Carol Midgley: it’s time we started taking candy from babies
While we were staying at an hotel in Spain, my daughter announced that it was quicker to take the stairs because “the elevators are crap”. Naturally, we gave her a stern talking to. “I will not tolerate language like that,” I said. “The word is lift, not elevator. Lift, lift, lift.”
I’m not proud of morphing into a spluttering old colonel whenever British people use Americanisms, but I can’t help it. It’s a borderline obsession. Every time I hear an “airplane”, not an “aeroplane”, a “cookie”, not a “biscuit”, a “cellphone”, not a “mobile”, that a letter has been “mailed”, not “posted”, a little piece of me dies inside. No, little boy, that is not a fire truck, it is a fire engine. Now eat your chips (which you get from the chippy, not from inside a packet of Walkers).
But it’s too late. The battle is lost. A study by the Oxford University Press, which analysed 74,000 short stories written by British children, shows that the country has been well and truly colonised by American English. Children think they wear sneakers, not trainers; eat cupcakes, not fairy cakes; fill their trash cans with garbage; have smart friends, not clever ones; and get cranky, not grumpy. I suppose we have to eat takeouts now, not takeaways?
People such as I do what we can for the cause: I will never ask for a regular-sized drink, never say “Can I get?” or ask for a “pay hike”. And hell will freeze over before I buy a pack for my fanny. Yet I think we all know a corner has been turned. When you hear children in Kettering asking each other if they want candy you know it’s basically over. Period.
Of course we should try not to work ourselves into too much of a froth about this because it is largely inevitable and natural. No language is static, it is a fluid, evolving thing. Flexibility has been a key to our language’s success and children like to sound contemporary. Being raised on Hollywood films (not movies) and excellent fare such as The Simpsons and Garfield, it’s obvious that they’ll pick up the odd “vacation” or “rookie”.
People often accuse me of being anti-American or snobbish when I get into one of my “But this clearly isn’t a bathroom, it’s a toilet. See — no bath!” routines. This is annoying. I love many things about American culture: I actually prefer some of their words to ours. Apartment sounds so much more chichi than flat; pacifier less ugly than dummy; freeway more romantic than motorway. (Though why anyone would choose eggplant over a beautiful aubergine defeats me.) Americanisms are fine when spoken by Americans. It’s when British people say them that I cringe. It sounds so needy, so sucky-uppy. It smacks of a David Brent-ian desperation to be “with it”, like an ageing uncle from Scarborough saying “Yo, dude”.
Actually, yes, the spelling variations do rouse a bit of the snob in me. I swear at inbuilt computer spellchecks that turn criticise into “criticize” and colour into “color”. How dare they?
“Brits” who opt to use American spellings surely do so because they’re easier. But this is our heritage. A friend was recently helping her son with his chemistry homework and was shocked to see, in his textbook, sulphur spelt “sulfur”. A footnote said this was now the accepted version. Not in our house it’s not.
If we bend over and accept all Americanisms, we will lose our sense of self. Handbags will become purses, in restaurants we’ll ask for “checks” and we won’t even understand how to be “pissed”. And what if condoms become rubbers? For the sake of schoolteachers everywhere, this must never be allowed to happen.
Grey’s Anatomy: What’s really gonna happen…
The final of Grey’s Anatomy is nearly here. Misery will come to us all in MANY different guises. This is what I think is going to happen.
What do we know:
The plane carrying Meredith, Derek, Cristina, Arizona, Mark and Lexie crashes. Lexie is crushed, trapped beneath part of the fuselage. Arizona has at least a fractured thigh leg. Derek has his hand trapped and in a desperate attempt to free it he bashes it with a rock…
Cristina has a dislocated shoulder. Meredith pulled a piece of metal from her leg. Mark appears to be ok.
Bailey and Ben are considering the benefits and drawbacks of a long distance marriage.
Callie is considering slavering Arizona’s body in edible paint. (hmm. I fear she may be reconsidering soon).
April is on a road to nowhere.
Jackson thinks he’s Jesus Christ (yeah, ok I made that up).
Very little is known about Mr Misery Hunt, Alex or Teddy.
What’s gonna happen? – Summary:
By the end of the episode, Lexie will be dead, almost all the others will be in deadly peril because they won’t have been found; spouses and friends at the hospital will have heard that the plane has gone down with no survivors; April will herself be in some form of desperate self harming, self destruction mode.
Lexie and Mark: In a deeply tragic yet devastatingly sweet conclusion to their romance Mark will declare his undying love to Lexie. Only on her “death bed” does he realise that the choice he has between Lexie and Julia is indeed no contest. It’s always Lexie. He will be distraught, possibly unable to function as the only apparently unharmed doctor.
Arizona or Meredith: – both of them have left leg issues. Arizona could very possibly bleed out of the femoral artery (I know nothing about medicine). Her life will be borderline survival at the end of the episode. Meredith pulled something out of her leg so she too could have a residual problem but I think it will be Arizona. Arizona won’t die, but at the end of the finale it is really not clear. (JCap/Arizona fans should be prepared for this!)
Derek: Yeah, Burke 2.0? His life will not necessarily be in peril from injury but…
Cristina, Meredith and Derek: They will spend the vast majority of the episode fighting the injuries of their colleagues and pilot, in shock and frightened that they are actually lost.
Back at the hospital…
April will be pushed to the brink and do something stupid with Jackson drinking himself into oblivion in guilt.
Callie and Owen will find out towards the end of the episode that there is no hope of any survivors and will collapse in grief and despair. Teddy will be looking on and saying to herself “yeah, I got no sympathy from you so you ain’t getting any from me”. Okay she won’t.
I can’t guess about Alex or Richard, bit of a mystery. Whatever happens to Arizona Alex will spend Season 9 miserable through massive guilt that he should’ve been on the plane. Joy.
Bailey and Ben will split up. OR like the end of S6 with Callie and Arizona they might end up as the ONLY happy alive couple on the show at Season finale.
Oh yeah, the pilot. He’s a gonna.
At the end of the 43 minutes…
We will realise that the passengers are completely lost in the wilderness with no food or water (though there is a stream), with bears for company and freezing night time temperatures. They will all be left in deadly peril but Arizona will be at deaths door. As we are left with the impression that more may or have died, those at the hospital will be told that there are no survivors of the crash and collapse in devastation.
And what of the future - well, those that survive are going to be totally fucked up. I wouldn’t want to be a patient at Seattle Grace Mercy West in Season 9
Or I could be talking a complete pile of pony.
Facebook may just be a box that goes ‘bing’
First published in The Times 12th April 2012
What if the urge to share everything online is just a fad? Then Mark Zuckerberg can kiss his $100bn goodbye
For those of you who have read about Instagram — purchased by Facebook this week for $1 billion — but don’t quite understand what it does, allow me to explain. It allows you to take clear, accurate photographs with your existing state-of-the-art technology, but make them look like photographs that you have taken with old, rubbish technology and then dropped in a urinal. Then it allows you to share them with people who aren’t particularly interested.
Hey, I’m not knocking it. Uretic, yellow photographs are much in vogue. I have one of my daughters on my phone right now. We’re pretty simple creatures, we modern humans. We all take far more photos than we used to, and we no longer think of them as precious things. Dimly, though, we remember a time when we did, and this is what they looked like. Even if we hadn’t dropped them anywhere.
As a brain-fooling strategy, I reckon this will work for another six months or so. Thereafter, grimly stained photography will seem so wholly redolent of 2012 that, on the rare occasion we actually do come across photographs taken at a San Francisco rock festival in 1977, we’ll struggle to grasp that they weren’t taken last week in a Clapham beer garden.
Instagram has made no money and has no immediate prospect of making any money, which has led to some keen-eyed tech industry experts questioning whether buying it for $1 billion might not be a touch rash. It doesn’t sound too tough, being a keen-eyed tech industry expert. They’re also questioning whether we’re on the way to yet another dotcom bubble.
Of course we bloody are. A billion dollars for Instagram is insane, everywhere except on the planet where Facebook itself is worth $100 billion. Alas, with Mark Zuckerberg’s creation going public next month with a valuation of just that, this is the planet we are on. True, Facebook supposedly made profits of $1 billion last year (all these round numbers are terribly helpful), but even the layman might notice that spending $100 billion on a company that makes $1 billion a year would leave you twiddling your thumbs for a century before you started to show a profit.
Speaking as a layman, it’s hard not to feel that there’s an element of Enron-ism in all this; not in that there’s anything dodgy happening, but in that these numbers are only real because everybody agrees they are. I could be wrong, but I don’t see how.
The vast bulk of Facebook’s profits come from advertising, but its users are increasingly using the site through their smartphones, where advertising doesn’t get much of a look-in. That’s a problem. To continue to profit — for the next ten years, never mind the next hundred — Facebook is going to need a dramatically different way of wringing cash out of the people who use the site. More importantly, they need to keep hold of those people.
Buying Instagram was about the latter bit of that. Even if you aren’t into the whole retro thing, the app offers a simple, efficient way to take photos with your phone and upload them online, and Facebook reckons that this is a vital part of its own raison d’être. Instagram has only 30 million users, compared with Facebook’s 850 million or so, but it is growing. Had it been bought up by Google or Apple instead, the social network’s dominance would have looked wobbly. If you can’t beat ’em, buy ’em.
Being superseded by a rival, though, is only one way of losing users. The other is that they just drift off and go and do something else. In his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, 25 years ago, Douglas Adams wrote about a computer entrepreneur who lost his fortune for “the usual reason”, which was that “every 12-year-old in the country had suddenly got bored with boxes that went bing”. People talk about social media — sharing — as being this thing that humans didn’t want to do and now do. As though, irrevocably, Homo sapiens is becoming something else.
Nah. On these pages last week, Emma Duncan wrote of her horror at suddenly realising that the music- streaming service Spotify was posting everything she listened to on Facebook. Privacy, she reckoned was on the way out, with the young sharing everything as a matter of instinct. I suspect, though, that they’ll grow out of it. I know I have.
I’ve never been a prolific sharer, one of these “here’s a photo of my lunch” type people, but you dabble when it’s new, because it’s fun. And once or twice, you get burnt. You find all your phone numbers on public display on Facebook, synced because you ticked a box you didn’t quite understand.
A friend discovered that a browser extension was publishing all his saved links; effectively he had a blog he didn’t know about. Yes, there are always things you can do to turn these things off. But it’s a hassle. And for what?
I’m not some old, baffled pensioner not getting this stuff. My first job was online; social media and I are exact contemporaries. Some things, such as Twitter, feel as natural as shouting. But that’s pretty much my limit. I love the way that Google+ automatically uploads pictures I take with my phone, but the “share” button that appears next to each one has remained unused. I adore the access Spotify gives me to music, but if I want somebody else to know what I’m listening to, I’ll tell them. This stuff is mine. I have grown to resent the constant assumption that it should be everybody’s.
The dotcom industry today, at the very top end, is basically a protracted struggle to be in charge of absolutely everything. Facebook, Google and Apple are vying not to dominate the internet, but to be the internet, with everything that happens happening through them. Apple’s strategy is to sell you hardware that only Apple can then fill up. Google’s is to study you like a biologist studies a dissected rat, and be ready and waiting every time you turn a new corner.
Facebook’s strategy is to assume that now and forever more, humankind will feel essentially unfulfilled if everything they do is not known about through everything else. And maybe that’s right. Maybe, though, it’s a box that goes bing. A fad, like yellow photos, that will one day lose its appeal. That’s my hunch, for what it’s worth. Although there are a hundred billion reasons why I might be wrong.
Hugo Rifkind
Have you heard of mummy porn? You will soon… it’s the new erotica
Originally published in The Times 12 April 2012
Pornography, it says in the dictionary, is material produced to stimulate sexual excitement. But, says the author of Fifty Shades of Grey, this year’s S&M-heavy bolt-from-nowhere bestseller, it is definitely not porn. “It is a love story,” she insists. “It has graphic sex in it and people who fall in love have sex, that’s what they do. And so that’s my answer to that.”
E. L. James is in London, and from London, which is a surprise to her thousands of newly lascivious, emphatically female fans, most of whom are from the US and who assumed from her books that she is too. Her mother, it transpires, is Chilean; her father was Scottish. A normal enough looking fortysomething suburban-dwelling mother. In New York two months ago she attended her first book launch. “I wandered into this room and there were people screaming. I felt like Brad Pitt.”
Today we find ourselves in a more serene setting: her agent’s office, north of Soho. Fame makes her cringe, she says, though she loves her fans. “I’m not used to this,” she says apologetically. Her shellshock is understandable. Two months ago Erica (her real name) was “bumbling along” anonymously. Now every word E. L. James (the surname is one of her multiple pseudonyms) utters in public is frenetically relayed all over the internet.
Fifty Shades of Grey is, perhaps, an unexpected book to have perpetuated such a frenzy among womenfolk in the US in 2012. It takes as its plot the relationship between the sexually naive and virginal college girl, Anastasia Steele, and the fabulously good looking, surprisingly young, self-made millionaire and control freak, Christian Grey, whom Anastasia meets when she interviews him for the student paper.
Christian’s voice is “warm and husky like dark melted chocolate fudge caramel” Anastasia notes and, in one of the book’s many unintentionally hilarious lines, she also observes: “I can tell from his accent that he’s British.” Furthermore, Christian is in possession of a private jet, a beautiful pad, a pilot’s licence and a lifetime’s supply of psychological issues. Is it any wonder, therefore, that he has stalkerish tendencies, showing up at Anastasia’s house unannounced and showering her with devices (a MacBook and a BlackBerry) so that they are never out of touch? But the sex is, naturally, mindblowing, though Anastasia refers throughout demurely to her privates as, “there” (James’s italics). Christian’s equivalent, Anastasia delights in recounting, resembles “steel encased in velvet”. Christian introduces her to his “playroom”, a chamber decked out with the kind of S&M paraphernalia that would prompt many women to run for their lives. But somehow Anastasia sees through Christian’s collection of ropes, dog collars and gags and decides to sign a contract: she agrees to be his submissive. Anastasia is not allowed to even eat without her rich handsome dom’s say-so. Ah, but there’s a subtext here. Anastasia wants Christian to be her boyfriend and thinks she can change him.
There are not many printable passages from the book, but here is one of them: “‘Why don’t you like to be touched?’ I whisper, staring up into soft gray eyes. ‘Because I’m fifty shades of f***ed up, Anastasia.’ Oh … his honesty is completely disarming. I blink up at him.”
Fifty Shades started as a work of fan fiction — a tribute to Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight series — and was published in instalments, before the names were changed, the plot was shaken about a bit and the text was published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, an Australian-based “book-loving community” that functions as a social sharing site as well as a distributor.
Despite the book’s wonky prose and its long periods of plotlessness, it was quickly declared “hot” by American women of child-bearing age who were happy to eulogise in public about how much it had done for their sex lives. The newly randy soccer mom phenomenon would be less astonishing were it not for the sadomasochistic nature of James’s (deeply purple, very explicit) prose. BDSM, an erotic preference in the sadomasochistic vein, is not a term most of them were familiar with before getting their hands on this book but women — publishers were surprised to find out — are into it, especially if the female lead plays the submissive.
“It’s relighting a fire under a lot of marriages,” Lyss Stern, the founder of DivaMoms.com, told The New York Times in a recent article that was the most e-mailed story on the website for over a week. “I think it makes you feel sexy again, reading the books.”
As for James: “I’d read some BDSM stuff and found it really hot and I thought what if you met someone and they wanted to do that and you didn’t? What would happen there?” Nevertheless, “I wouldn’t call [the book] a BDSM book, I don’t think it is. That’s just the backdrop.” What would she call it? “I’d call it a contemporary romantic novel.” Whatever it is, she gets a lot of e-mails, “saying ‘… and my husband thanks you too’. So I think you know what that means: people’s bedroom antics are …”, she laughs nervously, “… enhanced.”
Brought up in Buckinghamshire, “a real Home Counties girl”, James took a degree in history, specialising in medieval and 18th century Europe and did her thesis on Tsarist Russia (hence the name Anastasia).
Not long out of university, at 24 years of age, she married Niall. They had two boys. Niall (“The master of my universe,” she says in the book’s dedication) became a television scriptwriter, while she pursued a career in television production, working on Noel’s House Party andThe Generation Game. Her commute to work on the Tube would have been unbearable had it not been for her stash of romantic novels.
“I love a good love story. I used to have to travel in from West London on the Tube and the commute is just awful. I used to just bury myself in novels.” They were mainly writers from the US: Elizabeth Lowell, Brenda Joyce, Nora Roberts, Johanna Lindsey. (If you have not heard of them, the titles, Beautiful Sacrifice, ADangerous Love, Gentle Rogue, will give you the idea.) “I never thought,” she says, laughing with embarrassment, “that I’d ever speak about them like this. It’s a guilty pleasure. All of that is a guilty pleasure: falling in love again, time and time again. It’s just a little escape, an escape from my Tube ride, basically.”
She was still working as a production manager when she was doorstepped by a journalist this January. “He looked about 12. And I opened the door and he said my name and I said: ‘Yes?’ Not that I’ve been hiding, I just didn’t expect this.” By “this” she means instant fame.
Fifty Shades of Grey, the first in the trilogy, went viral early this year. By March it had hit The New York Times e-book bestseller list and the paperback rights were quickly bought up by Random House. No publisher would have touched it as an unsolicited manuscript, but its electronic format means that women have been able to read and download the explicit sex covertly and pass it on to their friends on social networking sites.
Two weeks ago James signed a reported $5m (£3.1m) film deal with Universal and Focus Features. The internet is alive with rumours about who will play Anastasia and Christian.
The doorstepping moment in January signalled the moment her success in the US crossed over into Britain and on January 16 she gave up her day job. Just before she did, she took her two sons, aged 15 and 17, aside. Have they read her books? “No.” Do they know what is in them? “Oh they know it’s naughty because I used to shout: ‘Don’t look at the screen!’ They’re so proud of me, they’re so sweet and so supportive. They know it’s a racy novel. They know there’s bondage involved. They just roll their eyes and go,” — she sticks her fingers in her ears and shuts her eyes – “lalallalalal! Mothers and sex are just, you know, wrong.”
An interesting point considering that, in America, James has been christened the queen of a new genre, “mommy porn”. “I think that label came about because of the way the word was spread. It was just women at soccer practise in small towns all along the East Coast going ‘have you read this book?’ And it is women who have kids.”
Does James find it embarrassing to talk about the book? “Yes, very. Hugely. Hugely embarrassing. Can you imagine being in a room full of Hollywood men and talking about this? ‘Yes, this is my fantasy.’” Does she fancy Christian Grey? “Yeah, I think so. He’s my fantasy guy. He’s ridiculously rich, capable, great in bed, controlling — on the page he’s great. I think in real life it would be different.” She thinks the book, “takes you away from doing the laundry, cooking, supper — doing all that daily grind of stuff”. It has been argued that the attraction for otherwise financially independent and self-confident women of a fantasy dominant male is the need to escape temporarily from their own responsibilities. Does James agree? “I think so. Just for a day. You just decide what to do for a change.”
Although they’ve been available on Kindle, then on print on demand since last year, fewer people have read Fifty Shades in Britain. That, for better or worse, is about to change, now that Arrow is making the books available in paperback. It is now hoped that the word-of-mouth frenzy of success that James’s works have enjoyed in America will be replicated here, although it is unlikely to do so without more controversy. Some call Fifty Shades a love story, others prefer the words erotica or romance. A lot of people have written it off as trash. Men, particularly, seem to find it offensive. An American television host recently pronounced the sadomasochistic themes in the book “a rape fantasy”.
“That is ridiculous,” James says, bridling again. Everything that happens in Fifty Shades is “safe, sane and consensual”. Indeed, there are condoms littered all over the book. “No one gets raped. In fact I find that quite offensive.” Surely, though, it is pornographic? “I don’t understand what you mean by pornography,” she says testily. “People having sex is not pornography, to me. You’ll need to define your terms. People fall in love, they have sex. That’s perfectly normal and natural. To call it pornography is weird. I think pornography for me is women drugged and … something horrible. What’s that Stieg Larrson thing? That rape scene. That’s obscene. I saw the Swedish version of the film. It shocked the hell out of me.”
Unlike Larsson’s fiction, James argues, hers is not misogynistic. Indeed, there are women out there who argue that her books are empowering, that Fifty Shades is encouraging women to be more open about their sexual desires.
“Women aren’t supposed to like this sort of thing. To have a man tie her up and dominate her.” But because it’s on the page, “it’s very, very safe”.
“What has been really interesting,” she adds, “is how it’s brought women together to talk about their sexual desires and really open up.” This happens, apparently, especially in book clubs. “When you’ve got small kids, that kind of stuff gets pushed to the back and when you read something like this it rekindles your … Certainly it did for me reading my romantic fiction back in the day.”
The reviews have started cropping up on British Amazon, many of them from women who don’t seem to read much — among their other purchases are books such as Giving Up Booze For Lent andThe Embroidery Pocket Guide. One British reviewer on the site describes Fifty Shades as “Mills & Boon with S&M”. Another claims that description “does a disservice to Mills & Boon”. A third says she found Fifty Shades informative: “I have learned something from the book — sex really can be fun. I found out that I have led quite a sheltered life and there is more than just the missionary position and blow jobs. I’m almost 47 years old and have definitely been missing out. The next time I see my man he is in for a treat.”
Is the success of graphically explicit e-books among women so very different from how popular internet pornography has always been among men? James says the two things are incomparable. But if men are indeed more visual creatures than women, doesn’t it make sense that the written word would present a more appealing alternative for women to explore whatever it is that gives them kicks?
“Maybe the book is doing that. That’s a really interesting thought. Because we do have sexual desires.” There’s no big shock there. James’s is an enormous achievement, certainly, but not a literary one.
Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James is published today by Arrow at £7.99 in paperback and is also available as an e-book
What is fanfiction.net?
EL. James’s novel started life on fanfiction.net, an online resource of unauthorised extensions to the works of published authors.
Founded in 1998 by a Los Angeles computer programmer, Xing Li, it is now the most popular fan fiction website in the world, with nearly 2.2 million users and stories in more than 30 languages.
Most popular is the Harry Potter section, with 588,000 free stories uploaded by fans. Second is Naruto, a Japanese manga series with some 301,000 stories. Meanwhile, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight has inspired 198,000 contributions and Lord of the Rings 46,000.
A few years ago, James posted the original version of her novel Fifty Shades, then entitled Master of the Universe, which retold Meyer’sTwilight with X-rated scenes. In Meyer’s original, Bella Swan falls for Edward Cullen, a rich hunk who is also a vampire; in Master of the Universe, Cullen is a rich hunk who is also a kinky sex maniac.
So what’s the difference? “All the names have been changed, certain situations — it’s been re-edited so there are quite a few changes.”
Still, it seems that James owes Meyers more than just a hearty thanks for inspiration, having drawn on the success of Twilight to achieve her own.
Daisy Greenwell
If marriage is good it should be for everyone
Theresa May
Published in The Times 15 March 2012
Plans to allow gays to wed will strengthen society and pose no threat at all to the Church
Should two people who care deeply for each other, who love each other and who want to spend the rest of their lives together be allowed to marry? That is the essential question behind the debate over the Government’s plans to extend civil marriage to same-sex couples.
My answer is that marriage should be for everyone, regardless of their sexual orientation. Society is stronger when people enter into a stable relationship; when they commit to each other; when they make binding vows to love, honour and cherish one another. That is a deeply conservative opinion — conservative with a big and a small “c”.
The introduction of civil partnerships in 2005 was a significant step forward for our society. For the first time, same-sex couples could make a public and legally recognised commitment to one another. That made relationships more enduring and our society more stable.
Civil partnerships gave lesbian, gay and bisexual couples important rights, protections and responsibilities that they had been denied in the past. Society now sees the commitment in a civil partnership as no different to the commitment made by opposite-sex couples when they enter into a marriage. Indeed, many people already refer to a civil partnership as a “gay marriage” and to civil partners as “married”.
But the problem is that they’re not. Gay people can work where they want, go where they want, live where they want. They have equal rights — but they still can’t get married. I don’t believe the State should perpetuate discrimination and prejudice. I believe that in modern Britain we should seek to eliminate discrimination wherever we find it.
That is why we have today published proposals to remove the ban on same-sex couples entering into a civil marriage. This is a step many other countries have already taken. Spain — with its Catholic traditions — has legalised marriage for same-sex couples, as has Canada, Portugal, South Africa, several other countries and a number of US states.
The Times has been forthright in its support for the extension of civil marriage to same-sex couples in Britain as well. I welcome that support. Indeed, I welcome the debate that we are having as a nation. But I am worried that at times that debate is in danger of spilling over into hyperbole, with many myths prevailing on both sides. So I want to clear up once and for all what our proposals are about, and what they will and won’t do.
I don’t usually talk about my own faith. In British politics we tend to feel uncomfortable about that sort of thing. But as an Anglican who attends church each Sunday and whose father was a vicar, I understand the Church of England. That’s why I want to emphasise that this has nothing to do with telling the Church — or any religious group — what to do.
I want to be absolutely clear that we do not propose to touch religious marriage in any way. We are talking about civil marriage ceremonies — the sort currently conducted in register offices, country houses and hotels. Civil marriages can’t happen inside a church now and won’t under the proposals we are announcing today.
Under our plans no church, mosque, temple, synagogue or other religious premises will be forced to hold gay marriage ceremonies — in fact, they won’t be allowed to even if they want to. Religious marriage between a gay couple will remain illegal. Churches will continue to be able to teach, preach and practise their view that marriage can only be between a man and a woman, without fear of being sued. People of faith have nothing to fear from our proposals.
But the State clearly does have a role in defining what is and isn’t a legally recognised marriage. Polygamy is banned in this country by Act of Parliament, as is sibling marriage. Parliament first passed a law allowing civil marriage in 1837. So the State has defined what marriage is and who can be legally married for nearly 200 years. It is then for religious institutions to decide who should be allowed to marry in their buildings, following their ceremonies, in accordance with their beliefs and consistent with the law. These two roles are rightly separate, and they will continue to be.
Our proposals are motivated by the desire to strengthen our society by extending the right to marry. Marriage is one of the most important institutions we have. It binds us together, brings stability and makes us stronger. So I don’t believe that the State should stop people getting married unless there are very good reasons — and being gay isn’t one of them. If we believe that commitment, fidelity and marriage are good things then we should not restrict them, we should let them flourish.
Theresa May is Home Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities
‘Eeeeuw’ is no argument against gay marriage
Taken from The Times 9 March 2012
Neither is saying ‘God doesn’t like it’. In fact when you think carefully, there is no plausible case at all
Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve been trying to find a reason to be against gay marriage. There aren’t any. There’s just God and the “eeeuw” factor. And, while these might seem like pretty powerful reasons to be against gay marriage if you’re that way inclined, they don’t do it for me and they shouldn’t do it for the country, either.
This is not to be a fighty column. Although it could be. Certainly, it can be fun getting fighty with the views of people like Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland (who this week described gay marriage as “a grotesque subversion of human rights”) but it doesn’t, ultimately, get us anywhere. The greatest misconception about gay marriage is that it’s somehow an assault on religion, and you certainly don’t fight that misconception by making it one. So I’m not going to bully. I’m going to cajole.
The thing about this debate is that there isn’t a debate. There’s just a pro side, which is right, and and an anti side (which some polls suggest may be larger), which is wrong. And, by “wrong”, before you get sniffy, I don’t mean “thinks something with which I disagree”. I mean “thinks something which doesn’t make any sense at all”.
I wasn’t always in favour of gay marriage. I didn’t get the point. Civil partnerships were an act of political genius, possibly Tony Blair’s greatest. At a stroke, in 2004, his Government solved a problem that most people hadn’t particularly even noticed yet. Same-sex couples were delighted, finally having their unions recognised by law, and opponents — given how studiously unthreatening the new law was — couldn’t even mind too much. A couple could say “we’re married!” and bishops could say “no you aren’t!” and neither would be wholly wrong. This was, literally, the third way.
Then, a few years ago, I walked into a gay marriage debate at a Liberal Democrat party conference. At first, they weren’t really selling it. Look, you know what Lib Dems are like. It was all girls who are boys who like boys to be girls who do boys like they’re girls who are seriously into local government, and I came away thinking, oh, just give it a rest, it’s only a word. Only later did I stop and properly think about what they were asking for. It was for the State to stop telling some couples who want to get married that, unlike some other couples, they can’t. Hmmm, I thought to myself, we can’t have that.
And we can’t. Not without very good reasons, and in the case of gay marriage (unlike, say, sibling marriage) there aren’t any. There aren’t even bad reasons. There are no reasons at all.
“Marriage is a thing between a man and a woman,” say those against. Well, yes. Indeed. That’s rather the problem. It’s only true until it stops being true. It’s analogous, exactly, to saying “voting is a thing done by men”. This isn’t a reason, but a description of the status quo.
“Marriage is a natural thing with a historical pedigree,” they say. “Civil partnerships are a legal construct.” Natural? Do the birds and bees do it? I’ve never been invited. Come on. Do better.
“Difference doesn’t entail inequality,” say the opponents, learning now. “They can be equal without being married.” That almost sounds reasonable. But you’ve got to be careful with this “difference” thing. You can’t just state it, you’ve got to justify it. Different how? Not the childbirth thing, surely. What about the old, the unable, the plain unkeen who can’t have children or who just don’t fancy it? What if scientists found a way to enable a man to give birth? Problem solved?
“This undermines marriage,” they say, growing cunningly sociological. Nah. This is what a philosopher would call circular reasoning. You are arguing from your own conclusions. If same-sex relationships were wrong and perverse, then they would undermine marriage. But if they aren’t, they won’t. Don’t you see? This isn’t a reason, either. It’s a declaration of prejudice, disguised.
“Do this and it will be polygamy next! Or paedophilia! They’ll have to teach about gay relationships in schools!” Same again, I’m afraid. It’s a bit like saying: “Eat a burger today, and tomorrow you might as well be a cannibal!” This makes perfect sense if you think eating burgers is a bit like cannibalism, but none whatsoever if you don’t. And yes, they’ll have to teach about gay relationships in schools. Remind me why this is bad?
“God doesn’t like it.” Well, maybe. I’d be surprised if He’s that bothered, frankly, although I’ll take your word for it. And so what? Speaking as somebody raised as a Jew, who married a Christian, God technically wasn’t that keen on my marriage either, to the extent that I couldn’t have had it in a synagogue. But even the most Orthodox and ringleted of rabbis wouldn’t suggest that civil law should thus have ensured I couldn’t get married in Camden Register Office, either.
Why does gay marriage get religious leaders so much more worked up? On that, I just defer to what Ted Heath said, when asked why Margaret Thatcher got so worked up by him. “How should I know? I’m not a doctor.” At any rate, why should it matter? This is not a theocracy. In a secular nation, “ARCHBISHOP SLAMS GAY MARRIAGE” should matter about as much as “IMAM SLIGHTLY MIFFED ABOUT PET LICENCES”.
“I just don’t like it! Eeeeeuw!” Ah yes. “Eeeeuw.” This is the position perhaps best illustrated by Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, MP, who famously grew so incensed during a House of Commons debate on lowering the age of gay consent in 1994 that he shouted down a speech by Tony Blair with a graphic description of exactly what, in his view, homosexuality entailed. You’ll find it in Hansard, it’s a bit rude forThe Times. All about what goes where.
“Eeeeuw” is rarely so overt. Often it’s not even antagonistic; just an unthinking inherited prejudice that is not, without effort, easy to overcome. Yet you’ll find that it, or God, is at the root of all anti-gay marriage arguments. Literally, all of them. Those who make them ought to admit this, at least to themselves, and also admit that neither is a basis for policy. The State should not see a difference between a gay union and a straight one. Calm down and think about it. You know I’m right.
The Times - The Oscars: truly appalling telly
Taken from The Times, 27th February 2012
The great Oscars oxymoron goes unanswered for another year: TV’s biggest night of the year, film’s biggest night of the year, which allegedly celebrates the best in screen-craft — and yet, why is it so appallingly executed as a piece of entertainment? Truly appalling. The land beyond appalling. All that TV and film expertise, that desperate desire to be the ultimate showcase of your art and yet you produce an overlong, self-indulgent and most unforgivably, arse-achingly BORING TV show.
This should be the night where film offers itself to be loved, yet out there, in front of our TVs we sit slack-jawed at the flavourless slop of self-love dished up instead. All that glamour, all those frocks, and it plays out as a bad, strip-lit office party.
The best moment came on E! in the preceding “red carpet” coverage, when Sacha Baron Cohen, dressed as The Dictator, deposited an urn of ashes on Ryan Seacrest, the Mr Perky of American television, whose company produces the “red carpet” show. The ashes were a pancake mix, said Ryan, who attempted to be jovial but was steaming with humiliation and anger, especially as his co-presenters, including Kelly Osbourne, ribbed him about it for the duration of the broadcast. Manning it out made him seem more and more petulant. It was delicious.
The show itself was the usual three-and-a-half hour formless, self-congratulatory love-in, with the added turn-off about being wholly focused on the history of cinema, with montages of famous actors telling how much their eyeballs burnt as they did their day job, how searingly hard it was being THEM. Yes, paid millions and cosseted by agents and assistants… oh how they suffered for their art.
Well, tonight we suffered with them; the evening began with inconsequential awards and unfunny skits — there was a focus group set after the screening of The Wizard of Oz, which was one clunker after another. Cirque du Soleil did some trapeze stuff which proved an effective moment to do some washing-up. Host Billy Crystal provided a “safe” pair of hands, but his face seemed creepily unlined and pasty. His opening skit featured a kiss with George Clooney, but so what? Clooney should really parade a boyfriend to add another layer to all this constant gay jokery.
A room full of unmoving foreheads confronted with having to show emotion is always going to be a tough watch. They even made the Muppets — Kermit and Piggy in a weird, dead double-act moment — seem boring. The Oscars producers made the history of cinema seem like the worst kind of maths homework.
There were some lovely moments but they mostly came in speeches. Streep’s was gracious and fun, the father and daughter from Northern Ireland who won for best documentary seemed overjoyed. Emma Stone was almost funny — acting overwhelmed presenting an award for the first time, but the moment suffered because she was wearing a blood-coloured dress that appeared to be intent on strangling its wearer.
The French were Gallic and crazy and happy as The Artist won everything, but although Uggie the dog was on stage he did nothing. The mass audience would have forgiven anything if Uggie had done something doggy and fun. But no. No fun. Attempts at fun, signs of life: all extinguished. It should be a night of fun: if this is “the gay Superbowl” as has been said, then there are either not enough gay men on the production team or the “fun and gay” chip has been removed from their gay brains. The show needs to be comprehensively re-gayed.
Far from celebrating the history of film the Oscars showed the business in its dead-eyed present form: an industry shamelessly intent on manipulating our emotions and wallets with only the veneer of magic left. It’s tired. And boy, it makes us tired.
(via trippingly)
Brighton
“This is a place that I call my home.”
To build a home - Cinematic Orchestra
