I always naively think that the British Times is above your common-level misogyny, but it seems I’m wrong again. A piece today on Sandra Bullock’s legal battle to secure her husband’s custody of his daughter is misogyny-laden from start to finish. You see, Bullock is ‘America’s Sweetheart’. The mother of said daughter is a porn star. Ergo, Bullock would be a good mother, and the porn star – the whore, the slut – must be a bad mother. Dammit, the Times author didn’t even try to cover up his blatant bias. Observe:

America’s sweetheart, the actress Sandra Bullock, is being dragged into an unpleasant legal battle to prove that she is a better parent than her husband’s former wife, the star of more than 100 pornographic movies.

…

His ex-wife Janine Lindemulder, 40, star of such video titles as Mrs Behavin’, Sleeping Booty and Dyke Diner, disagrees. She has just been released from a six-month prison sentence for tax evasion.

…

The tattooed blonde remains in a halfway house in Los Angeles until the end of this year when she can seek custody of her daughter.

Now, it has to be noted that the rest of the piece does not paint Bullock’s husband in a favourable light, but none of what he has done previously (even leaving his seven-month pregnant wife) means that he could possibly be a bad parent. You see, boys will be boys! But women who enjoy sex, who have sex because it’s their choice to do so, or who are involved in the sex industry are, de facto, bad people. You didn’t hear it here first.

If you’re looking for some giggles today (and Lord knows I am), and know anything at all about feminism/ the feminist movement, read this Onion piece.

After decades spent battling gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace, the feminist movement underwent a high-level shake-up last month, when 53-year-old management consultant Peter “Buck” McGowan took over as new chief of the worldwide initiative for women’s rights.

…

“You can’t waste time pussyfooting around with protests and getting all emotional about a bunch of irrelevant details,” McGowan said. “If you want to enjoy equal rights, you have to have a real man-to-man chat with the people in charge until you can hammer out some more equitable custody laws.”

Sometimes satire doesn’t get it right, but this time it’s just bang on.

Via Alas, a blog.

It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

I don’t think there is one word I could add to this story to make its message any plainer or any more disturbing. These are the cruel realities of life in South Africa.

Some key statements:

• One in four South African men questioned in a survey said they had raped someone and nearly half admitted having attacked more than one victim.
• … practices such as gang rape were common because they were considered a form of male bonding.
• A recent trade union report said a child was being raped in South Africa every three minutes with the vast majority of those cases going unreported.

What?! How long has this been going on, and why has there been no outrage about this before? And why?!

The researcher suggested that:

“… it’s partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men.

Really? Can this adequately be attributed to a patriarchal society and the on-going prevalence of negative attitudes towards women, or do these statistics require a phenomenon all of their own? I can certainly see her point, but this theory still doesn’t explain these staggering statistics when men all over the world have been socialised into those very same forms of masculinity. (And I question, by the way, what a ‘form of masculinity’ is in the first place.) No, there’s something much more sinister afoot here, and I wish I understood what it was. But more than that, and infinitely more importantly, I wish that somebody, somewhere was doing something about it. The responses in this piece indicate to me a complacency about these crimes and an acceptance that this is just how things are in South Africa. I cannot get my head around this at all. And I’m fucking disgusted.

Full piece behind the cut.

One in four South African men questioned in a survey said they had raped someone and nearly half admitted having attacked more than one victim.

The study, by the country’s Medical Research Council, also found three out of four who admitted rape attacked for the first time while in their teens.

It said practices such as gang rape were common because they were considered a form of male bonding.

The MRC spoke to 1,738 men in KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces.

The research was conducted in both rural and urban areas and included all racial groups.

Using an electronic device to keep the results anonymous, the study found that 73% of respondents said they had carried out their first assault before the age of 20.

Almost half who said they had carried out a rape admitted they had done so more than once.

One in 20 men surveyed said they had raped a woman or girl in the last year.

Professor Rachel Jewkes of the MRC, who carried out the research, told the BBC’s World Today programme: “The absolute imperative is we have to change the underlying social attitudes that in a way have created a norm that coercing women into sex is on some level acceptable.

“We know that we have a higher prevalence of rape in South Africa than there is in other countries.

“And it’s partly rooted in our incredibly disturbed past and the way that South African men over the centuries have been socialised into forms of masculinity that are predicated on the idea of being strong and tough and the use of force to assert dominance and control over women, as well as other men.”

She added that all the victims in the main survey were said to be women, but participants were also interviewed about male rape.

‘Sad state of affairs’

The study found that one in 10 men said they had been raped by other men.

Some 3% of the men interviewed said they had coerced a man or a boy into sex.

The participants were also tested for HIV and the authors of the survey were surprised that men who had raped were not more likely to test positive for the virus.

Mbuyiselo Botha, from the South African Men’s Forum, which campaigns for women’s rights, told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme that any view of women as “fair game” had to be challenged.

Mr Botha, a father of two girls himself, said: “I think that yes, the figures are that high and for us, for me in particular, that is a very sad state of affairs.

“It means that we continue in South Africa to be one of the highest capitals of rape in the world.

“I don’t think it’s cultural per se; I think it has to do with how a lot of us men worldwide were raised. The issues of dominance against women, issues of inequality, are pervasive and you find them throughout the world.”

South Africa’s government has been repeatedly criticised for failing to address the country’s rape epidemic.

A recent trade union report said a child was being raped in South Africa every three minutes with the vast majority of those cases going unreported.

I’m not one to defend the general British public (see forthcoming entry on culture when it, erm, forthcomes) but I feel that I should get my spake in, albeit briefly, about this.

BBC Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman has described the British public as “barbarians” who are too busy working to find time to appreciate art.

I’m not a huge fan of Paxman’s, it has to be said, for I find him more much more offensive and condescending than I do challenging and interesting, and the above strikes me as a typical statement of his.

Here are a few simple sums for you Mr. Paxman: earnings of £XX,000 per year, X children, £XXX,000 mortgage, and £XX,000 in car loans/ student loans/ credit card and other debts don’t leave many of us with whole lot of Xs to play around with. We work all the time, just to make our ends meet. And you wonder why we plebeians spend all of our time working and little of our time perusing art galleries? We’re flipping exhausted!

I would have thought it was f-ing obvious, even to a snob like you who makes considerably more Xs than the rest of us put together, and who doesn’t have to worry at all about where his next paycheck comes from or goes to.

I wonder if that will actually make me post more? (I have been saying, after all, that I think that WP could really, really, really use a post-by-email feature.) We’ll see.

Life continues to be very busy, dear reader(s). Let’s call this a holding post, innit.

It’s not often I break out the old blog these days, although I certainly have a few things in mind that I want to blog about. Let’s start with Saturday night’s Doctor Who. Oh dear God, yes, let’s start there.

I was excited for Doctor Who’s return at the weekend for, with all its faults, it’s a damn good show. And the good outweighs the bad. There’s been lots of coverage, of course, about the new Doctor and about David Tennant’s departure from the role, but I’m rather more interested in changes in the writing team. Now, all due credit to Russell T Davies (RTD) for resurrecting Who after its 15 year break, but my respect for him largely ends there. RTD cannot write. He’s the head writer of a major television production, and he just cannot write. Something isn’t right. Yes, many will argue that if he’s given the time to think through his stories, and he takes the time to scribe coherent ideas, he’ll manage to come up with the goods. But I disagree. I’ve seldom enjoyed an episode penned by RTD, and Saturday night was no exception. Let’s summarise what happened. We had a wooden companion who we were presumably supposed to like, a handful of vacant and pointless characters who served no purpose other than filling out the numbers, and a sloppy story premise which involved – as it always does in RTD’s episodes – the end of the world. Again. Groan. The first ten minutes were wholly derivative of Midnight (another RTD story), while the remaining 50 were a mix of unimpressive special effects and RTD’s trademark ‘cryptic’ prophecies. There was little discernible story arc and there was even less to engage the viewer and make them care. So the world was going to end again or something. Isn’t it always Russell? The whole thing was just embarrassing. I was bored out of my mind.

One poor episode I could forgive, of course – God knows we’re used to them by now with RTD – but my concern is for David Tennant. He’s been the best Doctor, in my opinion (and he’s had some hard acts to follow) and I feel bad for him that this – this inconsequential, lazy rubbish – will be how he finishes out his days in Who. Tennant acts his little socks off every single time he’s on camera, and he himself must feel dejected that he has this nonsense to work with. I look forward to Steven Moffat taking over the writing team shortly, for he is very talented and he never fails to please, but it will be too late for David Tennant, alas. He’s just going to have to put up with these horrendous stories in the meantime and hope that his fans know that he’s better than them. This fan certainly does.

I always listen to Radio 4 in the mornings on my way to work. I’m in that demographic now, don’t you know. I’m nearly always leaving as ‘Thought for the Day‘ begins. For those of you unfamiliar with Thought for the Day it is, as the link says, ‘reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news’. I think it would be more accurately described as patronising and sanctimonious reflections from God-bothers full of their own self-importance, but anyway. I find it insufferable.

This morning the Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled was doing his piece. He started off by recounting a tale of how he tried to help a young lady with her suitcase onto the bus. She declined his offer, and brushed his hand away when he offered again. This reaction, he blamed, on women’s constant quest for equality. If it wasn’t for the equality gained so far, he implied, women wouldn’t think twice about accepting help from a man. He tried to redeem himself, of course, by talking then about the disparities in earnings of men and women – and in doing so ‘approved’ of our pesky feminism – and then came back to the quandary of women not allowing men to help them when they clearly need it.

Seriously, Reverend Doctor Middle Class and Vaguely Disgruntled? Really? If I give you the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and believe that you genuinely thought that telling a story about a woman ‘in need’ would be a good introduction to a discussion about equal pay rights, I have to tell you that you’re a little naive. I know a lot of women – and I’m one myself – and I’m pretty sure that most of us don’t spend our time declining offers of help from men because we’re obsessed with equality. If you really need to know, I rather think that we women feel that it’s intrusive to be approached by strange men offering help (or anything else), that it can often be intimidating to be approached in such a manner, and that we decline because we feel uncomfortable and we would rather not have you near us or our suitcases. Is that unfortunate? Of course it is. In an ideal world, we would all be helping each other carry our butterflies and rainbows around; in a realistic world, we react as we do because we’re conditioned to do so by what we see around us. It’s got nothing to do with equality, or its lack.

But I’m not going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I think that for all your talk of equal pay for the sexes and of narrowing the employment gap, you think we women have got too much equality already. You gave your game away when you mentioned that ungrateful young woman twice in three minutes. You’re thinking, I’m sure, that she should have been happy to take help from you, the Big Man, instead of trying to assert her independence when she was so clearly in need. But the world, thankfully, doesn’t work your way any more. Perhaps the next time you pipe up on Thought for the Day, you’ll remember that it’s not all about you, and that women don’t spend  their waking moments trying to figure out how to get their equality points higher at the expense of people like you.

I’m only really posting this because it makes me laugh. Not because I care enormously about it one way or t’other.

Peers respond to cash allegations

Two of the Labour peers at the centre of claims they were ready to take cash to change legislation have responded to the allegations in the House of Lords.

If there was ever a reason to reconsider the effectiveness of the structure of Parliament in this country, then surely this is it. You don’t need a moral conscience when you’ve got vaguely royal blood, it seems.

On the way home this evening, I heard Radio 4 play a recording of Lord Taylor’s conversation with the Times in which he discussed a bribe, followed by Lord Taylor telling the House of Lords that he doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong. The juxtaposition was priceless.

In his defence, he did sound a bit dottery. Well, when he was addressing the Lords anyway. Less so when he was talking cold hard cash. Frankly, I feel he was selling himself cheap for a grand. Apparently, he often gets offered £25,000 to pull a few strings. Marvellous!

Who wants to bet me 20p that the Lords in question get away with it? That’s how it rolls here, no?

If you don’t fancy that game, play this one instead. Get more metaphors into one paragraph than Lord Strathclyde does here. I don’t think it’s possible, myself.

“This House has been mired in a grim torrent of criticism about a culture of sleaze,” he told peers. “If these allegations are true those involved have shamed this House,” he said, adding there were no “grey areas in the paid advocacy rules”.

I love politics.

Ben Bradley (a friend of the late John F Kennedy) on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday morning:

Jack [referring to JFK on his election] was half Irish and half an educated and sophisticated man. And he wasn’t sure which one he wanted to be yet. He hadn’t decided which one he wanted to be.

Because, clearly, you can’t be both.

We love the casual racism.