BDSM

I’m suffering at the moment. First an identity crisis, and secondy a cold. So I grew a beard. I went to do a gig in Edinburgh in July, and the guy at the stage door told me to report to the Stage Manager. I was the only poet doing stuff as part of a burlesque variety show.

So I got to the SM, and she said; “You must be the comedian…” so I replied – in as poetly a fashion as I could muster – “How so?” and she; “Because you look funny.”

It’s not looking funny that it’s about though, is it? Unless you’re Lee Evans or Jim Carrey. It’s about words. Getting people’s bodies to respond without even touching them – the involuntary breathing spasms and convulsions of laughter – nice trick, if you can do it.

The gasps, the groans, the moans, the writhing and wriggling.

Like Meg Ryan in ‘When Harry met Sally’. Or Gurdjieff, who, allegedly, could make women orgasm merely by looking at them.

So, to get recognised as a ‘poet’, I grew a beard. But my wife insists I shave it off. She says it tickles her inner thighs.

I’ve got this thing about fur anyway. Wherever it grows naturally, I reckon we should leave it there. Anything else is both unhealthy and dishonest. So it’s probably a good hedge against getting a cold. And a good bush could protect you from a whole bunch of other transmissible infections.

But to get back to the words. They can get you into a lot of trouble. Especially if you’re called Pussy Riot. I know it’s possible to make loadsamoney out of words. I heard EL James became a multi-millionaire almost overnight through BDSM.

I thought BDSM stood for ‘Bloody Digital Social Media’, so, of course, I signed up for Twitter straight away, and I’m now on my way to becoming a fully qualified twat.

It’s how I’m going to reach the Global Village and make the sort of cash I can spend in the Universal City. But there’s a problem right away. Like our lovely Mr Cameron; thinking LOL stands for Lots of Love. You’ve got to learn the argot. The jargon.

Everywhere you go there are language barriers. Don’t get me wrong: there are no more fascinating people than nerds and geeks. I used to spend my life travelling from country to country four weeks out of five, going to exotic foreign places and staying in mostly identical hotel rooms, eating mostly identical food and getting monotonous constipation and dehydration from all the airmiles I was collecting. Business class is full of people with piles. Of Haemorrhoids. Policy wonks.

And nobody can fill the time better than an obsessive enthusiast, who knows far more than you’d ever want to know about something you could never be interested in, even if you had all your limbs amputated after a plane crash.

There you can get real word problems. Between Italy and Spain, I travelled Iberia instead of Alitalia, and was asked about my breakfast preferences. Still thinking Italian, I asked for ‘pane e burro’, which is fine in Italy, if you’re into bread and butter, but a burro in Spanish is entirely different from mantequilla, which so far as I remember, is the Spanish word for butter. Unless it’s one of those combs you put in your hair. The stewardess was apologetic;

“I’m thorry, thir, but we don’t carry donkeys on short-haul flights.”

Nerds and geeks have their own specialised language relating to their specialty (we used to say ‘speciality’ but Yankee is taking over the global lingo, Gringo!) which is partly why, if you are a global jet-setter, travelling the world alone, you end up listening to them in bars talking about the terminology of planespotting or whatever floats their boat. If that’s not a mixed metaphor. Flies their plane? Whatever! And, up to a point, it can be quite educational. (Note to self: write piece about planing flies.)

Then, when you get bored, talking to ex-pats, you decide to stop shouting in English and try to learn a little of the local language.

They often protest that English is hard to learn, with the way we can pronounce the letters ‘ough’ as in cough; through; slough; slough; ought and so on. OK, so, I admit English is a bit of a mouthful, which brings me to the French for vagina, which is ‘le vagin’.

The French have something of a reputation for being good at sex, unlike the Brits, who are supposed to enjoy spanking – a reputation not enhanced by 50 Shades of Grey being by a British woman – but ‘le vagin’ is a masculine word. What’s all this with words having a gender? Don’t the French care whose vagin it is?

And the French even express national prejudices through their words, never mind gender confusion. What we call a ‘French letter’, they call a ‘Capot Anglais’ which translates as an English hood. They get everything backwards. What we call the EC, they call the CE. And just be very careful if somebody in Normandy offers you CIDA. They haven’t forgotten Waterloo. And it’s not made from apples.

Acronyms are such a problem. Remember the Bloody Digital Social Media? Well I decided to join our local BDSM group, and went along to a ‘Munch’, which is a sort of social gathering in which they talk about BDSM, but don’t actually do any. A bit like going to writing workshops. I was talking to this woman about the whole thing, (you know), and she told me that what I needed was CBT. Being well-educated, as – doubtless – you can tell, I asked; “Why do you think I need Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?” and it turned out that she was propositioning me for a session of Cock and Ball Torture.

When I’d managed to extinguish the soles of my shoes, I had the opportunity for what Wordsworth so aptly dubbed; ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ and reflected on what I’d learned at the Munch. Apart from whom to avoid on future occasions. In written communications, subs (no, not an advance on salary, nor an underwater boat) are required to address their Doms as Sir, with a capital ‘S’ or ‘Master’, also with the upper case letter, which should be applied to all personal pronouns, appurtenances and characteristics – like in the King James version of the Bible, and they should always use lower case in alluding to their ‘subby’ selves, which, previously I’d thought was a device used only by ee cummings, whose excuse was a stuck shift key on his typewriter. That was a machine used for imitating the printed word before the PC and Laptop and… well you know the rest.

Funnily enough, the conventions of BDSM require that dominant people of the male gender use the title Dom, spelled; ‘D-O-M’ in common with Dominican Monks. Possibly the only thing they do have in common with Dominican Monks. And female dominant persons use the orthography; ‘D-O-M-M-E’ after the French.

Which is ironic, since the image of the French is that – along with the Belgians – they are the traditional victims of cruelty in Europe, and the Germans are their foil as the wicked oppressors. Which can’t be right, since the Marquis de Sade was French, whereas Leopold Von Sacher Masoch was Kraut… sorry – Boche… erm… German.

I just hope there are no Nazis reading this.

Back to the French. And the Capot. And my cold.

Having a cold screws up your singing voice. Even the Bee-gees would have to cancel out. Which is what a guitar capo is for.

It’s not a hood, nor a contraceptive device. You put it on to make it possible to reach higher notes. On the guitar. It comes from the Italian. It means ‘Top’. Not in the BDSM sense. Remember the ‘Godfather’? Yeah… top!

The full name is ‘Capo d’Astra’ which means ‘Top to the Stars’ which would be a rather extreme instruction in BDSM, and certainly wouldn’t include a ‘safe-word’.

Any non-guitarists who’ve ever picked up a bit of sheet music (Debussy and Bizet used to sheet music) will have seen the instruction; ‘Da Capo’ occasionally. It doesn’t mean reach for the capo, but simply ‘back to da top’, or, in Hollywood terms, ‘Play it again Sam’.

Being a dilettante, which means I can’t stick to one thing and be good at it, I do ‘mediocre’ in writing, sculpture and music. So whilst (infra-did word, I’m told) I’ve got a cold, I’ll stick to doing Tom Waits covers.

And writing mediocre blog entries.

Lust

Lust, according to Saint Augustine, is an overindulgence, but to love and be loved is what he has sought for his entire life. Saint Augustine says the only one who can love you truly and fully is God, because love with a human only allows for flaws such as “jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger, and contention.” According to Saint Augustine, to love God is “to attain the peace which is yours.” (Saint Augustine’s Confessions)

 

Quoted from an article on ‘Love’ on Princeton University Website.

 

Lust is simply a natural drive, like the need for warmth, shelter, food and water.   Psychologically, the sex drive – libido – can be stronger than the hunger for food.  But it is not intrinsically an overindulgence. 

 

The problem with the suppression of sex by the major religions; Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Sikhism, is that the rules were set by men who sought socially to engineer conditions in which women become the ‘property’ of men, and men are supposed to be assured of the paternity of all their children, so that they see it as worthwhile to invest their effort to provide for their upbringing. 

 

The natural impulses of both men and women are to enjoy sexual relationships with as many people as possible, in order to ensure the survival of their genes to the next generation.  As women are always assured that the children they bear will carry their own genes, the selection and retention of the father is not as important as it is for men, who tend to seek to invest only in the children they are convinced are their own.

 

This has resulted in social models of ‘love’ which are based upon men having exclusive sexual access to their woman or – in the case of polygamous religions – women.  The virtuous idea of ‘courtly chivalrous love’, featuring exclusive pair bonding, mutual sexual fidelity, and lifelong companionship, is a taught behaviour which forms part of the social conventions of civilisations led by men.

 

Matriarchies and polyandrous societies are rare.  The type of ‘love’ to which St Augustine was alluding is certainly not the same as any type of love as understood between human beings.  It is certainly not sexual erotic love (although cases of religious extremists having erotic fixations on the deity are not unknown) nor is it the kind of Platonic relationship that might exist between human mutual admirers, sometimes distinguished by the Greek description of Philos as opposed to Eros.  Nor is St Augustine’s love of God akin to Storge which is the type of love the Greeks believed typified parental love for children, which is characterised by unconditional tolerance of however the beloved might behave. Storge is a bit like the other Greek concept of love; Agape, which describes, amongst other ideas, the kind of non-sexual bonds which can exist between married couples.

 

The notion of the love of God is an interesting phenomenon.  If your belief is based upon a concept of a deity or deities which is or are in some way similar to human personalities, then it is reasonable to project a theory that to love the deity results in a reciprocal love of the deity for those who love the deity. 

 

Clearly these kinds of religion act as a sort of comforter for believers, who can imagine that – even if the world appears to be entirely hostile towards them, they are not ‘alone’ and that at least the deity loves them.  These religions often act as  kind of spiritual insurance policy, in which the reward for a life well lived will be paid-out after the believer dies, and attains some form of post-mortem consciousness.  In it’s simplest form it is the promise that the ‘virtuous’ will go to heaven, and the sinful will go to hell.  Often the representations of each are based on physical pleasure or pain, so that a religious martyr might be promised the sexual love of multiple virgins when  they arrive in heaven, whereas a sinner might be threatened with everlasting genital torture.  It seems that visions of heaven often incorporate freedoms to behave in ways that would be considered sinful if they were enjoyed before death.

 

St Augustine was said to have asked God to make him virtuous, but added – being keen on enjoying a wide variety of ‘sins’ -’not yet’.

 

Spirituality is not limited to paths which require belief in a deity which in any way resembles humanity, and some belief systems can be said to be ‘mystical’ in that they merely acknowledge the existence of some unified force within all universes which is unknowable, and beyond full human ability totally to understand.  Unlike most deities, this ‘force’ incorporates all that is both positive and negative in existence, and includes as a part of itself, every natural phenomenon of the universes, and human individuals themselves.

 

Given that spiritual pathways are used by people to come to terms with both the joys and pains of existence, and to try to identify a way of living that is best for themselves as individuals, there are often distinctions made between the ‘left hand’ (or sinister) pathways and the ‘right’ (both as a descriptor of relative direction and of that which is correct or true).

 

Broadly, to chose to explore potentially destructive phenomena is to choose the ‘dark’ or ‘left’ approach, and the ‘light’ or ‘right’ path is often approached by employing a kind of ‘enlightened self-interest’ and seeking to live in accordance with those things one can observe as being ‘creative’ or positive.

 

The kind of extreme sexual behaviour often considered to be ‘debauched’ which can lead to damaging other people, or causing other people to be provoked to damage the protagonists, can be seen as belonging to the ‘dark side’, and is usually proscribed by people who seek to be ‘righteous’, however it is possible to see lust as a positive force, and to include it validly as an act of worship for the unified force which drives the universe.

 

Most of the ‘good’ reasons why sex is commonly kept under strict control by organised religions are simply practical ‘bathroom’ issues of health and safety.  Obviously the sexual transmission of diseases is a problem in any society concerned with the health of all its members, and the possessiveness of men often leads to violence, injury and murder when women are permitted total sexual freedom.  Interestingly, in the few matriarchies that exist around the world, sexual promiscuity of women is not considered to be sinful, and probably causes less problems than the consumption of pork and shellfish would cause if regularly eaten in hot countries without refrigeration technologies – the practical reasons for the dietary laws of Judaism and Islam.

 

It is entirely sensible to see sex as a positive and natural part of the creative forces in the universes, and hence a perfectly valid aspect of life to celebrate as part of a life of ‘worship’, just as one might celebrate food – enjoying it, but not to the excess which leads to obesity, morbidity and mortality.

 

In my own opinion, the most sublime religious experience is shared orgasm between male and female, as a transcendence of self – humanity being far more than either gender alone, and as an expression of the origin of human life, as our only relationship with everything that comprises the universes of which we are a part, and the only way to ‘experience the love of God’.

 

To believe that we are loved by a benevolent and caring personality is, in my opinion, merely a comforting act of self-delusion, and leaves us liable to many other sophistries which result in us behaving in ways which are destructive to each other and those aspects of the universe which lie within our sphere of influence.  Sex can be highly moral, including unbridled promiscuity.  Our immoralities concern destruction of our planet and its environs through warfare, greedy exploitation of natural resources and other species through technology and lack of a balanced approach which not only threatens other parts of creation, but humanity ourselves.  That’s where we have over-indulged, and accelerated climate change and potential pandemics are only symptoms of how unbalanced we are.  God will not save any of us; if the balance overtips, we’ll be as beloved by God as were the dinosaurs.

Burlesque

I’m taking part in the Edinburgh Festival of the Erotic Arts from June 22^nd to 24^th 2012, (http://www.erotic-arts.co.uk) and reading some of my unpublished work. There are exhibitions featuring visual, plastic and other arts under virtually every medium available.  And there’s a lot of Burlesque.  Which is interesting.

‘Erotic’ Burlesque flourished in America during the ‘Great Depression’. Think of Josephine Baker – but there were many others. It’s a retro thing. It’s a kind of magic.  The same sort of magic that propels so many unsolicited e-mails, texts and phone calls that fall under the generic parenthesis of ‘scam’.  Whichever of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ are invoked to conjure our response, whether greed or lust, be sure, we are being conned. It probably can’t be entirely blamed on the current economic situation.

Strangely, (or perhaps not so strangely), criminal psychologists (the ones who study the psychology of criminals; not those psychologists who are criminals) tell us confidence tricksters are particularly susceptible to being conned themselves.  It has something to do with belief in credulity.

Maybe it’s why, in my formative years, I quite fancied becoming a Snake Oil Salesman; the opportunities:- the sheer charisma of becoming the Professor, the charlatan, the mountebank (and briefly an actor), that would win me adulation, cash and an ‘access all areas’ pass to sexual freedom. Easy.

If I’d decided to direct theatre (which I might still do) I’d’ve been very likely to cast Burlesque performers to play the Faeries in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’.  Their very unreality suits them perfectly for the part. This isn’t to suggest they’re ‘painted harlots’, but merely presenting themselves as clichéd throwbacks to an imagined and irretrievable mode of life.  Peter Pan is no longer played in Pantomime because cynical  children would rather see Tinkerbelle die than counterfeit a belief in Faeries.  And good for them.

Women are about to turn the tables on men.  The paternalistic and Chauvinistic assumptions that have driven much of the World are being invalidated by women taking the substantial ‘power’ in the direction many developed (decadent?) civilisations are going.

Women don’t need to be ‘validated’ by men. Nor do they need to fight not to be ‘objectified’ by the lustful gaze of their worshippers.  But some theorists suggest – including many ‘second wave feminists’ –there are some women who don’t want to take responsibility for being the leaders.  They want to be the objects of uncontrollable male lust; to justify their existence by being desired and therefore fed, clothed (Louboutin included) and housed in the manner to which they’d like to become accustomed by men. That’s reactionary, and a ‘cop-out’. Sex and shopping are getting their notice to quit.

This is the ‘Stalingrad 1942 to Stalingrad 1943’ turn in the battle of the genders. But that means the uncomfortable burden of victory in the ‘sex’ war needs to be borne by women.  Now women will – if they are men’s women (like some men used to be ‘ladies’ men) – need to be able to win the man who stays at home to look after the children (not, thanks to lab-science, temporary tenants of women’s bodies) by appealing to his dumb-blonde inferiority.

But, as the forthcoming book by Hanna Rosin; ‘The End of Men’ is expected to assert, it’s all about to turn tits up.  So is this why a return to the cockteasing power of the Burlesque (originally a satirical attack on what men believed to be seriously worth considering) is becoming  – perhaps intuitively – a fashionable obsession amongst women?

Neo-Burlesque is an ‘in yer face’ confrontation with women expressing themselves as sexual beings without kow-towing to male-defined criteria of what is desirable.  Fat, wobbly and intensely unpretty women are showing they can arouse men indiscriminately by not exposing themselves as the object of penile penetration, but by performing long lost arts of Vaudevillian skills like fire-eating, Fakir tricks, and a whole host of ‘showbizzy’, dancy stuff.

As Shakespeare’s Faery said; “What fools these mortals be!”

The women who choose to perform as Burlesques, despite their very creditable theatre-skills, might just be as foolish as the men they seek to seduce then deny. (Because denial is the greatest frisson of Burlesque.)  It’s unoriginal, retrograde and regressive. They’re falling, perhaps, for the con they think they’re perpetrating.

Possibly the fad for Burlesque will fizzle out.  But I do hope the perennial fascination for erotic art won’t.  As I also hope men won’t be ended totally as Hanna Rosin might suggest.

Speaking for myself, it really doesn’t matter.  I can probably keep getting my rocks off as long as I want to do so.  But I have a sneaking feeling that it will be a pity if the male-female thing disappears altogether. But I’m not in control of human evolution, and I’m not especially proud about what the male ones have done.

The female of the species (according to Kipling) is more deadly than the male.

But the Burlesques with their counterfeit desire do not attract me, and won’t kill me.

A Few More Shades of Grey

Let me confess; I’ve not read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ by British author EL James, and I don’t intend to.

Nevertheless, I’m extremely pleased she’s risen to the top of US Bestseller lists with her trilogy, originally released by a small Australian e-publisher. I suspect she might be a lot more literary than her success displays, but has evidently pitched her ‘Fan-Fic’ novels to provide a lot of pleasure to a lot of people. As a TV executive she must have an intelligent grasp of how money is made in mass-markets.

I’m really not a ‘Fan’. Fan-Fic is openly derivative, and demands that authors adopt the writing style of another writer’s original, without falling straight into the black-hole of parody or pastiche. There’s nothing wrong with pastiche; Sebastian Faulks’ ‘Pistache’ is a fine example of the art. There are many more, including accomplished exercises in completing authors’ unfinished work, or continuing a series after the progenitor has died.

I also dislike pulp genre fiction with its stylistic clichés, plotline memes and targeted unoriginality. This isn’t to say that many ‘great’ literary novels haven’t been dubbed genre fiction, whilst not actually suffering from the flaws of the category. There are, for instance, many Sci-Fi titles, since it’s a perfect structure by which to explore utopian or dystopian scenarios, set either on a future Earth or some imaginary planet of another star. Most of the mechanical bits are merely incorporated to lend some credibility to a tale which demands the readers’ suspension of disbelief. Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ for example.

If you consult a list of the world’s highest grossing authors, up there with Shakespeare and Tolstoy are Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland. I’ve read Blyton, but not Cartland. It’s not that I’m a snob, but I prefer stories about sexual love not to cop-out with ellipses when I get to the sticky bits. I prefer erotica to say something about people and their unexpurgated inner motives and behaviour. I don’t simply want to hear that X inserted Tab A into Y’s Slot B and instant satisfaction was delivered. I want to know the whys, hows and the effect on their lives as a result of all the beastliness.

Speaking of beastliness, I understand that Fifty Shades of Grey features themes of ‘BDSM’ as an undercurrent of the leitmotiv of Vampirism. Although the views of actual Vampires have not, so far as I’m aware, been expressed, I also hear that ‘serious lifestyle BDSM practitioners’ consider the BDSM aspects of the trilogy to be disappointingly flawed. Maybe it’s the author’s British reserve? Has she written scenes that would best be filmed as ‘Carry On Spanking’? Or is it the same type of disappointment that trainspotters feel, reading the Thirty Nine Steps, when they find there’s not enough detail about the locomotive that hauled Hannay halfway across the Forth Bridge?

There is a pruriently coy tone to polite mainstream conversations when it’s suggested that women fantasise about dominant males, being tied up and spanked, and even raped. Psychologists rush to the media to assure us fantasies of these types are entirely ‘normal’, and no woman desires actual rape. Sexual games of dominance (of both genders) bondage, and consensual ‘Sado-Masochism’ are far more widespread in respectable bedrooms all over the developed world than we like to pretend.

It’s been suggested the growing prevalence of e-readers has fostered a huge growth in the market for womens’ pornography. No longer must copies of ‘The Story of O’ or Anais Nin’s short stories be hidden behind the detergent box or in her bedside cupboard drawer. She can read them on the train on the way to work, and no-one will guess the reason for her Mona Lisa smile.

Perhaps this is not quite a symptom of the moral collapse of the West, but a positive step towards defusing the bomb of sexuality. There is, however, a long journey ahead before men and women are going to be honest with each other; before we reach an open understanding that women who fantasise aren’t ‘gagging for it’, and that sometimes perfectly virile men long for appreciation, gentleness and affection rather than a demand for athletic performance ‘in the sack’.

The cosy myths of virility and femininity are well past their deflower-by date. Without sexualising children, we need to stop building their expectations of sexuality into forbidden, must-have prizes of adult freedom and admit that the whole experience has many more than fifty shades of grey in the ‘how was it for you’ spectrum.

At its best, it can be sublime; an almost sacred, divine union of two (or more) people sharing the experience on a total physical, emotional, and spiritual level, but at its worst, it can be soul destroying, painful, heartbreaking and destructive. Like any spectrum of human activities, it seems to follow a bell-curve, with the majority of examples falling around the middle; that’s where adjectives such as; nice, OK, alright, pleasant and satisfactory pivot around ‘neutral’ towards acceptable, uncomfortable, unimpressive, a nuisance and disappointing.

I want people to enjoy good sex, much as I’d like them to eat good food. So long as they think, in the words of Anthony Worrall Thompson; “It’s all good!” they’re going to feel they aren’t doing it right. Like food, I tend to believe it’s better natural: nothing added and ‘nowt taken out’. I don’t object to adding a little spice, now and then, but I can’t live on nothing but hot curry, and variety itself is said to be the spice of life. I’m also prepared to accept that for those with self-raising problems a little blue chemical additive might be justified, but I’d prefer not to have added flavourings, and I’d rather the wholemeal approach would come back into fashion, so that hair would be left where it grows naturally. It might be a little bit of hypocritical sophistry, but I’m in favour of the additive of a little contraception, adjusted to taste.

When it comes to being ‘natural’ we might learn from the Bonobos, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. They are relaxed about sex and it seems to make them happy, but men might not like to know that they are a female dominated species.

The distinction between pornography and erotica ought to be that pornography encourages people selfishly to gratify their own desires, whilst erotica persuades people to share: giving pleasure to others, which is socially constructive; if you sweep away moral judgements based on paternity, property, materialism, ownership and jealousy. If men did what women wanted, they might just find that, as the ‘inferior’ gender, they’d be a lot happier. Just like male Bonobos.

I suspect that EL James does not write, by this distinction, pornography. I’d like to imagine she might the Jane the Baptist of progress in the evolution of human civilisation. We need high quality erotica, in all fields of the arts, although I’m not sure what erotic music would sound like. So it’s good that we can’t pretend that women are exactly how men would like to imagine them, and it’s time that publishers began to take erotic writing seriously as a valid literary form.

Banned? No. Censored? No.

Just recently I have come across several cases in which people have tried to sell creative work they produced, both visual art, and pieces of ‘erotic’ writing, and have been refused hosting by the sites on which they were trying to sell. Paypal policies were quoted as one of the reasons for this, although the people concerned claimed they did not believe they had infringed Terms and Conditions.

Banks worldwide are now working towards direct payment using cellphones, principally because they want the business they see being taken from them by Paypal and other ‘secure’ payment systems. Maybe that will allow you to take payment with less high-minded interference.

Some national and state governments are actively legislating against particular products and services, as well as media, on a wide range of grounds, and are effectively banning and censoring all sorts of material and media. If someone prints tee-shirts with a slogan which incites hatred on racial or religious grounds, for example, in some territories everybody involved in the chain from originator, through manufacturer, distributor, payment facilitator to the end-customer can find themselves being prosecuted, convicted and fined or imprisoned.

So it may be that banks won’t cooperate either.

It is reasonable to expect anybody who finds themselves at risk, through ‘regulatory’ issues like these, to impose Terms and Conditions as a defence against prosecution, and to demonstrate that they exercise ‘due diligence’ in enforcing them. When they refuse to provide their service to a vendor, it is not they who are banning or censoring the item being sold; it is the regulatory system within which they operate.

If I wrote a book on slaughtering animals and cooking their meat, I would consider it reasonable that no organisation owned by Jains (vegetarians) would wish to have anything to do with my ‘product’. That is a principled choice.

Corporate entities tend to have one principle:- make as much money as possible, don’t get prosecuted, fined or jailed, don’t offend any significant percentage of your market. They really don’t mind about moral or ethical issues unless they affect the ‘bottom line’.

The justification for refusing to handle anything is based on trying to ‘please’ the greatest possible number of people. Even governments argue that they legislate in order to protect the people, and if the majority of the electorate raise no objection to ‘tightening’ of laws that are supposed to reflect the ‘moral’ attitudes of their electorate/subjects, then it is assumed that they give their assent to abide by those laws.

The problem arises when the behaviour of significant numbers of the population defies the laws they have ‘approved’. Psychologists have frequently observed that the majority of women enjoy fantasising about rape; many are aroused by spanking and that incest fantasies are by no means uncommon. Whilst noting that actual rape and incest are likely to be socially destructive, the experience of reading, seeing representations in art and movies and other means of running imaginary scenarios can be cathartic and has positive effect on people who find these fantasies attractive.. There are counter arguments, naturally, and some people argue that playing ‘Grand Theft Auto’ encourages some players to act out in reality the excesses that most people ‘get out of their system’ merely by playing the game. They might also argue that some people, reading about a serial killer, will then go out and do likewise. Which is true.

When it comes to sex, there is a huge amount of hypocrisy. Even the leaders of ‘puritanical’ repressive organisations have been exposed as enthusiasts for the types of sexual activities against which they preach most vehemently. Ordinary folks would like to do many things that they are often seen to say ought not to be permitted.

Sexual liberty is a major problem. Many people are frightened of being judged ‘immoral’ if they aren’t seen to support censure of things they’d privately like to do. This does not mean that their desires are ‘right’ – it just means that society fails to be honest about those desires, and to deal with them.

Paedophiles, for example are hardly likely to campaign for sexual relationships between adults and children to become socially permissible. Just where does Nabokov fit in here? Does Lolita ‘corrupt and deprave’, or does it enable people to think more deeply about Humbert Humbert’s actions and psychological state? It is hardly likely to turn people into paedophiles.

When it comes to painting, drawing, sculpture, literature and movies ‘challenging’ sexual material is often defended on the basis that it is art, but this defence is unlikely to succeed in the case of genre pulp fiction. Many representations of sexuality across the whole spectrum have no more claim to artistic substance and merit than pulp westerns, low grade science fiction, cheap crime thrillers or Barbara Cartland’s romances.

I am opposed to censorship on principle. It is not the books which commit crimes (although some current self-published e-books do not stand as shining examples of grammar, spelling and the writers’ craft) but people. Perhaps some people will read ‘The Story of O’ and never be able to rid their psyche of desire they were previously unaware they possessed.

It takes effort to publish anything. If you actually break the law by producing material banned by law in the country in which you publish, then you must face the consequences,regardless of whether or not the state were wrong to create such a law.

If you publish trash, then it is unlikely to have a tremendous impact. If you publish something of literary merit, that explores things about life that will enrich readers’ understanding of themselves and other people, then in any reasonable country you ought to be immune from prosecution.

But we do not live in a reasonable world. Social attitudes need to change; we need people to be more honest about the bits of themselves which aren’t as ‘nice’ as we want to be thought to be. Populations need to object if they find themselves being confined by laws they secretly break daily.

In a book about the life of Emmanuelle Arsan there is little parable about her return to Paris after her husband left a diplomatic mission. On previous visits to Paris she had often joined a stream of traffic driving the wrong way along a one-way street (big enough to allow two way traffic) to shorten her route. The street passed a Gendarmerie (Police station), but the police always ignored the lawbreakers; there were too many to challenge. She was surprised to find on this occasion that the signs had been removed and the one-way restriction abandoned. Surprised, she parked at the Gendarmerie and asked the policeman at the front desk why they had finally allowed two way traffic. The Gendarme replied; “every day we had to sit here and watch so many people disobeying the law. The law was stupid, and it made us look even more stupid, so we had it taken away.”

Society will remain fundamentally sick unless we get repressive legislation taken away, but that means getting public opinion on ‘our’ side first.

Premature Capitulation

Last night, British public service TV (BBC2) broadcast a show presented by Terry Pratchett – the fantasy author – about assisted suicide. It showed what happened to a wealthy seventy-one year old man, who had motor neurone disease, and chose to buy the services of the Swiss-German ‘Dignitas’ organisation to arrange his death.

Terry Pratchett has Alzheimer’s disease, and says he’d choose death rather than lose his mental and physical faculties. After the show he said he still wants to see that choice made available in the UK, despite appearing distressed on the show, when he knew that a ‘young’ man of forty two, suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, was exercising his choice in another room at Dignitas’ premises near Zurich.

I’ve always agreed with my wife that I’d rather be dead than become a ‘burden’ to anyone through mental incapacity – I reserve any decision about physical pain and debility until that happens. I certainly don’t want the ‘slow and painful death’ they advertise on the backs of cigarette packs. She says that she feels the same impulses.

My mother-in-law arranged for her husband and, a year or so later, herself, to receive overdoses of opiates when she judged first that he had lost his ‘mind’, and latterly that she was on the verge of physical dependency. She gathered her children around her (She lived outside the UK, and they all lived elsewhere around Europe) and arranged to have her own overdose. Despite her physical frailty, it took several attempts and a matter of days before she achieved the end she wanted. It seems that the human body is addicted to life even more firmly than it can be to other things.

Each of her children would gladly have cared for her continually until her life reached a natural end, but they were used to their mother having her ‘own way’. She had spent her adult life ‘in control’; not only of herself, but also of anybody who came within her sphere of influence. Many people willingly submitted to her rather imperious dominance. She did everything with grace and dignity, and enjoyed hosting social occasions, which she did with considerable style. Much as she achieved her own death. Her many friends – most of whom were ‘high achievers’ and internationally known amongst the ‘privileged’ – mourned her in the full knowledge that she had died as she had lived; decorously and with faultless dignity.

She died in a country in which assisted suicide isn’t legally sanctioned, although Switzerland wasn’t inaccessible to her. Citizens of the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg all have freedom under the law to choose an assisted death, but those countries don’t offer the option to subjects of other countries. That’s a little ungracious of the Belgians and the Dutch, given the large number of foreigners who died in both countries during the World Wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Nor did she pay a fee for the service; her doctor was working within the socialised medical provisions of the European Union.

I’d like to make it absolutely clear: I’m not one of those package-bought hippies who believes that ‘if it’s natural, it must be OK’ – deadly nightshade, digitalis and hemlock are all perfectly natural, but they make lousy tea. But there are some things over which it is both unnatural and foolish for human beings, as natural animals themselves, to seek complete control. Just think how hard it is for some men to control premature ejaculation.

Whilst I’m on the subject of the beginning, rather than the end of life, I reckon interfering with evolution by genetically engineering designer babies is an example of unnatural folishness. Mess with the way that genes operate, and things we do not understand are likely to happen, leading to us paying a price for overstepping our competence.

This is not the old familiar ‘god’ diatribe. I have no fond delusions about some benign creator of universes of pattern and order that we shall eventually understand and control, but I think it’s even more delusory to fantasise that humanity is the undoubted heir to all the ‘secrets’ of ‘life, the universe and everything’. When we die, we rot, so far as I’m concerned, and notions of ‘dignity in death’ are just a pompous symptom of the self-aggrandisement which seems to typify the silly behaviour of the animals we are.

We speak of ‘nobility’, of glory and admiration of courage, of martyrdom, of qualities we assert are uniquely human, the product of our reflective and self-aware intellect. We like to see ourselves as the most important part of everything. The owners.

If there is one sure product of our humanity, it is our capacity to fool each other and to be fooled in return. Flattery, manipulation of greedy desires and immediate short-term appetites plus a whole bunch of other methods to trick our perceptions, constantly persuade us to take what we can get, and keep what we have, and easily divert us from any focus upon our ‘being’. We define ourselves by acquiring trappings that others can see.

Watching the show, what I was surprised to feel, seeing a man buying his fully packaged, Dignitas-branded suicide, was that we have now commoditised death. The man clearly had the wealth to accumulate all the enviable status symbols; the sports car, the wine cellar, even the trophy wife who only half-jokingly described his car as an object, not for driving, but for ‘pulling women’. Perhaps the man had earned all of this. He certainly had a ‘lifestyle’. And he was finally able to buy a ‘deathstyle’.

Maybe ‘deathstyle marketing’ could be a growth opportunity. Some folks want dignity, but others might opt for some different style. Dignitas’ premises looked a little too much like an office on an industrial park. Maybe they could have had a proper Swiss Chalet, with blonde Swiss milkmaids and those nice cows with bells round their necks? Maybe they could even deliver the lethal dose in a barrel worn by a Saint Bernard dog? And the customer could choose a selected scene from ‘The Sound of Music’ to play out their last conscious moments.

The possibilities are endless. Funerals have become quite entertaining in recent years, and it’s quite possible that, with the ability to choose the moment of death, some folks could host their own funeral, hear their friends give eulogies and then finish the occasion off by hopping into the box before swigging down the poisoned chalice.

And it need not be downbeat and all about people being past their sell-by date. Think of all the teenagers who get sick of living. Quite a lot of them opt for the ‘do-it-yourself’ route, and nobody else makes anything out of it at all. Maybe there’s room for a special service just for the younger market. You could have a slogan like; “We put the youth into euthanasia.”

Once the trend gets established it could get to be quite fashionable. I’m sure that with the right promotion you could soon have loads of people just dying to go. It needn’t be for avoiding pain or the indignity of dependency. You could choose suicide because you weren’t really getting much out of life. Maybe because you can’t get a job, and you haven’t any hope of better prospects. Or you are bored. Whatever.

Given the problems of global overpopulation, governments might offer welfare assistance to people who couldn’t afford the fees. Some people might even decide to do it for fame and glory, a bit like the people who joined up to go off to Belgium in 1914-18. I bet they could make a really good reality TV show, with internet spinoffs, providing people could make the death bit interesting enough. Death has always been a popular human obsession, second only to sex, for a lot of people, and everybody knows how well sex sells. You might even combine the two.

And once deathstyle choices become popular, it wouldn’t be so hard for governments to persuade people who are economically unviable, like old people, and people with disabilities, people who are morbidly obese and so-on to consider a good death as a much better consumer choice than a miserable life. Some people might even be able to pass on a bonus to friends or family, by selling healthy organs for transplants, or by being reprocessed for food.

Of course, if it does turn out that there is some kind of ‘post-death’ experience, it could be a little embarrassing turning up at whatever ‘pearly gates’ venue exists only to be told that you aren’t expected, and can’t just turn up uninvited. From premature ejaculation to premature capitulation.

Reality? Wossat?

I am old enough to remember the JF Kennedy assassination. In the UK people were shocked, felt empathy toward the mythical Jacqui, and a little afraid of potential world political instability.

Later TS Eliot and Winston Churchill died, and the nation mourned their loss as distant and respected examples of ‘people better than us’ (that concept of an elite still existed in 1965 Britain). The killing of John Lennon, who had been idolised and mythologised in his life, was a shock too, and people began to express a kind of personal grief, based upon the notion that Lennon was ‘like one of us’. I felt that there was a certain amount of self-aggrandisement going on here, and the media offered five minutes’ fame to anyone who could wax lyrical over ‘what John Lennon meant to me’.

Then, sometime around the end of the eighties, it became fashionable – possibly prompted by the American Psychoanalysis movement – to ‘get in touch with your emotions’. Jerry Springer, Oprah Winfrey and others then decided to invite disenfranchised rural Americans onto TV to bare their souls for the entertainment of Middle America, who probably felt markedly superior, but nonetheless joined the competition to express their emotions, based on the criteria of having ‘better and more’ emotions than everybody else.

Then Princess Diana got killed, and Saint Blair in a spectacular display of fake sincerity described her, through his crocodile tears, as; ‘The People’s Princess’, and a wave of mass hysteria swept the UK. Because the elite in British society had been careful to cultivate the appearance of being ordinary people, when the gap between the rich and privileged in the UK and the ordinary electorate had become immensely wider than ever before, sobbing and impoverished citizens mourned her as if she had been their sister, and had had a personal relationship with each and every one of them.

The people who enjoy indulging themselves in ostentatious displays of extreme emotion are often, in ‘reality’, numb to the core, and do not give a flying fig for anyone else, but vigorously assert their own importance as deeply wounded individuals.

There is every indication that this is getting worse, as the Brits recently got all worked up over the deaths of fictional characters in TV and even Radio soap-operas. Weeping idiots wail publicly about their personal sense of bereavement, and other idiots comfort them, assuring them that they share their grief.

Does nobody understand ‘catharsis’?

People are beginning to suggest that they are suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of misfortunes suffered by their ‘Second-Life’ personas. I’m waiting for the first major lawsuit in the ‘real world’ for compensation for ‘virtual’ injury which was confined to someone’s ‘second life’ in the cyberworld.

Human kind cannot bear very much reality? They are successfully annihilating it.

Rebuilding Babel

I used to be a Marketing Director.  I used to be interested in finding out what people wanted and needed, getting something done to meet their needs, wants and desires, then communicating the message that we had the best answer to our target market’s needs.

Since I had cancer at the beginning of our brave new millennium, I have been quietly devoting life to art, music and thought.  Haven’t marketed in anger for about a decade!

Because I had time, and had also worked in TV production, I decided that Tania and I would take part in the GFK ‘Media appreciation poll’, to contribute something of use to fellow marketeers and – hopefully – to programme makers. 

Recently we’ve responded less to the GFK Poll because we’ve found less and less worth watching on TV.  Nowadays we tend to watch previously recorded stuff, or programmes from the various channel catch-up sites available via the internet. Our radio listening is also likely to include catch-up stuff from Radio 4 occasionally.  We aren’t alone in finding ourselves choosing to watch content at times other than when first broadcast, and apart from listening daily to Radio 4′s ‘Today’ programme, we find that consistent consumption of broadcast media  is becoming less a part of our lives. 

Because we might not watch anything listed under live broadcast times on the Poll, we cannot record usage which is probably known only to the sites in question through their site traffic analysis data. So GFK don’t really see what we are doing.

Declining advertising revenue for the ‘conventional’ and ‘traditional’  live broadcast media is likely to speed up the further decline of the importance of these delivery routes, as more people migrate to internet access as the most common means of media uptake, particularly via mobile devices.

Unfortunately this also signals a decline in the ability of independent agencies such as GFK NOP to track audience response to media output, because the media owners will be monitoring audience data directly ‘in house’.  There may be some opportunity for NOP to carry out a ‘media omnibus audit’ based upon submission of data by media owners across the industry and ‘independent analysis’ by GFK NOP of the data received, but the pattern of audience fragmentation and the phenomenon of media diversification means that the size of  audience attained by any individual programme product will continue to fall, with segments and sectors becoming more diverse and, in mass-terms, culturally less significant. National opinion polls will reflect this, because there will be an increase in the number of distinctly differentiated segments according to particular ‘cultural’ signifiers. In other words, there will be no identifiable, majority mass-market.

In the medium to long term, the assumption that the majority of UK citizens have a common cultural media-based consumption of programming output will cease to be valid.  Only a small segment of the population will follow the ‘soap-operas’ and even viral advertising campaigns will find themselves hitting smaller target markets. 

It will become less and less possible to identify any particularly ‘national’ target market as cultural diversity will tend to create distinct and separate sub-cultures, aligned by factors such as ethnic adherence and possibly educational attainment. 

The inhabitants of the Island of Britain will begin to resemble ‘tribes’ and the notions of a ‘classless’ society will cease to be relevant – if only because there will be no overriding common set of values which can be identified which link a single majority of the inhabitants. 

This will present problems in governing the population.  Already a diversity of opinion exists concerning the desirability of national involvement in conflicts in other countries, the policies of economic alignment with other states and trading blocs – particularly with respect to the EU, the USA and the ‘developing world’.

Increasingly, minority opinions concerning the reliability of the police, the legal system and the sanctions of sentencing of criminals, the educational system and the effectiveness of policies which have been devised to create citizens to fulfill roles within the purpose of maximising Gross Domestic Productivity, and the health policies of the state, are attaining the mythological status of becoming the opinion of a notional ‘silent majority’ who, if apathy was not one of the few remaining characteristics of the populace, might be encouraged to call for an anarchistic revolution.

Over half a century ago it was possible to influence a great majority of the population through the media.  Both ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’ and ‘The Archers’ were intended to educate the nation and to reflect a general cultural and moral ‘tone’, which was identifiably ‘British’.  As a nation we assumed that teachers, doctors, lawyers, the police and politicians were worthy of respect.  None of these groups can be expected to enjoy the universal respect of a majority of the population today. Indeed, it is actually difficult to identify any group of people who might be considered the cultural, moral and esteemed leaders of the nation.  Those who come closest to widespread adulation, such as Geldof and Bono, were celebrities created before media began to lose the power to influence mass audiences.

The cult of the individual, and the tendency of citizens to see it as their right to do as they wish, providing they intend no direct harm to others, has paradoxically resulted in a proliferation of surveillance methods used by those who wish to control mass behaviour.  The generality of ‘mass observation’ which is familiar to those conducting social and market research under the usually anonymous data gathering activities of organisations conforming to MRS rules is ceasing to be as useful as the particular methods available to commercial organisations in tracking purchasing behaviours of individuals through EPOS data, their communication habits through ISPs and telecomms providers, and even their everyday movements through CCTV surveillance, and travel waypoint information such as Oystercard, passport controls, online travel and accommodation bookings and so on. The addition of Identity cards and a DNA database is only a very small step away.

Citizens seem to respond most to the motivation created through the fear that others will threaten them, and submission to some form of state ‘big brother’ capability will be seen as acceptable on the basis of protection. Because individual self interest is more powerful than any of the media for social persuasion which are currently losing their effectiveness, it will become easier for those in power to foster acceptance of principles which were once considered anathema to liberal ideals of human interaction.

Under the guise of creating greater freedom, voluntary euthanasia will become increasingly acceptable, under the guise of creating greater safety, it will be possible for any state to use DNA profiling to identify individuals with particular behavioural tendencies.  If, for example, the state was to declare that – as has already been the case for certain cancers – the gene potentiating paedophilia had been identified, the majority of citizens might readily accept that measures should be undertaken to ensure that those individuals would never have the opportunity to act upon their tendencies.  Perhaps they might be offered gene therapy, or alternatively they might be allowed to opt for voluntary euthanasia.  Those who readily call for the castration of sex offenders might prefer the alternative of compulsory euthanasia, as there cannot be any possible mistake in identifying a gene in the DNA, so it has none of the problems of carrying out the death penalty upon an individual who had been wrongly convicted.

There is some debate currently concerning whether or not it might be morally permissible to torture terrorists, because they do not observe the Geneva Conventions in their activities.  What people accept as being civilised behaviour has changed throughout history.  It is not a very long time since slavery was abolished in the West. Some countries in Europe did not allow women to vote in democratic elections until the latter half of the last century.  Is there a point at which progress becomes decadence?

Might we see the acceptance of other measures for the greater good? People identified as failing to contribute to state economic prosperity being offered exile or compulsory euthanasia?  Perhaps there is a gene for social non-compliance?  Wouldn’t it be safer for all concerned; those who have the power to protect the citizen-consumers and those who are themselves the producers and consumers within the economy, to prevent any individual from conflicting with the interests of the majority?

There are far too many people on this planet.  Now that we have nearly developed the technology to ensure that only those with the best qualities should be preserved, isn’t it perfectly logical that we should weed out the people who might be a burden and a challenge to the greater good?  And isn’t it why those in power are quickly preparing to make such measures possible, before communication and persuasion media can no longer win the cooperation of the majority? 

Surely we can all see that we are headed for our own destruction? Would we rather starve and die as population increase and Global Warming make it impossible to feed everyone? Or would we be better to allow those who know best to take totalitarian control and, for our own protection, use eugenics to prevent any undesirable people being born in the future?

After all, those who know best have already thought of all this. Why else are they trying to shape public opinion?  Why are they so happy to see the media losing the ability to influence the masses?  Wasn’t it their own policies which made it possible for everybody to shout their own message to anyone who will listen?  Even the best of the Bloggers, the biggest of the Twitterers will never have the power to persuade the majority, to threaten those with the real power. And if they do, it will be a simple matter to silence them. Start by preventing them from gaining access to the communication channels.  Then see if they have an identifiable non-compliant gene. If they are guilty, then they can be euthanased.  Simplz!  Easy as Comparethemeerkat.com!

Goodbye, Wren

I met my first wife when I was 21 and she was sixteen.  It had been love at first sight for me.  I cannot speak for her.  We married three years later.  The seven year itch ended in divorce, and I married Tania, who had been a good friend to both of us; she’d even been present at our wedding!

 

After the initial pain we kept in touch, as Adrienne – more familiarly ‘Wren’ – went on in life.  Initially living with a guitarist on a non seaworthy trawler in drydock at Bristol, she then moved on to Wales with a solicitor who eventually gave her a child in 1993.  They lived in a house with no mains electricity and no mains water.  For reasons not relevant here, the father of her child ceased practising law, and eventually Wren flew the nest and married again to a thoroughly wonderful Welshman.

 

Wren was creative, a great hostess, she had run her own successful restaurant in the late seventies and early eighties.  She had wide ranging artistic talents, in printmaking and ceramic sculpture.  She was a great singer, with a catholic taste in music ranging from Purcell to the Pogues.  She was generous and inclusive, and it was a privilege that many enjoyed to feel the love that she readily gave to people all around her.  She loved The Archers, she loved nature and detested the ecological disaster of civilisation, she loved animals.  She was no conformist: she always made up her own mind.  She loved cooking for other people, always rustling up something magical for uninvited guests.  She had a sense of the mystic about her; a pagan, almost Wiccan approach.  Not long ago she began a formal study of herbal medicine.  She loved sex, drugs and rock and roll.

 

It was a green funeral, and she was buried by friends in the Pembrokeshire countryside on Thursday 12th February 2009.  She was 52.  She was buried in a wicker coffin, decorated with flowers, without religious ceremony.  It was said that no religion was broad enough for her.  Afterwards we met in a pub – one of her favourite places – and there was singing, laughter and a few tears.  Many of us felt angry;  she had died too soon.  And she had been a major contributor to that herself.  Those of us who would have liked to have influenced her regretted that we had not persuaded her to take better care of herself.  Many of her heroes had died young too, including Dylan Thomas who had lived down the road.  Our anger was not directed against any ‘Deus ex machina’ who had taken her from us, but at Wren herself for seeking to numb her oversensitivity to the business of life by excessive use of alcohol, and in her earlier years, drugs.  And anger at ourselves for failing to win her from her self-destructive lifestyle by loving her as well as she loved others.

 

She would have grown old disgracefully if she had grown old at all.  But many of us know that she hoped she’d die before she got old.  And so she did.  My thoughts are with her son, her husband, her sister, with her many friends who will miss her.  And to some extent, with those who never met her, but whose lives would have gained a little from having done so.  They, like us, have no opportunity to share in the light she could bring to a moment of our lives.

 

Beauty, Truth and …

Women are demanding that photographs should not be airbrushed and digitally distorted to represent celebrities as they truly aren’t.

This notion that we should ‘tell it as it is’ seems to be a little selective.  All this takes place as London’s Hayward Gallery is showing an exhibition of the work of Soviet photographer, Aleksandr Rodchenko (Spelling academic when translating from Russian) sponsored by that nice Mr Abramov.

Rodchenko was a pioneer of the manipulation of photographs, having, in the service of the Soviet State, manipulated photographs of the building of the White Sea Canal during the nineteen thirties to convey the impression that it was an heroic and admirable achievement.  It wasn’t.  The Soviet regime used the construction project to work over 200,000 prisoners to death.

Nonetheless, Rodchenko is championed as a groundbreaking photographic artist.  Much as was Leni Riefenstahl, who put her talents as a photographer to use in Nazi propaganda.

People are falling out of love with photographers.  The Papparazzi are demonised for involvement in hounding Princess Diana to death.  Nobody needs professionals any more since the advent of digital cameras and bundled image editing software.  Now everybody can make their own image.

Apparently it infringes our human rights if someone else tells lies about another somebody else in order to prop up the ‘proper’ social order, but it’s ok for us to tell little fibs about the desirability of our own propositions.  Like the vendor of a car who ‘tidies up’ the photograph he puts on e-bay to remove the odd blemish or two.

Where does it end?  Enhancing one’s CV? (Resumé for US readers)  Or maybe where does it all begin? Shaving off one’s beard? Cutting one’s hair into tonsorial topiary? Putting on make-up?  Shaving one’s legs?

I don’t know about you, but I find it rather sad that fashions in beauty are such an insidious part of everyday life that natural phenomena such as body-shape go in and out of fashion and lead to ridiculous efforts amongst the population to conform to the ideal.  It’s by no means a new thing.  Corsetry and surgery was used over a century ago by women who would have ribs removed to achieve an eighteen inch (45cm for metric readers) waist.

I must admit that the plague of obesity currently burgeoning in the UK does make me wish I hadn’t put my harpoon-gun into the car-boot sale, but I still hope that people could be taught to feel more comfortable about the way nature (or God, for religious readers) made them.

I do think that there is a link between beauty and Truth.  Artificial objects just can’t match up to natural creations.  We can try to modify or improve nature until the genetically modified milk producing units return to the collection depot, but we will not succeed.

When it comes to Art (capital A for observant readers) all creations are artificial.  But I do think that artists have a moral responsibility to show a view of Truth.  Some images of Truth, especially those which depict human behaviour, are far from being beautiful.  In photography one thinks of journalistic reportage of death, warfare and destruction – a tradition that numbers Goya’s horrors of war amongst its predecessors.  Of course, images of negative behaviour are often condemned as ‘obscene’.

What might be construed as more obscene is the manipulation of an image in order to create a false impression.  Such as Rodchenko’s lies about Soviet atrocities.  And maybe the creation of false ideals about what the perfect woman ought to look like.

Photography is one of the tools of pornography.  Pornography also tends to represent an image which does not match the reality, and unfortunately affects a lot of people whose ideas of everyday human behaviour get modified by the images they see.

Pornography often presents images of women, infantilised by shaving off the hair they grew when they ceased to be children, apparently enjoying the gratification of men by fellatio and anal intercourse, and almost never shows couples genuinely enjoying ‘conventional’ consensual sexual activities in which each gender plays an equal part.

There could be no better propaganda for the sort of men who wish that adult women were not their equals.  The insistence that women wear make-up, shave their legs and armpits and even their pubes seems to betray some kind of paedophile longing in the men who want to see women with the hairless bodies, rosebud lips and large eyes of little girls.

Such is the power of the bland propaganda of the mainstream media, that most women seem eagerly complicit in their own image manipulation, and few would not be horrified by the thought of giving up shaving their legs, bleaching or epilating facial hair, and presenting themselves ‘unretouched’ in public.

We should watch carefully how our images are presented, lest we start to try to become like the images rather than to insist that the images present a true likeness.  Even if we don’t yet feel comfortable with our own likeness.