There’s nothing quite like being personally and viciously attacked by the leader of a political party to ruin my really nice nap. This week, Peter Reynolds, presumably awaiting the Mail on Sunday expose that has now been written on him, decided that while waiting for that to come out, he’d take a crack at me.
Imagine you’ve gone to a different country, one where people speak your language but the way they live their lives is completely different to how you do it. Any time you ask someone a question, like what sort of currency they use or what public transport is available, they look at you like you’re crazy and tell you that you should already know. Worse, every so often, others will tease you and point you out to other people as someone who doesn’t get the simplest things. Angry, frustrated and confused, you give up asking questions and try to avoid having to speak to anyone about things you don’t understand. You try to work out what’s going on by watching the other people around you and trying to copy what you see for the duration of your stay.
Now imagine that you are autistic, that that country is your society, and the duration of your stay is the rest of your life. This is the reality for autistic people.
A few months ago, I was deleted by someone on Facebook for making a joke about Christianity that they found in bad taste. It turns out that this had also been fuelled by the fact that I had earlier poured withering scorn on their belief that we should forgive unrepentant rapists and because I had called them sexist and homophobic (which I still believe is true for various reasons, the latest being that they referred to LGBT in their last blogpost as “politically correct lingo”). My subsequent attempts to reconcile with them privately failed miserably, as they sent me increasingly bizarre messages that included mocking me for having a mental breakdown last summer and a lengthy explanation about how they had only started sending me abusive messages only when they considered that our relationship was doomed and that’s why it was justified. I’ve never found “Thou may abuse ex-friends and strangers” in the Bible, at any rate.
I found the hypocrisy of someone sending me messages telling me that I am unconscionably rude and arrogant and then signing them, “Your better” breath-taking. I still find it reasonably incredible that someone can call for a Christian attitude towards men who commit violence against women and then apparently fail to demonstrate it themselves to people who offended them. To this end, I wrote a blogpost on the matter entitled, “A Joke to Delete For? Religious Humour and Hypocrisy on Facebook”. I took it down after a lot of criticism for apparently attacking religious people and because the person involved claimed I was back-biting.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the comments that I received. They ranged from suggesting that I should never have posted the joke at all in order to offending someone’s sensibilities, to the fact that my post was largely intended to publicly proclaim someone to be a hypocrite. (more…)
This article was originally written for a private zine about coming out experiences, and has now been published on LiberateYourself.co.uk.
...this is quite nice.
You know, I was writing my CV today and as I was looking it over, I realised it was quite, um, gay. “Coordinator, LGBT WikiProject”, “Delegate, NUS LGBT Conference”, “Bi rep, UMSU LGBT”. I spent a brief moment thinking that maybe, maybe it would be a bad idea to go around announcing my sexuality to any potential employer looking. Our society’s pretty down with people like me, but there’s still plenty of homophobia going around. So I thought about it for a second. And then I thought, “Yeah, fuck them”, and kept gaying up my CV. It’s like the Graham Norton of CVs now.
Because what’s my life worth if I can’t actually live it? I’ve done my time in the closet. I had my lightbulb moment when I was 14 when I fell for my best friend – she was mildly homophobic, I was in an all girls’ school where I was bullied quite a lot. I subsequently spent three miserable years trying to hide that fact from her and everyone else. I knew I was one of millions of LGBT people, I knew that teenager-falls-for-same-sex-best-friend is nothing new, but that’s really all besides the point when you’re the only one you know, you know? The first time I met another gay person I broke out in a cold sweat. The first time I came out on a message board, I realised a friend had once used the same message board, freaked out and spammed fifty other forums so that one post wouldn’t show up on my account if she had happened to look at it. Sometimes, I literally struggled to breathe. (more…)
Because I and apparently so many other continue to enjoy my best Facebook stati post of 2010, I have done the same again this year. As last year, here is a selection of my Facebook stati over the past year that I thought emerged from the better recesses of my mind and my wanderings over the Internet. New and improved: now I have included images and videos! Lol.
This blogpost is in two parts, and the first part is available here.
* One of the things that I do like about OKCupid is that it sends me several emails a month saying “Someone HAS RATED YOU VERY ATTRACTIVE. How awesome is that?” Which is, you know, nice.
* Sarah: “Why do we have a signed photo of Jean Claude Van Damme on the wall?” *Argument erupts between both parents about who put the photo there and why. Both deny responsibility.*
* In other news, Mo Saqib lost his latest bid for power and didn’t get elected to Block. Still a cheat though, lest we forget.” [This isn't funny or interesting, I just want everyone to know he cheated in his election campaign.]
* After undergrad you think you know everything, after a master’s you realise you know nothing, after a PhD, you know that that’s ok cos no-one else knows anything either.
* Ah, the sun is out, I am wearing shorts, this can only mean one thing – MASS CONSUMPTION OF HUMMOUS.
* You know the point at which you are absent-mindedly inserting cell spacing into a html table in your PHP template footer is probably the point at which you have lost the right to say “oh, I know nothing about building websites”.
* Folks who tell me that animals aren’t people have never seen a guinea pig establish just how pissed off it is with you despite not having eyebrows or facial expressions.
* “In the film, the anarchist revolutionary V incites the population of Britain to don his mask and rise up against the government, because nothing captures the spirit of anarchy better than a mob of people in identical uniforms unquestioningly obeying one man.”
* “I got back and was talking to- oh, I’ve forgotten her name again. A girl with an odd name.” “Maeve?” “Yeah, Maeve.”
* Dear bank: if your “secure payment systems” are so secure I can’t use them, it’s not me losing money.
* Miles: “By what standard am I a member of the Green Party?” Me: “They’ve just sent you election ballot papers in the post?” Miles: “Good point”. Miles Battye, possibly the only person in the world who could’ve accidentally joined the Green Party.
* Ben Ali (Tunisia), Mubarak (Egypt), Gadaffi (Libya), Porter (NUS)… #ihearttherevolution
* Sarah McCulloch has had many guinea pigs: Robbie, Oscar, Alfred, Vivian, Cyril… and Squash. Guess which one I didn’t name…
* “These days, the equivalent [of Dante's Inferno] would be if Eminem released a 40-track album in which he personally named you and called you a fuckhead in every single song, and it went triple Platinum.”
* “Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
* Passer-by: “Are you vegetarian?” Sarah: “Yes, how can you tell?” Passer-by: “You just bought seven packs of half-price quorn pieces.” Ah…
* It’s 1:12pm in the McCulloch-Allen household, and so far only Sarah has managed to get dressed. Mummy McCulloch has scribbled some cooking times on some of the packets from Marks and Spencer and wandered off, Patrick got up half an hour ago, and Cyril, Vivian and Alfred have all been picked up and petted repeatedly and are dealing with their trauma by munching hay and freaking out at the sound of someone coughing.
* Anon1: “How are you eating?!” Anon2:” With great interest and not a little anaesthesia.”
* Sarah: “Eww, this knife has lube on it.” Five minutes later, Jess picks up the same knife. Jess: “Eww, you’re right…”
*
* Sarah is not in the office right now, but please leave a message and she will ignore it until she is back from funtimes with Robbie Court.
* “Would you be prepared to die for what you believe in?” “Absolutely, but right now it’s a hugely inefficient use of resources.”
* John Copestake: “No, I’m sorry, they can’t do whatever they want just because they put up a sign. I could put up a sign saying that I will eat your spleen if you go into my garden, but that doesn’t mean I can.”
* Sarah McCulloch is just so efficient sometimes she just wants to reward herself with a biscuit.
* Me to mum: “Why the hell are you wearing a shirt with the mandelbrot set on it? That’s so geeky!” Mum to me: “Says the girl who’s wearing a shirt with an IPv4 related joke on it?”
* Perhaps Ste Monaghan and Robi Folkard can explain the symbolism of the part of my dream that involved sex with Ed Miliband. Am I subconsciously expressing my desire for collectivist reformism? :P
* And switching between my Digg, Twitter, Facebook and blog, checking stats, tweaking content and adding friends, I realised I was Geek.
* Sarah McCulloch doesn’t think words can really express the feeling on seeing the words “Add as friend” next to someone to whom they should never have been attached.
Because I and apparently so many other continue to enjoy my best Facebook stati post of 2010, I have done the same again this year. As last year, here is a selection of my Facebook stati over the past year that I thought emerged from the better recesses of my mind and my wanderings over the Internet. New and improved: now I have included images and videos! Lol.
This blogpost is in two parts, and the second part will be published tomorrow.
* Random status I just looked at – Commenter 1: “Anyone with mental health issues should be in hospital not prison.” Commenter 2: “Precisely, but [person who has just suggested flaying paedophiles alive and rolling them in salt] here *seems* to be advocating torturing/killing them.” Commenter 3: “Everyone is entitled to an opinion.”
* *sigh* Putting xXx in Google was never going to bring me Vin Diesel’s cinematic masterpiece…
* Hehehehe. “I’m a Lib Dem candidate, would you like to take my deposit?”
* “Socialists promote the vanguard party, which I have to say I often find counter-productive. But on the other hand, the anarchists talk about ‘organising’ and then don’t turn up to anything.” – Intervention at a talk on “Consensus, democracy and leadership”
* “We’re still bitter about 24 not ending with Jack Bauer exploding from all the accumulated urine in his body, like our write-in campaign suggested” – Oh Cracked…
* SKYPE: “We do not give refunds to people who are victims of fraud.” SARAH: “mmhmm.” *files complaint with PayPal* PAYPAL: “Yep, we’ll refund you from Skype’s Paypal account, fraud’s a nasty thing.” SKYPE: “…and what we mean by ‘don’t give refunds’ was ‘fraud’s terrible, and here’s your money back policy on non-refunds, what policy?” Bastards.
* “Fully half the crime-fighting heroes ever have been variations of the “Punches people really hard” power, but when you’re dealing with four-story tall robots that also turn into tanks, it’s like a particularly athletic moth launching itself at the sun.” I love you, Cracked.
* “I waited for years for someone to say what I thought should be said. But no one did. So I started saying it myself.” – John A. Erickson
* Sarah: “You didn’t bring the chair!” Joe Baines-Holmes: “I *did* bring the chair, that is why I am carrying a chair.”
* Nickelback: *If everyone loved and nobody lied* Van Occupanther: “Then they’d all be fucking aspergic!”
* “Hilton family hilariously told the press that no one should watch the video, because Paris was “under age” at the time. Yeah, that’ll scare the Internet off. “Please, we beg you, our daughter was merely a nubile, young, wild teen at the time she performed her extensive fellatio on this video that you can download for free, right now, but shouldn’t.”"
* “Taylor is hard but fair, and the advice she gives her charges (wash your hair, be punctual, don’t get a giant cannabis leaf tattooed on your neck) is broad enough to be adopted by the viewers.”
* Nearly left the house without my waistcoat. Never again.
* Sarah: Revise. Revise. REVISE.
Joe Baines-Holmes: Look, we just visited a nuclear bunker, give me five minutes on Facebook, alright?
* “Unlike most other camps in the Nazi concentration camp system, and even unlike other extermination camps, Treblinka II was not so much a “camp” as it was purely a factory of death.” Wikipedia wins the award for neutrality.
* God, it must be so demoralising to be a “Zimbabwean human rights lawyer”.
* “If it helps, try to remember that you’re still one of the one percent of humanity that was born in a time and place where there is such a thing as anesthesia.”
* “The [Kinsey] scale goes from zero (so heterosexual you can impregnate women over the phone) to six (The Literal Gay Lord, savage emperor of the Gays).”
* “..so, did you like the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili at the beginning of Civilisation 4?” Ever the charmer at small talk, Bainsey.
* Dear grumpy white guy, I am aware that the people sitting next to me seem to think that their incomprehensible discussions of corporation tax in some south asian language will become clearer by trying to talk as loudly as possible, but the answer is to tell them to stop trying to drown each other in sound, not to walk out in passive aggressive annoyance. Lots of love, Sarah.
* Sarah McCulloch appears, incredibly, to have cut open her wrist on the zip of her own trousers.
* Sarah McCulloch took two bags to north campus today. Hers contained homemade vegetarian bolognese, cracked bulgar wheat with chickpeas and sweetcorn, a pot of hummous and four wholewheat rolls. Bainesy’s contained 56 packets of walker’s crisps. You’re going to die young Joe Baines-Holmes.
* What I like about Glee is they have outrageous gay (Kurt), normal gay (Blaine), homophobic closeted gay (Karofsky) and evil closeted lesbian (Santana) and self-accepting label-resisting bisexual (Brittney). What I don’t understand, however, is why everyone else in America is enjoying what is basically becoming High School Queer As Folk.
* Sarah McCulloch has no hair, and it’s interesting to consider that it depends on what part of my body that has no hair that makes me considered either more masculine or feminine.
* Looking at the orly owl makes me really, really happy. It’s happy! Be happy! Yay!
* Sarah McCulloch smells like a sea mineral now, apparently.
* I think I just actually found an entirely legitimate reason for putting drugs on UMSU society expenses…
* No niceties from the Guardian – “Before Sarah Palin was understood to be the most catastrophically stupid politician of our age…”
* Sex Education of the Future: “Never connect without a firewall!”
* Me on why I can’t donate platelets: “I have tiny scrawny veins that love me and my blood and won’t give it up without considerable battle.”
* Love the way, btw that Syria is currently using tanks against its people, riots have just broken out in Uganda, and the only uncensored radio station in Libya has been bombed three times, but my God! the Duchess of Cambridge is wearing Sarah Burton!
* Me: “Did you kill the little squidgy thing?” Mum: “No! …I may have done.”
Holding hands is a sign of friendship in many countries, and is totally gay in others. Make your choice.
A lot of people spend time thinking about their partners and how to make their relationships work out and get better, but I wonder how many of us really put as much thought and effort into our friendships? I don’t think it is any secret to those of you reading this who know me personally that I have had a lot of drama llama this year over my friendships, and a lot of the people whom I have spoken to about the issue seem to find it quite hard to understand why I have been so deeply affected by the actions of my friends.
But why the hell wouldn’t I? Your friends are going to outlast most of our partners at this age, and you have more of them to manage. But for some reason friends are dropping of our to-do list of things that are important. The Naked Photo Test, or, to whom would you be prepared to confide a photo of you doing something utterly shameful and embarrassing, shows that most people have two people they really trust. But 25% of people don’t have anyone.
I just say this to make the point that friends are important. In fact, I think you should all stop reading here right now, and go tell one of your friends that you love them. I’ll wait right here. Go on.
—
No, actually go do it. Text, email, FB, just go do it.
—
Ok. You have no doubt made someone feel quite happy and quite confused. If you couldn’t think of anyone you would be prepared to say that to, you should stop reading this article and go make some friends immediately. Actual friends, not activity buddies.
A Friends' Meeting House. Nothing to do with this article, but it was a funny search result.
And the reason that I make that distinction is because what I really want to talk about is not how to make friends, but knowing when you need to lose them. See, I had a friend, whom I finally got round to blocking a year and a half after I realised that our friendship was screwed, in June. We were not very nice to each other in that time, with particularly memorable nastiness from them including:
* breaking into my computer and my email
* threatening to use confidential information obtained from me via my flatmate to try to break up my best friend from their boyfriend and boasting to me about it
* telling people that I was supporting in an election that I was publicly telling everyone to vote for their opponent
* telling me they had never received an important document that I needed them to fill out when they had actually opened it in front of my flatmate and left it in his room
* telling a work colleague that I am mentally ill
And I kind of just put up with all of that out of some folorn hope that they would stop being a twat, because I loved them, a great deal. And also because I was a moron – looking back at that list, it seems almost incredible that I harboured some desire of rekindling a friendship with someone who had no qualms about hurting me in every way imaginable for a fleeting second of gain.
Because it seems despite what we’re told by our culture and media, that love conquers all (amor omnia vincit, for you geeks out there), that all you need is love, that if you just communicate your feelings, everything will be fine with everyone – well, it seems that’s just drivel sometimes. (Particularly if, as I suspect, your friend happens to be a psychopath – but that’s not relevant to you. Update: link changed because the Guardian one died)
This was what came up when searching 'psychopath' - I'm using a better search engine form now on, I swear.
What finally made me metaphorically shut the door in the end was the discovery that this person had deleted me from Facebook (I will not pretend that I was all love and bouquets – I gave as good as I got, but I do claim self-defence). By bizarre coincidence, I saw them in person about twenty minutes later, and we spent the entire evening getting drunk and discussing our “issues”. We talked about “respecting each other’s space” and “not being a twat” anymore. We said we wanted to be friends. I went to bed hopeful, if somewhat skeptical. I woke up the next day to greet a hangover and the news that they’d been planning to screw me over the next day the entire time we’d been talking (I’d call being able to get on with someone superficially and promising to repair your relationship whilst simultaneously preparing the opposite deeply psychopathic, actually – but we’re not talking about that right now). I was devastated.
It turns out that relationships that you have with other people that are “ambivalent friendships” – i.e. you have some good times with them but they also take every opportunity to kick you when you’re down, then swear they’re sorry and make it up to you, then kick you again – are actually far more harmful to people psychologically than if you just hate someone. You know where you stand with people who just plain despise you. What I’ve learnt from this experience is that letting someone continue to drain you of your energy and happiness because they’re a short-termist selfish pathological liar, albeit one that you’re quite fond of, is ultimately going to leave you with depression in the short term and stress-related health problems in the long term. True friends are people who are worth fighting for – friends that you sort of keep around because they’ll mutter nice things to you when you want to talk about the fact that they’re making you miserable, are not.
Remember when Joey made Chandler sit in a box over Thanksgiving as a way of proving their friendship? That's what I like to see.
After finally ridding myself of the expectation that I would ever have a meaningful friendship with this person again, I swore to myself in July that no friend of mine would get to string me along again with nice words whilst ultimately hurting me with their actions. I looked up non-violent communication, I read about dealing with difficult people, and then I assessed who among my friends was getting me down.
Some of those people have been deleted and forgotten (deletion from Facebook being the ultimate sign of disfavour…). Some I’ve realised that the way that I talk to them is causing the friendship dynamic that is getting us down, and I have talked it over with them to sort it out – that’s ongoing. Someone with whom I was developing a business idea was told in no uncertain terms that I was no longer prepared to tolerate the way they behaved towards me – they continued, and I duly ended that aspect of our friendship, to their surprise. I am hopeful that that particular friendship will now be much stronger without any more resentment laid upon it.
I feel like I now have a lot more control over my life, and I no longer have any “ambivalent friendships” that I think have no future. I cannot help but regret that I had to trash a friendship that had meant so much to me in the past, but what I really understand now is that you cannot allow the past to draw a veil over the fact that someone is being an irredeemable arse in the present. Life’s too short.
I invite you all to look at your friendships, and see who you would entrust your Naked Photo to (maybe if you haven’t told them you love them already, you should just go quickly do that now, this article’s nearly done), and who you’re ultimately friends with because you don’t want to face up to the reality of the fact that they make you miserable. Don’t let someone get you down because they only say they like you.
Oh, and if you’re reading this and I haven’t sent you an email telling you I’m not happy with our friendship? I love you.
Every year I try to donate a portion of my income to charity. This year its been a bit lower because I wasn’t getting lots of money from the Student Loans Company. I used to try to find a single charity to donate to, such as the Iranian Queer Railroad, to whom I donated in memory of my friend Jeff, but this year, as last year, I donated to several different charities and write about them here. However this year, I have also added charities you can volunteer for if you don’t have any money to give.
The Lama Foundation is one of the few intentional communities left over from the 1960s. It’s a non-denominational spiritual community that is, quite frankly, AMAZING, and everyone should go visit it. There are statues of Quan Yin by the kitchen, Sacred Hearts over the door, water goddesses by the spring, and hindu gods in alcoves all over the places, random images of gurus and teachers scattered on every wall and in every room (which were all built by hand over decades of work). And most importantly, people everywhere giving their time and love to maintain a community where you can just be yourself and everyone likes you for it. It is awesome.
I have never felt so happy about giving large amounts of money to the Lama Foundation. When you turn up, their cars are battered beyond recognition, the building are home-made from straw and mud, and they don’t have indoor toilets. Every dollar you donate goes on feeding people who come to visit, to putting on programmes, to supporting the stuff that needs to be done instead of making things look good. Really, go check them out. They want to build a new roof for the main dome complex that will last the next fifty years, go donate!
The Albert Kennedy Trust was founded in 1989 to provide LGBT young people in crisis with accommodation and support. It was named after Albert Kennedy, a 16 year old Mancunian who fell to his death from a car park while trying to flee homophobic bullying.
They regularly have to turn away homeless LGBT teenagers, because they don’t have room to take care of them all. I am not, unfortunately, able to offer foster care because of that whole being-a-student-and-moving-every-year thing, but if you have the time, they’d appreciate that a lot more than money. Although money is also useful…
Yep, I’ve donated money to the drugs charity that I helped found. Always be suspicious of the person who won’t put their money where their mouth is, or expect other people to pay for their charitable endeavours.
The Re:Vision Drug Policy Network is a national charity aiming to empower young people to campaign against the war on drugs. The aforementioned “war” is often used to destroy the lives of young people under the bizarre illusion that this will somehow protect them. It’s therefore important that we as young people stand up and say “nuh uh.” We stand for the control and regulation of all drugs – it’s a little ambitious, but we’re confident we can make an impact. We started up in March and are looking to start doing some serious stuff from September. If you don’t have any money, we’ll take your time instead. :)
So, Harold Camping, a small-time Christian preacher told us that the end of the world was coming last Saturday, when 200 million Christians would rise up off the ground and go to heaven while the rest of us mooched around murdering each other until Judgment Day in October sometime.
Pretty much everyone who doesn’t listen to his radio shows found the concept pretty damn funny, lots of people held rapture parties, etc. More serious minded Christians pointed out that the New Testament is pretty clear on the fact that you can’t predict the end of the world by adding some numbers together – Jesus himself says “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” (Matt. 24:36). But mostly, we all took the piss. It’s a funny idea.
Come 5pm my time, I posted on a friend’s Facebook Wall, “So, um, you haven’t felt the urge to float upwards at all?” I was expecting some kind of response along the lines, “Oh, Harold Camping is an idiot, something-interesting-about-said-person’s-views-on-eschatology” I was mildly surprised to get the response “fuck off you rude bitch” and then to be promptly deleted as a friend. I was even more surprised to get the response when I asked what he was doing by Facebook message that “you compared me to the lunatic fringes. I am completely fed up with your lack of respect and rudeness. Mocking my faith is completely unnacceptable and reveals you as the hypocrit you are.”
Well, look at me, mocking my faith. I'm a hypocrite, natch.
Now, setting aside the comment I could make about someone expressing their frustration with my “rudeness” by telling me to “fuck off you rude bitch” and then calling *me* a hypocrite, I must take issue with these accusations. I am deeply religious, I was well before this person decided to start church shopping, and perhaps my relative confidence in my identity is why I can take criticism of my faith and he can’t. Because take criticism I do, and I have yet to delete anyone for it (except for that one person who started claiming that Hamas had the right to demand the UN teach Holocaust denial in Gazan schools, but that’s less criticism and more anti-semitism).
I’m not a fan of Christianity, I won’t pretend that is not the case. However, the reality is that a lot of people profess Christianity, including some people I love dearly, and if we don’t find a way of politely turning a blind eye to the fact that Christianity itself states it is incompatible with everything else, we end up with crusades and jihads and segregated communities, and I don’t really think that anyone wants that.
But that doesn’t mean pretending that freedom of religion trumps freedom of expression. You have the right to go to church, to take communion, and to really, earnestly, believe that everyone around you is going to hell, and I have the right to call you an idiot and take you to task for corrupting my scriptures. But conversely, I have a right to go to synagogue and believe that God created a world-wide flood several thousand years ago for which there is little to no archaeological evidence and that’s why I can’t work on a Saturday, and you have the right to tell me that I am an idiot and take me to task for that.
Faith is not, and should not be, exempt from scrutiny, humour, criticism, and parody, no more than any other subject which you or I may hold dear, be that politics, family, or relationships. You may call me up on any of my beliefs and, believe me, a lot of people do. To call me a hypocrite for criticising Christianity when I field regular hostile questioning about everything I believe from my wide circle of outspoken atheist friends is simply to misunderstand what that word means.
Sometimes a good dose of satire is what we all need to gain perspective.
Although I got deleted, a few friends commented on the wallpost saying that he had overreacted somewhat. In response, this person wrote “that is like writing “looking forward to your 72 virgins?” on a muslims wall when there is a terrorist attack. completely unnacceptable.” Indeed, writing such a thing would be completely unacceptable. Making an insensitive and tactless joke following a highly emotive tragedy, however, is not exactly analogous to making a knowing joke following a mildly embarrassing incident by someone else to whom the recipient has a link. An actual analogy to the 72 virgins comment would be writing “I’m planning to start a bakery and I hear you have some ovens going spare?” on my wall on Holocaust Memorial Day, or “What’s the difference between Jesus and a painting? It takes only one nail to hang a painting!” on a Christian’s wall on Good Friday. Those are just lame and offensive.
A much more appropriate comparison would be posting on my wall, “so, how can I serve you, O overlady?” the day after Ovadia Yosef, a respected but ultra-Orthodox/Haredi rabbi, delivered a sermon in which he said that the sole purpose of non-Jews was to serve Jews. I can tell you now that my reaction would not have been “fuck off” but “lol, yeah, bit embarrassing, that guy…”, maybe do a little debunking if I felt like it. Telling someone that they’re a “rude bitch”? Perhaps not. An (atheist) friend who does Physics noted that an analogy for him would be “if someone asked me how the search for those 7 extra dimensions was doing”. You can’t disavow members of your own community, but you can fail to defend them when they do something demonstrably stupid, and dare I say it, you can take a joke aimed at them in good humour. Such has been the reaction of most Christians I have spoken to about Harold Camping, because of course I didn’t single out this person for my “abuse”, as I am sure he would like to believe.
Swearing always makes you seem more Godly. ...right?
I’m pretty sure that this person, whom a few friends have seen since and he seems somewhat embarrassed about this entire episode, wants to believe that he is persecuted for his faith, as he further commented that I deemed his “”Christian views towards forgiveness” (paraphrase) as “anti-woman.”". I was genuinely saddened by that one, because I said no such thing. In a Facebook post I had made on a book extract by a woman who had had her rapist jailed twenty years after he and two of his friends had drugged and raped her at a party, I had actually said that his accusing a woman he had never met of lying about her trauma after rape was sexist. (No, I’m actually not making that up. He wrote “just because someone is a rape victim, it doesn’t mean she is a portal to objective truth, her claims must be subject to the same scrutiny as his … Her attempts to belittle his ‘spiritual awakening’ indicated to me someone who doesn’t comprehend the depths that a person can change.”) I then said that his motivations for accusing her of such a thing derived from his Christian convictions, which were blinding him to the facts actually presented in the article.
There are some very interesting analyses out there to say that Christian attitudes towards forgiveness *are* anti-woman (because some denominations encourage women to stay silent about rape, assault and other abuse in the name of “forgiving” their attacker, who are often fellow Christians – the Amish are especially bad for this). However, that really wasn’t the point, and I have no desire to promote or develop such ideas further – forgiveness is important for any traumatic event committed by or against you, but it’s not an excuse for inaction. If someone cannot recognise that refusing a woman justice after rape because her attacker wrote her an insincere letter saying sorry, then they cannot recognise how they are perpetuating a blame culture in which women are expected to just deal with men’s “uncontrollable” desires and consequent begrudging apologies. And that is really just sad for all of us who have to keep living in the world that culture creates.
I’m really not kidding that not actively batting down excuses for rapists encourages rape, and I think that it is deeply hypocritical to claim that Christianity is the most moral and true religion while advocating policies that I cannot help but see as actively immoral. Allow me to demonstrate this and quote a good article entitled, “Feminism 101: Helpful Hints for Dudes, Part 3”
A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?
Rapists do.
They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.
Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.
If one in twenty guys (or more) is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, in a pick-up game of basketball, at a bar, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can’t tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It’s not like they announce themselves.
But, here’s the thing. It’s very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another, someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn’t mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed.
Or maybe you didn’t laugh. Maybe it just wasn’t a very funny joke. So maybe you just didn’t say anything at all.
And, decent guy who would never condone rape, who would step in and stop rape if he saw it, who understands that rape is awful and wrong and bad, when you laughed? When you were silent?
That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.
You. The rapist’s comrade.
No-one asks to be raped. No-one is to blame for being raped.
I’m not sorry for making a joke about religion, and I simply don’t have sympathy for people who accuse me of being abusive in abusive messages. I am very grateful that I live in a relatively free society devoid of theocracy, and I’m glad the worst I have to fear is being deleted from Facebook rather than having my head cut off. I think it is a moral imperative for anyone religious who cares about the dignity of the human condition to call sexists sexist when they’re being sexist, regardless of how much it upsets them, because, maybe, one day, they’ll stop. “The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
The greatest irony, of course, is that someone who demanded that I forgive an unrepentant rapist apparently couldn’t find it in his heart to forgive me for my “sin”. But I think I can forgive him for that…
So, the 30 Day Song Challenge is sweeping Facebook at the moment, and as with many of my friends, I spent a spare few hours pondering such existential questions as “But what song defines *me* as a person?” and “What does *guilt* really mean in this context?”. From this, the list below was produced. There’s more than 30 songs, I didn’t do it in thirty days, whether a Wii game counts as a song is rather dubious, but it was definitely a challenge. And here’s (what I consider to be) some ace music.
This article is in three parts, and the first part is here, and the second here.
day 21 – a song that you listen to when you’re happy
This makes me so happy. How can you listen to Poppi Holla by Chincane and not be even more happy?!
day 22 – a song that you listen to when you’re sad
When I am down, Cher lifts me up. This is a Song for the Lonely, don’t you know.
day 23 – a song that you want to play at your wedding
Voodoo Child by Rogue Trader. Because I did play it at my wedding, and it was awesome.
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG2w1k1_BZ4
day 24 – a song that you want to play at your funeral
Linkin Park again, Leave Out All the Rest. See, they have a song for every eventuality! Sod off, music fascists.
day 25 – a song that makes you laugh
Being a Dickhead’s Cool is funny, mainly because I know so many people who are actually a “part time blogger with my own jewellery line, which is a mix of religious iconography, kinda with a Saved by the Bell vibe?” Lols.
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVmmYMwFj1I
day 26 – a song that you can play on an instrument
Dunno if the Nintendo Wii counts as an instrument, but in Rhythm Parade, the music only continues if you hit all the right buttons in sequence, so I guess it kinda counts. I LOVE marching bands, so this is really fun to do, if hard – took me six hours to get a perfect score on the Advanced level.
day 27 – a song that you wish you could play
I did in fact briefly download the sheet music to this song, but while A Thousand Miles by Vanessa Carlton is beautiful and mellifluous, I am dyslexic and never made it past my first term’s worth of piano lessons. A doomed dream, I think.
day 28 – a song that makes you feel guilty
This is Your Life, asks Switchfoot, are you who you want to be? NOOOOOOOOO, argh, must be more productive and useful as a human being. *guilt guilt guilt*
day 29 – a song from your childhood
When I was growing up, I listened to three things: Queen, Flanders and Swann, and the Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat soundtrack. They were just the cassettes my mum had around at the time, so I ended up with a very odd childhood mainly filled with rock, folk music, and the odd tape about The Snowman that came with Tetley teabags. Hammer to Fall is one of Queen’s best.
day 30 – your favorite song at this time last year
My introduction to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face was as I was walking to a lecture and heard someone playing it very loudly in their car. It took some garbled half-sung rendering of it to a friend a few hours later to work out what the hell it was (being completely unable to identify the “Poker Face” of the song and mishearing it as “[indeterminate garbling] ger faith”) and then a new love with born.
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