I discovered a relatively new blog recently, called Reeses Rants. One of the things I find interesting about it is that the author, Lucy Reese, set it up as part of her MA studies. But she tells us on her blog that she enjoys writing on this platform so much, that she goes way beyond the demands of the course and writes it for pleasure. Which, as a compulsive blogger myself,  I think is pretty great.

I wanted to link to her blog to show that people are reading it, and interacting with her work.

Also her latest post caught my eye. It is about blogging and identity, a subject that is very dear to my heart. She critiques a paper by an academic, who claims that the internet allows people to move ‘beyond’ identity positions such as gender, class, age, and perform online identities quite freely:

‘This paragraph – at the start of Merchant’s essay – was a bit of a worry in itself: Merchant (2006: 235-6) writes:

The rise of a new capitalism (Gee, 2004) with a global reach has given rise to a system in which it is less likely that goods are produced and consumed locally, and more likely that production is coordinated across locations and that goods are marketed to consumer types, rather than geographical locations. This sort of arrangement requires the development of particular communicative tools, but more pertinently leads to the emergence of new social identities; identities that are more accurately defined by lifestyle, media consumption, and affinity spaces than by the more traditional markers of race, class, gender and place.

The idea that there are consumer “types” outside of race, class, gender and place just doesn’t wash with me, fitting as it does into the Nu Labour/neo-liberal ideology of “choice” – I am who I am because I am wearing Adidas rather than Nike or because I shop at Waitrose rather than Asda.’

I agree with Lucy up to a point. We never really get beyond race, class, or gender, though maybe we do transcend place more easily via the internet. Language less so. An example of the power of gender identities online is how, when I openly ditched feminism, I immediately got accused of being a ‘man’.

But I think both the internet and consumerism have changed the playing field more than she acknowledges. For example I wrote after the UK riots last summer, how people have come to define themselves via brands such as Adidas, and how people’s actions in the riots affected brands:

http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/09/08/no-logo-when-branding-goes-bad/

Someone else who has written about the importance of consumerism and the modern media (including the internet) to forming our identities, is Mark Simpson. His 2011 book, Metrosexy is all about how masculinity is now mediated and commodified, and how brands maketh the man. Whilst Simpson does not claim we have gone ‘beyond gender’ as a result, he has warned that we are nearing the ‘end of sexuality as we have known it’.

So I think Lucy Reese underestimates the power of consumer culture in changing how we identify ourselves as humans.

There is something else that her post reminded me of, to do with blogging and ‘identity’. That is how much of my identity I invest in my online existence, and how much online interactions have influenced my sense of self.

I have written before about how my world-view and my life have been transformed by the work of Mark Simpson, who I got to know via the internet. And how I have had various ‘identities’ imposed upon me by people online, due to my ‘relationship’ with his work. ‘Mark Simpson’s Pitbull’ and ‘Ardent Simpsonista’ are two of my favourites.

It was through reading Simpson that I was able to finally pluck up the courage to reject feminism, and it is his work on metrosexual masculinities that has given my writing and my lust for gender theory a new lease of life.

So when I clicked on his blog to see a white screen and the hostile message: You Are Banned, recently, I was devestated. Me, the human flesh and blood person was utterly distraught by something that someone else did hundreds of miles away, in the dashboard of their blog.

It has been a stark reminder to me of the complex relationship between ‘real life’ and internet identities.

Lucy is a ‘real life’ friend of Mark Simpson. In some ways she knows him much better than me. But in others, I think I have got a handle on him and his work more than any other person I know of. And that could be one of the things that has led him to ‘ban’ me from the personal space that is his blog.

Even hundreds of miles away, alone in the confines of my study, I encroached too far onto his personal space.

Concepts such as ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘censorship’ normally are applied at the level of state laws, or corporations – those brands again – controlling their products and their customers. But I think those terms go deeper than that. On a  one-to-one level people can ‘censor’ each other and themselves. Stop them from speaking.

Mark Simpson has failed to stop me speaking. I use a proxy server now to access his blog. Rather, ironically it is he who has gone rather quiet lately, including on his own blog which he has not updated for over a fortnight.

Maybe Lucy can infect him with some of her enthusiasm.

Blogging is real life to me.

I hope it gets better soon!

Mark Simp­son undresses the tor­tured rela­tion­ship between Amer­i­can men and their swimsuits

(Out, Feb­ru­ary 2007)

PROHIBITED… THE WEARING OF SKIN-TIGHT FORM-FITTING OR BIKINI TYPE APPAREL OR BATHING SUITS BY MALES OVER 12 YRS. AGE 

“

If the stern, killjoy rubric of this warn­ing sign, erected in the 1960s by the good peo­ple of Cape May, N.J., sounds like a way to rain on a gay beach party, that’s because it was.

Cape May, a resort town a few hours south of New York City by car, had become a pop­u­lar gay haunt by the late 1950s, nick­named “Cape Gay” by the cognoscenti. Accord­ing to a 1969 arti­cle in Philadel­phia mag­a­zine, “their pub­lic dis­plays of affec­tion, par­tic­u­larly among men wear­ing women’s bathing suits on the main beach…turned off the towns­folk.” The city coun­cil, eager to pro­tect its flock from glimps­ing the ter­ri­fy­ing out­line of adult male gen­i­talia, was moved to pass a law for­bid­ding bikini bathing suits on males over age 12-a “phal­liban,” if you will.

Now, of course, such a sign is incon­ceiv­able. Or rather-unnecessary. After all, every­one knows that male bikinis-or, to give them their trade name-turned-generic moniker, “Speedos”-are unof­fi­cially banned from all main beaches in the United States, what­ever your age.

You may think them prac­ti­cal and sexy and iconic. You may con­sider them the sin­gle most per­fect and pithy item of cloth­ing ever designed for the male body. You may con­sider them the only thing to wear on the beach. You might even con­sider your­self slightly over­dressed in them. But if you do, it’s prob­a­bly because you’re gay. Or for­eign. Speedos, oth­er­wise known as “banana ham­mocks,” “mar­ble bags,” “noo­dle ben­ders,” and “budgie smug­glers,” are appar­ently as un-American as Borat’s body thong.

Speedos on a non­gay beach are the surest way to earn your­self angry stares, abuse, and plenty of room for your beach towel. As a result, Speedos have in the United States become a badge of gay pride and exclusion-as overt homo­pho­bia declines, ram­pantly overt Speedo­pho­bia is bring­ing U.S. gays and Brazil­ians together, hud­dling together at the far end of the beach in their Lycra.

Male celebs like David Beck­ham, Cris­tiano Ronaldo, and Daniel Craig may now be nicely fill­ing out their Speedos on their beach holidays-but none of these fel­lows are Amer­i­can. Speedos and even more reveal­ing male swim­suits are pop­u­lar in South Amer­ica, Asia, much of Europe, and espe­cially, of course, in the land of the pert-butted life­saver: Aus­tralia, the place where the “Aussie cossie” and much of the beach lifestyle we know today was born.

The Speedo is more than just “gay” beach­wear: It’s a sym­bol of sex­ual free­dom and a redis­cov­ery of the body after cen­turies of clammy Chris­t­ian morality.

Bathing and swim­ming are undoubt­edly pagan pas­sions. The ancients invented the sea­side resort and spent a great deal of gold on, and time in, their blessed pub­lic baths, where the men bathed and swam naked. Not because they were indif­fer­ent to naked­ness, but because they esteemed viril­ity. Every night was wet jock­strap night (with­out the jock­strap) at the Roman baths, and espe­cially well-endowed bathers were likely to be greeted with a round of applause; dur­ing the reign of noto­ri­ous size queen Emperor Elaga­balus, those who hung low at the baths were pro­moted to high office.
Alas, nei­ther swim­ming nor bathing nor size-queenery sur­vived the decline of the Roman Empire. Medieval Chris­tian­ity, with its ghastly sus­pi­cion of the body, ren­dered water-the sen­sual cleanser of limbs –sus­pect. As late as the 16th cen­tury, bathing was thought to be wicked, unhealthy, and, er, filthy. (Even Catholic bap­tism used only “holy” water, water that had been blessed, sym­bol­iz­ing the cleans­ing blood of Christ: Sin was the deep-down dirt that Chris­tian­ity was angry with.)

The Eng­lish were the first to redis­cover the lost art of swim­ming, largely as a result of their explo­ration of Poly­ne­sia in the 18th cen­tury, where swim­ming was com­mon amongst the bliss­fully naked natives. By the 19th cen­tury swim­ming in rivers, lakes, and the sea was almost as pop­u­lar in Eng­land as it had been in Rome-frequently naked, males and females, some­times at the same time.

Chris­t­ian moral­ists, their influ­ence hav­ing resurged in the late 19th cen­tury, were nat­u­rally incan­des­cent at these dis­plays of wan­ton hap­pi­ness. They suc­cess­fully cam­paigned for local bylaws ban­ning day­light bathing, or insist­ing on the use of “bathing machines” that allowed the bather to enter and depart the water unseen, or requir­ing “neck-to-knee” bathing cos­tumes (New York State had such a law until as late as 1938). A typ­i­cal swim­ming cos­tume com­prised a pair of woolen knick­ers extend­ing to the knees and a sleeve­less jer­sey. Not a good look.

To their eter­nal credit, it was the Aus­tralians who struck the first blow against the 19th-century phal­liban. With typ­i­cal Aussie obsti­nacy, the men of Manly Beach chose sim­ply to dis­re­gard the pissy-prissy laws ban­ning day­time bathing. Faced with this sea­side insur­rec­tion, local author­i­ties threw in the towel and lifted the ban in 1903. The rest of Aus­tralia fol­lowed (swim)suit, though pre­cisely what kind of swim­suit was still con­tested. Many male bathers dis­re­garded the neck-to-knee ordi­nances, either rolling their one-piece down to the waist or, wear­ing trunks, sim­ply impro­vis­ing. Good Chris­t­ian folk found this intol­er­a­ble. There was a stri­dent cam­paign by decent, upstand­ing, if slightly pal­lid, Chris­tians to get male bathers to wear modesty-preserving bathing “tunics.” Protests by angry crowds of male bathers at Manly and Bondi Beach-wearing bal­let skirts and sarongs-put an end to the phalliban.

So it was in Aus­tralia, a warm coun­try where most of the pop­u­la­tion ten­derly hug the coast­line and pay lit­tle atten­tion to busy­bod­ies (per­haps because Aus­tralia began as a con­vict colony), that the bod­ily free­dom of the mod­ern beach lifestyle (“surfers rather than serfs!”) was invented, antic­i­pat­ing by decades the sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion of the 1960s-giving men’s pack­ets and asses free­dom of expres­sion. It was this, not Kylie Minogue, that was their great­est con­tri­bu­tion to world cul­ture. Aus­tralia, a coun­try fond of casu­ally abbre­vi­at­ing Eng­lish, abbre­vi­ated the male bathing “cossie,” and with it Vic­to­rian morality.

The insti­tu­tion that did more to export this vision of a sandy, nicely rounded utopia than any other, smug­gling mil­lions upon mil­lions of “bud­gies,” was orig­i­nally called MacRae Knit­ting Mills after the fam­ily who founded it in Aus­tralia in 1914. Among the first com­pa­nies to pro­duce specif­i­cally “ath­letic” designs (i.e., swim­ming cos­tumes that didn’t dou­ble as sea anchors), MacRae changed its name to “Speedo” in 1928 after staff mem­ber Cap­tain Par­sons coined the slo­gan “Speed on in your Speedos.”

In 1955, Speedo intro­duced nylon into its fab­ric for com­pet­i­tive swimwear (unwit­tingly invent­ing a whole new branch of fetishism). The 1956 Mel­bourne Olympics pro­vided a sen­sa­tional debut for the new sheer style of brief briefs when Speedo spon­sored the medal-sweeping Aus­tralian team. By the time of the 1968 Olympics and through the ’76 games, almost every gold medal­ist swim­mer wore Speedos. Nat­u­rally, men all over the globe wanted to enjoy the sen­sa­tion for themselves.

Even in the United States. Up until the early 1980s, Speedos were a com­mon sight here, both on the beach and at the pool. Every­thing was lovely and snug and nicely out­lined. But then some­thing hor­ri­fy­ing hap­pened. Some­time in the late ‘80s men’s swim­suits began to grow in length and bulk. Year by year they crept down the thigh toward the knee-and beyond-all the while bil­low­ing clown­ishly out­ward. Now U.S. men wear, of their own voli­tion, not even the knee-length woolen knick­ers that the Aus­tralian men of Manly hero­ically protested in the early 20th cen­tury, but bloomers, a volu­mi­nous form of female attire last seen in the 1850s (and gen­er­ally regarded as ridicu­lous back then). In the water, today’s Speedo­pho­bic males are half-man, half-jellyfish.

Unfit­tingly enough, this tragic trend began with some­one wear­ing two pairs of shorts at the same time. In the ‘70s bas­ket­ball shorts were skimpy (almost like Oz foot­ball shorts), but Michael Jor­dan pop­u­lar­ized sex­less long shorts in the NBA in the late 1980s. “He wanted to keep wear­ing his lucky [Uni­ver­sity of] North Car­olina shorts under his Chicago Bulls shorts,” explains Aus­tralian aca­d­e­mic David Coad, author of an upcom­ing book on sex­u­al­ity, gen­der, and sport, “and decided to wear a longer pair to cover the shorter ones.” Because Jor­dan was Jor­dan, oth­ers copied, and thus baggy shorts became fash­ion­able. It seems that this evil trend spread to male swimwear.

There was, I’d ven­ture, another, weight­ier rea­son for this swimwear ele­phan­ti­a­sis. The late ‘80s was also when male obe­sity became a big trend in the United States. Baggy shorts hide baggy but­tocks. They also wear higher, and their large pro­file makes a baggy stom­ach con­sid­er­ably less obvi­ous than when hang­ing over the waist­band of a Speedo. More­over, “board shorts” hide the chicken legs of a car-centered soci­ety in which men watch sport (while eat­ing) instead of play­ing. Is it sim­ply a coin­ci­dence that when many young Amer­i­can men saw their bod­ies los­ing mas­cu­line def­i­n­i­tion they started wear­ing ladies’ bloomers?

The ‘80s also saw the rise of the male as appe­tiz­ing, ide­al­ized media sex object. The bar for male beauty was being set higher and higher as the real­ity was get­ting heav­ier and heav­ier. The tyranny of “board­ies” is an expres­sion of male self-consciousness, self-loathing-and para­noia both of being “checked out” and not mea­sur­ing up. The ‘80s saw a steep rise in the Amer­i­can male’s aware­ness of gays-and with it his desire not to be mis­taken for one by in any way sig­nal­ing that he had an ass and a packet. Baggy shorts are a delib­er­ate and cruel affront to homos — but it’s nice to know that straight men are think­ing about us so much.

Gays are, of course, flam­boy­ant Speedophiles. They are less likely to be over­weight. They are more likely to be worked-out. Hence their wear­ing Speedos really rubs people’s noses in it — in every sense. Gays are more than happy to adver­tise the highly ver­sa­tile sex-object sta­tus of the male body — and a Speedo screams Cock! Balls! Ass!…in any order or com­bi­na­tion you fancy.

It’s as obvi­ous as a badly smug­gled budgie that despite the pagan pas­sions of pop cul­ture and an enthu­si­as­tic uptake of the beach lifestyle, the promise of sandy sex­ual lib­er­a­tion has come slightly adrift state­side. The painfully unequal sex­ual divi­sion of labor on U.S. beaches, where women wear lit­tle more than eye­liner and men wear tents-without the pole-is a sorry tes­ta­ment to that.

The phal­liban spirit of 1960s Cape May has triumphed.

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/02/11/speedophobia/

Rachel Kramer Bus­sel at The Daily Beast thinks that male bisex­u­al­ity has become ‘cool’.

‘…whereas bisex­ual women had their fling with pop cul­ture in the 1990s-when every­one from Drew Bar­ry­more to Madonna messed around with women, not to men­tion the famous Van­ity Fair cover show­ing Cindy Craw­ford shav­ing k.d. lang-“bromances” are now the dri­ving force behind Hol­ly­wood come­dies and Style sec­tion fea­tures, as men find more ways to play for both teams, or at least act like they do.

Exam­ples are every­where. In John Hamburg’s recent movie, I Love You, Man, the gay guy who unwit­tingly goes on a date with Paul Rudd isn’t just played for laughs, but to some degree, sym­pa­thy. This sum­mer will also see Lynn Shelton’s buzzed-about Hump­day, in which two straight male friends decide to make a home­made porn video. And Brody Jenner’s real­ity show Bro­mance blurs the line sep­a­rat­ing friend­ship and attrac­tion in what Videogum’s Gabe Dela­haye calls “basi­cally the gayest thing ever, made more gay by everyone’s des­per­ate attempts to pro­vide chest-bumping proof of their heterosexuality.“‘

For my part how­ever, I’m not entirely con­vinced that male bisex­u­al­ity has become ‘cool’, not least because most of the bisex­ual guys I meet are still ter­ri­fied any­one will find out — and I still can’t name off the top of my head a sin­gle out male bisex­ual celeb in the UK (aside from my friend the nov­el­ist Jake Arnott — but as a self-described ‘gay bisex­ual’ he is rather excep­tional). Whereas almost any female star under the age of 40 has to pre­tend to be bi–crazed or else risk that Nuts/FHM cover.

And the recent trend for ‘bro­mance,’ far from prov­ing the hip­ness of male swing­ing is, as the name sug­gests, almost defined by its incest-taboo-driven need to purge the male love affair of the pos­si­bil­ity of any­thing phys­i­cal, any trace of erotics what­so­ever, to a degree which male buddy flicks in the past didn’t, and in fact often went out of their way to inject: e.g. Top Gun, Butch Cas­sidy and the Sun­dance Kid, Thun­der & Light­foot, Mid­night Cow­boy. By con­trast these mod­ern buddy flicks make me think ‘bro­mance’ is just another word for ‘bro­mide’.  Or les­bian bed-death for straight men with­out the hon­ey­moon. (The art­house movie ‘Hump­day’ seems to be another story — and pre­cisely because it is another story, it is highly unlikely to be a hit.)

But we are cer­tainly liv­ing in inter­est­ing times, and the cul­ture is slowly — and fran­ti­cally — try­ing to nego­ti­ate, how­ever ineptly, how­ever decep­tively, the thing star­ing them in the face like the out­size erec­tions in the mandigo gang-bang porn so pop­u­lar with straight guys these days: male bi-responsiveness is prob­a­bly very com­mon, rather than the deviant, bizarre, incred­u­lous excep­tion (it cer­tainly was at my board­ing school).

The met­ro­sex­ual is also, of course, part of this jour­ney — and also some­times per­haps part of the attempt to deflect it.

But there’s a long, long way to go before male bisex­u­al­ity is even approach­ing the same level of accept­abil­ity let alone cool­ness as female bisex­u­al­ity.  A recent study pub­lished in the Cana­dian Jour­nal of Human Sex­u­al­ity found that the famous ‘sex­ual dou­ble stan­dard’ has now reversed polar­ity and shifted in the direc­tion of inhibit­ing men’s sex­ual adven­tur­ous­ness while encour­ag­ing women’s.  Accord­ing to The National Post men are:

‘…more lim­ited by what is con­sid­ered taboo in the bed­room; hit by a new dou­ble stan­dard that expects men to be highly sex­ual, and yet expects them to be less exper­i­men­tal — while the oppo­site is true for women.

The study, pub­lished in the Cana­dian Jour­nal of Human Sex­u­al­ity, found that soci­ety accords men less “sex­ual lat­i­tude” than women, deem­ing it abnor­mal for a man to be dis­in­ter­ested in sex, to engage in homo­sex­ual fan­tasy, and to engage in sub­mis­sive sex­ual acts.

“The dou­ble stan­dard used to give men more sex­ual free­dom than women, but these find­ings indi­cate that the dynamic is chang­ing” said Alex McKay, research coor­di­na­tor for the Sex Infor­ma­tion and Edu­ca­tion Coun­cil of Canada. “Men are forced to abide by a cer­tain gen­der role, while women are today more free to be them­selves. In this sense, the stan­dard actu­ally works against the man.“‘

I came to the same con­clu­sion three years ago in a piece posted on here called ‘Curi­ouser and curi­ouser’ — based on my own very pri­vate ‘research’:

‘That women are being encour­aged to talk about their bisex­u­al­ity as an enhance­ment of their fem­i­nin­ity and sex­u­al­ity is rather mar­vel­lous — but it also height­ens the dou­ble stan­dard about male bisex­u­al­ity, one as pro­nounced than the dou­ble stan­dard about promis­cu­ity used to be (men were ‘studs’ and women were ‘slags’), and makes it more inevitable that male bisex­u­al­ity — by which I sim­ply mean ‘straight’ male sex­u­al­ity that doesn’t fit into het­ero­sex­u­al­ity, and boy, there’s a lot of that — will have to be addressed can­didly sooner or later.

The tidy-minded inhi­bi­tions which keep male bi-curiousness under wraps are still pow­er­ful, but have largely lost their social value, their attach­ment to any­thing real; they are mostly rem­nants from a Judeo-Christian (re)productive, world that doesn’t exist any more, except per­haps in Utah, every other Sun­day.… When enough young men realise this — or maybe just the des­per­ate pre­pos­ter­ous­ness of the prej­u­dice and ‘sci­ence’ deployed against male bi-curiousness — the change in atti­tudes will occur very quickly and dra­mat­i­cally indeed.’

As the Cana­dian report sug­gests — and Canada is about as lib­eral and relaxed a coun­try as you could con­ceive — that day is not yet here.  How­ever, the fact that such a study exists at all is per­haps a sign that that it’s com­ing closer.

Either way, more research is needed.  And I need a grant to con­duct some more ‘interviews’.…

Mark Simpson 2009

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2009/04/23/male-bisexuality-is-it-cool/

More on bisexuality by Mark Simpson:

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2006/04/26/curiouser-and-curiouser-the-strange-disappearance-of-male-bisexuality/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/07/30/straights-go-gay/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2007/08/14/the-private-lives-of-dr-sex/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2009/04/28/bisexuals-musto-be-gay/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/06/29/the-starman-has-landed-bowie-and-his-glam-love-children/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/12/30/the-bizarre-world-of-the-bisexual/

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/08/23/bisexual-men-exist-but-does-scientific-sex-research/

In that auto­bi­og­ra­phy you may pos­si­bly have noticed for­mer British PM Tony Blair is cur­rently tout­ing, the one called ‘A Jour­ney’ (a title that mas­ter­fully cap­tures the sub­limely faux mod­esty of its sub­ject), Blair com­pares him­self to Princess Di.

‘“We were both, in our own way, manip­u­la­tors” — good at grasp­ing the feel­ings of oth­ers and instinc­tively play­ing on them.’

The papers of course have seized on the People’s Premier’s can­did­ness, mak­ing head­lines out of it.  That and his obser­va­tion (con­veyed in a kind of morse prose) that Gor­don Brown had: “Polit­i­cal cal­cu­la­tion, yes. Polit­i­cal feel­ings, no. Ana­lyt­i­cal intel­li­gence, absolutely. Emo­tional intel­li­gence, zero.”  And also his claim that he knew Gord’s pre­mier­ship would likely be ‘a dis­as­ter.’

I agree with Tony.  Or rather, Tony agrees with moi.  Back in 2006, when Brown’s bizarre (and now con­ve­niently for­got­ten) pop­u­lar­ity with the media was ram­pant, just before his coro­na­tion as Labour Leader, I pre­dicted, with Cas­san­drine accu­racy, that Brown would be a dis­as­trous leader of the Labour Party and that he had in fact already lost the next Gen­eral Elec­tion.  I also com­pared Brown and Blair to Charles and Di, call­ing Brown an ‘oper­a­tor’ and Blair a ‘great manipulator’.

Of course, it didn’t really take much insight to see all that com­ing, even if most of the media couldn’t at the time.  But in the piece I talked about how Blair’s ‘lying’ was what made him a much more suc­cess­ful, much more pop­u­lar politi­cian than Brown – who was very, very bad at it.  Which is not to say that Brown was a much more hon­est man – just that he wouldn’t and couldn’t per­form for us.

‘Admit­ting he lied is not a mis­take Blair is likely to ever make. Blair’s spe­cial tal­ent, the thing that puts him ahead of most other politi­cians, cer­tainly in British polit­i­cal his­tory, is that he can con­vince him­self his lies are lit­er­ally the god’s hon­est truth, at least for as long as he’s telling us them. And – truth be told – in his mind, he never actu­ally ‘lies’ to us at all. He’s an actor – an actor of the Stan­lislavsky school: the emo­tion he shows us is ‘true’, it’s just usu­ally attached to some­thing that is not. This is why he’s such a great per­former and politi­cian – we appre­ci­ate and are flat­tered by the energy and the psy­chosis he puts into his per­for­mances. He is a great manipulator…’.

‘Brown on the other hand is a great oper­a­tor. And oper­a­tors, unlike manip­u­la­tors, are painful to watch. They resent hav­ing to manip­u­late us and we resent hav­ing to watch them resent­ing hav­ing to manip­u­late us. Tony is Princess Di to Brown’s Prince Charles. Brown, who tells us he is ‘quite pri­vate’ and who prefers ‘sub­stance over celebrity’ as if these were rea­sons why we should be inter­ested in him, clearly wants power but he doesn’t really want to become the thing that power is in this medi­ated day and age: an actor. He won’t be for­given for that by the electorate/audience.’

Brown’s des­per­ate agree­ment to appear in those Elec­tion X Fac­tor shows – in which David Cameron and Nick Clegg, both thes­pian heirs to Blair, shone with their ‘look, guys’ sin­cere insin­cer­ity – only threw his bor­ing manse inflex­i­bil­ity into even more painful relief.  The elec­torate treated him with Cow­ellian dis­dain (the most damn­ing thing of all was that those lis­ten­ing on the radio thought Brown had won the debates).

And even in the polit­i­cal after­life the emo­tional gulf between Brown and Blair per­sists.  Blair of course is pas­sion­ately hated, where Brown is merely despised. Or worse, pitied.

‘Doesn’t he look OLD?’ we spit, when Blair pops up in the papers or on telly, usu­ally to tell us with those raised eye­brows how he doesn’t regret any­thing and didn’t fib about any­thing either, hon­estly guys.  ‘Hasn’t he aged BADLY?’ we gloat, pre­tend­ing to be beyond his charms now.  But actu­ally sound­ing just like a bit­ter ex try­ing to con­vince them­selves that their for­mer amore fell apart after the affair ended after he turned out to be sleep­ing with the au pair.

Truth is, Blair still has that Diana star qual­ity – partly because he is still a great manip­u­la­tor, but mostly because it’s so dif­fi­cult to work out which side of the reason/unreason line he’s on these days.  You can’t but watch with rapt atten­tion, try­ing to divine the con­tent of his (Catholic) soul.

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/09/02/why-we-still-love-the-peoples-premiere/#comments

Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist, is investigating the TED talks in America.

I first came across TED when I saw a video of a talk by Hanna Rosin, on gender and women’s continuing march forwards (and over men?).  I criticised the content of her talk but didn’t address my problems with TED itself. But there was something about the set up I didn’t like.

It turns out quite a few people are not that keen on TED talks. Nathan collected some criticisms of the organisation on twitter.  I agree with most of them, particularly how ‘corporate’ it is.

So here are a few of my own criticisms of TED now I know more about it, and have seen quite a few videos of their speeches.

1. Everyone’s Steve Jobs.

Or rather, everyone wants to be Steve Jobs. When you think of the late Apple director what do you see? I have an image in my head of Jobs, stood on a stage in jeans and a black poloneck, talking to a rapt crowd. It seems to me that TED have copied the ‘look’ and feel of a Jobs talk, but without actually thinking about what makes Steve Jobs Steve Jobs! My research on creative entrepreneurship has been quite critical of the way the ‘entrepreneur’, black poloneck, ipad, lecture circuit bookings and all, is turned into a ‘type’ of person. TED seems to be replicating the entrepreneurial ‘type’ without actually considering the substance of entrepreneurship, technology and social change.

2. Evangelism Sucks

TED talks look and seem to me very similar to countless ‘evangelical’ religious conferences I have seen, especially in America. There is a ‘preacher’ element to them, which doesn’t sit well with me. I followed a  man who gave his first TED talk not so long ago, on twitter and his blog, and it seemed like once he had done it he felt somehow he’d ‘arrived’ in the special, spiritual club of TED talkers.  But if they are evangelising, what is the good word they are preaching? A kind of vague, All American, entrepreneurial, individualistic dream? Maybe.

3. It’s Nothing New – and Badly Researched

I am not a techy so I am unable to judge the more technical content of TED talks. I am an ‘expert’ in gender though. And the speeches I have seen about men, women and gender have been nothing new. They seem to re-hash very common ideas and perspectives, but just with the added ‘Steve Jobs’ effect as if appearance is everything. I come from an academic background, so when I hear people spouting their own individual ‘ideas’ about gender, I want to ask them who they have read, what research they are referencing? Genuinely original theories in gender are very rare. But you can be sure they have been informed by existing theory. So I don’t trust these talks that don’t situate themselves in research and writing and reading.

4. TED Women is tokenism

TED introduced a set of lectures called TED women and received a lot of flak a while ago. Because they seemed to be saying that TED talks are naturally ‘male’ and women need their own special section to exist. I think the video above of Hanna Rosin is a TED women talk, the audience is certainly full of women. This seems to be a tokenistic effort. If women are under-represented in certain areas and industries, surely men need to discuss this issue, if they are the ones who dominate those sectors? And if, as Rosin suggests, women are actually gaining ground and even overtaking men in many areas, shouldn’t men get the memo too? My research on ‘creative entrepreneurs’ has shown that the ‘creative entrepreneur’ is constructed as a ‘masculine’ figure – see Steve Jobs again! And TED Women only seems to emphasise this, by adding on the ‘women’ to qualify the male entrepreneurial TED.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/psychology-ruin-porn/886/

It’s the sort of image, imbued with loss and layers, that architecture buffs drool over. A wheelchair sits center stage, its orange vinyl back echoed by a round tabletop that leans against a wall, painted in a familiar shade of institutional green. A mattress, flattened and grimy, lies tossed onto a floor that’s littered with fallen plaster. In the foreground, an overturned metal trashcan speaks volumes. A mirror reflects the whole sad scene.

It’s romantic, it’s nostalgic, it’s wistful, it’s provocative. It’s about time, nature, mortality, disinvestment.

Pursuing and photographing the old is an addictive hobby. Dozens of blogs and online galleries share strategies for entry and showcase ever-bulging collections of moss-covered factory floors and lathe-exposed school buildings.

There’s no shortage of theories as to just why these images (in this case, a long-shuttered mental asylum) fascinate us. They “offer an escape from excessive order,” says Tim Edensor, a professor of geography at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the appeal of urban ruins. “They’re marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects. You can see and feel things that you can’t in the ordinary world.”

Len Albright, a 31-year-old Princeton post-doctoral student who’s tagged along with ruin explorers in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, believes the experience is “more about the sense of ownership than anything else.”

He describes the derring-do involved in scaling urban ruins. “There’s this whole strategy for figuring out how to get in,” he says. “They start by hiding in the tree line at the edge of the property, checking for security guards. Then one of them dashes to the wall of the building. He starts looking for unlocked doors or busted out windows. There’s a lot of creeping and crawling, almost like a military operation.”

But for Matthew Christopher, the man who snapped the photograph described above, it was — at least in the beginning — more about curiosity. Only as he stood amid the eerily silent hallways and peeling ceilings of a similarly crumbling institution did he truly understand its role in the history of mental health. “When I visited the abandoned Philadelphia State Hospital, and then some of the others, I was able to connect the dots, to see the progress of treatment through the years,” Christopher says. “Architecture and the ethos of the times became linked for me.”

Reading about the field couldn’t compete with actually seeing the buildings and complexes firsthand. “I realized this was real, not abstract,” he says. Christopher became so intrigued with that first experience ten years ago that he switched from studying mental health to photography, eventually shooting some 300 abandoned asylums, schools, and factories.

“It was a case of that old cliché, ‘a picture speaks a thousand words,’” he says. “When I’d try to talk about the presences that seem to linger in these places, people would look at me like I should be in an asylum myself. When I showed them pictures — they’d suddenly get it.”

A long artistic history backs him up. Renaissance painters romanticized Greek ruins. Piranesi’s etchings memorialized Roman antiquity as it was being torn up. Photographer Eugene Atget sought out whatever bits of a rapidly-disappearing Paris he could find in a post-Haussmann era.

Now, Christopher has his own portfolio in the form of a website, abandonedamerica.us(subtitled “an autopsy of the American dream”), and he’s studying fine art photography at Rochester Institute of Technology.

As part of a disparate cadre of urbanists who have embarked on the road to ruins, he’s opened himself to some flack.

Critics accuse photographers like him of objectifying empty buildings as pretty stage sets filled with juxtapositions, fading colors and dramatic light. Those who are driven by the frisson of scampering around abandoned places, on the other hand, are often lambasted as criminal trespassers. Edensor thinks such invectives give these intrepid romance-seekers short shrift. “In the best photography, there’s a silent comment on economic disinvestment through an attempt to capture the sensations and memories that remain,” he says. “The conscientious explorer, on the other hand, seeks to create a relationship with the past, to produce a history that’s not been museumized or curated by experts.”

The two factions have, at times, gone to war. Urban explorers view photographers as passive watchers, unwilling to get their hands dirty. “Explorers move away from the porn metaphor, because it’s all theirs to experience — not to watch,” says Albright. “You poke your head into a hole, climb up a ladder, peer under a desk. You’re trying to put together a story.”

But photographers say they too put up with the slight dangers that come with the territory — Christopher has the Tyvek suit and breathing apparatus to prove it. More seriously, he contends, explorers can seem selfish, interested only in their own jollies.

“I’d like the viewer to step back just a bit and to see the horror story that’s implicit in the image,” he says.”These pictures document physical conditions that are the direct consequences of failed economies.”

With their more rebellious stance, explorers would probably issue a big meh to that idea, posits Albright.

“I’ve interviewed people who have been to the same building 20 or 30 times, they just love it so much,” he says. “But when I asked them if they’d like to organize a cleanup or a preservation effort, they’d be indifferent. They might think that’s fine for someone else to do … after awhile, though, they’d be off to hunt for the next abandoned building.”

All photos courtesy of Matthew Christopher.

On the whole, the mainstream media avoids metrosexuality as a subject, and particularly the ‘m’ word itself, but somehow sports journalists are unable to avoid either for any length of time. As I have written recently at QRGHQ:

‘I spend a lot of time looking for references to metrosexuality. Often the subject matter is covered but the ‘m’ word is hardly used. In the Guardian for example, there were only 35 references to ‘metrosexual’ in the whole of 2011, the lowest number since 2004.

One place that metrosexual masculinity is really grasped, though, is in sports journalism. Partly because it has been in sports and sports ‘branding’ that metro men have really come into their own.  Sporno has meant that top sports men have been such tarts  in advertising and promotional work that the media have been unable to ignore the shift. And metrosexual icons such as Ronaldo , Henson and Becks have brought their fashion style and narcissism off the billboards and onto the pitch.’

My ‘metrosexual’ search in the media at the beginning of 2012 has thrown up an interesting curveball. Both The Guardian and The Independent newspapers so far this year have only mentioned the word ‘metrosexual’ in one article each. And both pieces have featured the Australian cricketer, and captain of the national team,  Michael Clarke. Apparently, Clarke is a metrosexual of such dedication that his ‘lifestyle’, like Beckham’s , has been the focus of quite a few column inches.

This section from the Guardian article that mentions Clarke could be describing    David Beckham himself:

‘Then Ponting lost the Ashes for the third time, broke a finger and in came the antithesis: a smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, baby-faced fellow from the metrosexual generation, with his tattoos and celebrity girlfriend, and image promotion from an early stage in his career. ‘

This essay by Mark Simpson is an extract from Anti Gay (1996) edited by Simpson (Freedom Press)

I hope that now you’re Out, life improves for you no end. You’ve lifted the burden of secrecy and deceit and that might mean that the other problems that have plagued you will simply evaporate.

-Gay Times columnist Terry Sanderson in an open letter in the Guardian to the entertainer Michael Barrymore

I wanna be free, gay and happy!
- The Coming Out Crew

I am a homosexual in a city full of gays                                                                                  - Michel Foucault

Isn’t it just fabby to be gay? Gay is, after all, good, and everyone fortunate enough to be gay is, of course, glad – when they’re not too busy feeling proud. Which is perfectly understandable since gays, as we all know, have the best clubs, the best drugs, the best underwear shops and the best time. In fact, gays are so glad and proud that they have a big, sweaty street party every year to show the world just how glad and proud they are and what great underwear they have.

All things considered, it’s so fabby being gay, that it’s difficult to imagine what it must be like to be straight. Imagine the suffering of those poor souls who are doomed by some accident of genetics or underdevelopment of that brain lobe which regulates aesthetic potential not only to never be able really to appreciate Ab Fab or carry off wearing a silver thong, but also never to be able to come out. Imagine never being able to experience the joy of discovering your true identity and inheriting all this gladness; imagine being excluded from a world so marvellous, so welcoming, so well-presented, simply because you thought having children and living in the suburbs seemed like the thing to do.

Even worse, imagine what it would be like to prefer the same sex but to be denied the rewards  that this display of good taste so rightly entails and be forced to pass for straight. Difficult as it is to believe, this was once the universal state of affairs. This is because – horrible to relate – once upon a time there were no gays, only dreary homosexuals.

Naturally this was before that watershed moment in human history by which everything must be measured – the Stonewall Revolution. Before Stonewall, or BS, homosexuals had internalised straight values and were labouring under oppression and a false sense of guilt. They thought themselves ill or sinful or both. So, in dimly – lit, underworld – controlled basement bars, wearing cardigans in muted colours, they cried into their Martinis and looked enviously at the carefree drag queens – so strong, so colourful, so successful with straight trade. As Disco had not been invented yet, there being no gays to sniff poppers and woop it up in bell-bottoms, the pitiful homosexuals’ only solace was singing along to Judy Garland’s The Man That Got Away, and of course, Over The Rainbow.

No wonder these poor creatures would often be heard lamenting their lot, expressing shame and wishing out loud that they could be cured of their sad affliction.

However, in 1969 at the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, New York, all this changed. Forever. During the course of another police raid by heartless pigs unconcerned that the homos had buried poor Judy’s bones only the day before, something unheard of happened. Inspired to anger by the drag queens’ feisty show of resistance, homos revolted. An ear-ring or beer bottle brutally ripped from some fierce, befrocked lovely resisting arrest, crashed to the floor and the ancien regime of homo-shame shattered into a thousand dangerous pieces as the rioting that changed the world began.

Exhilarated by their new-found Gay Power the rioters had a revelation. It dawned on them that their sense of guilt and shame was just a trick designed to keep them out of sight and in conservative clothes. There was no longer any need to repress their desires or their undergarments, or acquiesce in the New York Police Department’s attempt to repress them.

Armed with the new-found weapon of Gay Pride they fought back, surprising and vanquishing the entire NYPD whose Irish muscle, used to yielding fag flesh, now found itself impotent against the righteous anger of these empowered pansies. That magical night all the homosexuals in New York became gay and flooded out of their basement bars, darkened piers and parks, onto the streets, peeling off their sweaters, discarding their corduroy trousers and shouting out the message for all the world to hear: Gay Is Good! The cure for their sad affliction had turned out to be not prayer, psychiatry, electro-shock or football, but Gay Pride.

That message resounded around the world. After Stonewall, or AS, homos everywhere began to discover the indisputable truth that gay is as moral, as natural, as healthy, as beautiful as they had been told homosexuality was immoral, unnatural, unhealthy and ugly. The Stonewall Revolution corrected society’s misconception about homosexuality not by turning the world upside down but by turning it the right way up: the inverts merely overturned a world that was already standing on its head.

So, in the As epoch, homosexuality, with its nasty medicinal odour, was now an increasingly redundant term. Instead, ‘homo-phobia’, a word with a nasty medicinal odour, was coined to explain the origins of the obviously mentally imbalanced idea that gay wasn’t good. While the innocent BS homosexual was the victim of pathologisation and prejudice, the guilty AS homophobe was obviously deserving of pathologisation and prejudice. It soon became apparent that since homophobia was an illness produced by ignorance, secrecy, and an aversion to wearing leather harnesses in public, the underlying cause of homophobia was a shortage of proud gays.

This was underlined by the fact that the homophobe was invariably a homosexual who wouldn’t accept his identity/duty and become gay.  In fact, it was soon recognised that any congruence of same-shaped genitals, or interest in such congruence, however casual or passing, anywhere in the world at anytime must eventually be paid for by full membership of the gay community and an account with ‘Big Boy Athletic Supplies’ or else face charges of hypocrisy and living a lie.

Gays quickly discovered another, related truth. If gay was good 0 and this was an a priori truth – then the gay life was also the good life, in every sense. So not only was being gay a real gas, and as you know, really fabby, but it was the moral thing to do. Homosexuals had been encouraged to say ‘no’ to themselves several times a day ( or at least feel guilty about not saying it). Gays, on the other hand, would learn to say ‘Yes please!’ several times before brunch.

In fact, square, trad old ‘no’ was not a word that gays had time for anymore. Once the ultimate ‘no’ had been shouted at Stonewall –‘No!’ to a world of shame, ‘No!’ to straight convention, ‘No!’ to cotton/polyester mix joxkey shorts – there was no need ever to say ‘no’ again. Moreover, ‘to your own self be true’ was the Disney-esque existential motto of gays everywhere – and since as a gay your sexuality/pleasure was you, saying ‘no’ to any form of indulgence was a denial of the truth of who you were. Abstinence was a form of mendacity at best and collaboration at worst – since saying ‘yes’ to yourself was also the gay way of continuing to say ‘not’ to straight convention, hedonism was a positive virtue and absolute duty. After Stonewall abolished guilt overnight where centuries of philosohpising had failed, the only thing to feel guilty about now was feeling guilty itself. This is how gays invented the 1970s and made the world safe for designer underwear.

Of course, the thrilling times of Stonewall are a long way behind us now. But their spirit is very much alive today. The life-transforming revelation and truth of Stonewall is repeated every time someone comes out and is baptised into the gay community. The truth shall set ye free. When one comes out, and ceases to be a private homosexual and instead becomes a public gay, the burden of deceit and false consciousness is thrown off, the sex police are vanquished and the out person demonstrates new-found whistle-blowing pride in sexuality instead of shame. It is a confessional narrative of sinner and saved. When a man comes out as gay he is coming out as what he was meant to be all along, he had found his true self, his existential soul, and rejected the sin/guilt of the previous, inauthentic, closeted self that thought baggy clothes were quite comfortable really.

And now that the scales have fallen down from the new convert’s eyes he is born again – not in the silly, lying, sex-negative fundamentalist sense of the word, of course, but in the new, meaningful, sex –positive gay sense. And indeed sense itself is bestowed upon the lucky soul who comes out. His whole hitherto confusing life has been  leading up to this moment – a long gestation period spent in the chrysalis of the closet. What seemed without purpose before now takes on meaning. What’s more, the other problems that have plagued him will disappear. Coming out id thus a moment of revelation and redemption: I was blind, but now I see; I was lost, but now I’m found. Just like the homos in the Stonewall Bar that night in Year Zero, from the nasty straugt-acting grub emerges a fabulous gay butterfly with wings of lycra.

Coming out is also a form of death, but a fabulous, life-affirming form of death to be sure. To be ‘reborn’ you have to destroy the wrong person that existed before. So the out person now recalls that he knew he was gay from the earliest age; before he encountered puberty, before he could walk, before the afterbirth was cold, etc etc. Early playground friendships  with members of the same sex are now seen for what they were: passionate gay attachments which no one straight could possibly have entertained. On the other hand, any encounters with, interest in, or marriage to the opposite sex is now quite rightly seen as nothing but an ill-judged attempt to satisfy one’s peers, parents, guilt, false consciousness or just sisterly feeling. You know the scenario, I thought I loved you, but really I just envied your make-up skills.

And best of all, the newly emerged out person also discovers that a sense of difference and apartness, feelings of aloneness and hollowness common to most at some time or other and exploited by all nasty religions – especially the anti-gay ones – are in fact a product of being homosexual but unable to become gay. It is surely a great consolation to know that the real reason for your sense of smallness in the universe as a child was not because you were human and frail,or separated from God, but because you were meant to dance till dawn in a Spandex all in one, surrounded by young men with mobile hips and chemical smiles, and yet were stuck in a Gap-less town in Cleveland where the only place open after 11pm was the deathburger van outside the Young Farmers Club.

And it has to be the case, doesn’t it? If coming out isn’t a coming home, then it would mean that homos were still lost souls who have to face the universe alone. And that would be a bit of a downer, really.

That sense of difference is anyway replaced by an enveloping , snuggly sense of sameness when you come out. In the gay world everything is reassuringly similar, wherever you go. Gays are better at franchising than McDonalds. Just in case you should feel homesick when travelling abroad or just around town, gay bars and clubs around the globe are playing the same musc and the patros are wearing the same jeans, haircuts and even facial expressions. In the backroom the same American porn movie is showing and men are on their knees performing the same acts they see on the screen and rapping the same rap in the same Strykerese. And wherever you go you can pick up a gay publication which is full of pictures of people just like you and exciting information on just how many other people just like you there are out there and how you can meet them. Once you’re out you need never be troubled by pesky old difference ever again.

An inconvenient sense of insignificance and humdrumness is also eradicated when you come out. When you come out you are midwife and mother to your own birth. Nature and heterosexuality have no claim on you anymore as you become a godlike creature of culture. By heroically refusing to allow contact between penis and vagina the gay man refuses to accept his mortality and the ignominy of driving space –mobiles (even if reproduction occurs, as a result of some drunken accident or some sober design of turkey basters).

Straights, on the other hand, are doomed to be the mere vassals of nature and Pampers shareholders. Their bodies are used in a cruel and mercenary way merely to mix genes together, to pass the new gene line on to the next generation and to pay school fees.  Gays, meanwhile, use each other’s bodies in a tender and beautiful way to mix together aftershaves and pass on new fashion lines to the next generation.

In this sense, gays, contrary to their perception by many straights as the embodiment of immoral ‘animal lust’, are actually a brand of holy celibates. Yes, some may be very promiscuous, but only with other men, a choice of partner which – until the appearance of AIDS – was a form of sexual activity with absolutely no consequences (unless you count increased expenditure on Crisco and Kleenex).

But perhaps the most marvellous thing of all about coming out is that you leave psychoanalysis behind as something for uptight straights. When a man makes the transition from homosexual to gay, he is choosing light over dark, truth over falsehood, reason over superstition, rationality over convention, expression over repression, Calvin Klein over Hanes; he is emerging from the twilight world into the sunlit uplands of life where everyone has a great tan-line. The homosexual who walks out of his stuffy closet and into the open arms of the gay community is in fact conducting a walking cure instead of a talking cure, one which renders all further analysis, or even thought, completely redundant.

Everything is now, by definition, out in the open. The gay man knows who he is, what he is, what he wants and where to find it at a ten per cent discount. There are no longer any conflicts to be told, any mysteries to unravel or any dreams to be interpreted. Nothing needs to be unlocked because this has already been done by opening the closet door – Eros has been liberated, inhibition vanquished. After the gay man’s debut on the world stage as a fully formed person with fully formed needs and fully formed pectorals, everything is exactly as it appears to be. The gay man is, in fact, the very embodiment of enlightened common sense, full rationality and great grooming. And there is absolutely no truth in the scurrilous idea put around by anti-gay people and those, like Camille Paglia, who are No Friends of The Gay Community, that this is why homosexuals were more interesting to talk to, or, for that matter, read.

When you consider all the advantages of coming out, you can’t help but come to the conclusion that it is a pity that it happens only once in your life.

Which is why the Pride Parade was invented. At Pride, everyone can come out year after year. And they can do this en masse – just like the original Stonewall Rioters. Everyone has the chance to feel like they are changing the world, and, even more importantly, to try and draw as much attention to themselves as possible. So on the June anniversary of Year Zero, gays in big cities parade through town, hold hands, kiss and embrace, and blow whistles, while the fetishists in their ranks display theor paraphernalia, drag queens flaunt their stuff, male strippers flex and pose on floats sponsored by sexual lubricant companies, and young men in their underwear noisily relive and dramatise the excitement and the liberation of their own coming out, vanquishing any counter-revolutionary thoughts they might be entertaining about the muted anti-climax that may actually have followed this curtain-raiser.

And there are many reasons to feel proud at Pride. You are proud to prefer the same sex, proud to be open about it, proud of your floats and freedom flags, proud to be there feeling proud and especially proud of your cycling shorts three sizes too small. It’s quite dizzying, really. No wonder many people describe it as a ‘near religious experience’. It’s a wonder that proud gay hearts don’t burst with pride on such a proud day. The straight world can only look on in bitter frustration, realising that in spite of their best efforts, they haven’t succeeded in making gays hung up about their sexuality.

As a measure of how successful and how popular gay is, every year the parades get bigger, the floats fluffier and the male strippers beefier and oilier. In case we don’t notice this, the gay press helpfully points this out – along with the cast –iron prediction that this year the parade will be so big, fluffy and oily that the straights won’t be able to ignore it, like they somehow managed to last year (not counting, that is, those couple of photos of drag queens whose lives and choice of heels were obviously being validated because a camera was pointing in their direction).

And knowing that the numbers are growing each year is gratifying news. It tells us that we are on the road to victory, that we must have right on our side, and, best of all, that we are fashionable.  But perhaps the most encouraging thing about the rising attendance figures is that they bring ever closer the realisation of the greatest gay dream of all: to turn the whole world into a gay disco! After all, Pride is nothing if it isn’t a vast gay day-club; a discotheque after the lights have come on but no one wants to go home.

Understandably, the Coming of the Kingdom of Kylie is something that most gays can hardly wait for. A world of free love and shirtless men with their hands in the air showing you their shaved armpits is something really to look forward to. Just think of the money saved on taxi fares for a start. And what better image could there be of freedom and love than the gay disco? With just a teensy-weensy bit of help from mind-altering substances, the gay disco is the place where you can experience the most intense sense of well being, belonging and happiness, not to mention some really interesting convesations about life, the universe and how difficult it is to get hold of good shit these days and how the tab you took last weekend turned the whites of your eyes yellow.

But this magic is not something gays want to keep for themselves. Gays are so unselfish, so giving and so concerned about the rest of the world that they devoutly want to extend this dry-ice Nirvana to everyone else, just so long as they’re cute and under thirty-five. And by one of those strange coincidences which makes you realise that Dame Fate is actually a fag hag herself, staights under thirty-five, lured by techno, house, and lycra cotton mix underwear, are the exactly the same ones who are queuing up outside  the gay disco wanting a piece of Utopia plus strobe lights. Everyone cool now wants to dream the gay dream, or at least stay up all night dancing to their records.

So gays, you see, really have reached the other side of the rainbow that Judy sang about. Now that we’re out of the closet and not living in Kansas or Cleveland anymore we don’t need to cry into our Martinis. In fact, such behaviour is not to be tolerated at all, being as I is just a sign that you haven’t really ‘come to terms’ yet or that you are just some terrible self-hating throwback. Any unhappiness is clearly the result ofstraight oppression, self-oppression or your dealer not having the right contacts.

Besides, we have everything you could ask for, and if, by some strange delusion, you feel you’re missing something in your life, thoughtful niche marketeers will think of it for you. The gay press, courtesy of kind telephone sex operators and their lovely sex-positive ads featuring buffed men in some really stunning underwear, is free and never stops telling us how marvellous we and the products aimed at us are. Gay pressure groups tell us we are adorable victims who deserve special protection and sympathy, while market researchers tell us we are adorable consumers who deserve special targeting. Really big stars like Shirley Maclaine and Liza Minelli love us. Madonna wants to be one of us. The younger generation wants to dance with us. And, God bless their bikini lines, Bob ‘n’ Rob Jackson pParis and their parakeets are role-modelling for us.

When all is said and done, the only thing to feel sorry about, apart, of course from the fact that the Olympic Commission hasn’t yet accepted the Wet Jockstrap Contest as a sport, is AIDS. But even then sadness isn’t what you should be feeling, except during those touching candlelit vigils. Instead you should be feeling angry at drug companies/the Government/Western medicine/The CIA/straights for letting it happen and pride at the heroic way gays have responded to it , and dismissing as patently homophobic and therefore not  worth discussing, the suggestion that AIDS might not have been a gay plague in the West, that gays might not have had to respond to it so heroically without the ghettoism and hedonism of the gay seventies and the gay identity itself.

After having discovered at Stonewall the Truth that gay is always good and having been set free by that discovery, at last seeing and showing things  as they really are, gays have indeed changed the world and the shape of men’s briefs forever.No wonder we feel so proud of our achievements. Isn’t it fabby to be gay?

——————————————–

By Mark Simpson, From Anti Gay (1996) edited by Mark Simpson (Freedom Press)

Some subsequent articles relating to this chapter (I am going to write a follow-up piece so this is here for my ref as much as anything):

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/04/17/sporno/gay for pay

In the UK, the year 2012 has begun with a trial that could have come straight out of the 1960s – and even has some resonance with 19^th century sexual morals and laws. R v Peacock, which already has its own wikipedia page, has been described as the obscenity trial of the decade.

The defendant in the case, a male escort called  Michael Peacock, was cleared of all charges of ‘depraving and corrupting’ the people who watched the dvds he sold, featuring men involved in sadomasochistic  acts. Writing in the Guardian after  Peacock’s acquittal, Nichi Hodgson asked:

‘Why is [the verdict] so important? For one, Peacock … challenged the notion of obscenity in law, a law that was last updated in 1964, and has stood since. A law that is expressly designed to tell us what is “deprave and corrupt” – defined by Justice Byrne in 1960 as “to render morally unsound or rotten, to destroy the moral purity or chastity; to pervert or ruin a good quality.”‘

Chris Ashford, an academic with specific knowledge in the field of law and sexuality, also commented on the outcome of the trial, saying:

‘The case brings some much needed clarity to this area of complex criminal law.  I understand that the Metropolitan Police will be sitting down with the CPS and the BBFC and this is a welcome step.  There will obviously need to be some revision to the CPS guidelines on prosecution in light of this case.  Longer term, there are sure to be questions about the continued appropriateness of the law in this area, and whether we still need this obscenity law’.

The overwhelming verdict from those outside the courtroom seemed to agree with both the jury and the ‘liberal’ press. As Hodgson put it in the Guardian, with a cheeky reference to the four finger rule employed by many pornographers featuring ‘fisting’ in their work:

‘For gay rights campaigners and for everyone of us that believes in social and sexual liberty, it’s a day to make a five-digit victory sign.’

I too welcome the verdict but I am not quite so jubilant as many seem to be about it. Nor do I like the tone and possible ‘agendas’ appearing in some of the media discourse around the case.

My first problem is with the fact this case was brought to the courts at all, in the digital 21^st century. Shouldn’t we be up in arms about this puritanical and oppressive legislation, before celebrating that someone has avoided being criminalised by it?

As Michel Foucault put it more eloquently than I could:

“But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.” ―

It is not just the archaic and anachronistic Obscenity Laws that are directed at ‘potentially guilty’ actors in the sexual sphere. Contemporary  legislation exists that continues to execute the ‘Law of Sex’ both in the courts and out. In 2009 for example, extreme pornography  legislation was included in the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act. This makes it illegal to possess and even view pornography that shows injury to the breasts, anus or genitals, or that suggests a potential threat to life. This has potentially criminalised whole sections of society, including myself, who express sadomasochistic desire.

As Jane Fae has indicated, maybe we should keep the champagne on ice.  On her blog she wrote:

‘However, opponents of censorship need to be very cautious indeed: what comes next is likely to be a thoroughgoing review of obscenity and, in the current climate, my expectation is that that will see a widening and toughening of existing restrictive laws such as the Criminal Justice Act (2008) – more colloquially known as the ‘extreme porn law’.

On the politics.co.uk website Fae also pointed out the difference in numbers between prosecutions under the OPA and the ‘Extreme Porn’ law.

‘This once proud piece of legislation [OPA], intended to be the last word in moral high ground, was down to 71 prosecutions last year – as against just shy of 1,000 for “extreme porn” and several thousand each for various forms of malicious communication and indecent images of children.

The prosecution attempted to use the ‘extreme porn’ law in R v Peacock, as the prosecution also did in the Vincent Tabak (murder) trial. Both attempts failed but it shows how this law is very much at the forefront of lawyers’ minds, and their legal artillery, when it comes to cases of sexuality and (sexual) violence.

One of these attitudes is the idea that some people are ‘normal’ sexually, and others are abnormal, or perverts.

Again as Michel Foucault has said (and as he was partially quoted in the Peacock case):

“…if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing”

Who are the ‘perverts’ and the ‘sick’ and ‘abnormal’ people in this ‘permissive’ age? Well, apart from the obvious ‘paedophiles’, judging by this and previous obscenity cases, people who commit ‘violent’ acts in a consensual sexual context are still considered perverse to some degree. Especially men who do so. It is a rarely quoted fact, that the ‘dominatrix’ trade continues to boom without too much regulation (apart from isolated incidents e.g. the Max Moseley case) or criticism, because there it is women doling out the ‘violence’, usually to men.  In our culture, women dommes ‘punishing’ willing men victims, seems to many to represent some kind of ‘justice’ or ‘payback’ for all the apparent crimes of ‘patriarchal’ men against women.

And when it comes to heterosexual men, feminism demonises them so successfully that often they do not have to be brought to trial in courtrooms at all. Men are ‘the potentially guilty’ in the Foucauldian sense. Think of the discourse of rape culture that presents all men (all heterosexual men) as potential rapists (of women) and we can begin to see how this ‘law of sex’ works.  In other words, as Mark Simpson has observed, ‘The feminist is Ms Whiplash’.

I also think that the emphasis in the media surrounding this trial on the ‘gay’ identity of the defendant and the people who watch his porn, is positioning other men who have sex with men who do not identify as gay, as ‘abnormal’.

Hodgson in the Guardian  emphasised the significance of the defendant here being ‘gay’ and called this a victory for ‘gay rights campaigners’. I disagree. Though Peacock himself identifies as ‘gay’, there is no evidence that the actors in the dvds he sold or the people who bought and watched them are ‘gay’.  As Mark Simpson has written, straight men enjoy watching men’s cocks in pornography.  Also, many women watch ‘gay’ pornography. Again as Simpson has told us,  Manlove for the Ladies is a big market and getting bigger. And many men who act in ‘gay’ porn are only gay for pay. So this divide between ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ porn is false and limiting.

During the trial I didn’t see any ‘gay rights campaigners’ speaking up for Peacock (with the exception of  Chris Ashford).  Maybe this was because ‘gay rights’ activists are often puritanical themselves, as they separate the ‘gay’ identity from ‘homosexual’ sex, making it respectable and almost ‘heterosexual’.  If the men hadhave been heterosexual, and fisting and urinating on women, how would the feminist Guardian have presented the case?

I wrote previously at Graunwatch about how gay activists such as Paul Burston have taken a dim view of men demonstrating their homosexuality in public. I am not surprised this case was not taken up by ‘Teh Gayz’.

Once again, Foucault nailed this issue of the ‘gay’ identity being prioritised over everything else when he wrote:

‘If identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility.

http://www.michel-foucault.com/quote/2009q.html

Currently people involved in s and m activities, if they commit ‘serious’ assault on each other as part of their consensual sexual acts, for example by drawing blood, are breaking the law.

Myles Jackson , Obscenity Lawyer, wrote:

‘I urge legislators and the Law Commission to reconsider the law surrounding consent to sexual assault.’ But as yet he has not had a commitment from the Commission that they will do so.’

Whilst very few people have been convicted for ‘assaulting’ their partners during known consensual sexual activity, the fact the law exists matters.  It has ramifications for domestic violence and sexual assault cases. If someone is accused of either of these crimes, and violence has definitely occurred, it is impossible for the defence to argue that ‘consent’ is a significant factor in the case.

Again this situation is highly gendered. Men were only counted amongst potential rape victims in the UK in 1994, and in United States  in 2012! And, in UK law, women are not able to ‘rape’ men technically, as a penis is required for that specific crime. This enables feminists to continue their assault on ‘rape culture’ and to portray men as predators of women.

I welcome this ‘not guilty’ verdict. I hope  it leads to the end of the obscenity law in the UK. But I do not think it necessarily signifies the end of ‘puritanical’ or ‘oppressive’ law in the realm of sexuality in the UK.  I believe the ‘discourse’ of sexuality is where most of the power occurs. And, the discourse around this case has not been ‘liberating’ so much as business as usual for those such as feminists who invest in continuing sexual repression, and in particular the demonization of men’s sexualities.

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Originally appeared (in edited form) at Open Rights Group Org:

http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/features/2011/puritanism-in-a-permissive-age