Toilet Talk Take Two

When you choose to advocate for a particular cause, there are certain things, certain issues, certain tropes, that you find yourself having to deal with again and again. If your beat involves taking on racist tabloid pricks like Richard Littlejohn and his ilk, you will constantly be having to explain that 'some of my best friends are black people' is not a valid defence. When you deal with bad science, you will have to explain the difference between correlation and causation until you're blue in the face. Set yourself against the lies of lying liars like the Taxpayers' Alliance or Migrationwatch, and you'll develop a near-supernatural ability to skewer bad sets of statistics.

If you deal with trans issues, the thing which crops up as often as the Riddler in the 60s Batman series - and is about 200 times as irritating - is the toilet thing. Every now and again, some right-wing, kyriarchal fuck decides to spread the toxic meme that allowing trans people to use the correct toilets will be a green light for any rapist to pull on an unconvincing frightwig and run wild in the ladies' loos like Molestozilla. The fact that this has never fucking happened - that there are, in fact, a number of reasons why it would actually be kind of impossible - never really bothers these people. They run with it because it allows them to trot out the old tropes about trans people being deceptive, not 'real' men or women, perverted, etc etc. It allows them to spread the fear for their own twisted advantage. It allows them to divide and conquer and, because the people they have to crawl over are some of the most vulnerable people in society, they figure they can do it with little chance of reprisal.

I set down my thoughts about all this a while ago, and now, after legal blogger Jack of Kent has ruminated on the issue - leading to some interesting and insightful comments - Natacha Kennedy has also outlined an interesting theoretical perspective on why many people obsess over this issue on her own blog, Uncommon Sense.

What it comes down to, in the end, is that, as always, it's the kyriarchy, stupid. And as Little Light points out, we have to fight the kyriarchy because, basically, the people who support it have already decided they're at war with us. And one of the ways we take on the kyriarchy and its supoorters is by explaining why the 'toilet argument' is bullshit: and we'll do it all again the next time it comes up, same bat-time, same bat-channel. C'est la guerre.

Gonna Be Some Changes...

I'm thinking of making a couple of alterations to this li'l old blog.

First of all, the title. The Fishblog originated as basically a review blog, a place where I could sharpen my critical muscles by writing (often essay-length) reviews of whatever books, film, music or other media had in some way got my dander up in any particular week. It's a cliche (and often untrue) that critics tend to be people who can't write themselves, but I admit in my case that that was part of the reason for setting up this blog: I was, at the time, lacking confidence in my original work, so decided to indulge myself in a spot of criticism to keep my hand in, so to speak, and to stop my aesthetic senses getting dull.

However, having allowed myself a space in which to express myself, I quickly reverted to my default state of using this opportunity to harangue the passerby. Very soon the idea that this was solely a review blog, or even a review blog at all, was abandoned, and I began using it to unburden myself of my opinions on the media, the BNP, gender issues, publishing, bookselling, gender issues, the problems of managerialism, kyriarchy, gender issues and why you shouldn't start fights with Tori Amos fans. I may also have written one or two posts about gender issues as well.

At the same time, largely following the senses-shattering announcement that I'd decided to cancel what was to be my second collection of poems, something seemed to free up in my writing and I found poems coming to me again, I started writing poetry again in earnest, I started performing again and I essentially got better in both senses of the word: I recovered from my writers' block, and I started writing better work than before. So part of the point of the blog became promoting my writing and the performances I was doing, especially around the time of my fourth plinth appearance and the recent Newcastle Human Rights Festival gig.

At some point during all of this gubbins, I jettisoned the name 'To Praise and Blame' and rechristened this as The Somewhat New and Allegedly Improved Fishblog, a title which is increasingly redundant really. I still think the blog has improved - and, while I still only have a small number of followers compared to the juggernauts of the blog world, the fact that that number has risen exponentially since this site stopped being a review blog is proof of that - but it's no longer really even somewhat new. So, I'm thinking we need a new title. This is where you come in.

If you're reading this, you've probably read this blog before. If someone asked you why you read it, you could probably sum it up for them in a sentence. You could tell them what interested you about the blog in the first place, what it is that makes it unique, and why you keep coming back. So - with all those things in mind - if you had the responsibility of thinking up a new title for this blog, one that reflects all of those things - what would you call it?

Answers on a metaphorical postcard please, either in the comments field below or via my Twitter or Facebook pages if you want. Best suggestion will be chosen as the new title for the blog. Get thinking!

Us Islamic-loving Leftie Liberals

I'd imagine that a lot of you reading this are familiar with spEak You're bRanes , the funniest epiphenomenon on the web, where much hilarity is enjoyed at the expense of the right-wing social cripples who post their ill-thought-out vitriol on the BBC's 'Have Your Say' pages.

One of the things that particularly enrages the HYS commenters is the fact that comments on the HYS boards are moderated - the beeb obviously not wanting to give space to every BNP-voting nut with an unhealthy fixation on the punishment of paedos.

So naturally enough, like the crew of Battlestar Galactica (well, actually more like the crew of the Pegasus , but you get what I mean), some of the angrier elements from HYS have migrated to a new home at the Biased BBC blog.

And there things may have ended. After all, spEak You're bRanes already have their hands full mocking the HYS posters. To give the B-BBC contingent the same treatment, you'd need a whole other blog. Fortunately, however, someone's started it. And if you need a recommendation to read that blog, Opinionated Beyond My Education, look no further than the considered and thoughtful response that its author has received from the courageous and principled freedom fighters on whom he comments:

"Only coke snorting, rent-boy shagging faggots, actually like the BBC! Think about that next time your sucking muslim cock"

Now, come on. You can't not follow a guy who inspires that kind of response.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are funniest...

George and Lynne is one of the most unfunny cartoon strips in the history of British newspapers, rivalled only for the crown of most unfunny by the woeful Fred Basset, a tremendously boring strip about a dog with some kind of canine learning difficulty.

However, while George and Lynne itself may be unfunny, analysing it with the utmost seriousness turns out to be comedy gold.

Unputwhattable?

I have a weird voice. Always have done. Despite having been born in the North East of England and having lived here all my life, I speak in an odd mid-atlantic accent which leads people to think I'm actually either American, Australian, South African, Canadian, Dutch, Danish, or even a Kiwi.

Because it's an odd voice, it commands people's attention, and it can be quite nice to listen to, when I pay attention to my diction and avoid eliding words like some stoned Californian. So I often wind up doing the sales announcements in the shop where I work. Today, I made use of that rather ugly portmanteau word 'unputdownable' in the course of an announcement, leading a customer to query whether 'unputdownable' is 'actually a word.' It's certainly an ugly word, two verbs colliding like cars between prefix and suffix: but is it an actual word?

A quick googling showed that most online dictionaries think it is, and also showed up two interesting articles, to which I link below:

Here, Andrew Brown has a good hard bash at the sort of crap perpetrated on the reading public by his namesake Dan, and here, Elizabeth Bachner wonders about the good/bad-putdownable/unputdownable continuum, in the process concocting an extended gustatory metaphor and having a swipe at publishing tastes. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.