hate

Until death do us part, my love; death took our first gasps.

Not the little death of our thousand filthy fucks,
not the poetic death of the Cure's underwater closets;

just hate relentlessly eating its children,
bingeing on the good,
just the inevitable loathing, just my muscles growing new ways, just your skin decaying -

just your pitiful craving for a wife-mother a grotesque amalgamation of all you lack, suck at the tit and lap at the cunt and never leave the womb -

just the slow drip feed of reality erasing us until we meekly return to grey and stop paining the faithful with our radiance.

half life

give me no part in this half life,
I refuse to sit by and love with diseased heart,

to portion up my life and send you rescue parcels whilst the stockpile is safe.

take my entirety and love without rancour.

so sick of part-time lovers.
take me in anger, take me in regret, take me in pain not ease.

I will not stroke your ego, I cannot detract the years from you, I will not be your fuck buddy, your NSA girl, your mistress, your whore,

those days are dead and gone.

fed up of spilling virtual ink over the perennial you, I attempt to write of the world, of esoteric concerns but

I am no painter of watercolours, I cannot show you the beauty of a still life.

the way my world spins compels me to show you the delirious joy of life with no centre of gravity.

Learning to swim

27 degrees in the shade but never enough to  bring us back to earth. 

Every drop of sweat from underarms was glorious damp and crumpled sheets of abandoned bed, every sunburnt cheek the flushes of ecstasy, every layer of peeling skin a reminder that there was so much time to take each other off and expose the raw selves underneath.

I wasn't allowed to find my bearings. It ruins the magic. I must leap,  naked and terrified, engulfed and consumed by the fear of drowning. I must dip my head and be cleansed, burn with the chill or die ignorant ashes. 

I trusted, and I leapt. I expected revolution but breath deserted me. My lungs drew waterfalls. ice rushed my bones. 

Through foil and saline, I swore I'd never do it again. Was it not sufficient to destroy my body and flood my mind with fear? 

'No,' you laughed, pushing tattered spectacles up your button nose. 'And darling, you never even swam. All you did was dip your toes.' 

For Ben

Catch my eye, my love,

I hope the fleeting glance gives you the smallest ray of hope that it's not just you, it can't just be you.

If it is then what are you but another of Ginsberg's angelheaded hipsters perpetually struggling against the darkness?

if it is, then we are all doomed.

If it is then you will never throw off your shackles and run defiantly into the night with an army who bear your scars and will carry you tear choked and stumbling when you can't find your way,

You will never surface gasping every single breath the first and last you will take, never fix the watery sun in your sights and pierce the membrane emerging into the sunlight sepia tone can't fix,

You are not alone, and my love on your broken body you keep the secret of a life which has threatened to destroy us all;

But you had the strength to fall from grace, to land on asphalt and linen and padlocked cabinets.

and I swear you have the strength to climb, even if your hands bleed and your lungs burn because there are countless like you, dangling toes and dropping rocks from the precipice and praying for your gaunt limbs to drag themselves back up and tell them,

How you ate the fruit and charmed the serpent and couldn't bear it again, how you crawled destitute on your hands and knees towards the smallest glimmer of light.

If you won't catch my eye, my love, catch theirs, hold their hands and feel the sunlight warm your back again.

Flesh

Borne of passion and continued because its razor-sharp teeth had clamped down on our flesh, because its intoxicating brew had worked its way into our bloodstream - the lovesick disease was killed before it had the chance to sever the spinal cord and change the future forever. 

How did it happen? Our bodies, our bones, were supposed to grow old and fuse together, not twist and crumble and turn to dust. We are so old, our faces distorted to cover a truth neither we nor the world could bear.

You have taught me how to be disappointed, and instructed me not to trust the world; You have opened me and poured in hate; You have sealed me shut and left me to decay. 

a part of me will always shine a little less brightly for having known you. 

white bread and restlessness

conversation laps at the edges of our consciousness but it never really threatens to engulf us.

we'd all like to write ourselves as the misunderstood hero, the boy who might or the girl who did, to twist our lazy slump into a night watchman biding his time. but the truth is we stay in all week because we spent all our money in Soho, we eat curried chickpeas and we fall asleep in front of Newsnight.

we drown in books and films, and music and radio, and still we have nothing to say,
somedays I look inside my mind and marvel at the wide open spaces,
why is my body so slow that it's all I can do to walk and breathe at the same time,

why

when I say I'm reading Lenin am I nearly always fucking,
when I say I'm writing my magnus opum am I eating white bread and watching mindless television,
all the while wracked with guilt that I'm not reading Lenin?

losing my head

I awoke this morning to find my head so cumbersome that my neck could no longer take the strain

millennia bearing down on just twenty two years of skin, sinew and a soft cushion goaded into life by second helpings all day long

dreams of grandeur piled under the concrete block of the work-pay-rent beat, the wallet that never stretches to a new pair of shoes but softly squeezes another round at the bar, caresses cocaine and greases the cab driver's palm

the thousand books I devoured were light; the unbearable weight of the millions I will never read finished me

today my body crumpled and sagged with the impossible understanding of what it will never be.

Notes on socialism and sex..

Some random notes I've put together this evening after reading Lenin's writings on women. Thoughts appreciated - these are very rough, so I'd like to know what to develop and whether to write it up into something more coherent!

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Given the constituent parts of my daily existence, it's hardly surprising that sexual politics is a large theoretical preoccupation of mine. There is passion, excitement, comradeship and beauty in equal measure in both.

And in imagining a better future, a socialist future, I have always been incapable of detaching political and economic liberty from the freedom to love in a new way. To love, as Kollontai argues, without possession or boundary. To love without the fear of reaching an impossible peak, to love without dependency or shame.

This is why, as a socialist, Lenin's insistent sexual moralism is such a constant disappointment.

In his discussion with Clara Zetkin, painstakingly retold in her notes 'Lenin on the woman question', he makes no bones about tearing Alexandra Kollontai's theory - that 'sex should be as easy as drinking a glass of water' - to pieces. 'Would a normal man, with normal thirst,' he asks, 'lie down and drink from the gutter? Or even from a glass who's rim had been greased by many lips?'

He will not vouch, he adds, for 'male comrades who chase after every petticoat', nor for 'women whose love affairs are entwined with politics'.

This from a leader who had an excellent position on the organisation of women in the party, and on the importance of extending revolutionary ideas into the home as well as the workplace.

Lenin's letters to his suggested lover, Innessa Armand, lay out his proposals for communist love. In place of marriage, he proposes a proletarian civil union; indistinguishable from marriage in form, he envisages the partnership as monogamous and lifelong. This is an exact replica of bourgeois moralism.

Of course, the Bolsheviks legalised divorce, so they were eager in one sense to tear down the oppressive family institutions. But as socialists we must understand that it was not simply the label 'marriage' that was so destructive to familial and sexual relations. It wasn't even the fact that divorce was illegal, although this was undoubtedly a huge constraint on the rights of women and the possibility of  unrestrained love. What ruins love under capitalism is the insidious nature of every intimate personal relation. The fact that every single interaction is bound up not only in the economic base, but in the ideological superstructure.

The superstructure is the terrifying mass of ideas, practices, ways of living our daily lives that come not from 'nature' but from our relation to capitalism. The base might dictate the need for women to work in the factories during both World Wars - but the superstructure created Rosie the Riveter. Likewise, whilst private property generates the need for patrilineal societies, it is ideology which supplies us with the ideal of lifelong love, of finding 'the one'.

Of course, this superstructure cannot simply dissolve immediately as soon as workers seize power. Lenin himself recognises this to an extent - he discusses the problem of women, post-revolution, still being confined to the eternal drudgery of housework whilst their male partners throw themselves into party work. This serves, he says, not only to perpetuate the oppression of women the Bolsheviks were wholeheartedly attempting to destroy, but also drives a wedge between women and the party as they begin to resent it for taking up their husbands time and energy and leaving them in much the same position they were before. His solution was eminently sensible and inherently progressive - a true socialisation of housework and childcare, leaving people of all genders free to work, relax and continue building a better society.

The fact that Lenin is so progressive in this respect makes his conservative attitude to sex almost ridiculous. Clara Zetkin points out that sexuality and the moral maze surrounding it is where women feel their oppression perhaps the most. If this is the case, it is likely to be where they find their liberation first too. A sexual awakening can be inherently political. Many people only discover love or sexual arousal for the first time when they discover someone of the same sex; given the social castigation that follows, how can we say this is not political? Or the freedom women discovered at the onset of the sexual revolution: the contraceptive pill and Shere Hite's groundbreaking study of female sexuality meant women could sleep around and enjoy it too, changing the way we interacted with sex and men on one level forever.

It's true that socialists can't substitute progressive sexual ethics for committed political work; we can't, as much as some of us might like to, move into polyamorous communes and spend our days wrapped up in love and sex, removing ourselves from capitalism. We need to work for a society where everyone has the opportunity to love without fear. But reinscribing the same conservative sexual moralism - or ignoring the question altogether - can only harm our cause and alienate those we wish to reach the most.

hide the flame

Your words sting harder than your fist ever could. When you write of me as a child, as incapable of constricting my emotions or repressing desire, I long for you to just punch me in the face. It would hurt less than a ruthless deconstruction of my personality flaws. Isn't that sick? Well, it's no sicker than  months of emotional turmoil, of so much guilt for demanding what I need, for being uncompromising, for refusing to be second best. No sicker than staying with a liar. No sicker and no more disgustingly misplaced than hating the madonna for making me the whore.

Well, no more. You called my demands monstrous, you said I burned too brightly. You are a dry husk and I am sorry for your loss, but I will not apologise for setting you on fire.

standing beneath the shard

I stood beneath the Shard and watched its peak disappear into the clouds and lamented a life spent on the ground. Where the colours are too bright, the focus too crisp, where people move with all the ungainliness and imprecision you'd expect from someone trying to force their way through a game they were never taught the rules of.

I stood below the Shard and my heart raced, my skin turned pale, my breathing rasped and fluttered.

The Porn Wars never ended: why we're still getting it wrong decades later.

In an effort to bring the sexual proclivities of modern Britain in line with the Tory vision for society – middle class couples with 2.5 children spending their Saturdays gardening and their Sundays performing the ritualistic once-a-week missionary position– Prime Minister David Cameron is looking to restrict access to internet pornography.

Lining up meetings with four top Internet Service Providers, Cameron is pushing for an ‘opt-in’ scheme to access adult content. Ostensibly the scheme is to protect children from being exposed to porn.  Faced with the cheek-scalding embarrassment of having to discuss your Sunday evening masturbatory habits with Sal in the BT Internet call centre, however, it seems likely that scores of people will essentially be goaded into locking themselves into a no-sex contract. Not a problem for a government that aims to recreate Victorian Britain, work houses and all: dismantling the welfare state and relying on private benefactors; leaving the poor to languish in gutters and beg for loose change; and making sure no-one thinks about, let alone takes part in sex that isn’t for the sole purpose of producing children inside a stable marriage.

It would not be unfair to suggest that a desire to instil a stiff-upper-lip-and-not-much-else attitude to sex might have something to do with the proposals. This is the party that introduced Section 28 – banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools – and recently attempted to make sex education optional. Essentially, they sent a message to a whole generation that you should only hop on the good foot and do the bad thing within the confines of a heterosexual monogamous marriage – and even then, you shouldn’t really talk about it.

 This proposal is another step in a long line of prudish and unhealthy proclamations and laws around sex that only serve to directly hurt thousands of people and make millions more unhappy.  HIV infections amongst the heterosexual population have skyrocketed because of consistent scaremongering around homosexual transmissions in the 1980s. Section 28 undoubtedly led to confusion, depression, and isolation for gay children and teenagers seeking legitimacy from teachers instructed by law not to provide it. Chlamydia infections amongst the under-25s in Britain have soared as a result of chronically underfunded sex education.

I certainly don’t want to argue that pornography is on a par with sex education and anti-discrimination laws in terms of what it can teach us about sex. Much mainstream pornography teaches teenagers that women love being doused in semen without being asked first; that the female orgasm happens in five minutes through penetration alone (not the case for 70% of us); that a man’s role in sex is to be a disembodied penis slamming relentlessly into a shaven vagina. The proposal, however, is non-discriminatory; videos of foreplay, (actual) female orgasms and real, sweaty, smelly sex between two consenting adults is made as taboo as the grotesquery of Barbie-style plastic porn.

Sadly, prominent critiques of the proposal in the Guardian this week by Brooke Magnati and Anna Arrowsmith have veered down an equally worrying road – for entirely different reasons.

In pieces for Comment is Free, both women draw attention to what they call ‘content theft’ – in other words, the online distribution of mainstream pornography through peer-to-peer file sharing, and YouTube-style user-generated porn sites. They argue that this is the real problem, as it allows teenagers to access porn online as well as reducing the profit margins of directors and producers. Arrowsmith asserts that “they need to take down the (handful of) porn torrent sites, which give teenagers free, easy access to hardcore scenes – scenes whose copyright has been stolen from the producers”. The women are essentially calling on the services of Mr Cameron to prop up huge pornography firms. It’s a clear-cut case of capitalist moralists versus capitalist pornographers; and it stinks. The issue here is not that teenagers are accessing porn, nor that content is being stolen from pornographers turning over a huge profit margin. The fabricated binary of sex being hush-hush or garish, boring and secret or loud and crass, means the biggest danger is that children will grow up with an entirely distorted vision of sex. A confusing garble of facials and profit margins; taboo and desire; shame and repression.

Imagine that instead of this mad crusade against depictions of sex, we had properly funded and comprehensive sex education in all schools; that diagrams of the female reproductive organs labelled the clitoris; that Personal Social and Health Education lessons in schools discussed active consent instead of encouraging students to wait until marriage, as my Catholic school did. And imagine that instead of sleazy shaven hugely profitable pornos, we had something which vaguely resembled real life.

Instead of engaging in a moralistic frenzy, or fretting about profit, we should give our teenagers the tools to successfully navigate a sexual minefield of commodification and shame.

The Kensington Hamster Massacre; or, a trip to the Science Museum

Tim Jones was exhausted after dragging himself up seven flights of stairs to his family flat. The fox-powered lift was out of order - the skinny buggers you get scrambling round inner-city estates just weren't up to the job like the fat fuckers you got in the countryside. Instantly cheered by the mushroom risotto his wife Lucy was prodding on the stove (luckily blood supplies were pretty high round here, especially given the recent spate of gang fights, so the cooker was less temperamental than the lift), he flopped down in front of the TV. Justin Beiber, he opined to just about anyone willing to listen, was the best Doctor yet, and at 73 he'd really broken out of the roles usually available to older men.

"Oh, for cocks sake,", he growled under his breath as the telly cut out yet again - bang in the middle of a climactic fight scene between Beiber and the Daleks - "I'm not the fucking hamster fairy- why doesn't anyone else in this house clean out that bloody dispenser?". Grumbling and muttering, he heaved himself off the armchair and fumbled around in the dank cabinet underneath the bookshelf until he struck gold, pulling out a small box full of the scurrying little bastards.
Taking the opportunity to stock up for a few days and avoid the hassle tomorrow evening, he upturned the whole box into the pulveriser. After those few seconds of frantic squeaking which he'd just about learned the trick of unhearing, Tim was once again absorbed in the Doctor's fearlessness in the face of danger.



Today's dystopic vision has been proudly sponsored by Shell, Siemens and Merril Lynch for the London Science Museum!


......no, really. [Well, minus Justin Beiber. Dramatic licience.]

I gathered, from the corporate-logo-plastered posters advertising the Climate Science exhibition, that it might not be the full, in-depth exploration of the technology and challenges surrounding climate change as I might like. But I had a free day and a man in tow, so off we trooped to peruse its seedy pleasures. (FYI, dates at the Science Museum are cool. You can count that as official party diktat).

A quick glance proved this was an exhibition primarily aimed at kiddies - *adorable*, and such fun given the Bank Holiday rush of concerned parents ensuring that Amelia gets some responsible education with her fun.

Incidentally, a giant circular electronic display showing the public's answers to hard-hitting questions like "What do you think about having a wind farm next door to you?" flashed up a truly vomit-inducing 140-character snippet from a six-year old; in response to the question "how can we tackle unequal consumption of energy?", he apparently replied "With a global carbon trading system, with carbon credits for underdeveloped countries". Right. I'm sure Mummy thinks she's doing a fantastic job imparting rationed, liberal thought to her poppet, and I'm sure he'll grow up a responsible citizen who always offsets the long drive in his 4x4 back from central London to the Home Counties after spending the evening ostensibly in a meeting but really shagging the low-paid female employee he keeps around for eye candy whilst professing a commitment to 21st century feminism, but it would have been nice to have a day out at the museum without being forced to swallow my own sick.

But, back to the fictional hamster genocide alluded to above. I had naively assumed that this would perhaps be a slightly-too-objective, catious, but ultimately factual presentation of the realities of climate science by, well, scientists. I hate to invoke repition to make my point but I was, in fact, inside the Science Museum. What confronted me was a garish jumble of interactive games, touch-screen fact finders and faux-art masquerading as an object with something important to impart.

The most disturbing aspect of the exhibition by far, however, was a trip into the future to investigate the possibilities for energy generation once our very finite pool of fossil fuels finally bites the dust. The exhibition in question introduces us to the Jones family and the innovative ways in which they navigate power in a post-oil world, and it looks like a vision of the 2000s by a wonderstruck producer in the 1960s. You can almost hear the RP voiceover exclaiming "in the future, cars will fly and humans will take all their meals in one small pill; not for the busy 21st century family the stress of eating!".

Sidestepping such irrelevancies as the invention of water, wind and solar generated energy, I learnt that in the future televisions will be powered by hamsters, electricity will be produced by blood in teddy-bear shaped bags ('to make it less scary'- of course!) and children will be forced to become a walking advertisement for their parents hydrogen home brewery. Below are some choice reproductions..

Of course, we don't mind destroying both animal and human life when we mine tar sands; but feeding hamsters to your TV in a fictional universe? Woah, soldier, that's one step too far!

I think my personal favourite here is "all the scientists we asked were sure that Tom and Tim's animal-eating, blood-drinking machine would never happen"...."but that didn't stop us from including this rampant scare mongering in our climate science exhibition, because hey, it's not actually based on science!"

I found the poo section particularly disturbing given that we had just had an extremely enjoyable jaunt around the psychoanalysis exhibition, which implored us to think about our relationship to fecal matter and what it meant regarding our unconcious mind..

And hey, why not instill some good old capitalist ethos in the kids whilst they're here? They sure as hell won't have learnt anything else on their trip to this godforsaken corporate island.

And this one is just to prove that they really did posit that the future entails evil televisions snaffling up baby hamsters...

I hope you're all suitably disturbed by this exclusive insight into the demonic minds of Shell's corporate executives, and implore you to avoid this pile of shit (quite literally) if you're in South Kensington. Instead, you should gaze upon this fantastically phallic sculpture in the Psychoanalysis section, which manages to create the shadow of a double-faced head from a craftily-lit sculpture made from casts of the artist's hand and (really quite large) penis. Brilliant. 

Lady Gaga: That's Not What a Feminist Looks Like

Originally published at Counterfire in March 2010

As someone who picked up on ‘geek chic’ about two years too late, who has only recently discovered the joy of cardigans and fell belatedly into the trend of spiky, shaved haircuts, it’s no surprise that it’s taken me so long to watch the new Lady Gaga and Beyonce video; the much-discussed, supposedly seminal, blockbuster of the year.

Ms. Gaga has been touted as the new Madonna; the provocative, exciting and edgy face of pop. I was promised by many a daring, queered-up feminist riot of a music video, accompanying the new single ‘Telephone’. Imagine my disappointment when, filled with wild expectations of the return of feminism to popular culture, I found nine long minutes of leather bikinis, a barrage of booty-popping and breasts, copious grinding and gyrating and more than one lingering shot of disembodied groins and fishnet-clad legs.

A strange amalgamation of scenes follow Lady Gaga being locked up and then rescued by Beyonce, whereupon they embark on a mass homicide involving maple syrup and rat poison, before eloping into the sunset with the police hot on their tail. Too much is wrong with this video to fit into 800 words, so let’s look at the most controversial clips; Gaga and the penis scandal, the lesbian kiss, and that sandwich.

After Gaga is thrown in jail, we see her vagina exposed as she’s undressed, and again as she rubs herself against her cell bars, prompting a guard to remark “See, I told you she didn’t have a dick”. There’s been a huge furore in the world of showbiz blogging over her purportedly ambigious genitalia, prompting remarks that she is trans, intersex, or a drag queen. Until now, she’s taken this whirlwind of gossip with the characteristic playfulness we’ve come to expect of her; telling reporters that she has a ‘huge donkey dick’, and posing for GQ with a strap-on down her trousers.

This is great: it’s funny, silly and a big “fuck you” to the hounding mobs of gossip weeklies that attempt to devalue her by suggesting she’s not a ‘real woman’. Rubbing your vagina through cell bars for a captive audience, however, is none of those things. It’s a capitulation to that very same pack of papparazi, who can now triumphantly hold up Gaga’s labia minora as their proof that she fits a binary mould of woman/man, and is willing to ‘get it out’ for the cameras along the way. Not exactly a triumph for challenging gender constructions.

When Gaga, bound in chains, is escorted out into the exercise yard, she proclaims her audacity and deviancy by engaging in that great taboo, the lesbian kiss. This has been the subject of much gleeful proclamation, the idea being that Gaga is taking lesbianism into the mainstream and ushering in an age where the gender of two people having a cheeky snog doesn’t matter.

Of course better representation of LGBT people in the media can only be a good thing, but in this context it’s about as liberating as T.a.T.u. dressed up as schoolgirls kissing in the rain: gratuitous shock-value porn that exists to boost video hits and not much more. Not quite a campaigning tool for the local LGBT group.

So far, it’s all been a little bit doom and gloom, so let’s look at the one aspect of the video that merits a bit of praise; Gaga eating a sandwich. Twice. Now, this might not seem like a rallying cry for celebration, but I seriously can’t remember the last time I saw a woman on the screen actually eating a meal that didn’t consist of a lettuce leaf and a couple of ‘naughty’ olives. Of course, in both of these scenes Gaga and Beyonce are either engaging in a little light domination fantasy (Beyonce), or dancing around in see-through vinyl with bondage tape crossed over their nipples (Gaga), implying that it’s only okay to eat if you’re making an effort to look hot at the same time.

Regardless, this is actually an interesting and perhaps even slightly progressive move in an industry that tells you that it’s not okay to eat, ever, full stop; lest you become a morbidly obese armchair-bound slob. Sadly though, this is not enough to save a video steeped in boring misogynistic femininity tropes.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect all pop videos to be genderqueering, femineering, domineering masterpieces. I’ve come to expect that much of the pop industry is happy to churn out the same tired sexist stereotypes day in, day out, and if I complained about every one of them I’d be wasting my time. But when the most liberating thing in a video touted as a feminist masterpiece is someone eating a sandwich (and not even the whole sandwich at that) then we need to seriously re-examine our notions of liberation and emancipation.

Panorama: The Cuts - How to Fight Back

Originally published at Counterfire in May 2010

BBC Panorama has, in recent years, bought us treats such as ‘Immigration: How we Lost Count’ and ‘Muslim First, British Second’ – so you would be forgiven for assuming that anything it beams onto your TV screen is likely to be a reactionary pile of frothing Islamophobic drivel.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, you’d probably be right. This week, however, seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

The Cuts – How to Fight Back , whilst not quite providing the ten-point plan it seems to promise, is an inspiring tour of successful campaigns fought by local residents against savage cuts to local services – if you can ignore the Dad’s Army theme tune that the patronising producer has inexplicably inserted every time an old person appears on screen, that is.

We begin, as ever, in London –  Barnet to be precise, where the Tory council has decided that a live-in warden is not a necessary part of sheltered housing for OAPs. Apart from begging the question of what then differentiates sheltered housing from the local estates, this move is fairly repulsive – as a resident points out, this means that there is nobody to visit them, or to assist them if they become suddenly ill, meaning that they are increasingly likely to be put into a residential home.

For a party that proclaims the values of self-sufficiency and savings, paying for healthy OAPs to be put into a nursing home they don’t need seems fairly counter-intuitive. Thankfully the residents organise, petition, march and demand the re-instatement of the warden, finally mounting a legal challenge and winning.

A whistlestop tour ensues, where we see various councils dangling the butcher’s knife over music lessons, community centres and road repairs. The award for most vomit-inducing council without a doubt goes to Northamptonshire, where officials mount a roadshow survey of residents asking them which public service they would like to see cut (it goes without saying that ‘none’ is an answer not represented here).

As an insightful resident argues, “it’s a con, it’s all cut and dried before they come to ask us. It’s like a murderer asking his victim, would you sooner I strangled you or smothered you?”.

Paul Blantern of Northamptonshire Council, effectively tells residents that they need to choose between safe roads without potholes, care for the elderly and money for local schools – whilst earning a salary of up to £130,000. Anybody who isn’t hopping up and down and screaming at the telly by the end of this sickening tirade should seriously re-examine their political principles.

Whilst scenes like this might test your capacity for self-restraint, there is hope; the packed meeting halls, angry demonstrations, committed residents and petitions you could fill Downing Street with show us that the next round of savage cuts promised by the coalition government (or the ConDemNation, as angry tweeters have taken to calling it) will not be accepted in silence – they will be resisted and resoundingly rejected.

When they ask us to bear the brunt of the financial crisis by giving up our local libraries, swimming pools, community centres and parks our answer should be loud and clear – can't pay, won't pay!

No Justice for Ian Tomlinson - Police Not Charged

Originally published at Counterfire on 22nd July 2010

The police officer implicated in the assualt and death of newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests last year will face no charges, the Crown Prosecution Service announced today.

Angry protests greeted the decision not to press charges, with the United Campaign Against Police Violence warning last night that this outcome would mean “stepping up [their] campaign for justice”.

The CPS defended their decision by arguing that the medical evidence was inconclusive and could not prove that Tomlinson died as a result of the blow administered to him by the police officer.

Interesting then, that two of the three post-mortems conducted into Tomlinson’s death agree that it was caused by internal bleeding. As even the BBC’s Dominic Casciani points out, that means 2/3 of the medical evidence points towards the police officer in question being directly implicated in Tomlinson’s death; more than sufficient for the CPS to proceed with the case.

Shockingly the officer – originally to be charged with manslaughter – also escaped the lesser charge of assault, despite clear evidence from the Guardian and other sources showing that Tomlinson was attacked unprovoked by the armoured officer.

This is not the first time that the police have evaded justice – the cases of Jean Charles de Menezes and Blair Peach can tell us that, as well as the scores of young Asian men imprisoned after the Gaza protests last year whilst the police officers who beat them were never brought to court.

This serves as yet another clear example of the disparity of power in society. Physically resist being kettled and attacked by police officers and you’ll be up in court for assaulting a police officer. Beat an innocent man with a truncheon until he dies from internal bleeding and you’ll walk out of court and straight back into the police force. Fiddle your benefit forms because £70 a week is nowhere near enough to live on and you’re the worst kind of state-scrounging scum; dodge corporation tax when you’re churning out billion-pound profits and you’re a thrifty, responsible entrepreneur. The list goes on.

The particularly galling aspect of this case, though, is the absolute brazenness of it; there’s no attempt to build up a narrative about the difficulties and responsibilities the police have to bear, or an appeal for understanding from a man who made a bad decision. There are simply out-and-out lies, outlined above, and incompetence – the officer can’t be charged for assault because the offence carries a six-month time limit, but there were no moves to prosecute him within the time frame after the attack.

But public anger towards police seems to be growing and growing -  in recent years we have seen police shoot an innocent man seven times in the head; brutally attack Climate Camp protestors chanting ‘this is not a riot’ with their hands in the air; and most recently set free Raoul Moat, a man who warned numerous times that he would shoot his ex-partner upon release. Protests against police violence have been sporadic but determined, and justice campaigns for those murdered by police continue. Public sympathy is waning and waning. With the anger and hurt expressed by the families of those murdered by the police, and the renewed determination from organisations defending the right to protest, perhaps this public antipathy can be turned into an organised resistance to police brutality and the lies that accompany it.

Rihanna and Eminem: Love the Way You Lie (Review)

Written in collaboration with Jo Gough. Originally published at Counterfire

Eminem and Rihanna's latest chart-topper, Love the Way You Lie, tackles the painful and prominent issue of domestic violence without resorting to shallow stereotypes.

The song follows the story of a violent relationship, narrated by the abuser. We are privy to the twists and turns in logic that run through the abuser's mind as he attempts to justify his behaviour – “but your temper’s just as bad as mine is”, he pleads.

Interestingly though, we also glimpse the moments of clarity – the shame and the galling realisation of what it means to be a woman-beater. And it is this that makes Love the Way You Lie both fascinating and instinctively repulsive – this is not the ramblings of a deluded maniac but of a troubled man struggling to draw lines between love, fear, hate and anger.

Rihanna is noticeably absent for the majority of this track, coming in only for the chorus:

“Just gonna stand there and watch me burn; well that’s alright, because I love the way it hurts.
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry, well that's all right because I love the way you lie."

This is, to say the least, uncomfortable – a song about domestic violence in which the only female voice is reduced to painfully affirming, over and over, how much she loves the beatings.

This has led to commentary that it glorifies domestic violence and makes it acceptable. Indeed, the video (directed by Joseph Kahn and starring Dominic Monaghan and Megan Fox) begins with the woman hitting the man, and throughout there is an interplay between sexual passion and violence, which could be seen to be promoting the idea that the victim 'provokes' or in fact enjoys the violence.

This is where the role of Rihanna is key. The photo of her horrific domestic violence was shown throughout the world. She asserts it happened to her; she did not cause it. Initially she went back to her perpetrator, but then left him because, "When I realized that my selfish decision for love could result into some young girl getting killed, I could not be easy with that".

The idea of the loving relationship is why so many victims return, and through the chorus repeating that she loves the hurt and lies it highlights the psychological hold within violent relationships. Love is used as a reason for both the violence and for staying together.

There is a quiet strength to Rihanna's singing, and coupled with the ironic undertone of the lyrics, the chorus could also be reaching out to perpetrators. Of course the woman doesn't love it, and no matter how much he excuses or gets her to excuse the violence, it is not justified.

From 3.13 in the video there appears to be a a point of no return; it only takes a look from the man to stop the woman leaving, and Eminems lyrics push through his excuses and show his acceptance of his violence and power, culminating in the lyrics,

'I know I'm a liar, if she ever tries to f**kin' leave again, I'ma tie her to the bed and set this house on fire'.

Rihanna's soulful chorus chimes in straight after, and we know the fate of the relationship.

The video ends with Eminem and Rihanna looking at the burning house, and then a repeat of the first clip of the couple lying in bed. This both emphasises the cycle of abuse and the need to leave the relationship at the point where it becomes abusive.

The song and video leaves you with a haunting insight into the cycle of domestic violence and where it can end up- and gives the message to leave the situation before it is too late. The song's message is for both the victim and perpetrator, sung by a victim and perpetrator who are no longer in abusive relationships. It sends out the message that there is a way out.

Rihanna was able to leave her situation because the abuse was in the spotlight and she had the financial means to physically get away. The court took it further than she wanted because it was such a high profile case- and even then Chris Brown felt he'd been let off easy due to his status. Recently a TV executive got only 18 months for killing his wife, after an argument over a joint of beef, because the judge deemed it a 'tragic accident'. For victims to feel able to leave and be safe and for perpetrators to get appropriate help, domestic abuse services and just prosecution are essential. 

One in four women and one in six men in the UK will be the victims of domestic violence during their lifetime. Two women a week are killed by a current or former male partner. To get advice on or help with domestic abuse you can:

talk to your doctor, health visitor or midwife
call 0808 2000 247, the 24-hour National Domestic Violence Helpline
run by Women's Aid and Refuge (calls from a landline are free)
call 0808 801 0327 for the Men's advice line

call Respect on 0845 1228609 (www.respect.uk.net) - advice and
information for male perpetrators of domestic violence.
call the Mankind Initiative on 01823 334244 (www.mankind.org.uk)
treatment for female perpetrators of domestic violence.

All in the Genes? Book choices and 'mating strategies'

Originally published at Counterfire

Cowboy. Doctor. CEO. Midwife. Nurse. Wedding. If you’re a woman reading this, you should be getting hot under the collar and weak at the knees right about now. At least, that’s what Anthony Cox and Maryanne Fisher, two evolutionary psychologists from Canada suggest in their recent research paper.
In an analysis of more than 15,000 book titles by the publisher Harlequin (owner of that famous literary giant, Mills and Boon) they found that the most popular recurring themes were commitment, reproduction and cowboys. From this, they assert that women are biologically driven to themes that suggest children, physical or financial resources, stability in relationships and protection, because of their evolved “sex-specific mating strategies”.

So, what’s the problem? The researchers justify their conclusion by saying

“Titles must be shaped by consumer demand; readers vote with their money by purchasing the titles that interest them the most..we therefore suggest that analyzing the titles is a valid way to investigate women’s mating interests.”

This might not seem preposterous at first glance – people only buy things they want, surely, and what they want can reveal something about their general personality and desires? Well, only if we assume that our desires are given and ahistorical.

Just like it would be ridiculous to suggest that a desire for this season’s broad-shouldered floral print sparkly maxi stiletto is a natural one, rather than one shaped by the various trends of the fashion world, it’s not only stupid but myopic to suggest that a desire for protection, children and commitment is entirely natural, devoid of history and context.

We’re born into a world that tells us that Disney romances and ‘The One’ should be part of the fabric of our daily lives, not just a bit of cheap escapism, and simultaneously ignores and marginalises the weak, the short, the ugly, the fat, the spotty, people with small breasts, big breasts, no breasts, no curves, too many curves, body hair (if you’re female), no body hair (if you’re male), until only the brightest, bubbliest and ‘best’ are left in the race.

This report makes no attempt to discover precisely what it is that moves us to act in certain ways, or believe certain things; no mention of advertising, of early-year socialisation, and crucially of capitalism.
Capitalists divide us along lines of gender, race and sexuality so that we are more fragmented, less powerful and easier to exploit. The report overlooks the ways in which capitalism shapes our desires and behaviour along gendered, raced and sexualised lines. There are countless examples of people’s actions being shaped by their material conditions, putting paid to the idea that behaviour can be explained away through biological imperative.

During the Second World War, millions of women took up work in the factories, offices and fields whilst men went out to fight; this was encouraged by a mass propaganda campaign from the government, with the focus on women being empowered and strong encapsulated in the American image of Rosie the Riveter.
When the war was over, this campaign was switched around and massive pressure was put on women to return to the home and raise children, resulting in the post-WWII baby boom. These weren’t just natural states for women; the machinations of capitalism, backed up by a propaganda machine in advertising, media and public discourse defined whether they could be a merchant or a mother, a hospital porter or a housewife.

As various people such as Nina Power and Lindsey German (who launched their Feminist Manifesto for the 21^st century recently) have commented, the connection between women, work and capitalism has never been more sidelined, or more pressing.

There are now ever-increasing numbers of women in the workplace; but what are they doing, how much are they being paid for it, and crucially what is inspiring them to take these jobs?

Germaine Greer recognised when she wrote The Whole Woman that “women have always done the shit work, and any work done by women in great numbers becomes shit work”. Nina Power looks at this in more depth in her discussion of the feminisation of the labour force; sections of the labour market are badly paid, precarious and without the benefits of sick leave, holiday pay and so on.

Not only are these jobs sometimes directly targeted at women (she takes on the firm Office Angels) but the jobs themselves are feminised – undervalued, underpaid and unstable, not the pension-paying, benefit-reaping jobs of the breadwinners.

The study mentioned at the start is symptomatic of a wider turn towards biological determinism – with studies ‘proving’ that girls are genetically predisposed to like pink, boys to play with Action Men and any number of tired stereotypes. Any analysis of gendered roles and behaviour needs to leave these assumptions behind, and stop ignoring the crucial shaping factors of capitalism and work.