The V-word(s)

I

A few days ago, in a fit of moral honesty, I decided that it is ultimately hypocritical and lazy of me to openly view the global meat industry as ethically fucked up and yet still directly give it my monetary support. I started thinking: seriously, why should I not at least try adopting a vegan lifestyle? In the end I came up with a few reasons:

1) I live in a flat situation wherein food is largely communal, and I think it's unfair for one person in the group to expect everyone else to conform to their dietary restrictions. I have a flatmate who's allergic to bananas, and we still collectively buy those with her money. I can't reasonably request that we all stop buying meat, eggs and dairy with my contribution just because I personally have an ethical problem with it.

However, all going according to plan, next year I'll be living in a smaller flat with a smaller group, and we're considering the possibility of sharing only some of our food/meals and taking care of the rest individually. In that case, I don't think my hypothetical vegan diet would be too restrictive on the flat as a whole. I don't believe in policing anyone's eating habits, and I honestly could not give a fuck if everyone in my flat decides to eat steak every night with a side of bacon-wrapped sausages and fried chicken for dessert -- it's none of my business. Similarly it's no one else's business if I decide to live on tofu, lettuce and vitamin pills for the rest of my life.

2) It's expensive to maintain a healthy vegan diet. By cutting out two food groups, you limit yourself in terms of quick, easy and cheap options for working in protein, iron, calcium, vitamin D, vitamin B12 and a few other necessary aspects of a healthy diet. While it definitely is possible to make up for the lack of natural sources of these things, it adds up. I'm a tertiary student in New Zealand, which is the only group in the country that is expected to borrow money just to live. While I would love to be able to buy five or six litres of iron, calcium,  and vitamin B12 fortified soy milk every week, it's not financially viable.

3) I don't know how my body is going to react to suddenly being deprived of some of the only nutrition it gets. I can safely assume that any attempt to actually plan meals -- which I would need to do -- would automatically result in a much, much healthier diet than the one I have now. My current diet is the kind that causes people to express surprise that I'm not hideously sick and/or obese. However, there's no predicting individual reactions to a sudden lifestyle change; some people seem to be able to adjust without a hitch, and some end up with rickets and rotting teeth. As far as I can tell there's no way of telling beforehand which is which, even with the help of a dietitian (many of whom are simply stumped when the recommended supplements just aren't working for certain people).

The health problems that commonly occur in the vegan community are exactly that -- problems that occur in the vegan community, usually as a result of cutting dairy products from their diet rather than the no-meat aspect. Because of this, combined with my limited finances and sincere love of woolly clothes in winter, I'm taking a step back from my original proposal and considering vegetarianism as a more viable and healthy option.

II


In my internet-trawling for information, opinions, and various perspectives on the issue of animal cruelty and ways to mitigate it, I came across a number of unapologetically stupid and/or bizarre views.

You're either for or against killing animals for food. Choose one.


This strikes me as incredibly black-and-white, and is invariably the opinion of someone who sees the world in simplistic enough terms to have chosen a side on the matter and denied the existence of the fence entirely. I am neither for or against killing animals for food, because the matter is not that simple. I am against the massive waste of resources, the social and environmental impact of large-scale farming. I am not necessarily against the killing of animals for food. In some circumstances I have no issue with it. Some people find it abhorrent, and that's fine. Some people are happy to raise an animal in good mental and physical health and then take a knife to its throat themselves. I don't see that as abhorrent, I see it as one person taking responsibility for the way they choose to eat.

It is the suffering I object to; while it's true that a herbivore taken down by a carnivore in the wild could potentially suffer much more in its death than a factory-slaughtered animal, that doesn't justify a human causing unnecessarily suffering. If you're going to maintain that humans deserve the right to kill their meals because they are more intelligent, you must equally maintain that humans' intelligence makes them wholly responsible for the preventable suffering of their prey. In a 'civilized' society, suffering is unacceptable, period. It doesn't matter who or what is doing the suffering. If you keep an animal in overcrowded conditions or deny it medical attention or castrate it while it's conscious without painkillers or keep it in an enclosure that is proportionally far too small for it to happily spend its life in, then you are engaging in institutionalized barbarism. That I have a problem with.

Humans are herbivores.


This is just blatantly silly. Humans are obviously not herbivores by any stretch of the imagination and the 'evidence' these people like to offer to support their 'argument' is incredibly selective. Humans are omnivores, which means we achieve optimal health on a mixture of meat-based and plant-based diets. If you're going to try to back up your moral superiority complex with science, please ensure it actually is science, not a selection of disparate facts arranged so it seems as if there might be a correlation between them. At any rate, if you try to exist on an entirely plant-based diet with absolutely no human-developed supplements (not just pills but calcium fortified tofu, vitamin D fortified soy milk, etc), you will develop health problems. Because you aren't a herbivore. Clearly.

If killing animals is wrong, why is it not wrong to kill a tomato?


The imbeciles who ask this question in all seriousness have somehow managed to completely miss the most important aspect of this issue is not the death itself, it's the suffering. There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that a tomato plant suffers when a tomato is taken from it, or indeed that it is capable of suffering at all. There is endless evidence, intuitive and scientific, that animals can and do suffer due to farming. Say it with me: suffering is not acceptable. Ever.

You'll never completely stop animal cruelty anyway, so why not just give up?


This is called the 'Perfect Solution Fallacy', which is a logical fallacy that
a) assumes there is a perfect solution to the problem, and
b) concludes that because the proposed solution is not perfect, it is entirely without worth.

To anyone who has rejected defeatism as their overall approach to life, it seems obvious that the actions of individuals alone are not going to have a measurable impact on something as enormous as the meat industry; but it is equally obvious that the more individuals who refuse to support it, the less successful it will be. In this case vegetarianism has been steadily gaining momentum (and strict devotees) over the past few decades and shows no signs of stopping. It has become so common that it's almost unusual to find a Western restaurant that doesn't have at least one vegetarian option on the menu. That doesn't strike me as "no impact whatsoever".

Long story short: people are still stupid, world continues turning, I continue to regret knowing these things.

Ayn Rand: Pseudo-Intellectualism At Its Finest

"Man's rights can be violated only by the use of physical force. It is only by means of physical force that one man can deprive another of his life, or enslave him, or rob him, or prevent him from pursuing his own goals, or compel him to act against his own rational judgment." - Ayn Rand.

Oh! Well, thank you for enlightening us! That makes a lot of sense, because classes don't exist and have absolutely no bearing on how someone's life turns out; there is no such thing as privilege whether it's in the form of race, gender or wealth, and if there is it's not primarily an inherited thing its recipients did nothing to earn one way or another. Right?

Because everyone is born equal with exactly the same opportunities for education and training. Right?

Because the wealthy and powerful are only wealthy and powerful because they're the smartest, hardest working and most talented people in society -- again, wealth and power are not primarily inherited or gifted things; they're only ever the result of mind-blowingly clever ideas and jaw-droppingly hard work, and therefore taxation is theft, and the use of public schooling is a drain on society. Right?

Because the poor and middle classes are only stuck at the bottom of the pyramid through their own despicable laziness and because they're just so damned average. Because all wages are sufficient to cover the costs of any necessary service if one simply budgets correctly. Because women are only treated as second-class citizens due to their insistence on acting inferior and submissive. Because every Westerner who isn't white chose to be subjugated, dismissed, abused and treated as foreign in their own country. Right?

Ayn Rand had absolutely no idea what she was waffling on about, and it shows: the people who subscribe to her views are either picking and choosing which parts of her views they like, or they're adolescents. As far as I can tell, most people are exposed to Rand -- usually in the form of her fiction, not her frankly ridiculous essays -- when they're quite young, say ages 12 - 22. Her ideas are extremely appealing at this age, because their black-and-white idealism suits the overly simiplistic world view most children have. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority tend to follow a pattern of thinking Rand is brilliant and amazing, growing up a little, and realizing how redundant and short-sighted most of her ideas actually are. Amazingly, her ideas seem to be making a resurgence of late -- I can only assume this has something to do with the state of the economy, and the fact that Ayn Rand was a little like Oprah in the fact that she could sound extremely knowledgeable and right without actually having any idea what she was talking about.

That isn't to say there aren't parts of Rand's "philosophy" that I agree with. I can't disagree with her views on bodily autonomy: she was loudly and resolutely for the rights of all individuals to do whatever they like with their own bodies. I am, too, and there are plenty of other extremely intelligent people who share this conviction and who can actually back it up with sound reasoning, which I wouldn't depend on Rand for. Rand was also firmly against racism, as demonstrated here:

 "They (Native Americans) didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent."

Thank you for that absolutely sickening piece of colonialist propaganda. Even Disney managed a less racist take on thegenocide of those primitive animals who totally deserved it for trying to keep the poor little white man from spreading his wonderful civilization. 

"The worst evil that you can do, psychologically, is to laugh at yourself. That means spitting in your own face." 

Really? Come on, now we have to take ourselves seriously all the time? I seem to remember a period in my life when I found it extremely difficult to laugh at myself. Predictably, it was when I was a raging ego on legs, otherwise known as a 'teenager'. I suppose my hormone-fuelled teenage hubris should be reminiscent of the world view of a woman who wrote an essay entitled The Virtue of Selfishness -- I'm not making this up. Ayn Rand literally believed altruism is holding back humanity's progress. I am growing steadily more and more embarrassed for anyone who takes her seriously.

"Evil requires the sanction of the victim."

I find this quote intensely disturbing in the light of Rand's original model for her "ideal man", the fictional hero she sought to immortalise on paper; his characteristics are evident in the lead male characters of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. These are some of Rand's notes on the heroic, perfect character she was inspired to write based on a man named William Edward Hickman: "[he] is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

This model -- Rand's highest ideal, her pinnacle of human achievement -- was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer. In December of 1927 he kidnapped a 12-year-old girl named Marian Parker. He proceeded to send her parents cruel, taunting ransom notes demanding the sum of $1500 for the girl's safe release. Her parents raised the money and delivered it to Hickman, who proceeded to dump Marian's corpse in front of her horrified father and flee. Her legs had been cut off and her eyes had been wired open to appear as if she was still alive. Her internal organs had been cut out and pieces of her body were later found strewn all over the Los Angeles area.

Hickman was apprehended, despite his best attempts to hide (seems odd, considering Rand's vehement denouncement of "cowards"), tried for not only Marian Parker's murder but also an assortment of other murders, robberies and forgeries, and eventually he was sentenced to death. 

This man was Rand's basis for her literary hero. There is a word for the type of person she aspires to so ardently:sociopath. Although, as far as Rand was concerned, Hickman was the victim in all this; where he should have been praised for his "courage" in defying society's expectations, the degenerate, stupid mob had the gall to turn on him!

"The first thing that impresses me about the case is the ferocious rage of a whole society against one man. No matter what the man did, there is always something loathsome in the 'virtuous' indignation and mass-hatred of the 'majority.'... It is repulsive to see all these beings with worse sins and crimes in their own lives, virtuously condemning a criminal...

"This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."

Yes, Ayn. Clearly the problem everybody had with Hickman was his daring individuality. Not his brutal murder and dismemberment of a 12-year-old child. Clearly the real villain here is the public. You are so very, very switched on and clever. What a unique and special snowflake you are, Ayn, for seeing this man for who he really is: a beautiful, bold and romantic soul. Maybe you should spend the next 7 years writing a novel 

about these misunderstood virtues that only you are clever enough to see, you special snowflake, you.

In which I wonder if I'm the only person in the world who doesn't think sexual violence is hilarious.

I have had an exceedingly depressing hour or so of finding what appears to be an endless stream of Facebook pages dedicated to rape jokes.

- "The awkward moment went your misses wakes up and ya dicks in her arse"

- "Im not a rapist LOL jks get in the van"

- "The awkward moment when a slut is not DTF but you fuck her anyway"

- "Raping pregnant bitches and telling my friends I had a threesome"

- "Looking in the mirror and wondering how you haven't been raped yet"

- "Is raping a hooker classified as theft"

- "You know shes playing hard to get when your chasing her down an alleyway"

Rape jokes are bullshit. I realize some people can find something entertaining and enjoyable about the real-life sexual assault of millions of their fellow human beings, and frankly I'd consider that a symptom of a worrying disconnect from reality. I am one of the unfortunate minority who
a) don't think it's funny, and
b) are not afraid to tell people that I don't think it's funny, and proceed to give them reasons why they should shut the fuck up.

It's not viewed as socially acceptable or 'polite' to call people out on their sickening attempts at humour, and apparently that's supposed to keep me from doing it, but I think that's piss-poor reasoning. I should stay silent and just accept it because...someone might feel perturbed by it if I speak up? Good. They should feel perturbed. Ideally they should feel incredibly embarrassed to be spouting this crap and passing it off as a joke. At any rate, keeping quiet is half the problem -- it's a lot easier to get away with hurting somebody if no one's willing to speak up and tell you you're wrong. And I don't really care if everyone in the group suddenly feels acutely uncomfortable and defensive. You know who's automatically going to feel uncomfortable over rape jokes? Rape survivors. The 1 in 4 women, 1 in 20 men -- and that's only the ones who report their assault. The numbers are higher than that in reality.

So you know a survivor, whether they've told you about it or not -- and if you've been running your mouth about how rape is funny, rape is a funny joke, they're probably not going to mention it to you because they can't trust you to take them seriously. And survivors don't get a choice about whether or not they've been sexually assaulted, but everyone has the choice of whether or not to make a crack about sexual assault.

You know it's in poor taste. And it's not the kind of 'poor taste' your grandmother complains about, when women wear red shoes on a date or something equally trivial and ridiculous. It's the kind of 'poor taste' that very literally and very directly communicates to everyone you're speaking to that you not only couldn't give a shit about rape survivors, you actively support rapists. You're saying that you think what they do is pretty okay, and honestly pretty funny.

I know that most of the time that isn't what you think you're saying, and I know for most people it sounds like you're making a joke ('haha, wouldn't it be funny if I really thought it was cool and normal to force people into sexual acts?' -- to which the correct answer is 'in what way would that be funny?'). There's one type of person who doesn't realize you're joking about that. That person is a rapist, and you don't know who they are. You don't know that you know them. They don't go around with flashing neon signs above their heads, but they exist in disgustingly high numbers in perfectly ordinary society, so I can tell you right now that you have met one. You probably hung out with one. Maybe multiple times. Maybe you thought he was kind of weird, maybe it never crossed your mind that he could ever be violent with anyone. Maybe you made a joke around him; it might've been about rape.

And there, right there, you've just told the rapist that you've hung out with at some point that his actions are normal. He already thinks that, this is statistical fact -- rapists believe that all men rape, it's just that some of them hide it better than others. What you've done when you make a naturalizing, lighthearted comment about rape is reassure him that it is normal, that you all do it too, and that you think it's okay. On top of that you've simultaneously told the rape survivor(s) you know that you're on the side of the person who assaulted them; that you don't believe their hurt is real or that it should be taken seriously. This could be your mother, your sister, your best friend.

Now tell me rape jokes don't hurt anybody.

Wherein I quibble about a few of the finer points of debate.

I do adore a good debate. I, like most people, openly love the sound of my own opinions; but I also appreciate the opportunity to express them in a setting that allows for them to be (intelligently and calmly) questioned, and I am quite open to hearing other people's views (so long as they are reasonably well thought out). I realize that not everyone can have the same opinions of every hot button topic, and you can argue politics until the cows come home but some people will just never see eye-to-eye, and plenty of women are exercising their right to not care whether they have rights. I have come to accept these facts, however grudgingly.

One thing I do insist on, if I'm to take someone's input with any level of seriousness, is that we are all clear on the definitions of the words and terms we're using.
For example, I find it bewilderingly difficult to find a person who understands what "privilege" is in a socio-economic context. Unless I feel like hauling out the chalkboard and teaching this poor imbecile from scratch what they should already know if they're displaying a willingness to engage in racial, gender-based or economic debate, I'm probably not going to bother paying any attention to their opinion. This isn't because I'm inherently arrogant (debatable; I won't deny it just yet); it's because their opinion is overwhelmingly likely to be uninformed and/or based on anecdotal evidence and/or based on prejudice and second-third-or-fourth-hand stories.

Rules of Any Decent Debate
1. Understand the vocabulary. If you want to argue whether or not there is a God, define 'God'.
2. If you know nothing or nearly nothing factual about the topic, don't start. Don't even say anything. Shut up and listen. You might learn something.
3. No anecdotal evidence. Ever. I don't care. If you utter a sentence during a serious discussion beginning with "My [insert relative/pet/friend/ex-boyfriend's name here]..." you are going straight to debating Hell and I will help you get there. It isn't relevant. Just because something happened to someone you know does not make it the norm. It doesn't mean anything at all, actually, so just don't bring it up. Good. Thanks.

These are all problems I tend to find in abundance on the internet. That's not to say they're not also tragically common in everyday (real) life, but the internet really manages to produce some doozies. If I had a dollar for every time I've come across a wildly creatively spelled missive denouncing one thing or another based on someone's auntie's personal experiences as a secretary, I'd be a very wealthy lady.

What's really caught my attention tonight when it comes to terrible arguments is the sheer number of people who dismiss concerns about underlying messages in anything aimed at children by saying, "But it's for children, so it's intended to entertain not indoctrinate". 
Intention is completely and utterly irrelevant. I'm sorry, but in cases of implied racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, or xenophobia, it really doesn't matter even a tiny little bit whether the creator of the thing really intended those ideas to be embedded in the fibre of it. If someone can find any of those things, and reasonably justify their point using the source material, then I'm real sorry, but it's there. You can choose not to look at it if you like. Of course there are other ways of reading it. That doesn't mean that implied racism/sexism/ableism/homophobia/xenophobia isn't there anymore. It just means you'd prefer not to acknowledge it.

Another thing - indoctrination is most often not intentional. I don't understand where exactly this idea came from that 'indoctrination' means 'deliberate and malignant brainwashing', but it's complete nonsense and shows a poor grasp of the vocabulary. According to that fount of knowledge known as Wikipedia, "indoctrination is the process of inculcating ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or a professional methodology (see doctrine). It is often distinguished from education by the fact that the indoctrinated person is expected not to question or critically examine the doctrine they have learned."

The only difference between indoctrination and socialization is that one has a negative connotation and the other has a positive connotation. It's all cultural learning, and it is never more significant and influential than it is in children's entertainment.

On Ellen Page.

So, supposedly Ellen Page has been 'outed' by an outraged blogger with unnamed sources. Question: has this always counted as a reliable way to find out about somebody's sexual orientation? I'm neither here nor there on the issue; it's bullshit to forcibly out somebody, and something about the inherent sideshow-ish nature of the claims makes me pretty uncomfortable. It's as if they've found out she's abnormal, dug up a dirty scandalous secret worth blogging about, which I'm sure is doing wonders to reassure those LGBT teens they're so worried for.

Plenty of people manage to live their lives without discussing their sexuality with people they don't know, and frankly I don't see why anyone should be made to do it if it doesn't appeal. If a prominent member of the community is gay and they want to talk about it in the press, make a statement about it and volunteer themselves as a positive representative, that's brilliant, but it's not something you can force someone into. It's intensely personal, and claiming anyone should bring their sexuality into their profession on the basis that it's a job that forces them into the public eye is ridiculous. Go find someone else to point the finger at, as if they were personally responsible for the bullying of LGBT youth. Maybe this time pick somebody who isn't a young LGBT person.

Alright. I've been neglectful.

The last time I wrote here, it was May. It is now late July, and while I would love nothing more than to claim to have been whisked away from blogging by some fascinating, adventurous and slightly dangerous diversion, I can't. I can't even claim something commonplace but legitimate, like study or a death in the family. Really I've just been terribly lazy. That's not to say I haven't found things to fill the time otherwise:

A Game of Thrones - both the TV series and, to a lesser extent, the books. That sounds wrong, doesn't it? Moving pictures before the written word. It probably is. I don't care. It's that good.

Fallout 3. I'm kind of working backwards with these games. I started out with New Vegas at the start of the year, and I've only just gotten my hands on Fallout 3, but it is most excellent. I've been playing it for three days or so, and they've been punctuated by nights filled with dreams of the Capital Wasteland. 

Series 6 of Doctor Who. Of course. I await the upcoming Hitler episode with pleasantly squirmy anticipation.

Sherlock. I knew before I even started watching this show that I was going to love it with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, and I was right. True, the whole 'quirky/rude but incredibly intelligent investigator' thing is a bit overdone these days - House and The Mentalist spring to mind - but let's face it, Sherlock was the original, and the modernity of this reboot does nothing to detract from his brilliance. 

It doesn't hurt that Martin Freeman is made of kittens, and Benedict Cumberbatch is tall, dark and well dressed - and that voice. Come to think of it, that name.

Dirty, dirty girls, indeed.

You probably now have the impression that I'm basically incapable of tearing myself away from the TV. And you might be right. But in my defence, there has been snow and illness to keep me indoors. Judge not lest ye be judged, and all that.

I regret nothing.

This is a fashion post.

I have decided that I am not allowed to buy another black or grey item of clothing (unless it's absolutely amazing and one of a kind and completely incomparable to anything I've ever seen before). I've also decided (and this was almost definitely influenced by my overwhelming love for everything Karen Gillan touches) that I can and will rock chequered shirts, red things, baggy tops, and ponchos.

I am now the proud owner of something that looks a little like this:

except it's having an identity crisis. It thinks it's a poncho. And that's fine by me. Unfortunately, it hasn't really brought me any closer to looking even vaguely like this:

but a girl can dream, right?

Also high on my fashion to-do list are shawls. Shawls! Shawls are a severely underrated item of clothing, as my recent adoration of Stevie Nicks has brought to my attention. I wore a shawl to my seventh form ball and I haven't touched one since, which is basically a travesty considering how often I long for something between a vest and a jacket that isn't a cardigan. Clearly I need a wardrobe full of beautiful, ethereal, cuddly shawls!

WITHOUT FLAWS.

People like to bitch about winter, and it has its downsides, don't get me wrong; but frankly I can't wait for an excuse to break out the wool and leather.

On natural human insanity.

'Insanity' is such a relative term. 50 years ago running for the sake of fitness would have been considered pretty insane. Now I can't walk for 15 minutes between my house and campus without having at least two near-misses with deliriously exhausted joggers who apparently are blind to everything except cars and cyclists. Clearly the whole idea of craziness is rooted in the zeitgeist of the time and place you find yourself in. This makes me feel a little better whenever I find myself thinking, "What I am doing is batshit insane". Hey, it might be, but that isn't always necessarily a bad thing.

Thinking about the Slutwalk.

So, clearly, given my leaning toward equality and my complete disgust for the general perception and handling of rape in most societies, I thought that whole Slutwalk thing was brilliant. The idea behind it -- that anyone may be raped, regardless of what they were wearing, and that none of them either asked for or deserved it -- seems so mind-crushingly obvious to me that it almost causes me physical pain that it has to be said aloud, let alone that some people argue with it. 

Tonight I came across a profoundly self-loathing essay written by a depressingly unintelligent woman named Chelsea Fagan. 

I have, like pretty much every 22-year-old girl, gone out looking like a slut occasionally. And I got a significantly higher amount of leers, cat calls, and uncomfortable attention. I was not surprised; I had no one but myself to blame for the sudden nervous feeling that flared up in my stomach as I walked passed men checking out my shape in my revealing dress. I don’t dress like this anymore for that very reason. I want men to look at me and have thoughts other than, “I could have sex with her tonight if I wanted.”

This paragraph alone is stunningly near-sighted. "I had no one but myself to blame for the sudden nervous feeling that flared up in my stomach as I walked passed men checking out my shape in a revealing dress." Really? Really?

A) At 22 years old, you are not a girl. You are a woman. In Western society, identifying or being identified as a child when one is clearly not is insulting, demeaning, and has been associated with slavery and racism. It equates you with people who cannot live an independent life, which I'm sure is completely coincidental, oh hi thousands of years of gender-based subjugation. Cut that shit out.

B) passed? Look, I can see you have a bit of trouble on the intellectual level, but correct spelling and grammar is a joy we can all share in.

C) If you feel like you are at increased risk of assault because you're wearing tight clothing, that is not your fault. That is the fault of the men who assault women, the society that promotes sexual violence as titillation, and everyone who perpetuates the myth that the only women who get raped are dressed "slutty".

Aside from all that, there is no such thing as "slutty". The idea of a "slut" is a completely subjective thing. It changes from person to person. What looks slutty to your grandmother is probably completely different to what looks slutty to any given 15-year-old schoolgirl. "Slut" isn't even connected exclusively to clothing -- oh, no.

This photo turned up in a Google image search for "slut".

If she doesn't look slutty, that's alright, she can still act slutty, or have a slutty history, or say something slutty, or hell, maybe you just don't like her. It's a nebulous concept, and that is exactly why it's so convenient: it can be slapped on any woman, anywhere, at any time. It's completely meaningless. And it is certainly not justification for assault.

Women are pressured, followed, and hounded by men who, when sober and in the light of day, often would never do such a thing. And for a man, a sexually and visually driven man not in full command of his wits, having a woman tell him “no” while wearing the most provocative, arousing, blatantly sexual outfit possible is, to say the least, confusing. And while that does not give him the right to violate her, it also cannot be claimed that women are entirely innocent in this situation.

Er...yes, it can. If a man is so completely out of control of his instincts around attractive women when he's drunk that he cannot help raping them, I'm pretty sure he belongs in prison. I'm also bewildered by the idea that when a woman dresses "provocatively" (which is a relative concept, again) that means she is looking for sex from anyone at all, regardless of what she says. "Slutty" clothes are apparently implicit permission to all men who lay eyes on her to have sex with her, and if she isn't quick and loud and strong enough to withdraw her implicit consent, well, that's her fault. It's another nonsensical facet of the delicious subject of slut-shaming that it is supposedly so awful for a woman to want sex, and dress in a way she considers sexy, that any woman who does is therefore deserving of rape.

Over 80% of sexual assaults are committed by friends, acquaintances or family members of the victim. It has absolutely nothing to do with how they're dressed, or how much makeup they're wearing, or whether the news is on. Rape is always completely and utterly the fault of the rapist. This is a fact, not an opinion, but it's one an alarmingly small number of people seem to acknowledge.

Allow me to take a few minutes to rhapsodise about Damien Rice.

Yes, I'm well aware how very late I am to this realization, but Damien Rice writes amazing songs.

We might make out when nobody's there

It's not that we're scared

It's just that it's delicate

So why do you fill my sorrow

With the words you've borrowed

From the only place you've known

And why do you sing Hallelujah

If it means nothing to you

Why do you sing with me at all?

So, it is entirely possible that I just have a very generic and predictable life, and it is entirely possible that the phrases were just general enough that almost anything could be read into them, but I spent around seven hours last night immersing myself in these songs and I found myself pleasantly surprised by how very appropriate some of the lyrics seemed to be to my immediate situation. 'Hey!' says I, 'I know what that's like!' We bonded, Damien and I. I swear. It was magical. 

And what I am to you
Is not real

And what I am to you

You do not need

And what I am to you

Is not what you mean to me

You give me miles and miles of mountains

And I ask for the sea

I'm unsure how to react to this chorus, other than to say: yes. This, exactly. Phrasing so perfect, I can barely handle it.

I came.

Just trust me, I didn't know whether I was grinning or crying the first time I heard it. That's how unexpectedly accurate it was.

Now, I don't want to be one of those stupid fucks who are so insistent in their fangirl/boying that they end up issuing a ridiculous and completely untrue ultimatum like "if you don't ___ this ___, you are [insert bad thing]", but if you don't get that this song is beautiful, you don't have a soul.

That awkward moment when you stay up all night playing Pokémon.

After nine all-too-quick hours of wondrous training, bonding and adventure, I looked up from the world of Pokémon to discover that the sun was rising. It occurred to me in that moment that
a) I had not slept at all, and
b) I have scheduled an entire season of Doctor Who for tonight, so there is no sleep forthcoming when that fiery ball dips below the horizon once more.
This is perhaps more meaningful for me than one might think, given my generally nocturnal nature. Contrary to popular belief, just because I tend to be awake for more of the night than the day doesn't mean I don't value my sleep. Oh, no. In fact I value my sleep more than most things. Breathing comes in first, and sometimes food, but sleep is generally the top of the pile. Without it...things get strange. Bat Country strange. I have very little capacity for long periods of wakefulness.

Whatever else you may say about sleep deprivation, it amounts to a state of mind which is simultaneously like being incredibly drunk and also like having had way, way too much caffeine. It walks the line between 'funny' and 'humiliating'. I, for one, think it's worth the sideways glances and exasperation of my hapless friends, because I come up with some brilliant thoughts in my zombie-like state. Currently I have latched onto the idea of recreating these beauties in the comfort of my own kitchen with a ferocity I am unaccustomed to, even for baking:

It may even happen, if I don't collapse into a snoring, dribbling pile of insanity before I get around to it. Wish me luck.

I am obsessed with baking.

Baking is possibly the best thing ever. It's fun, pretty easy for the most part, and it results in delicious food. What could possibly go wrong with this equation? That's right -- nothing.
With that in mind, I am now dead set on baking some sort of Pokémon-related cake. Since my skills at cake decorating are undeveloped at best (and by that I mean I've never even tried it), this is probably going to take some practise. Some chocolatey, straight-out-of-the-oven, frosting-covered practise. 

Disclaimer: I am not responsible for any of the wondrous Poké-delicacies pictured above. They are merely my inspiration and I can only hope to attain such glory in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Dear world:

I was going to lie and say that I don't give a fuck if you think anyone else's body is sub-standard, but then I decided that it's okay to give a fuck. (I also decided that it's incredibly sad and pathetic that caring about things is still seen as a weakness; although it's hardly surprising given that particular attribute's association with femininity, which is the scourge of humanity even though sexism is supposedly dead. But that's a different rant for a different day.)

Instead, I'm going to attempt to stick as closely to the truth as possible. So: obviously, I do care quite a lot that you think anyone else's body is sub-standard. I mean 'you' in the general sense, of course, this isn't a missive aimed at one particular person -- mainly because I've noticed so many people spouting that distinctive body-policing rhetoric lately that I wouldn't know who exactly to address it to.

I don't intend to go to the gym. I don't care if you do. That's your choice. I don't intend to punish myself into a smaller dress size under some pretence that I'm only doing it to get healthy. I don't care if you do. That's your choice. I don't intend to stare judgementally and make bitchy comments every time someone bigger than me walks by. I don't care if you do, but it makes you look so shallow and insecure that I get second hand embarrassment just listening to it. Again, that's entirely up to you. I don't intend to start judging my physical appearance based on how closely I resemble emaciated women with eating disorders. I'm not about to convince myself that exercising excessively isn't frequently a product of the exact same mental illness that anorexia and bulimia spring from. I've given up caring if you do, because I don't have the patience or the training necessary to handle mental disorders. If you want to come to me and ask for help, please do, and I'll do what I can, but I'm not going to jump down your throat unasked and tell you that I think you're unwell.

I'm also going to avoid having that conversation wherein I reveal that fat people are usually either just as healthy as you are, if not actually healthier. For every skinny person who is woefully unfit, weak and sickly, there is an athletic fat person in peak physical condition. I'm not going to mention to you that statistically it is virtually impossible to lose a significant amount of weight and keep it off for more than five years, because your body has other ideas about what your ideal weight is, and you're quite pointlessly exhausting yourself fighting against it. I realize you aren't open to these facts, because they don't gel with that nice little cover story about how you "just want to get fit", but complain when your thighs get bigger and you actually weigh more because you've gained all that muscle. It's a bit inconvenient to have to forgo that intelligent and balanced image you like to project and just admit that you're placing an unhealthy amount of value on looking skinny.

I wish I knew what to say to make you realize that it's not actually that important to be thin. It's like high school: you think it's the be-all and end-all while you're there, and then you leave and look back on it and realize it really wasn't. It was just a tiny facet of everything your life is going to add up to. I can guarantee that if you were to live your life as a size 14, 16, 20, you would still be loved, you would still have friends and family who adored you, you would still learn things and still experience things and you might even realize that there's nothing wrong with it. And if you never did, I guess it follows that you'd also refuse to accept that being skinny won't make you beautiful, it won't make you attractive, it won't make you clever, it won't make you wiser, it won't make you more likeable, and it won't make you any less superficial. It might make you simultaneously more arrogant and more terrified, but that's just a guess.

Music is a litmus test for cool.

Sometimes I think about music, and what it means to me, and contrast it with what it seems to mean to other people.

I have a reasonably wide variety of music on any given playlist. Acapella, ambient, post rock, post metal, big band, jazz, blues-rock, bossa nova, dream pop, alt rock, pop punk, Christian rock, ska, drum and bass, dubstep, industrial, doom jazz, screamo, showtunes, sludge metal, swamp rock, symphonic metal, synthpop, trip-hop, New Romantic, psychobilly, folk, post-hardcore, prog rock, goth rock, gospel, grunge, gypsy punk, hard trance, indie pop, indie rock, J-Pop, jazz metal, minimalist pop, the list goes on.

I’ve had plenty of people express surprise or even disgust at the fact that I can and frequently do swing from Copeland to Pelican to Glenn Miller to Fall Out Boy to Regina Spektor. I don’t quite follow the logic behind it; don’t most people find themselves listening to things they ‘shouldn’t’ like at some point? And beyond the age of 16, don’t most people find themselves maturing past the point of moralizing something as open to interpretation and completely subjective as music? I still feel a strong urge to smack anyone who asks, “What’s your guilty-pleasure music?” Are you fucking serious? Are you still in high school? Are you gearing up to make a call about my personality based on whether I listen to Tool or not?

And the stupidest part is, they usually are. Maybe I'm just lucky, but most of the people I seem to bump into in a social setting seem to have quite a lot invested in the idea that everyone they're friends with must have similar or exactly the same taste in music, and more importantly, we must all dislike the same music. I’ve started intentionally throwing out the most widely hated bands in my repertoire whenever people ask what music I’m into, just to watch them pull faces and make disapproving or disappointed sounds over something so petty. “My Chemical Romance.” It’s always followed up by a silent fuck you.

Hey. Hey, Lauren.

YOU'D LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT TO BE YOUR BFF OR YOUR GF RIGHT?
RIGHT?

Every time I come across a video of this man speaking, I grin like an idiot.

So how do they do it, these people for whom the naked vulnerability of the act of giving flowers creates no fear? -- who are somehow capable of thinking, 'I fancy this girl; I should let her know. Tell you what -- I'll declare it unilaterally, in the most unequivocal way possible.' How does that make them in any way sane or human?

This precious, precious man, who would no doubt object to my referring to him as 'precious',  gives me hope for humanity. Even if he lacks an appreciation for coffee and New Who, he's so eloquent about his dislike that I don't particularly mind.

Having said that, this video:

does conjure a certain amount of...

before my rational mind kicks in and reminds me that
a) it's some guy's opinion,
b) we don't pick on the Classic Who fans just because they don't get New Who, and,
c) Classic Who fans do tend to be polarized over the new series.

Look at all the fucks I give.

Aside from which, he goes on to raise an interesting point about the prevalence of things aimed at children which are also accessible to adults. I'm calling it 'interesting' because unlike 99% of everything else David Mitchell has to say, I actually disagree with him on this one. Oh, not about the idea itself - of course, there are plenty of things fitting that description floating around nowadays. Harry Potter, for instance. 

And as soon as the thought occurred to me, I had to admit that no, that's actually quite a generalised, and thus ignorant, way of looking at it. For the first few books in the series, yes -- for the series as a whole, not at all. By the time the last book rolls around, you are acutely aware that this is not really children's literature anymore. If anything it's become an elaborate, deeply political allegory for a number of very serious subjects including racism and war. That's not to say that children's literature can't be all of those things -- the Narnia books come to mind -- but the tone and style of the novels evolve to the point where they are unmistakeably aimed at people who are probably too old to be considered a 'child audience'. And that is just one facet of the brilliance of that series: the books grow up with you. 

Of course, that may not be immediately obvious to someone who has never read them.

Another series that comment reminded me of is one which is so comfortably nestled between 'children's fiction' and 'young adult fiction' that it has been marketed as both of those things, and as adult fiction, in various countries: His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman, who apparently has a bone to pick with the Church.

I remember reading the first novel of that series, Northern Lights, and finding it -- honestly, a little infantile. I was 11 years old at the time. Admittedly, I had finished The Lord of the Rings about two years before this, so my reading tastes were perhaps a little eclectic (read: snobby) for a child. At any rate, I was sufficiently intrigued to read the sequel, The Subtle Knife, which I found far more satisfying, but which was still pretty safe to describe as a very long, very meaty children's book. And then the third book came along, The Golden Compass. It contained concepts so far above my little head that I had to read it four times in succession to even begin to grasp the full magnitude of it. In hindsight there were a ridiculous number of sub-plots which made it at times very difficult to follow with any degree of coherency; and Pullman had apparently chosen this book in which to stop dancing around behind the veil of tolerance and blatantly attack monotheistic religion as a whole. That isn't to say that I wouldn't happily hand that book to a child and say "Have at it", but I might doubt how much of it they would really understand. 

That phenomenon, incidentally, is basically embodied by The Simpsons. It's probably a large part of why that show been so successful for so long.

Possibly I'm the only 20-year-old who still snickers at the log.

If I go back now and watch episodes I saw for the first time as a child, I can still distinctly remember finding it hilarious and entertaining and generally brilliant, but I realize now that most of the references and a good portion of the jokes went straight over my head. Nonetheless, The Simpsons is definitely what I would call a children's show which is also accessible to adults.

Doctor Who is not. Or at least, the new series isn't. Right from Rose, it struck me as -- well, a teen's show. My 16-year-old self is still filled with glee at the mere prospect of a 12-hour marathon of soft sci fi blended with a lot of social drama and thinly veiled sexual tension between attractive people. But, and this is where I can see Classic Who fans getting tripped up, the classic show wasn't like that. It's essentially the same concept, but aimed at completely different audiences. And of course it should be; the audience of 2011 is a very different one to the people parked in front of the TV in 1963. If anything, we're simply more accepting of ambiguity in target audiences now than we were back in the day -- children's television is still very much children's television (look at Dora the Explorer: I defy any mentally sound adult to sit through it and claim to have enjoyed the experience). But we're not exactly thrown off by the idea of a show that both the little 'uns and the high school kids can watch together. Different things appeal to us now; we expect different things from the shows we watch. 

And that interests me again, because really, Classic Who is what should be appealing to us -- aren't we constantly being told that these modern audiences want an anti-hero? Someone arrogant, cynical and a little bit bitchy, but clever enough to back it up. Artemis Fowl, Tony Stark, Hannibal Lecter...Someone more like, oh, I don't know, the first incarnation of the Doctor? Instead we have Nine, Ten and Eleven, all irrevocably driven to help the underdog, all classically heroic, all frightfully boring by modern standards. And I can't help but wonder if perhaps that's exactly what's so lovable about Doctor Who: it reminds us -- first as children, and now as a wider audience -- what there is to like about something that's unfashionable. The zeitgeist may lean in favour of the anti-hero, but it seems there's still something to that old concept of cheering on someone who is kind and brave and fighting for what anyone with a moral compass would think of as 'right'. It may be old hat, but put it in a bow tie and make it considerably younger and more attractive, and you might have something.