday 11 May 2017, page 9). Well, duh, of course it's non-Christian. As is tai-chi and tae-kwon-do, which are also implied to be a problem. As for what the article suggests are the other activities under contention, "cash prize bingo and the like" I could not possibly comment. The key point in the debate seems to me that this new community centre is part of the church itself, "converted" to the more secular interests of the "parishioners" as they are called in the article. But if the complainants were actual parishioners, people attending the church, supporting it and being involved in it, would part of St David's have had to be converted into a community centre? Isn't a church a community centre by definition? Not if no one's going, though. If the locals were attending and supporting the church they would know in what ways yoga and other eastern practices are legitimately non-Christian - or at least they wouldn't be so "shocked" that the Church holds this view. While some individual Christians can withstand activities or habits that are non-Christian - from practising yoga to watching "Game of Thrones" - that doesn't mean such things ought to be endorsed by any church in a general way.  There is no such thing as a "fair and non-biased community centre", as the denizens of Blaenporth apparently desire. There is always a set of values setting a limit to what can or cannot be indulged in: bomb-building classes would not be allowed anywhere, one suspects, even if demand were high. To complain that a church holds to Christian values is an intolerant view all its own.

UK police headgear, two perspectives

There was an interesting contrast on the subject of police headgear in yesterday's Daily Telegraph. On page 12 of the newspaper was a piece on how Northamptonshire Police were adopting a baseball cap design, like the forces of Cheshire and Lancashire before them. The new hats are called "Bump Caps" and unlike regular baseball caps they have a "reinforced internal frame". However they were not adopted primarily for their protective qualities. At least not for their protective qualities in the physical sense. Rather, they were adopted to protect the emotional sensitivities of any non-binary potential applicant to the police who is now protected from the terrible dilemma of having to choose between the traditional helmet (for men) or the bowler hat (for women). On page 19 of the paper, in the "Letters to the Editor", was a reader's account of having attended a seminar "with a group of refugees, Syrians, Chechens and Iraqis who had recently arrived in Britain." The three groups were asked what impressed them most about the country: all said the police. These new arrivals fully appreciated the fact that police here "do not steal from you, beat you up or intimidate you. Most are not even armed." Incidentally, anyone inclined to diss the police as a matter of course, either here or anywhere else in the West, would do well to reflect on this sobering perspective for a while. But the seminar attendees were also disappointed: they felt the police looked scruffy and overly casual, nothing like "the illustrations of helmeted officers in smart uniforms" they had expected from the photographs and illustrations they had seen over the years in their native countries.  As an immigrant myself, I'm with the refugees on this one. Britain, stop throwing away the iconic designs that still do contribute to your greatness.

Child endangerment poster

Is it just me or does this actress look like a child? And a gender-ambiguous child at that. Maybe there's a wider trend to de-gendering acting than the silliness of MTV awards: narrow the gap between men and women by featuring actresses  who look like children.  In the original "Alien" the whole point about Sigourney Weaver was that she was a woman. That's what made both her and her character memorable. The same could be said more recently about characters played by Jennifer Lawrence: though chubby-cheeked (like the person in this poster), Lawrence is unambiguously a woman. Who or what this character is I have no idea, but please let's get the poor child away from the monster.

'Best Actor'?

And speaking of plural language, there was the news a few days ago that Emma Watson had won MTV's new-fangled genderless acting award. 'Best Actor' and 'Best Actress' categories were dispensed with and replaced with one single category called, wait for it... 'Best Actor'. Hilariously, this progressive destruction of  'Best Actress' enshrines the allegedly sexist masculine plural, you know the one that oppressively encompasses the feminine as well.  There is no reason to give Emma Watson a 'Best' award for acting under any category, and especially not for "Beauty and the Beast", but the political idea MTV was presumably serving is just wrong. We don't call female doctors doctoresses or female lawyers lawyeresses because whether the doctor or lawyer is male or female makes no difference to the work they do. Acting, on the other hand, is an activity that is based entirely on the use of the person: body, appearance, voice, past experience, inner resources, everything. Whether that person is male or female is precisely the starting point of the activity, however much one would wish this reality away politically. Abolishing the category of 'actress' is in fact detrimental to all women who try to earn their living by acting because it fails to recognise the most basic quality they are bringing to their work.

Plural language and the Trinity

Here is a quote from Nabeel Qureshi that delightfully ties in my points about French plural forms and knowing what the word Trinity refers to (previous post). It's from Qureshi's  2016 book No God But One; Allah or Jesus?, Chapter 6, the section entitled "The Trinity in the Bible":
"After emphasising that God created mankind in his image, the Bible then says he created them male and female. That's not to say God has genders, but it is to say that there is a plurality in his image. This is reflected in Scripture's use of him to refer to mankind, and then its switch to them. Mankind is in one sense singular, one humanity, but in another sense plural, composed of men and women. That is the image of God: both singular and plural. (p.58)
Who's to say that, far from being sexist, the French plural form in the masculine isn't in fact a glorious reflection of our status as divinely created and beloved beings?

Language use in France and Oxford

"The Times" today features articles on Macron's wife, as I discovered after posting the previous blog entry. The articles are advertised on the front page of the paper with the headline: 'The First Cougar?", which really catches the eye as a being nice and classy, doesn't it? Anyway the main article, written by Helena Frith Powell, starts out very positively by describing "the spring in every older Frenchwoman's step" caused by glamorous Brigitte Trogneux, the 64 year-old spouse of the presidential candidate. But the second paragraph begins: "France is an extremely sexist society. You have only to look at how the language is structured to see that. A group of men and women in a room become grammatically masculine." So would a group of foodstuffs, or plants, or whatever. It's gender (linguistic), not sex (physical, biological), that dictates the rule. What else is a language with gendered nouns and pronouns supposed to do with a group composed of both genders? I always thought it was a neat solution for the masculine plural to be made to encompass the feminine, whereas when you have a feminine plural you can be certain only feminine genders are being referred to. Simple! Further down in the article Frith Powell has no problem quoting Inès de la Fressange's reference to the country as a whole in the feminine: "France is showing her individualism". Is this traditional usage also wrong? Should men decry it as sexist? Traditional language use comes under fire elsewhere in the "times2" section. The columnist Robert Crampton comments on the silliness of Oxford University's recent warning to its (or 'her') students about how failure to make proper eye contact could be construed as a micro-aggression. Crampton rightly points out that youths arriving at University are not necessarily blessed with perfect social manners and beyond that, could find sustained eye contact difficult for a variety of reasons (he mentions shyness, introversion, mental health issues; to which one could add, learning difficulties, being anywhere on the autistic spectrum, plain kookiness and good old-fashioned eccentricity). But that's not enough for Crampton: he has to manufacture a grievance with Oxford for its use of traditional names to refer to the three terms of its academic year: Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity (Trinity being the current term). "As if anyone knows what Trinity means!" rebukes Crampton. His advice to Oxford, so as to make everyone "feel more welcome", is to "ditch the whole embarrassing antiquated private-lingo nonsense." Right. So, does he know for a fact that those students from "unlikely backgrounds" feel micro-aggressed by the term names? If so, maybe the names of the Colleges are also a problem? How about the name 'Oxford' itself: too grand-sounding, too steeped in history for comfort? Where does such nonsense begin, and where would it end? As someone who came here in 1988 from a most unlikely background, I can vouch that learning the unwritten rules and the formal peculiarities of such an ancient university was far more of a strain than learning three new names. In fact those names can be seen as a plus, as different and interesting. Oxford Brookes University, up the hill in Headington, now operates a two-semester year, unimaginatively referred to as Semester 1 and Semester 2. Is that better and, if so, why? Discuss. I'm not sure in what way Crampton finds the traditional term names 'embarrassing'. 'Antiquated' means 'old, used here in a pejorative sense. Well, those names are old, but they are not 'private-lingo'. On the contrary, they are drawn from the social and church year, as they were observed by pretty much everyone in the country for hundreds of years. And far from being 'nonsense', they refer to dates and events everyone used to observe or at the very least know about. Michealmas:  the feast day of St Michael, September 29th, also marking one of the four 'quarter days' of the year when rents etc were due; Hilary: named after the feast day of St Hilary, January 14th; Trinity, the summer term: named after Trinity Sunday, the first Sunday after Pentecost, Jesus's promised gift of the Spirit after his Ascension, and thus celebrating the fullness of the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Mr Crampton might not believe in what the term names refer to, but what he should find embarrassing is the ignorance and chronological snobbery of his attack on them.