Shagging the Tudors and Stuarts

While I’m having a go at the Scots, I am going to settle down and have a thoroughly good bitch about Mary Queen of.

I have finally pinned down what annoys me about Mary Stuart-Darnley-Bothwell or whatever her surname was. Some people are ruled by their heads, some are ruled by their hearts and some do all their thinking with organs that are slightly lower down, and I suspect Mary Stuart was one of these. There are lots of good things about having a powerful libido, however far too many women whose cognitive abilities have been washed away by their hormones deny that they have a strong sex drive and present themselves as being sensitive, emotional or romantic, because it’s nicer than being a hot babe. Their admirers describe them as ‘passionate’ though that’s often no more than a polite euphemism. In fact many of them are drama queens, and the rest of them are just plain needy because all they want to do is buck like rabbits but they can’t face the implications, so they wrap their lust up in pink bows and say that they are longing for a relationship. As I said, Mary Stuart’s series of overly-emotional and frequently disastrous marriages suggest to me that she came into this category of self-indulgent and rather precious women.

If we look at Elizabeth we find a much cooler customer. Whether or not Elizabeth bedded her various favourites is a matter of speculation but whatever her sexual history she didn’t for a moment get off on the emotion of it all. She sometimes comes across as ruthless and cold-hearted, but in fact I think it is simply that she had a very strong survival instinct, honed by the extreme precariousness of her upbringing as the sometime illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII. Elizabeth could never afford to put a hair wrong; her mother had been executed while Elizabeth was still an infant and she had veered from heir to bastard and back again depending on the political and religious inclinations of her father and siblings. Whatever other speculations you make about Elizabeth’s sexuality and gender, it is quite clear that personal survival was a primary goal.

Mary by contrast was raised as the golden little darling of the French court, feted, spoiled and flattered, and never developed any of the survival instincts which Elizabeth learned as a toddler. Maybe Mary didn’t need them, maybe she was just incapable of developing them. Mary comes across as emotionally self-indulgent and short term: Liz Taylor to Elizabeth’s Katherine Hepburn.

It is probably unfair of me to admire Elizabeth’s self-control and dislike to what I see as Mary’s self-indulgence, but women who wail about love and betrayal when all they want is a good shag scrape on my nerves like chalk on a blackboard. If you want a good shag, go out and shag someone.

Right. That’s the Scots insulted. Again. I’m off to read up about Owain Glyndwr now.

Not so decayed

At what point does “immaturity” become “youthfulness”?

“You’re so im-mat-chure” was the deepest insult my teenage peers could sling at anyone and we were desperate to grow up, so when did the tables get reversed?

I confused a colleague yesterday about something, and she checked my age with elegant delicacy. It turns out she thought I was a good decade younger than in fact I am. I cannot pretend I didn’t feel a little smug. Mind you, it probably has more to do with her own inexperience than anything else and of course the one advantage of superfluous avoirdupois is that excess oestrogen’s good for the skin. (I am sure the medics who read this will put me right if I’ve got that wrong).

But on the other hand, what about that extra decade of experience? Where did that go? I have learned so much, done so much, felt so much, grown so much in the last ten years. What about that?

Perhaps the reason she thinks I am so much younger than I am (and the reason I’ve pulled the one I’ve pulled) is that I can behave - well - rather immaturely. I flirt. I giggle. I swear like a trooper. (Make that a fucking trooper). I kick back. I tease my colleagues. I make jokes in meetings. I laugh. I don’t flick ink-pellets across the office though; there are limits, you understand.

Surely at some point all this becomes inappropriate, mutton behaving like lamb?

When does immaturity become a good thing? At what point is growing up bad?

I have an irritating ex-boss who runs marathons which more than proves we are members of entirely different species. She told me today about a mutual colleague who’d told his wife she was “becoming a very beautiful middle aged women”. Now, I like that as a compliment. I like it when people think I’m beautiful, I prefer the maturity of men who can appreciate a woman over 30 and maybe our mutual colleague just likes MILFs and is glad he’s married to one.

I was bemused by Marathon Woman’s horror and couldn’t get her to consider that “middle aged” might be a statement not a judgement. I find being middle aged rather useful, not to mention subversively powerful.

So how come being immature was the worst thing we could be when we were teenagers, and now it’s a compliment?

Swallow the dictionary

I once told a friend that I was having sex there isn’t a term for. Spent him mad with prurient speculation for a week.

Hah!

Serves him right, the dirty-minded bastard.

I quite like being in a minority so obscure it’s nameless. It makes me feel special, unique and ever so slightly smug. Not attractive attributes, I’ll admit.

I was of course told that I was a SOFFA. Significant-Other, Friends and FAmily. It’s a term I dislike because it’s too generic. It implies that it’s ok for trans-men and women to have social networks or be in emotional or domestic relationships but that no-one would actually want to get down and dirty with them. There’s no suggestion at all of body fluids or pulled muscles. It looks like a typo, an’ I don’ wanna be no fuckin’ typo.

Someone suggested pansexual. This sounds unnecessarily goatish to me. Urbandictionary.com gives:

2. Noun: A person who is sexually interested in other people regardless of gender including males, females, transsexuals, transvestites, gender benders, hermaphrodites, intersexuals, androgynous people, and those with sex-chromosome anomaly such as klinefelter syndrome or turner syndrome.

Ye-es. But I don’t wander around like a bitch in heat. As his gynaecologist told me, “…. you look so straight”. Mind you, he’d had a couple to drink or he wouldn’t have said it. Bless. But the thing is, he’s right, I am pretty straight. I’m just not heterosexual. Or not just heterosexual.

Pansexual 3. Noun: … a person who associates with people of all sexual orientations but is not necessarily interested in sex with people of all sexes or genders ….

That’s for fag-hags who want to graduate.

Then there’s polysexual. Which sounds like parrots to me. Psittacosis should not be a sexually transmitted disease. Urbandictionary.com describes polysexuality thus:

to be attracted to or sexually aroused by a variety of different objects, lifestyles or activities, for example, learning, reading, gardening, massage etc.

Now, I’ll admit that a good pun can make me whimper and I made inappropriate noises at work the first time I saw visual thesaurus , but I’m not actually polysexual. I’m not even that into toys.

Finally, I’ve come across the term Anthrosexual, which urbandictionary.com defines like this:

Anthrosexuality … means being attracted to humans. The word ‘anthro’ comes from the Greek ‘anthropos’ which means ‘man’ or ‘human’.

Anthrosexuality is … like bisexuality, except that it refers to all genders and ‘in-betweens’. It is the blindness to another’s gender or sex. The personality of a person is what attracts an anthosexual person and the connection that is shared between two people.

Anthrosexuals don’t have a list of acceptable genders and lifestyles. Instead, they have no list and see people for what they really are: Human Beings. (My italics).

I can recognise myself in that definition. But I do wish, firstly, that it wasn’t obviously going to be the pose de jour for skinny little gothettes with more sincerity than sense, and secondly that it didn’t sound like sex with a biological weapon.

The one I go to bed with has an unusual back story, but it doesn’t feature Porton Down.

Category Errors #2 - Ann Widdecombe

Ok, not a category error as such, but a mental derailment all the same.

There I was, chatting away at the WI Christmas party with another member. It turns out that she’d had a pub about 20 miles from where I used to live. It further turns out she used to work for the local MP running his constituency office. It further further turns out she is a raving, raging, spittle-frothing tory.

We had a slightly one-sided conversation about Wonderful Tories She Had Met. “Michael Hestletine, he’s a very interesting man”. “That Boris Johnson, everyone under-estimates him”. Even, “Jeffrey Archer did a lot of good” and “Margaret Thatcher, what a lovely lady”.

I made suitably non-committal replies. I was brought up nicely. I have good manners.

Then she said

“Ann Widdecombe, I’m a big fan. She talks such sense in the Daily Express every Wednesday”.

(The Daily Express thinks that Prince Philip took out a contract on the Princess of Wales, so we are not talking about evidence-based news-reporting, really).

Now it may be that there is much that is great and good about Ann Widdecombe, but unfortunately friends of mine used her name as a safe word during what the Daily Express would probably call “kinky sex sessions” and this struck me as being a rather good idea. You see, unless you are Paul Merton (who is a twisty so-and-so if ever there was one) you cannot think about Ann Widdecombe and sex at the same time. Or not in a good way, anyway.

Try it.

It cannot be done.

Not without feeling enormous physical and mental discomfort.

On the other hand if you have summoned the spirit of la Widdecombe to rescue you from pleasure past bearing, then she is inextricably bound up in your mind with kinky sex. Not a pleasant image I grant you, but that is rather the point.

So there you are. Not actually a category error. But while “rabid Tories I have known” might be a suitable subject for a chat at the WI, “choosing and using a good safeword for bondage games” isn’t really.

Or not at the one I go to, anyway.

Disgrace notes

2004. I am waiting in the foyer of a London hotel to meet the man I am having an affair with. My handbag is large and slung from my shoulder. It contains a selection of scarves, condoms, lube and other bits and pieces. I have no other baggage. It is February and there is a light sprinkling of snow on the ground. I am wearing a fur coat. The young man at the desk accepts my payment up front without bothering to ask if I will be wanting a newspaper in the morning. I realise that he assumes that I will be making a profit out of the afternoon, though in fact I am an amateur doing it for fun.

---

2006. My lover wakes me suddenly out of a sleep he didn’t know I was having. There is some confusion and I end up crying as I tend to when woken quickly from post-coital sleep. He ends up bewildered and distressed. Neither of us know what we are fighting about. Neither of us want a complex scene. As I go down on him, I reflect that oral sex is the great ender of squabbles and that if it weren’t for the risk of infection I would like a tongue piercing. Sometimes I wish I was not quite so sensible.

---

1982. Students. I have arranged a girls’ night out with a friend. I have a shower, wash my hair and I ruefully acknowledge as I shave my legs that I am preparing my body as I would for a lover. Later, I realise that sex with another woman is the nearest I will get to sex with myself; I love the soft mirror-image of myself in bed beside me.

---

1983. Still students. I am at a party, a formal ball in fact. The young men are in DJs the young women in satiny gowns. It is late and four of us are piled, kitten-like, in a huge arm chair. For no particular reason I am kissing her escort, and she is kissing mine. Someone elsewhere in the room says “swap partners” but we already have. I look at her and she looks at me. We smile and start kissing each other. The quality of silence in the room changes.

---

2002. I am standing outside a hotel with my lover and a young girl who works at the hotel. She is bright, funny, clever, sexy, charming. Who wouldn’t fancy her? She is also talkative and, standing in the street lights as we say goodnight, I do not have the time to say to him “I fancy her, do you fancy her?” So the three of us go our separate ways. I see her once again some time later and we go out for a meal and some drinks. She is the first person I tell the story of how I lost my virginity. I don’t sleep with her that time either. Looking back, I am not sure why.

---

1971. Childhood. I am standing in a secluded part of the playground at school with another girl and a boy. We are playing “aliens”. It consists mainly of cautious explorations of each others’ bodies. There are no kisses. There are no naked parts. There is however sexual tension, though we do not understand it at the time.

---

2006. Another formal ball. My lover’s gynaecologist is there. He is a little drunk and rather puppyish. Like all male gynaecologists he is deeply charming. He remembers my lover’s hysterectomy and tells him about other work he has done with trans-people since then. He keeps on saying “good on yer, mate”. At one point he blinks at my myopically and says “… but you look so straight….”

---

The bauria language in India has a word which means “to love falsely”. Well, there’s a thing.It also has a word which means “to love for the last time”.I dread that.

Faking it - who’d f*** Germane Greer or Fay Weldon anyway?

Are they taking the piss, these feminist icons?

The Times, today:

Weldon recommends that a good woman should fake her orgasms “and then leap out of bed and pour him champagne, telling him: ‘You are so clever’. ”

We moan and groan to make our man feel good, much as a man will tell his date that she’s the prettiest girl in the room. It’s just good manners.

Weldon is certainly right to say that there is no point in a woman demanding an orgasm from her man. If an orgasm is what she wants, rather than intimacy, there’s always the Rabbit.

All of the above from Ms Greer in today’s Times.

What

complete

bull

shit.

I have never faked an orgasm in my life for three very simple reasons

1. It is way too much like hard work - do you honestly think I’d expend that much energy if I didn’t have to?
2. Why reinforce bad habits? If you reward what doesn’t work, you’ll never get what does.
3. Sod “bad manners” - I don’t lie about other aspects of my relationship, what on earth makes it ok to lie about orgasms?

I’ve never liked Germane Greer for no particularly good reason, I’ve just never liked her. Or Fay Weldon for that matter. This all kinda suggests a good reason why. And what is it with the term “good” woman? It does give me some satisfaction to think that they spent the 60s fucking like, well, like rabbits, but faking like their mothers.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t firing off Big Ones from an early age. Far from it. I was nearer 40 than 30 before I’d worked through my hang-ups enough for someone with a useful combination of skill, tenderness and generosity to find the blue touch paper.

The orgasms I have on my own just aren’t the same. Sorry, Ms Weldon, sorry Ms Greer, but it really makes all the difference when it is someone else’s fingers doing the walking. When I do it myself it is like telling myself a joke, or tickling myself. It just doesn’t do it the same way. Or at all, a lot of the time.

I dunno. If I’d read this a few years ago, then maybe I’d have accepted its rather bleak counsel, but it seems to me that if we fake orgasms when we are with men, then we have only ourselves to blame if they carry on doing what they think pleases us.

This is presented as good manners and convenience, but this is the counsel of low self-esteem.

No.

Sorry. My ego matters too.

And so does my orgasm.

Sisterhood is for bitches

I tumbled across a this on FtM Doctor’s blog today, and have been choking on my reaction ever since.

The story is about a feminist music festival in Michigan which is explicitly for “womyn-born womyn” and explicitly excludes trans women. Presumably they also explicitly excludes trans men. In fact, it is not actually a story, it is a press release, explaining the organisers’ point of view.

The language is interesting, veering between the hate-filled and the overly emotive. At one point the organiser of the “womyn-born womyn” sends the following email to the leader of “camp trans”.

I deeply desire healing in our communities, and I can see and feel that you want that too. I would love for you and the other organizers of Camp Trans to find the place in your hearts and politics to support and honor space for womyn who have had the experience of being born and living their life as womyn. I ask that you respect that womon born womon is a valid and honorable gender identity. I also ask that you respect that womyn born womyn deeply need our space — as do all communities who create space to gather, whether that be womyn of color, trans womyn or trans men . . . I wish you well, I want healing, and I believe this is possible between our communities, but not at the expense of deeply needed space for womyn born womyn.

The self-righteous emotional manipulation of this is nauseating, with its talk of “deeply desire[ing] healing”, “respect” and “deeply needed space”s.

We strongly assert there is nothing transphobic with choosing to spend one week with womyn who were born as, and have lived their lives as, womyn. It is a powerful, uncommon experience that womyn enjoy during this one week of living in the company of other womyn-born womyn. There are many opportunities in the world to share space with the entire queer community, and other spaces that welcome all who define themselves as female.

Is it unkind of me to consider the spaces and places that I have spent with “womyn-born womyn” this past week, which include a women-only gym and the WI? It is not hard to find women-only groups, if that’s what you need for a while. I’ve been on women-only holidays and women-only retreats. I was educated in part at an all girls’ school.

Of course the gym, and the WI aren’t full of radical feminists or …

womyn who could be considered gender outlaws, either because of their sexual orientation (lesbian, bisexual, polyamorous, etc.) or their gender presentation (butch, bearded, androgynous, femme – and everything in between). … gender variant womyn …. ” or women who ” … consider themselves differently gendered

… so far as I know.

I find myself wondering why the organisers exclude trans women if the spread of women at the festival is so broad, (yes, I know, the “deeply-needed space” thing) and also whether or not there are any straight married mothers there, or whether monogamous heterosexuals are not welcome either.

Rather than rant on and on about this, I will conclude with three final comments.

Firstly, it would be acceptable for the “womyn” of Michigan to create an activity exclusivly for “womyn-born women” if, on other occasions, they created events which were exclusively for other sub-sets of women, for example women who have been abused, or widowed, or who are lesbians, or indeed trans. But to exclude trans women and only trans women smacks of the “all men are rapists” school of separatist radical feminism which de-personalises half of the human race in a way which is as unjust and unacceptable as the de-personalising of women by men which went on for centuries before.

Secondly, I wonder if this is actually personal. If it isn’t about all trans women, but about one particular trans woman, if the organisers lacked the balls to exclude her and if they therefore decided to exclude them all. I find this theory rather compelling, given how petty, emotional and factional groups of women can become. See quotes above.

Finally, I put the press release through Gender Genie, and it scored 30% female and 70% male. Which made me snigger. Bitch that I am.

Abortions, sex changes, genetic defects

I offer you two thoughts from two different sites.

First - 21st century data in the UK: “A patient will not be entitled to refuse to make their personal data available to the [NHS] Spine [data systems]. Data about all patient events may be routinely communicated to the Spine without the consent of the patient. … The citizen has no legal right to stipulate what will and will not be recorded … nor where those records will be held.”

And secondly - 20th century data in Germany: “Only after Jews were identified — a massive and complex task that Hitler wanted done immediately — could they be targeted for efficient asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, enslaved labor, and, ultimately, annihilation. It was a cross-tabulation and organizational challenge so monumental, it called for a computer. Of course, in the 1930s no computer existed. But … punch card technology did exist. … [and] Hitler was able to automate his persecution of the Jews … from the identification of the Jews in censuses, registrations, and ancestral tracing programs to the running of railroads and organizing of concentration camp slave labor.”

The problem of course is not with data, per se. NHS staff are a pretty benign bunch. The problem comes when people with strong convictions have relatively friction-free access to data, and it is compounded when data becomes more enduring.
In this world of increasing fundamentalism, I am not comfortable that the health service can record abortions, gender re-assignments, genetic abnormalities, and other politically, socially or financially sensitive information, that they can record it in ways that mean that the data is pervasive and enduring, and that they can record it against our will.

More juxtapositioning

I was looking on the web to see if there is a book-group locally, and was deeply amused to find a coherent and sensible conversation about reading books on….

…. a forum called “Swinging Heaven”.

It really IS a site for Swingers.

It really is a conversation about books.

I’ve never been ill-disposed towards swingers, and now I rather fancy the idea of being felt up while discussing Ian McEwan, or chatting about Illywhacker between mouthfuls.

Well, its a way to meet people and to have something to talk about.

I’m no prude, but Debbie… pastels?

It fascinates me how most of the times that someone starts a sentence with the phrase “I’m no prude, but….” they then go on to demonstrate that yes, indeed, they are a prude. (My two favourite responses in a party-game were “I’m no prude, but unfortunately my sheep is” and “I’m no prude, but I think that’s illegal in Texas” - make of those what you will).

Anyway. I am no prude. Obviously. No-one ever is. However, three things recently worried me.

The first was an advertisement for a lap-dancing and pole-dancing club which I saw on the back of a mini-bus contracted as a school bus. The juxtaposition made me uneasy, though the fact I only saw it once suggests that I was not the only one to raise a disturbed eyebrow.

The second was a joke and party shop which sold “naughty” maids outfits, pink fluffy handcuffs, “naughty” uniforms and other joke bondage gear and next to them there were little-girl fairy wings and children’s Halloween costumes. I found using infantile words like “naughty” disturbing when combined with blurred boundaries between fetish gear for adults and fancy dress for children.

The one that worries me most recently, however, is playboy stationery marketed at little girls. I’m obviously not the only person who finds this disturbing: Brand Republic reported protestors as saying:

Jennifer Drew, chair of Object, said: “We are challenging the normalisation of porn into mainstream media. We feel that … WH Smith … is giving out the message that it is acceptable to have girls as sex objects. Object is not against sexuality, but it is against exploitation.”

They also report WH Smith’s breathtakingly disingenuous reply:

WH Smith is claiming that the stationery is being sold as a popular fashion range and that the image is not inappropriate in any way. The group also argues that many youngsters do not know what the image stands for.

I don’t even know where to start with those remarks.

I’m trailing way behind the zeitgeist here, since all of the stories I found are so-o-o-o-o last year darling, but the fact that I came across the stuff about 10 days ago in WH Smith troubles me, as does their spokesperson’s comment, reported in the Guardian last year.

“Playboy is probably one of the most popular ranges we’ve ever sold,” says head of media relations for WH Smith, Louise Evans. “It outsells all the other big brands in stationery … by a staggering amount … We offer customers choice. We’re not here to act as a moral censor.”

What? I mean WHAT? “Not here to act as a moral censor”. Is Ms Evans disengaged and morally unimaginative? Is she naively innocent? Is she just stupid? There is a category error so large you can drive a horse and cart through the middle of it. The issue is not about censorship, it is about what is appropriate. It’s about what has become a very old fashioned word: it is about propriety. In an age where the Internet and mobile phones enable adults to obtain unsupervised access to young children in a way which they have never had before, is it wise to normalise erotica in the presence of children, or to infantalise sexuality in the presence of adults?

Perhaps it takes a deviant and dirty mind to think these deviant and dirty thoughts. Although we live in a very knowing age, it can still be a surprisingly innocent one. Certainly, I was astonished by the naivete of the conversation about this particular piece of what is obviously fetish-gear. (If the link from that image does not work, then try the knitter’s main page instead). It seems that the darker aspects of human sexuality are being re-wrapped in ways which are cute, fluffy and frequently pink. I am reminded of Anjelica Huston’s line in Addams Family Values:

“You have gone too far. You have married Fester, you have destroyed his spirit, you have taken him from us. All that I could forgive. But Debbie… pastels?”

I don’t think that the pastelisation of what used to be called perversion is a bad thing: it’s just a thing. BDSM gear spent a long time being black rubber, black leather and studs. A lot of it still is, though recent goth imagery is bringing purple and red into play too. Previously, in the 19th and early 20th centuries it was all mahogany furniture, and crimson satin and velvet-wrapped ropes and, from von Sasher-Masoch to Elinor Glyn, 19th and early 20th century kinkiness was frequently surrounded by fur. Fashions change. Now BDSM is made safe with fluffy handcuffs and angora home-knits. So what?

However, I do find myself asking what sort of society is it which will happily market pornographic brand icons to little girls, and appears to have no qualms about placing strongly sexual imagery and products in the same space as products marketed to young children?

What sort of society makes sex a pink and sparkly thing for little girls to appreciate?