Back

It's two in the morning and I'm awake. Don't rush to comfort me. This is actually a good thing.

It's a good thing because the reason I'm awake is a burning need to write. To get something down. To express something I haven't felt in a long time. Anger. And that I feel angry is a good thing, because for far too long I've felt, if not exactly depressed, then certainly worn-out. Beaten down. Burnt out.

It started with a little local difficulty at work. I won't go into details here - this blog has always prided itself on being as unspecific as possible about where I toil to earn my handful of scraps from the capitalist table. Confidentiality is one reason for this, but another, very important reason, is universality. I believe the problems I encounter at work - the problems most of us encounter in the warped work culture of the kyriarchy - are pretty much the same anywhere. When I blog about some aspect of work, it isn't because I want to have a dig at a particular employer: it's because I'm painfully aware that the issues I deal with at work are the same or very similar to the issues others deal with. It's an entire culture we're dealing with, a sickness that has metastasized through the entire body politic: and I need to describe the symptoms of that sickness in a way that's as depersonalised as possible. It can never be fully depersonalised, because suffering under such a sick system wounds me, as it wounds so many others, as it causes such a terrible psychic cost to our society as a whole; but adopting a 'no names, no pack drill' position allows me to sidestep the accusations of sour grapes that would doubtless be forthcoming if I were to get more specific, while at the same time allowing what I say to resonate with others. And the fact that it does resonate - that the responses I get when I write a poem like, say, Employer of the Year or Collude to Exclude, are expressions of weary familiarity rather than shocked incomprehension - rather suggests that this is a universal experience I'm writing about. Yemaya knows I wish it wasn't.

So, reader, you will understand why I don't wish to dwell on the problems at work that started off my downturn. After a certain point they became immaterial anyway. If it wasn't work it might well have been something else: certainly the kyriarchy showed no inclination to soften up during my own period of relative inactivity. Trans women were still being murdered, and misgendered in newspaper headlines. Disabled people were still subject to the vilest witch-hunt we've seen in politics in recent times. The Coalition still seemed hell-bent on turning Britain into a third-world nation to satisfy their big financial backers. All was fucked, all was fucked, and all manner of things would be fucked. But I lacked the anger to effectively deal with this. I was, as I say, burnt out. Like many of us from time to time, I felt as if I was repeating the same things over and over, banging my head against a wall and achieving nothing beyond throwing up the tiniest scattering of brick-dust and giving myself a concussion.

In that kind of headspace it can be hard to see the signs of hope. I saw the news finally start paying attention to groups like UK Uncut and The Broken of Britain; I saw Transmediawatch make progress signing media organisations up to a Memorandum of Understanding about trans representation; I watched as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya did the impossible and stood up to their oppressive, western-backed elites. Intellectually, I could see that progress was being made; emotionally, it failed to register. I would see a story and think 'I should blog about that' or 'there might be a poem to be made about this' but beyond a sluggish recognition of that fact, I couldn't stir myself much further. Just this week, for example, I found myself moved by the plight of Rebekah Brewis, a trans woman being brutally treated by the Oregon authorities, whose case I learned about on the eve of International Women's Day, of all times, and thought that here was something I needed to speak out about, and here was a time when it mattered to say such things. But it didn't happen because, still, I lacked the fire.

To be fair, I was partly to blame for this lack. I had planned, during my week off in January, to take some time to simply relax. However, the discovery of a cheap rail ticket offer in a local paper set me off planning to do a gig in London, and then - since I had the week off - to do a bunch of other gigs elsewhere to take advantage of the situation. At a time when I should have been replenishing my strength, I pushed myself to my final reserves, desperate not to waste time, to get out there and get my message heard. And I'm glad I did, because I enjoyed those gigs and, without going to London, I'd never have encountered the brilliant work of Anna Chen, but the net result of all that gigging, all those late nights and long train rides, was that when I returned to my day job I was running on less than empty. I needed time out. I needed space to think. I needed to sleep in late and spend whole days doing nothing more strenuous than taking a shower and putting a DVD in the machine. I needed to fucking relax.

Fortunately, this past week, I've had that time. Another week off work coincided with a friend being away for a week and needing someone to look after her cats. This gave me the opportunity to take time off away from work, away from my parents and - because I couldn't travel - away from gigging. It was, in fact, a way to force myself to relax. I could go out during the day - and I have, to attend a fantastic gig by local women poets for International Women's Day, and to check out the John Martin exhibition at the Laing Art Gallery, to acquire nice things using a money-off voucher for the Body Shop and to mark what seem the first tentative stirrings of spring by buying and drinking my first bottle of Rose of the year - but I had to be in by the evening to feed the kittehs. Wild nights were out of the question.

So, for a week, I've been forced to chill. And, tonight, my friend came back. And, lying in bed, I found myself turning things over in my head. Thinking about things like the March for the Alternative later this month. Thinking about what I'd say at the gigs I have lined up next month, when I'll have longer sets to work with and more time to make my points. Thinking about the government, reflecting on stories my friend had told me from the union conference she'd been on, pondering cases like that of Rebekah Brewis, mentioned above, and the shameful reporting of the changes to clothing regulations for trans women that I've seen in the papers this week, and the efforts I've made, and continue to make, to shift my own gender presentation to an identity with which I feel more comfortable, and the microaggressions (and, lets be frank, risk of macro-aggressions) I have to deal with as a result.

And suddenly I didn't feel burned-out. I didn't feel beaten-down. I didn't feel tired and weak and useless. I didn't feel spent. I felt a whirl of emotions racing through my brain. I felt a desire to engage with those emotions properly again. I felt my fingers twitch to touch the keyboard. I felt my synapses trying on sentences for size. I felt - for the first time in months - angry. And anger, as John Lydon once pointed out, is an energy.

So. I am angry. I am shouty. I am ranty. And I am going to be ranting about a lot more things on here in the weeks and months to come. If you're reading this and you like that - and I'm going to assume, if you've been reading this for a while, that you do - I'd like to bid you hello again. If you're new to this blog, I'd just like to bid you hello. And if you don't like the thought of being ranted at by an angry, poor, left-of-centre trans poet? Well, you could probably stand to learn the most of anyone from this blog but, y'know, if the thought of acknowledging the opinion of someone who lacks your privilege really makes your guts churn and your eyes bleed? The back button is your friend, chum. Jog right on.

I watched the news today, oh boy...

...and I saw a lot of nonsense about how two streets in London have been closed to traffic the better to facilitate the annual orgy of rampant consumerism with which we traditionally celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. All this on Buy Nothing Day too. Who says the arse-licking corporate media don't have a sense of irony?

Curious by its absence from the media, however, has been news of the ongoing student occupations of many major universities in protest at the coalition's assault on the right to higher education and their wider cuts agenda. The suppression of free speech can take many forms - one of them is ignorance and concentration on the trivial.

So against the silence of the media - who, as we've seen elsewhere on this blog, can be bothered to take an interest in the affairs of marginalised people when it suits them - I figured I might use this blog to link to all the occupations currently going on. Universities currently occupied are:

Newcastle

The University of West England, Bristol

Manchester Metropolitan University

The School of Oriental and African Studies

Edinburgh University

Sheffield University

Many other universities have been occupied, but students have either been evicted by riot police or forced out using siege tactics like denying them access to toilet facilities. A good list of all places where occupations have been in effect is the Solidaritree graphic on the Occupied Oxford site, and there's also a good list down the side of the Newcastle blog. And the UCL occupation, which is in many ways the flagship occupation now, goes from strength to strength, attracting messages and gestures of support from figures like Billy Bragg, Richard Herring and the mighty Noam Chomsky.

All these protests are peaceful, all these protests are ongoing and all are being carried out not by mobs but by students concerned about a government that is actively trying to destroy their future and that of their relatives. They are protesting against a society where corporations like Vodafone can get away with having their tax bills declared null and void, where the bankers who caused the crisis carry on paying each other massive bonuses with no reprisals from the government, where the young are invoked as a reason why 'we need to tackle the deficit now' - and are then made to pay for the deficit anyway as the government removes their right to education.

But because no-one has smashed a window, dropped a fire extinguisher or attacked a suspiciously-positioned police van, the media have refused to cover these ongoing gestures of resistance to kyriarchy. The revolution may well not be televised. But with Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere, it almost doesn't matter. The mainstream media refusing to cover a story isn't the kiss of death anymore. In a variation of the Streisand Effect, even suppression by ignorance doesn't make the story go away. All it does is make it more transparent whose interests the media really serves, hastening the media and the kyriarchal regime's decline into irrelevance.

The truth will out, always. And truth will be spoken to power, no matter how much those in power hate it. Power may try to suppress; power may try to ignore; power may try to punish, with riot police and other kinds of sanction: it doesn't matter. As I put it in my poem Class? War?, published in the Emergency Verse anthology - and which I used to finish my recent, well-received set at the inaugural WordJazz event - 'what we deserve, we will demand; you won't deny us.'

I finished that gig on Thursday by saying 'fight the power', which sounded a little odd in my girly little voice (I'm not exactly Zack de la Rocha, after all), but seemed like the only suitable way to finish in these turbulent times. A strange, jarring way for a poet who looks like a Primark Antony Hegarty , and identifies most strongly as a writer with an ancient Amherst poetess with one of history's most famous cases of the vapours, to end a set, but then, I suppose, these are strange times.

So...y'know, fight the power, yeah?

The PEN is mightier

A little over a year ago I took what turned out to be one of the defining steps in my journey to where I am today as a writer. I accepted an invitation from Anthony Gormley's 'One and Other' project to do an hour on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. I themed my hour around an interactive poetry experiment on freedom of expression which didn't quite come off on the night, but which I later got the chance to do right at Newcastle Library for their Human Rights Day Celebration last December. My back-up plan was to do an hours' worth of material (a pretty scary prospect in a scene where performances usually last about twenty minutes at most), and it was in the preparation of this material that I came to the realisations about myself that have been the driving force behind this blog since.

But there was another motive behind my performance that night, and it was to raise money for International PEN, a fine charity which provides support to writers who have been wrongly imprisoned for the crime of producing work which the authorities find subversive.

Punishing a writer for expressing themselves is a ridiculous and cowardly act which should be beneath the dignity of the pettiest of tyrants, but it happens all over the world far too often. This Guardian article came to my attention recently, marking PEN's Day of the Imprisoned Writer and making me feel a little guilty for not having referenced PEN very much in the year and a bit since I got the customers at the bookshop where I worked to contribute to my plinth fund for them.

Free expression is something I've been thinking of these past few days,  because we've seen how our new Coalition masters respond to it: by sending riot police on horseback to attack defenceless children.

So this is where we are as a society. Any dissent from the neoliberal concensus and the corporate interests it serves is savagely punished - even if the dissenters are the young people politicians blandly enthuse about as 'our future'. And oddly enough they're right, about that part.

The students and schoolchildren who protested this week are the future of this country in spite of all the mockery pampered newspaper columnists have directed at them. They represent the first strike back on behalf of all those marginalised and disenfranchised by this government and the kyriarchal interests it serves. These young people are the ones the Daily Mail warned you about, and they won't be the first.

A culture which fears dissent, a culture which attacks its own children, is a culture that is doomed. But the fault lines which cracked open this week have been present for a long time. They have been present in this culture's attitude to race, to disability, to gender. They have been present in every lie a middle-manager ever told for advancement, every slur hurled from a moving car whose drivers thought a pedestrian looked either insufficiently feminine (or too feminine if they happen to be male-bodied), every heartless little laugh issuing from the beer-swollen bellies of a gang of cosseted cis caucasian males when they watch their Little Britain DVDs. Our culture has been sick for a long time. These kids are the first sign of our culture beginning to recover. The fact that so little about what really happened at the protests has appeared in the mainstream media is a sign that there are many people in positions of power and influence who have a vested interest in keeping us sick. As well they might: like many in positions of authority throughout this society, they owe their 'success' to the sickness.

But the young are the future. Just as the other marginalised people are the future. We are, to borrow Camus' phrase about Africa, 'those shining lands where so much strength is still untouched.'

So much strength - because our eyes truly see the sickness at the heart of this world, and we refuse to turn away. So much strength - because we deal with attacks from the privileged every day. So much strength - because every day we survive horror which would break them if they had to live through it just once. And we don't just survive: we find joy and colour and real laughter and love in the midst of it. We make music, literature and art of unflinching beauty and truth. We live, truly, in a way which the sick, authoritarian masters of this culture could never really understand because it can't fit on a spreadsheet. Strength of this kind cannot be overcome. It can be repressed for a time, but the repressed will always return. Histories, like ancient ruins, are the fictions of empire. While everything forgotten hangs in dark dreams of the past, ever threatening to return.

This week the past tried to fight the future. The world of authority and submission and hierarchy - of kyriarchy - which is slowly passing from the earth, tried to abort the new world yearning to be born with truncheons, fists and lies. It failed. And it will keep failing. And there will be more protests, more marches, more occupations and more creative forms of direct action and protest and dissent, and more and more marginalised people making a noise to drown out the echo chamber of the right-wing press. More and more of us telling our stories, dreaming our dreams, until those stories, those dreams and the life and love and good real anger we put into them redraw the boundaries of this world forever.

Every society in the past which fears dissent as much as ours has fallen. Ours will too. The question is, where will you be on the day when it falls? Weeping in your bunker or dancing in the ruins?

Today's homework assignments for new readers: read Anna Funder's Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, and watch the film The Lives of Others. Think.

Oh, and you could do a lot worse than pick up a copy of one of International PEN's anthologies like Free Expression is No Offence. You'll read a lot of good stuff and contribute to the protection of one of the most important human rights. After all, if you're reading a blog like this, I figure free speech has to be something you consider important, right?

Hello, you! Let's talk about privilege, shall we?

It seems, from reading my blog stats and other news that's came to my attention, as if this blog may recently have enjoyed something of an increase in reader numbers. Of course, in the great ocean of blogging these are little more than tiny droplets, but it's still nice to know how many of you lovely people are out there reading. Still, an increase in readers brings with it the responsibility of bringing said readers up to speed on what's going down.

It occurred to me that it might be worth doing a few introductory posts to allow these fresh and fragrant darlings the chance to understand exactly why I do go on so about the things I talk about herein. So settle in new readers, because today we're going to talk about the big one, the issue without which Wrestling Emily would be nothing more than a chronicle of the adventures of a slightly socially inept poet with a fondness for mascara and the films of Patrick Keiller. I speak, of course, of that most important issue in modern activism, privilege.

Privilege is one of those words which often gets misunderstood by the average, non-ofay cat when one describes another person - or even said cat themselves - as 'privileged', because the average person assumes that when I say 'person x is privileged' what I mean is 'person x lives in a giant castle made of Aztec gold and commands an army of zombie servants who constantly do their bidding.' This is, of course, a category error. Being wealthy is a form of privilege - and certainly, in a society as economically unequal as ours, an important one - but it isn't the only form of privilege by a long shot.

Privilege literally translates as 'private law' (you see, new readers? Not only do you get the ranting of a marginalised person, you get fascinating Latin trivia too! I'm too good to you, really I am.). A privileged group is a group which operates by a different set of laws to the rest of society - a law that exists for their benefit and to others' disadvantage. Of course, as a supposedly democratic society we theoretically no longer have laws which operate to advantage one group over another - though if you actually believe that, dear reader, I suggest that you pay a visit to an impoverished, largely black inner city area of London and ask some of the young men how they feel when they see a policeman. You may well be astonished to find that, unlike you, they do not immediately wonder whether they should ask him the time.

The fact is that there are shedloads of privileges which make it easier for some groups in our society to succeed than others. The classic work on privilege is 'Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack' by Peggy Mcintosh, which explores White Privilege - the vast and invisible network of privileges which accrue to caucasian people purely by virtue of our pallid complexion. And I say 'our' because I will willingly cop to the fact that I have caucasian privilege. I may lose out on the axes in a lot of other areas, but I do have the Great White Advantage. This even modifies how badly I feel the effects of other areas in which I'm not privileged: as a nonbinary trans person, I lose out in a lot of ways - but as a Caucasian trans person rather than a trans woman of colour, I have a much lower risk of being murdered or being forced to engage in survival sex work. White Privilege is one of the reasons I get really annoyed when white people accuse people from other races of 'playing the race card' - because white people, without realising it, play the race card every single day and get away with it.

Are you white, new readers? My sympathies. I am too. And I know how hard it can be to acknowledge the privilege you get just because you have a lack of melanin pigmentation. Deal with it. I do. Robert Jensen did too. Let his example school you.

We touched above on another form of privilege - cis privilege. Sorry. Am I going too fast for you? I forget how hard it can be to come to grips with all these strange new words. Of course that itself is another aspect of many forms of privilege - you assume you already know everything and thus resent it when marginalised people start talking about things about which you have never heard. But anyway: cis is essentially the opposite of trans, when it comes to gender. A cis person is someone whose gender identity is in accordance with the gender assigned to them at birth. And while it may not be immediately obvious to you - it often isn't - the fact is that being comfortable in your assigned gender identity brings with it a whole load of privileges. Check them out.

Hopefully you're getting the point at this stage. There are, as the Native American character in Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josie Wales might put it, 'all kindsa privileges' (and if you're a quick study you'll have twigged that there's a problem with the Native American character in that film, in that he is the creation of a writer with white privilege - the character is never given an inner life, he only exists to explain the mystical significance of Eastwood's character to Sondra Locke. And if you're a really, really quick study you'll also realise that the fact that a Mystical Native American is required to explained the mysteries of Outlaw Manhood to Sondra is an equally problematic example of male privilege - this is called mansplaining, and is a topic to which we shall return in later blogs which cater to you, the new reader).

White people have privilege over black people, men have privilege over women, straight people have privilege over gay people, cis people have privilege over trans people, abled people have privilege over disabled people - there are, indeed, many kinds of privilege and they all intersect. The new reader may at this point be suspicious that this blog is moving in the direction of political correctness - and I would not disabuse said reader of this opinion, because I don't think there is anything wrong with political correctness. As Stewart Lee has pointed out, all political correctness consists of is 'treating people fairly'. What a sickening idea.

The vast and interlocking tapestry of privilege is called the Kyriarchy by those of us who strive to dismantle it and create a world in which its toxic effects will not ruin life for generations the way it has so far. Kyriarchy is a word invented by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who realised that the traditional feminist characterisation of society as a patriarchy simplified things too much by reducing things to a (cis) male/female binary.

You should care about kyriarchy because it's a web in which all of us are caught. Unless I've badly misjudged my new readers and this blog is now being followed by Donald Trump, I'm going to assume that you, like me, benefit from some axes of privilege while losing out on others. So what's the right thing to do about this kind of tapestry of evil?

That depends. It depends on whether all you care about is your own advancement or you genuinely want to make a fairer world. If all you're interested in is advancing your own shallow interests, then you'd follow the 'kiss up, kick down' strategy: kowtow to people above you in the kyriarchal pyramid, while ruthlessly suppressing those below you to curry favour with your superiors and show off your aggressive, dominant kyrio-cojones. But that way doesn't work in the long run.  The annals of Greek tragedy and the crime columns of tabloid newspapers are full of people who have licked the ass above and kicked the ass below until they reached some supposedly comfortable point in the hierarchy, only to have it brutally taken out from under them by someone who lacked their advantages. Remember the end of Carlito's Way, where Al Pacino survives the climactic shootout only to be murdered out of the blue by John Leguizamo's character?  That's the logical end-point of that strategy. But there is another way.

The path to making a fairer world is no less risky and a lot less comfortable than the path of mud-wrestling the marginalised for relative advantage. You'll face bigger obstacles, greater hardship, more humiliating losses and ultimately run a greater risk of dying early than the kiss-up, kick-down scum. But you have one advantage. And that is that, because you yourself are opposing the web in which everyone else is trapped, you show that, in the ancient activist proverb, another world is possible. You show that we don't have to buy in to a never-ending battle royale in which no-one ever ultimately wins. You show that it's possible to imagine a world where, pace Marcus Aurelius, life is more like dancing than wrestling. And, even if the worst happens, if you lose out on your position in a hierarchy - if you die - then you don't lose or die like Al P in Carlito's Way; you lose or die like Alec Guinness playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars: if your enemies kill you, they make you more powerful than they can possibly imagine; because the fact they've had to kill you shows that the one thing they fear more than anything else is someone who doesn't fit into their sad little world. And that example, and that reminder of what they truly fear, serves as an inspiration to the rebels who'll come after you; and eventually, through your taking a stand, a better world might be created and, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, something like heaven might dawn.

It's up to you really, readers. Maybe, as my analytics tell me, you googled this site using the disturbing phrase 'women pee after wrestling' and stuck around because you were trying to work out if I could possibly be for real; maybe you saw me at a gig, explaining why I apparently switch genders in poems describing my adolescent years, and were intrigued enough to look me up; maybe you encountered me in some other, more everyday context, and something about me intrigued you enough that you decided to go looking for my online presence. Who knows? All I know is you're reading this, you haven't been here since the get-go and, like those who have, it's time for you to make the choice. Do you want your actions to drive the world further to the brink; or do you want to join me in trying, in our fumbling and ineffective way, to make a better world?

The choice is yours. I hope you make the right one.

Bisexuality for Colonels: a Telegraph Guide

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I have a low opinion of the alleged British 'newspaper' The Daily Telegraph. Aside from a peculiar blip when it, inexplicably, was the paper which broke the MPs' expenses scandal early in 2009, the 'Torygraph', as people call it, is usually derided as 'the paper for retired Colonels', constantly serving up a diet of misinformation and right-wing vitriol.

When we last encountered the Torygraph in this blog, they were engaged in whipping up ill-informed hatred against the Trade Unions, with a biased report on the cost of 'facility time' which  just happened to coincide with David Cameron announcing plans to cut the public sector. This week, as Cameron plans to fill Margaret Thatcher's shoes and excite certain old guard Tories by 'getting tough with Europe', his loyal supporters at the upper-class chip-wrapper of choice have clearly decided they need a good old 'Brussells gravy train' story to get their teeth into, to show how Those Bureaucrats At The EU are Wasting Your Hard-Earned Tax Money.

And what are they wasting it on? Those damned queers, of course! You can practically hear the Colonels spluttering into their kedgeree (got a taste for it in India, don'tchaknow, last days of the Raj, MEEEEEEHHHH) at the thought that the European Commission has spent a whopping one-hundred-and-twenty-four thousand pounds on a 'gay activists conference'. How dare they! Did we fight Hitler so that gay people could live their lives free of hatred and intolerance? The very idea!

Like all the best right-wing scare stories, this one starts unravelling almost from the first paragraph. First of all, as we learn early in the article, this is not just a 'gay activists conference', it's for bisexual, trans and intersex activists too. This is important because the Telegraph has already shown its hand, and the degree to which it is ignorant of LGBTIQ communities, by subsuming all these disparate identities under the 'gay' label.

Recently at work I took a survey which had the usual 'diversity' section tagged on the end. This section didn't have a category for gender identity, but instead stuck 'transgender' in as a single option tacked onto the end of a question about...sexual orientation. This pretty much gave the game away about the surveyors' real commitment to diversity: they were sort of aware that trans people existed, and they had an idea that they would have to include a trans box for people to tick...but they hadn't gone to the trouble of educating themselves - because if they had, I dunno, looked for five minutes at the wikipedia article on trans gender identities, they would have seen in the second paragraph that trans is not a discrete sexual orientation of its own, but that trans people can be gay, straight, poly, pan, bi or asexual. But they couldn't be bothered to educate themselves. 'Stick a 'transgender' box on the end of the question about poofters, Ron,' says the lazy survey maker, 'I know we're both normal an' that, but we gotta do stuff like this to keep the bloody politically correct brigade happy.'

It's the same deal with the Torygraph and their headline writers. If you've been following the recent furore over Stonewall, you'll be aware that the LGBTIQ community is one in which there are divisions and issues of controversy. But none of this matters to the Torygraph. They subsume the entire range of LGBTIQ identities into the catch-all 'gay' category. Remember: these are people who call themselves journalists. Their job is to convey information about the world to their reading public. So when they indulge themselves in a little sloppy thinking about LGBTIQ people, that ignorance and arrogance gets passed on to their readership. But the Telegraph isn't really that bothered about this, because the Telegraph doesn't really care about gay, bi or trans people. It just wants to use them as cannon fodder in its assault on the EU.

If they don't care a lot about gay, bi or trans people, they care about intersex people even less. You can tell that by their disgusting use of scare quotes around the word 'intersex' itself. With those deceitful little punctuation marks, the Telegraph is telling its readers that all this 'intersex' business is just made-up nonsense. A little over a year after intersex issues exploded into the mainstream media because of the IOC's disgraceful treatment of Caster Semenya, the Telegraph is implying to its readers that intersex people don't exist. I can't imagine how it must feel to be an intersex person reading a paragraph like that. Not only do you have to deal with being marginalised since birth, now a major UK newspaper is denying the validity of your experiences - of your existence - and saying that a conference that attempts to deal with your experience (along with those of other marginalised groups) is a waste of money on 'politically correct twaddle'.

It isn't the paper saying this, you understand: they're just summarising the words of critics like Philip Davies MP. Who he, you ask, dear reader? Well, from what I can gather, Philip Davies is a time-wasting little creep who, rather than representing his constituents in Shipley, prefers to spend his time harassing Trevor Philips with meaningless letters,  telling Muslims to 'fuck off', and acting as a rent-a-gob for a whole host of right-wing pressure groups like the Taxpayers Aliance, and the Campaign Against Political Correctness. Wee Phil - a man so odious that fellow Tory John Bercow referred to him as a 'troglodyte' over his opposition to equality legislation, and who also allegedly likes to let rich men steal food from the mouths of babies in the third world - turns out to be the son of Peter Davies, who gave us all so much amusement when he was comprehensively schooled by a local radio DJ about how ill-thought-out his plans to shut down Doncaster Pride were. Clearly, all Davies fils yearns to do with his right-wing demagoguery is impress daddy dearest. How pathetic.

And how much more pathetic of the Torygraph to wheel out this kind of rent-a-quote to comment on this story in the first place. Again, their reliance on him as a source shows their intent to distort the story from the start. By flagging up Davies' position as an MP - and not informing the reader of his past ridiculous, obsessive behaviour - they present him as a figure of authority expressing a view, rather than the odd and rather odious little man he is.

Perhaps the biggest sign of how biased and twisted the article is, however, is its pearl-clutching horror at the lavishness of spending a whopping £124k on a conference. £124,000! What an unthinkable figure! Except it's not, really. From speaking to people I know involved with Trade Unions, and contacts on Twitter, the general feeling is that paying only £124k to organise a conference actually represents tremendous value - especially given that 200 delegates will be attending, and it lasts five days. Despite what the Torygraph are trying to imply, this is a lot more than just a big nosh-up and a few workshops.I talked to someone attending a one-day conference for a local organisation where hotel costs alone will come to £15000 in total for a hundred delegates. Multiply that by five days and the cost becomes £75000. Double that to allow for 200 delegates and you get £150K - which is £26,000 more than the ILGA conference, and remember this is just for accommodation - the real costs would be far higher. Frankly, £124k for a conference is a bargain. But again, the Torygraph don't want to set the costs in context - they want to scare their readers with a big, huge, expensive-sounding number which is being wasted, frittered away I tell you, on a conference for a bunch of pinko commie sexual deviants.

Now, £124k is a big number. But I'm pretty sure - and I can't be sure of this, I only got a B at GCSE maths - that SIX BILLION POUNDS is a much bigger number. This number, of course, was the amount of the tax bill that HMRC recently let mobile phone company Vodafone off without paying, leading to protests around the UK yesterday. Protests which - along with the original story - I can find no mention of on the Telegraph website. Funny that.

So the Torygraph is ignoring a real story about broad-based opposition to the unfairness of Coalition cuts, and instead trying to foment manufactured anger about a conference in Europe which actually won't cost a great deal of money in order to placate the Europhobic wing of the Conservative party. But that isn't all they're doing. The effect of their article is to reinforce the bigotry and prejudice which says that LGBTIQ people don't deserve even this relatively small sum of money to be spent on our concerns. That we shouldn't have our voices heard, or our views taken into account. That we don't matter - and, in the case of intersex people, don't exist.

This is a vile, inhuman, twisted piece of propaganda which doesn't deserve to be dignified with the label of journalism. To my mind, it isn't far removed from hate-speech. The Telegraph should be ashamed of themselves for printing it - but I doubt they will be. Privilege, after all, means never having to say you're sorry - even when you bloody well should be.

Stonewall: Captured?

Next Thursday, I'll be performing as part of the Finnish poet and artist Anna Puhakka's 'Tales Told at Dusk' event at The Bridge Hotel, Newcastle. And I'm looking forward to it, because Anna is an amazing person, and I'm always glad to have a gig...but I had been toying with hopping a train to the Smoke and attending the Why the Silence? protests against the Stonewall awards instead...at least until Stonewall, after being shouted at, browbeaten, and protested against on the web for ages, finally agreed to do what its actual members wanted and support same-sex marriage.

This decision comes hard on the heels of Stonewall nominating Bill Leckie, a transphobic journo who has been criticised by Stonewall Scotland, for an award - and then swiftly being forced to withdraw his nomination after a storm of protests by trans groups; and producing an 'educational' film for children in schools designed to prevent LGBT bullying and which yet says, with a straight face, that 'tranny is short for transgender' - an assertion akin to arguing that the N-word is 'informal slang to describe a person of Afro-Carribean origin'.

How did it come to this? How have we reached a situation where the progressive wing of LGBT activism is protesting against Stonewall, and not side-by-side with them? Part of the explanation for that may lie in the fact that many cis gay people have followed an assimilationist 'we're just like you!' strategy in the last two decades, but despite that I know that I, and, I'd guess, a lot of other gender-variant people, can say that I know a lot of cis gay folks who are more inclusive and radical on trans issues in their sleep than Stonewall are at their most on point. I think there's a more worrying explanation for why Stonewall has became more and more conservative (and more and more removed from the orginal spirit of the Stonewall riots, at which, let's not forget, trans people were front and centre).

There is a phenomenon known to people who study the intersection of politics and business as regulatory capture. It occurs when a regulatory agency begins to make decisions in the interests of the industry it supposedly regulates, and stops acting as a check on the practices of that industry. It's one reason why the Western economies are now in such a terrific mess: the agencies who were meant to regulate the markets wound up being seduced by the 'masters of the universe' whose powers they were meant to keep in check, and so the hedge funds, the banks and the rest of the financial industry were able to get away with what amounts to economic murder.

Now. Here's an interesting thing. Have a look at the Stonewall site, and in particular the list of 'Corporate Partners' whose names scroll along the bottom. Seem familiar? Yep: banks, financial companies, insurance firms...Exactly the same kind of companies involved in the regulatory capture of the financial watchdogs. These people are the experts when it comes to subverting outside agencies to their own ends.

I would suggest that Stonewall's increasing conservatism, and its refusal to walk the walk when it comes to trans issues (a refusal which extends to Stonewall stubbornly referring to itself only as a gay, lesbian and bi organisation, when just about every other gay group has at least added a 'T' to the end of its acronym, if nothing else), is the result of a desire on their part not to alienate these powerful sponsors. We can actually see this in the justification Ben Summerskill gave when he originally said he would not be 'jumped into' support for gay marriage - he believes introducing it would be 'too expensive.' This is not the argument of someone who believes he is fighting for a noble cause. This is the argument of a CEO who fears his shareholders will revolt if he damages their bottom line. And those 'shareholders' - who include people like JP Morgan, Barclays, Aviva and American Express - are, it seems to me, not exactly groups whose interests are best served by genuinely trying to dismantle the kyriarchy.

It looks, now, as if there won't be as much of a protest as there would have been on November 4th, now that Stonewall have given in and decided they will support the right of cis gays to get married after all. I still hope there's some level of protest, because the transphobia which their 'educational' film displays is something they still need to do something about. But I have to confess that, now I think about it, it would perhaps be more interesting to actually go to the awards themselves. Not to witness the orgy of backslapping and congratulation - or even to pour a bucket of champagne over some of those 'corporate partners' in a Chumbawamba-style act of protest - but to see Ben Summerskill's face up close. And, in particular, to look in his eyes.

Because I can't help but feel that those eyes are the eyes of a man who's beginning to realise that he may have compromised too much on the ideals that made him an activist in the first place. A man who knows he may have to choose between pandering to the corporations whose money supports his £90,000 a year salary, and making his organisation a joke in the process, or standing up for real equality (including equality for trans people), and running the risk of alienating those corporations and being forced to live a slightly less lavish lifestyle. And a man who only realises, now, with dawning horror, that it's the big salary and the life of not rocking the boat that exerts the greater pull.

A man, in short, who has been captured.

The Politics of the Heel Turn: or, Nasty Nick and the Kayfabe Coalition

2010 has been a strange year for British politics. Perhaps the biggest shock of all is the speed with which Nick Clegg went from being the British Obama to being, essentially, a stooge for a government which, as we learned from the Spending Review this week, wants to cut housing benefit for the under-35s, throw people off disability benefit left, right and centre, make life harder for women and old people, condemn young trans people to even more years in the closet than they put up with at the moment, deprive people in care homes of mobility aids, kick thousands of public sector workers out of their jobs and generally reduce Britain to a condition of neo-Dickensian misery (I suppose we should be thankful that Henry Mayhew's guide to the kind of world in which we'll all soon live has been reissued).

Many people were shocked by this change in Clegg's persona - none more so, I imagine, than the quartet of bright, breezy, cheerful young Lib Dem girls who I saw perform an impromptu 'I agree with Nick!' song and dance routine at Newcastle's Greys Monument in the week after the first televised election debate. I have to admit that I was less shocked than many people were by the speed with which Clegg dropped his principles at the promise of a ministerial limo, largely because, growing up in the 1990s, I had a ready-made model which I could apply to the situation. I've written before about my affection for the garish pesudosport that is professional wrestling. And in wrestling, the transformation in Clegg's character would be what's referred to as a heel-turn.

Profesional wrestling is a narrative form with a very odd attitude to continuity. Week-to-week continuity is important, but continuity in the longer term is subject to near-Stalinist levels of revision. The longer a character has been a heel or a face, the less chance there is that their previous status will be referred to. It is simply the case that they have always been 'one of the bad guys'. Through constant repetition, a narrative is generated that the fans buy into, and booing the dastardly villain becomes as easy as it was to cheer for them six months ago, when they were the crowd-pleasing hero.

Interestingly enough, the way the coalition have approached the economy has pretty much followed the same process by which professional wrestling creates its alternate reality. In much the same way as the WWE pretends that it was never called anything else, that Madusa Miceli wasn't the same person as Alundra Blayze, or that there exists a specific place called 'Parts Unknown' (whose inhabitants have an unusual fondness for face-paint and heavy metal; if it did exist, it sounds like it would actually be kind of cool), so we've been spoon-fed a series of egregious lies by the Coalition (whose name actually even sounds like a heel wrestling stable, albeit a slightly crap one; I'd have more respect for our new overlords if they took a leaf straight out of the WWE's book and started calling themselves the Corporate Ministry).

We've been told Labour left the country with an unbelievable deficit - in fact, before the recession, we had the 2nd lowest level of debt of any of the G7 countries.

We've been told that George Osborne's savage cuts to the benefits system are needed to wipe out '£5bn of benefit fraud'. In fact, benefit fraud costs only £1bn.

We've been told that desperate measures of the kind announced by Osborne are needed to save the economy. In fact, economists all over the world believe the Coalition is on the wrong course, and statistics show that these measures will plunge us ever deeper into recession.

There are more - many more - myths about the deficit, the cuts and the economy which the Coalition want us to swallow as uncritically as the marks at a wrestling match who will chant 'U-S-A!' during a match between a Candian face and a Mexican heel, but fortunately there are sites like Liberal Conspiracy, who have posted a handy myth-busting guide to the economic arguments here, and there are a host of blogs regularly deconstructing the lies told by the Tories' friends in the media. The point I want to make is that, while I enjoy suspending my disbelief if all it involves is a bunch of people jumping around in silly spandex outfits, when it comes to politics I would rather see a little more focus on what one of George Bush's aides (disparagingly) referred to as the 'reality-based community.'

Alternatively, if we are going to live in a world where our politicians treat us like a bunch of marks, then I demand that, during the next Prime Minister's Question Time, someone runs in and hits a hurricanrana on David Cameron. We may as well get some entertainment out of this bullshit.

We're Number One, So Why Try Harder?

It would seem that I myself am greatly privileged in a way I did not expect, because apparently, according to the kind of bullshit survey that occassionally makes the local papers, the place where I work is the best place to work in my entire region.

Hmmm. Well, I suppose these things are a matter of opinion, and I suppose for the (privileged) majority, a workplace like mine is pretty good; but personally, there are a lot of aspects of the place that make me, personally, more than a little uncomfortable. But I have my generous hat on right now, and I'm going to assume these things are more a result of the bullshit work culture that currently prevails in this country, rather than failings specific to my place of work.

Who knows? Your workplace may well have won some award or other in its own region. Hell, it at least has to have Investors in People status, right? Although, in my experience, any company that doesn't actively dismember its employees can get that one, and even if dismembering did occur they could probably scrape through as long as they only did it to a certain percentage of staff and made sure it was done in a caring way. Put it this way: I've worked in some shitholes, and they all had Investors in People status. Go figure.

Whatever awards your place of incarceration  work has under its belt, you can bet it touts them proudly, because endless self-cheerleading is one of the more nauseating features of the modern business culture, from the executives repeating their affirmations to each other as they brush their teeth in the morning to the press releases explaining breathlessly how Fuckthepoor.com (a division of PlanetRape Incorporated) is proud to give something back to the community by sponsoring the First Annual Bjorn Lomborg Greenwashing Prize. If you want a thorough overview of how this relentless positivity has fucked everything up, I can't recommend the sobering wisdom of Barbara Ehrenreich's Smile or Die enough.

But if you want a quicker, more bracing hit of cynicism to go with your morning cornflakes before you head off to the salt mines of late capitalism, you could always check out the new entry on my Write Out Loud blog.

Planet of the Arseholes (Part the First)

If you've followed this blog for a while, you'll know I have a pretty big problem with the kyriarchy. I hate pretty much anyone in a position of authority which they didn't, and don't, earn. And how do you earn a position of authority? You earn it by ensuring that you're worthy of it. You earn it by showing you deserve it. You earn it by not being an arsehole with your authority. You earn it by being a decent human being.

Of course, being a decent human being seems to be pretty damn hard for a lot of people. Especially those in positions of authority. Most people in these positions can't resist the temptation to abuse them, and in the process prove themselves unworthy of the position they're in. They enjoy the benefits of authority without doing anything to deserve it; they enjoy privilege.

The latest privileged idiot to prove himself unworthy of the authority invested in him by his money and the adulation of a society of idiots is one Duncan Bannatyne. If you live in the UK, you will have been painfully aware of this smug, ugly, pathetic, self-publicising little man for far too long. Bannatyne runs a chain of overpriced health clubs catering to pathetic narcissists, and has a second 'job' appearing on the charmless and deeply naff BBC TV programme 'Dragons' Den' in which he and a trio of similarly miserable-looking twits in suits sit in judgement on ordinary men and women who have came up with inventions for which they seek funding. It's a kind of variant of the X-Factor/Britain's Got Talent format, only the judges have even less charisma than Piers Morgan, which is some achievement. The whole programme is narrated in tones of breathless adoration for the dragons' bulging bank balances by Evan Davis, a man who used to be a serious business journalist before he became an ego-fluffer for these corporate idiots.

You can probably tell it's a show of which I'm not a fan. That's because I get sick of the pathetic, sycophantic adoration our society bestows on so-called 'entrepreneurs'. So they've made a pile of money in business? So what? We should adore them for being more successful at exploiting the labour of their staff than people who've made less? Stuff that. The usual defence offered by the grunting, forelock-tugging idiots who do adore these people is that they've 'came from nothing' and 'made something of themselves', to which I say: if you believe that, I have a lovely bridge I can sell you at an absolute song. Most 'self-made' men are anything but: they owe their positions to an invisible network of privileges which people never take into account. For one thing, they usually are men; they're always cis, they tend to be straight (and most of the few who are gay tend to be gay men); they're able-bodied and usually don't suffer mental illness (or if they do they don't talk about it); most of them are caucasian; and they all tend to have the sort of swaggering, cocksure, one-of-the-boys confidence which business culture - mistakenly, as I've pointed out before - regards as a prerequisite for success. Show me any self-made man and I'll show you a list of ways as long as your arm in which kyriarchy and privilege helped the lucky bastard get to where he is.

Now, some people in positions of authority are self-aware enough to be conscious of this on some level, are self-deprecating and even humble about it, and try to behave with a bit of class towards people who haven't had their luck. Not so Bannatyne. This Friday, a young woman made an innocent joke about Bannatyne on Twitter, and Bannatyne's reaction was to threaten to sue her, then unleash his legion of moronic fans, some of whom called her such delightful things as 'blonde slag cunt' and threatened to kill her. More details of the event can be seen here.

Bannatyne's attempts to position himself as a 'victim' of 'bullies and haters' are laughable: here is a man who has vast reserves of wealth, who is adored by millions (millions of idiots admittedly, but those idiots have disposable income), and who has a variety of media platforms in which his every brainfart is treated as if it's an outpouring of genius, threatening to use his wealth and the courts to silence someone for making a joke - then refusing to intervene when his acolytes begin a hate campaign against the woman he's persecuting? Bitch, please. The victim here is the woman who made the tweet, who has had to put up with vicious abuse and threats all weekend, while Bannatyne sheds crocodile tears about 'protecting my family' while pleasuring himself in front of the mirror with yet another ivory-handled backscratcher.

A lot of people say that deference is no longer a feature of British culture. When they say this, they're referring to the culture of deferring to authority figures from the old-fashioned upper classes who reached their simultaneous zenith and nadir with the likes of Sir Alec Douglas-Home. But many privileged people in society still expect deference as a right from those they see as 'below' them. I've seen this close-up when I've dared to criticise the transphobia of privileged cis people, and we saw exactly the same type of behaviour from Bannatyne this Friday and, indeed, over the course of the weekend. These people are happy to tell the less-privileged that they just have to buck up their ideas, knuckle down and take it - sometimes with horrific consequences, as Ian Birrell pointed out in yesterday's Guardian - but as soon as you challenge them, it suddenly becomes the most important thing in the world that they have been offended, and how dare you say such a thing to them - just as Bannatyne was blind to the offensive and intimidating way he blundered into his exchange with the woman on Twitter, and yet was hypersensitive to the offence this had caused him and which he imagined it might possibly cause his family.

This kind of behaviour, of course, creates a climate in which people feel afraid to make jokes because they are afraid it might offend people. And weirdly, Duncan Bannatyne was keen to say this was a Very Bad Thing in the context of the Equality Act (and my bringing this up should in no way be construed as support for that act - as I've pointed out before, its effect on trans people is likely to be very negative): and yet as soon as he's on the receiving end of a little light-hearted banter, he threatens to take the person responsible for court. And why? Because the Equality Act (generally) protects people who lack privilege; and in Bannatyne's moral universe it ought to be okay to joke about such people. But joking about people with privilege? In Bannatyne's universe, that's unthinkable - as Karl Webster at The Ugly Truth points out hilariously.

In summary: Duncan Bannatyne is an arsehole and has proved himself comprehensively to be an arsehole, and a load of even more pathetic arseholes who worship Bannatyne proved themselves to be arseholes as well. Fortunately, the internet makes it more and more easy to point at and mock these people for the arseholes that they are. And by crikey do they hate it. But they're just going to have to toughen up and take their lumps - because if they really earned their authority, they wouldn't be in this situation.

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.

Weeks like these will happen to you (2)

I promised some more updates on what this week was like for me, and it's nearly over now, so it's probably about time I did that. From my vantage point here at the arse-end of Saturday morning, it doesn't actually seem like I did a lot this week, but the major achievement, the thing that really came to a head, was that I finally finished editing and sorting out the manuscript for what will now be the second collection.

The impetus for this was the Grievous Prize, which my fellow poet Sarah Coles informed me about on Facebook after I ranted, recently, about my annoyance when looking at the web pages of publishers who claim to be producing 'edgy, contemporary, risk-taking etc' stuff but whose lists are endless parades of photogenic cis caucasian Oxford graduates. That was not a night I'm proud of: not because I said things I shouldn't, though I probably haven't done myself any favours in some parts of the poetry community by calling some publishing houses on their BS, but more because my emotional reaction to this overwhelming onslaught of the Stepford Bards was to metaphorically curl up in the corner and whimper. To be fair, it was an onslaught: every tastefully shot picture of a fruity post-graduate cis girl, or neatly-coiffed young man looking deep in rimless spectacles, every sentence containing the phrase 'read literature at Oxford and went on to study creative writing at UEA', every little logroll-quote from another similarly clubbable poet, and, most of all, every bland, vacuous, and completely unengaging poem to which all these things were appended, was like a punch in the gut.

So yeah, it's fair to say I threw myself a little pity party. Thanks to everyone who chipped in with their thoughts and replies, esecially the many, many poets and writers whose work I admire who've talked about the same thing. And a very big thank you to Sarah, for posting the link to the prize, which gave me something to shoot for. Even if the manuscript turns out not to be what they're looking for, working towards this competition, and its deadline, gave me the impetus to pull together the poems I've been working on lately, along with a bunch of older work on the same themes, into what I think is the strongest selection of work I've done yet. Flicking through it, it becomes clear why I had to cancel All Haste is from the Devil: if I hadn't done that, if I hadn't forced myself to write more honestly, to throw out all the posturing and the parody of myself that I'd become, if I hadn't came to the conclusion that I had to write about what I feel instead of what I thought people would accept, I'd never have written this.

And I'm not saying this is a better collection, I'm not saying it'll blow people away, just that it had to be written. Sometimes, the writing dictates what you do, and you only realise it's dictating after the fact. It's only when the poem's been written that you realise you had to do certain things so you could write it. And that's the feeling I have now, as I look at this collection.

The Grievous Prize manuscripts are submitted anonymously, so I'm afraid I can't tell you the title until I know if they want to publish it. I'm hoping they will, because there aren't enough poetry publishers doing stuff that genuinely takes risks, and it would be nice to be associated with some who are. But even if it turns out not to be what they're looking for, and whether I have to edit it or not, I now have the shape of the collection. Hopefully, in whatever form it finally gets published, you'll get to read it and see for yourself why it had to turn out this way.

Tell Me Why (I Don't Like Sundays)

Ah, Sunday morning, and here I am up way before the sun getting ready for work. I have to get up stupid early because I need to make sure to get the bus into work at the right time. The bus I need to get only runs once an hour on Sunday in off-peak time, and this is definitely off-peak time.

You have to hand it to the kyriarchy (Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's more nuanced term for the dark forces who would rule this planet - go read the link, it's important), it played a blinder when it convinced us that allowing shops to trade on sunday would give us all more freedom. Of course it hasn't. But it oppresses us in different ways, and we only think that some of those ways are freedom.

It oppresses me because I have to get up this goddam early. It oppresses me because so much of my time is spent trying to find a way around the crappiness of the Sunday morning bus schedules so I can get my ass into work without being late and without being so bloody early it hurts. It oppresses the bus driver who has to be there in that bus driving my sorry arse into work in the morning, and the guys at McDonalds who have to be in there even earlier than I do to give us other Sunday-working mofos our coffee while we wait for the managers to arrive and open up the shops we work in. The only people who think they're liberated by this system are the people who don't have to work on Sunday, the middle class folks who get to spend Sunday morning nice and comfy in their beds before they go out shopping.

But here's the news from those below: if you're taking your ass out shopping on a Sunday, then your ass is not liberated. Because you have accepted the idea that your role as a passive consumer, as a cog in the neo-'liberal' capitalist economic machine, can know no bounds. You are accepting that there is no space, no time in your life which cannot be commercialised. I don't agree with the Christians on a lot of grounds, but one area where I do agree with them is that, when we decided to treat Sunday as basically just another shopping day, we lost something. We lost the idea that there might be one day a week when Mammon didn't reign supreme.

This Sunday, readers, don't go shopping. Don't necessarily go to church, either, but do something different. Start a little project at home - something you can get started on without going out and buying materials for it. Visit a museum (do not go to the gift shop). Go for a walk in the woods, go running, take a trip to the seaside. Read that book you haven't got around to. Listen to some music. Visit a friend. Step out of the machinery, start focusing on the idea that maybe there ought to be more commerce-free areas of life. And stop submitting to the collective hypnosis that tells you you are free because you can buy useless consumer tchotchkes on a Sunday, and which oppresses us all.