Gay Pride Explained

Two interrelated things which I often hear people not understanding are a) what the point of gay pride is and b) why gay people feel the need to have their own support groups and internet forums and whatnot. So I'm going to do my best to concisely explain both of them, speaking from my infallible position of informedness as A Person of Gayness.

Firstly, Pride. People are often confused about Pride for understandable reasons, like, how is being gay something to be proud of? Homosexuality isn't an accomplishment, it's just a thing you are; we don't have "tall pride" or "blonde pride" or even "straight pride", so why gay pride? Similarly, marching down the streets with rainbow flags seems to be in direct conflict with what people understand to be the whole point of the LGBT rights movement: to assure straight cissexuals that gender and sexual minorities (GSMs) are not so different from them, and thus discretely integrate gay etc. people into straight-dominated society.
The point of pride is that it is the opposite of shame. Shame is what opponents of GSM rights would have gay, bi and trans people feel; and it is often the default emotional setting for GSMs when they are coming to terms with their own "weirdness" in the face of a society where heterosexuality and cissexuality are consistently showcased as the way to be. So the point of gay/LGBT pride is to declare unto the world that being gay etc. is not something that people should be ashamed of.
If it helps, try to tweak the definition of "pride" in this context from "a reaction to one's accomplishments" to "open satisfaction with the way one is", which is closer to the definition of the word when used in, say, Pride and Prejudice. I think a lot of the confusion surrounding rainbow-ardorned capital-P Pride basically comes down to semantics.
So Pride gives people a chance to be open about something which they usually spend a lot of effort trying to hide or suppress, and it serves to show the world that being gay etc. is not something to be ashamed of. The reason we don't have straight pride is that the straight equivalent of Pride is embodied in everyday life: in all the advertisements and TV shows and various other media outlets which showcase heterosexual relationships, and also the cultural assumptions about how every child and world leader and next-door-neighbour is going to be straight.

The other thing is GSM groups online and IRL, which is kind of a smaller-scale version of the 'ghettoization' drive which creates gay-centric districts and communities in cities. I remember a specific occasion when someone told me they thought such things were pointless, in response to a gay Christian online forum. His reasoning was that having gay-specific groups and forums implies that gay etc. people are incapable of discussing issues with straight people, which is quite demonstrably not the case. So why bother?
The reason I, personally, have been prone to seek out gay-specific groups online and IRL is that I want to briefly be somewhere where being gay isn't weird. The truth is, no matter how accepting the people around you are, being a marked minority is always going to be kind of wearing. Knowing that, for instance, everything you say about sex/romance/whatever will always have a kind of strange novelty for most people, and that at any point someone could ask you if you have a girlfriend and you'll have to explain and they could be one of the ones who react badly, and that well over 95% of your acquaintances are privileged in a way that you will never be and can't help sometimes resenting, is something that you just need to not be the case every once in a while. Creating gay groups, or gay 'ghettos', gives us the privilege of being the majority once in a while, and there's a certain kind of freedom interlinked with that; which, by necessity, people who are white and heteronormative have difficulty understanding, because it's something that they take for granted every day and probably can't really imagine not having. (I also take that freedom for granted when it comes to my accent, the colour of my skin, my cultural background, and to a certain extent my sex.)
Also, while gay people are not incapable of talking to straight people about life and stuff, there are certain issues which do apply pretty much exclusively to GSMs, and which few straight-cissexuals are empathetic enough to understand or want to talk about. This isn't a bad thing or something I'm trying to make straights feel guilty about, it's just the way it is. I'm talking coming out to your family, trying to tune your gadar (you laugh, but it's hard!), what the gay scene is like and how not to freak out whilst navigating it, etc. In the average room of people, where the vast majority is probably straight, conversation is naturally going to be guided away from these topics, because most of the people talking don't care. Having organised gay groups lets GSMs talk about this stuff without the uncomfortable feeling that most people present are bored and want to start talking about boobs.

So, there you have it. If you're not convinced or have further queries, then I welcome you to ask me. If you want. You might not. It's ultimately your life, I suppose.

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"Religious people are stupid."

There seems to be this idea shared by an unfortunate number of atheists, that anyone who believes in God is automatically less intelligent than anyone who doesn't. This idea is perpetuated by ridiculously unfunny comedians, like Jimmy Carr and this guy I just discovered today, Jim Jefferies, who has this to say:

"Here's the thing about people who believe in God: they're idiots. There's no dancing around it, you're a borderline fucking mentalist. You're an idiot. You're like a thirteen year old who still believes in Santa. Fuck you."


Wow.

Here's the thing: negatively caricaturing a group including billions of people, and reducing their reasons for holding a certain opinion to "they're idiots", is always bad. It is phenomenally unscientific, unless he's actually performed IQ tests on a sizable sample of theists, which somehow doubt. It incites tribalism, by riling atheists up against theists for no good reason. It denies the need to imagine other people complexly. And above all, it denies the fact that many theists have logical reasons to believe in a God or deity. Because who cares about the truth, when we can reassure ourselves about our position by dismissing the opposite view with a few words?
So all this is bad, and what's more, it's the kind of thing which non-religious types criticise religious types for doing all the time. But so many otherwise rationally-thinking people are going along with it; they are lampooning the intellectual worth of their fellow humans, and they are refusing to think deeply about the issues which they claim to have the better understanding of, and they feel entitled in doing so.

The explosion in the popularity of atheism that has occurred with the release of books like The God Delusion, God is Not Great, etc, has caused a great many viewpoints to be rationally challenged when before they were just accepted. And that's fantastic. But for some, it's having the opposite effect, by providing atheists with a kind of zealous entitlement to mock and deride theists and caricature them with their own unfounded assumptions. It's also making people have an intellectual reverence for jackass comedians who want to be provocative for the sake of it, when in fact nothing they're saying nothing particularly intelligent at all.
I mean, are we seriously supposed to accept that someone who uses the word "mentalist" to refer to mentally ill people is automatically more intelligent that Issac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Thomas Aquinas etc, simply because he has rejected the idea of God?

So, no, Mr. Jefferies, religious people are not just "idiots". Some of them are, of course, just as some atheists are. But many of them are more intelligent than either you or me. 

Truth is better than an illusion, no matter how comforting the illusion is. This goes for the illusion that everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot as much as for any other.

Book Banning is EVIL.

So recently, there has been a wave of attempts by certain people to stop teenagers from reading books which handle certain subjects in a certain way. Any book which admits the existence of gay people, vaguely describes any sexual act, contains any sort of violence, or makes the slightest allusion to magic or vampires or any sort of supernatural phenomenon, is in the potential firing line.

Of course, you already know this. It was all over the news when religious groups started frothing that JK Rowling was going to turn our children into Satanists, and parents who flail their arms around whenever a book contains the word "penis" tend to crop up everywhere.

But, it's important to stress how hurtful, ignorant and just plain silly all book-banning attempts are. So, that's what I'm going to do.

Groups and individuals who promote the idea of forcing certain books off shelves and out of classrooms like to encourage an idea of teenagers as brainless drones who will uncritically absorb and mimic everything they are told in literature. The justification of one school/district/whatever for banning John Green's Looking for Alaska, a book which amongst various other things includes characters smoking and one sex scene, was that reading about sex and smoking would inevitably make teenagers want to light up and get down themselves. The spokeswoman actually used the phrase "mokey see, monkey do" in her explanation.
Not to mention the crowning jewel for the book banning movement, the recently viral Darkness Too Visible article from the Wall Street Journal. This article cries that teenagers need to be deliberately surrounded by "images of joy and beauty" in order to develop property, and unless subjects like self-harm and abuse are censored from them, they will never be capable of happiness (or something). Also, we hear once again that allowing teenagers to read books about self-harm will cause the behaviour to spread; a conclusion which, frankly, the writer wouldn't have come anywhere near if she had any first-hand or professional understanding of the nature of self-harm.

Here's the thing: teenagers aren't robots. Every single individual between the ages of twelve and eighteen has an independent brain capable of critically analysing input, more or less as effectively as an adult's. As such, it is ludicrous to argue that a teenager's response to reading about an activity will be to unquestioningly mimic it. Hell, not even the average five-year-old reacts to a book like that. No reader expects a novel to be an uncomplicated demonstration of desirable behaviour, and rare is the author who intends it to be. John Green doesn't want his readers to engage in emotionally empty oral sex, JK Rowling doesn't want hers to try and magically inflate their aunts (or, for that matter, don a black cloak and start murdering Mudbloods). And teeage readers get that; they get it because all humans know, from the moment they finish their first book, that that's not what reading is for.

But book-banning isn't just insufferably patronising. It's both a symptom and a weapon of a much greater evil, one which is made more apparent by some of the crazier banning going down in places like Arizona.
A few months ago, following the suspension of a school's programme on Mexican-American studies, a number of books relating to the course were confiscated from teachers and students. Essentially, the school systematically denied students any possibility of reading about Latino issues from the perspective of a Latino writer. Now, imagine being a Mexican-American student in that school; being implicitly told by the people in charge of your education that the voice of your community must be silenced. The word "alienation" doesn't quite seem to cover it.
It's a similar case with the Darkness Too Visible writer's complaint that novels about self-harm "normalise" (God, how I hate that word) self-destructive behaviour. By necessity, then, what the writer wants is for issues like self-harm and suicide to be sidelined, and for teachers and writers to reinforce the idea that people going through such difficulties are "weird". Which, you know, is the exact opposite of what people need when they're suffering from depression.
We see the same pattern with banners who want to pretend to teenagers that sexual abuse doesn't happen, that gay people don't exist, that drug abuse is a fantasy. What this does is prescribe to teenagers that there is only one acceptable way to be: that if you are gay or trans or mentally ill then you are an unacceptable deviation from normality, and if you have been abused or fallen into drug addiction then you are fundamentally Other and can't ever expect anyone to empathise with you. For the privileged white heteronormative mentally healthy majority, their opportunity of learning about and trying to understand other ways of being will be largely denied to them. As such, the social divisions between majority and deviant, which already cause so much suffering in this world, will grow wider and deeper with each generation.

Adolescence is the time when we grow from child to adult. Hiding all dark and diverse things from adolescents stunts that process, because the primary difference between a child and an adult is the amount of experience they have internalized. Censoring potential input for young people, literary or otherwise, helps no-one; least of all those it is intended to protect. 

Okay.

"Most of us don’t think about the ridiculousness of what we’re actually saying when we say, “I’ll love you forever,” or “I will always remember this day,” or, “I’ll never forget you” or whatever. Like, I say those things all the time, like most people do. But Hazel and Augustus are both a lot more measured in the way they imagine themselves and their love for/responsibilities to other people, hence them adopting “okay” as the word that serves as an expression of their love for each other." -John Green, talking about The Fault in Our Stars

One of the most difficult things about life is reconciling yourself to the fact that you will never be able to give anyone eternity, or perfect happiness. Like, when we fall in love (romantically or platonically), we want that person to be happy all the time, and we see ourselves as agents in making that the case. But as long as there is life, there will be sadness, and as long as there is life, it will be temporary. Our love, while powerful, cannot change that.

The trick is to co-exist with sadness, and give that person experiences which are happy to ensure that there is more than sadness in their lives. We can't remove sadness from anyone's life, but we can decrease sadness, and we can increase happiness. And if the object of our love has a particularly painful life, then we can help to make it liveable. We can help to make it okay.

And that's why telling someone "okay" is a beautiful way to express deeply felt and thought-out love for another person. And it's yet another reason why I love The Fault in Our Stars so much.

Ed Milliband

The current leader of the Labour party is growing on me.

I know that this is a dangerous thing to allow to happen, and that all mainstream politicians are probably in fact callous moneygrubbing bastards. But I don't seem to be able to help it.

I mean, he's definitely developing a knack for calling Call Me Dave out on his crap. That's probably not a hard thing to do. But still, he's good at it.
From watching PMQs today, it hit me that Eddie M is not actually a horrible public speaker. At least not all the time. He's certainly got the hang of making his points heard in the Commons, and at least today he managed to do so without resorting to pointless populist soundbites. So, he could be much worse.

The main thing, though, is how extravagantly underestimated Milliband is. The standard reaction to his existence tends to be "oh, him, he's useless", or "I definitely couldn't see him as PM". But this seems to be for no reason other than his geeky face and nasally voice. Do we really think, as a voting population, that such things are a crystal-clear window into a person's soul?

The almost-unanimous rejection of any notion that Milliband may, actually, be a half-decent politician seems to me to be a symptom of just how shallow and populist our politics has become. The 2010 election pissed me off massively, just from the fact that Gordon Brown's startlingly evident intelligence and vastly superior economic experience seemed to be swept aside by the fact that Cameron was so much prettier than him. I mean, yeah, I know that's not the only reason Labour lost, and there were some genuinely decent reasons for voting Conservative. But if you think about it rationally for a second, there's sort of absolutely no reason that TV debates would be a good judge of who would make the best Prime Minister. Public speaking can't be more than 15% of the head of government's job. The rest is trying to work out coherent and effective ways of making the country better, something, incidentally, that Call Me Dave seems to be incredibly bad at.

So, yeah. I wouldn't necessarily vote for Milliband, but I think he's worth a lot more than what the media has decided.

Six Things on the Internet Which Have Annoyed Me Recently.

I have a bad habit of obsessively reading things that piss me off. I have no idea why. So yes, my experience with most of the following is entirely my fault. Despite this, however, I think I have a genuine reason to find this stuff irksome enough to blog about. So please enjoy this list of internet-based annoyances I wasn't able to stretch out into a blog post each.

1. The Facebook like-page-thing which says "like if you're a 90s kid without a kid"
This is an exception to the rule above, as it appeared on my Facebook news feed without any deliberate chasing down from me. But yeah. The point of this page is to celebrate the fact that there are 13-22 year olds (yes, I can math) in the world who have not yet begotten children, because, according to the creator, "there aren't many of us left!!". If fact, all the creator of this page is doing is getting a cheap sense of superiority by pointing out the fact that some people have made a mistake he somehow hasn't, and encouraging others to do the same. 
I'm going to blow this wildly out of proportion and use this as a platform for addressing the overarching attitude people seem to have towards teen pregnancy. The general idea is that teenagers with kids are automatically sluttier, less classy, less intelligent, and generally more worthless individuals than the rest of us. Bollocks. Most of the people I have heard bitching about teen parents are themselves a) teenagers and b) not virgins. Clearly and obviously, the only difference between the bitchers and bitchees here is that the bitchees have had a stroke of misfortune the bitchers have escaped (malfunctioning contraception, drunk sex at the wrong time in a menstrual cycle, etc.). The adults who go on about teen pregnancy also have no right to, well, go on about teen pregnancy, because it's precisely none of their business. Getting pregnant as a teenager in no way makes in necessary that the pregnant girl sleeps around, and even if she did, it's still none of your business. You don't get to judge people over how much sex they have, especially when doing so (as it surely must for some of these Daily Mail types) requires self-induced amnesia towards your own teenage years.
I especially hate that teen parenting is another incident in which girls/women are given infinitely more crap for the state of their sex lives than men. Since the boy/man doesn't have to have the foetus growing inside of him, he can take off, or at least walk down streets with strangers having no idea that he's impregnated anyone. Women aren't so lucky. They have the physical symptoms of their misfortune, which open them up to snide glances and comments from anyone in the same few square feet as them.
ANYWAY.

2. People going on about grammar in an unhelpful and boring way
So Youtube comment arguments are a thing which sucks. I think that's essentially a truth universally acknowledged. But it gets infinitely worse when people detract from the topic at hand to bitch at each other over their grammar or spelling.
Obviously the worst instances of this are when people bring in useless, invaluable grammatical rules like split infinitives being bad and how you can't end sentences with prepositions (which will pretty soon earn them a blog post of their own). But even when people do make genuine grammatical errors, like misuse of apostrophes or using the wrong there/their/they're, it's just not a valuable thing to talk about. You understood what they meant. They probably know what the rule is, it just slipped their mind in this particular instance. And most importantly, it does NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, automatically make you more clever them them. All it means is they've spent less time/attention in English lessons than you.
There is a certain group of people on the internet (and in, like, the real world) who seem to think that knowledge of spelling and grammar is the infallible means by which we rank the value of each member of our species. To those people, I say, "fuck off".

3. The perpetuation of "people cut themselves/act depressed for attention" myth
This is self explanatory (or SHOULD BE, if you've read my blog posts on the matter, as all humans must do). But, seriously. Jeeeeesus Christ.

4. Art criticism
I know that film or book reviews are by no means the sole domain of the internet, but my only real experience of them is through sites like RottenTomatoes and Goodreads, so I'm going to gripe about them here. Essentially, one's reaction to an artwork is personal and largely emotional, and trying to rationalise such reactions into some kind of objective, prescriptive truth is pointless and annoys me.
I mean, I get that there is an objective standard relating to the quality of art. I get that, technically, the Mona Lisa is probably the highest-quality painting that still survives. But I will never rate the Mona Lisa above the work of Van Gogh, because for me, the ML is just a painting of a lady, and Van Gogh's Starry Night is a moving and heartbreaking testament to the beauty of the universe. And that's okay.
The problem I have with art criticism is that the artsy reasons for crediting/discrediting something often have very little bearing on whether people will actually enjoy them. So what if the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel contains it's fair share of clichés. So what if the idea of children fighting to death in an arena under a totalitarian government did not leap fresh and unprecedented from Suzanne Collins' brain. That does not stop the Marigold Hotel from being funny and moving and wise and a joy to watch, or the Hunger Games from being thrilling and edgy and sad and joyful and immensely readable.
If art criticism exists, it must be to give people an idea of whether they would like a film/book/painting/whatever were they to experience it. It cannot be for the sake of satisfying the egos of pretentious irritating farts who like the feeling of importance writing gives them but don't have the capacity to write about anything interesting. Right now, the way such criticism works is great for the latter role, but completely fails to fill the first.

5. The Sun website
Because it vastly reduces the chance of the Sun stopping existing.
 
6. The BBC News comments section
One thing I will never, ever understand is why, when the BBC were deciding how to put together an internet based news service, they thought: "Hey, do you know what would be a nifty idea? Why don't we open certain articles up for being commented on by any member of the public, no matter how half-baked or uninformed their opinion is!"
My issue is this. I'm fine with people sharing there opinions, even when their opinions annoy me. But the internet is already a bountiful hunting ground for opinion-sharing opportunities, as proven by this blog. As well as blogs, there's twitter, youtube comments, Guardian opinion piece comments, etc. All these places are good arenas for open commenting for their own varied reasons. But BBC News is a place for fact. It's where nearly all British people, and many non-British people, go to try and understand what's occurring in the world each day. And having a page full of the random musing and reckonings of anyone who feels remotely strongly about an issue distorts that completely, particularly as the type of people who comment on BBC News tends to be the type of person who makes up their opinion before registering any but the most basic facts. BBC News comments have largely become a mincing ground for angry uninformed right-wing types, whose proximity to each others' views makes them think that more people agree with them then actually do. What I mean by that, is that if someone writes something like "poor people should lose their child benefit to stop them breeding because everyone born into a poor family is destined to be a scrounger", and it gets "voted up" 30 times, then the people reading the comment will think "wow, this must be a really popular view". In fact, it just means that 31 people hold that view, which given the number of people with access to the internet, isn't remotely surprising.
Also, I just don't really care about these people's stupid opinions, and don't see why anyone else would. I realise that probably makes me sound like a bastard, but I just can't comprehend how a substantial percentage of the people who read BBC News could possibly think: "well this is an interesting story, I wonder what a load of random people with keyboards with absolutely no qualifying connection to the issue have to say about this".


Aaaand that's all the bitching I'm going to do for today. I hope you had fun.

Happy Hunger Games!

So I know I don't usually use this blog to post film or book reviews. But I'm going to start, right now, predominantly because I just saw the film adaptation of the Hunger Games. And it was SO. GOOD.

So I loved this book. Basically, of the new books I've read this year so far, two have immediately leapt into my List of Favourite Books of All Time: The Fault in our Stars (which I've already bored everyone by raving about) and the Hunger Games Trilogy. HG has actually been out since 2008, but whatever. I take pride in not reading books until after everyone else already has done. I am a reverse hipster.

So obviously, when someone makes a film based on a book you love, there is HUGE EXCITEMENT, and there is also a sense of dread. You really want to see the fictional world you adore made into real actors and sets and things, but you also really don't want them to get it wrong. And I've had my fair share of disappointments with adaptations of books, Eragon and Harry Potter Six being the biggest examples. So I knew what the risk was.
But they got the Hunger Games film so, so right. Better than I ever dared to hope to dare to expect.

So I guess I should outline the plot, because that's what you're supposed to do, but I'm pretty sure everyone already knows it. Suffice to say, there's a future distopian type place called Panem, consisting of one Capitol and twelve Districts. Every year, two children from every District are reaped into competing in a reality show in which they have to fight to the death, basically because the people who rule Panem are dicks. This girl called Primrose Everdeen, who is the most sweet and innocent girl to ever exist in human history, gets reaped, and her kickass older sister, Katniss, volunteers in her place.

The reason the film is so good is because it mirrors exactly the spirit of the book: the twisted morality of the Paneminians, the shock of watching twelve-to-eighteen-year-olds reduced to killing machines, and the brutal empathy you cannot help but experience as you watch the Games occur through Katniss's eyes.
The film makers did the same thing which Suzanne Collins does, but perhaps even better: they make every single contestant in the Games into a human being. Every single death in the arena kills you, even though you're supposed to root for Katniss's victory, and even though many of the contestants are bastards. You truly understand that every one of the tributes is a human, and a child, and a victim of the same cruel system that has torn Katniss from everything she knows.

The film actually adds bits which are really effective, and which Collins would not have been able to do on paper. Like the scenes outside the arena during the games, with the Game Masters and Snow and Haymitch. I loved them. I loved how much they added to the feeling of outrage you regarding the nature of the games, and how they make it ever more clear how much control the Capitol has over these kids' lives.

I want to talk about the film in more depth than the desire to not spoil it for people will let me, so I'm going to do a second post in which I freely spoil everything. Please don't read it if you have neither read not seen the Hunger Games, because experiencing them without being spoiled is not an experience you want to miss.

This film/book will change the way you see and think about pretty much everything. It's a masterpiece, and all humans must experience it in one or preferably both of it's forms. Katniss' story is one of the most heart-wrenching and powerful works of fiction of all time.