Neither a girl nor a boy be

Do you believe that there is a limit to stupidity? I do, at least I used to, coming across some absurdity or other, saying things can’t get any more ridiculous than that, surely they can’t? But they can. There are no absolute limits to human stupidity; it expands ever outwards like the universe!

My attention was drawn recently to a story that appeared in the Toronto Star. It concerns a Canadian couple – people I decline to name – parents of a baby who decided that it should grow up genderless. Oh, they know the baby’s sex alright, as do the child’s older siblings, but the rest of the world is to be kept in the dark, and the rest of the world includes the child’s own grandparents.

So, I ask myself, do the grandparents refer to it as it? It's too young at present to have a view but how will it feel in years to come? Will it feel that it would have been better to have been born to parents who were not such stupid morons, parents who have taken political faddishness to the ultimate level: blaming God - and grammar - for creating hes and shes!

When it was born the couple sent an email to friends and family, saying that they had decided not to share its sex for now. “…a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand for what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime.”

Yes, Storm is its name, rather appropriate considering what it is likely to face at the hands of people who believe that parents making choices for children is “obnoxious”. Really? I rather thought that guidance and making choices was what responsible parenting was all about. Ah, but think of the freedom it will have, to live if it wants on a diet of chocolate bars and cookies!

My parents never imposed any kind of gender identity on me, whatever that is meant to imply. I was simply Anastasia, their daughter, valued as a girl and a daughter, never limited in any way, never taught to believe that there were restrictions on what I could or could not do simply because I was female. To that extent I suppose I, too, must have been a ‘genderless’ baby, inasmuch as I was always free from preconceptions, no limitation at all being created by the proper use of language and the rules of language. Oh, perhaps we should abolish pronouns also, along with gender!

It might give you some idea who these people are, what their mode of thought is, if I tell you that, when not working or ‘unschooling’ their older children (apparently it’s a offshoot from home schooling), they wander from place to place, spending time with the Zapatistas in Mexico at one moment, spending time with families in Cuba, learning about the ‘revolution’, at the next. Oh, brave new world that has such left liberals in it, people who turn the world upside down, formless freedom for some, abject tyranny for others!

That’s just the thing, isn’t it; this child of the revolution is not an individual; it's not a girl or a boy or genderless or a unique human being; no, it’s an experiment, an experiment in the most deluded forms of political correctness and liberal faddishness. It will not grow into freedom; it is likely to grow into neurosis, especially when it becomes aware that there is a wider world beyond the cocoon spun by its loopy parents; especially as the wider world has been made aware of it.

What these people are doing is encouraging the worst forms of voyeuristic speculation and curiosity, which effectively turns their baby into a sex object, not an individual who happens to be a girl or a boy. It is not a person; it’s an either or set of genitalia; for that’s what these publicity hounds have created. Setting out to do one thing they have achieved not just the contrary but the contrary at its most refined.

Oh, well, some folks are wise and some are otherwise, as Roderick Random says.

Hair today

Salvador Dali had a wonderfully subversive sense of humour. It found outlet sometimes in the most unlikely things. Take political banners, those displaying the Big Brother, larger than life phizog of some hero or other. It was once the fashion in communist parades, or in student demonstrations, for participants to carry these things, often showing their secular saints in profile in a kind of apostolic succession.

I’m sure you can picture the sort of thing I mean. It begins with a heavily-bearded Karl Marx, then and even hairier Friedrich Engels, then Lenin with his moustache and goatee, followed by Stalin with just the moustache, ending with a bare-faced Mao Zedong. It was one of these ghastly things that Dali took, adding the title underneath The Rise of Marxism Corresponding to the Decline in Facial Hair.

I wrote some reflections on this myself a couple of years ago. Now I’ve been inspired to return to the politics of hair by a recent article in The Economist (Taking it on the chin). One would have had to been away for decades in space not to know that hair has acquired a political and cultural symbolism, meaning different things to different people. And it’s not just the facial fuzz, the kind of thing that so excites fundamentalist mullahs.

In North Korea, Kim Jong-Il, himself sporting a fairly outrageous barnet, was so concerned by male hairdos that a television campaign was launched called “Let’s trim our hair in accordance with our socialist lifestyle.” Hmm, yes; knowing what I do about the ‘socialist lifestyle’ in North Korea I would have thought everyone, women as well as men, would immediately have gone for total baldness, the slaphead look.

It’s outrageously funny, yes, but there are some places where the politics of hair can be lethal. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, men sporting beards were in danger of having them ripped out by the roots, because this was taken as a sign of opposition to the new overlords, who never went beyond the Ba’athist moustache al la Saddam. Following the Coalition’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, when hair became Shiite, many barbers were murdered, accused of giving haircuts that were “too Western” or “too un-Islamic.”

There are places in the world where men are actually ordered to grow beards as a sign of Islamic piety, Afghanistan under the Taliban being the most obvious example. Even so, as I understand it, there is no firm rule here, practice varying from place to place across the Islamic world. In Iran, interestingly enough, while the ayatollahs get upset about hairdos that are too ‘Western’ (men are even taken from the streets to appear before religious courts), they are surprisingly liberal when it comes to face nests.

Actually, on the latter point, I suspect that there are good genetic and historical reasons for this. Iran was invaded by the Mongols in the Middle Ages, and a large part of the population is of Mongolian descent. The problem is people of this particular racial stock tend to be a bit challenged when it comes to face follicles. Just compare the fulsome efforts of Ayatollah Khameni, Iran’s present Supreme Beard (no descendent of the Great Khan, he), with the pathetic attempt of former president Rafsanjani!

The one sure thing is that the more popular beards become in Islamic societies and communities the less popular they are in places fearful of growing Islamic influence. Just imagine the reaction if someone like, say, Abraham Lincoln stood for office today, even with his relatively modest growth. And when it comes to our own Lord Salisbury, then just forget it! But this is not just Western or Christian beard-a-phobia. Hindu India does not like it much either. Recently a Christian college’s ban on Muslim beards was upheld by a Hindu judge, not normally sympathetic to Christian causes, with the remark “We do not want Talibans here.” Well, quite.

Before I conclude you might want to know how I feel about beards personally. Let me say, on a frivolous note, I was kissed by a bearded apparition at a student party a couple of years ago, taken by surprise when I was just a tincy-winsy tipsy. I honestly can’t begin to describe the sensation, other than to say it felt as if a mop had been thrust into my face or as if I was being embraced by Cousin Itt. Never again!

I’m as mad as hell

If you live in London I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that it’s impossible to avoid mad people, especially on the tube. I’ve had a few encounters, the last with a guy obsessing over my blonde hair, reaching out to touch it, not a comfortable experience, I assure you.

Rod Liddle, writing in the Spectator, describes an encounter he had recently on a train with a ‘loony’ (Rod never walks on verbal tiptoes!), a guy who was barking mad – literally! Every time the train drew into a station he barked, loudly. Only when the train pulled away again did he return to quiet reflection, dipping back into his copy of the Daily Mirror. Yes, of course, it would simply have to be the Daily Mirror!

I suppose this sort of encounter, Rod’s encounter, is mildly amusing, though we have moved on from the days of Bedlam, when people used to drop in on the mad for a spot of light entertainment. But dear Rod goes on to make a serious point. Old mental hospitals, the Victorian Bedlams, have all been closed. Now people formerly held in these places are being ‘cared for in the community’, which seems to mean being allowed to wonder about the place with no discernable sense of purpose. It may not be so bad if they simply bark…or even just have a fascination with blonde hair.

But it does not stop there, does it? To use Rod’s words the public has “every right to fear homicidal nutters.” (I’m adding ‘nutter’, a good old-fashioned English pejorative, in defiance of my spell-checker. How marvelous to see that political correctness has advanced even into the virtual lexicon!) There have been cases of people being killed by paranoid schizophrenics, allegedly obeying voices in their heads. Liddle’s Spectator column was written as a reflection on Why Did You Kill My Dad?, a BBC2 documentary in which film-maker Julian Hendy drew a link between mental illness and homicide, made all the more compelling for him by the tragic death by stabbing of his father three years ago.

Unfortunately I did not see this documentary- debated afterwards on Newsnight – but Liddle says the conclusion was that there is a greater threat to the general public than health care professionals are prepared to allow. Apparently the real numbers of people killed by those with mental health problems is roughly double what the official statistics suggest – somewhere in the region of two every week.

Official blindness here is partly governed by forms of political correctness, depending on the insistence that the mentally-ill should not be stigmatised. Yes, there may be some merit in such a view, but is this abstract principle, I have to ask, to be upheld even when lives are at risk? I find it wholly depressing to listen to yet another apology from professionals lamenting ‘mistakes’ that led to a preventable tragedy.

Political correctness is indeed at fault, as is the kind of bogus thinking that has governed so much practical psychiatry on the nature of mental health. Now I’m going to let Rod rip;

Allied to this are the implications from the mental health charities that it is therefore quite wrong, and perhaps should be illegal, for us to use pejorative terms as loony, nutter, psycho, madman; that the mentally ill, uh, community should not be regarded with suspicion at all. And a party line develops, much as it has done with those other anti-isms launched with the best of intentions (anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-bullying and so on), which begins to obscure the truth, and then later manipulates the data and vilifies anyone who might disagree with it.

The ‘rehabilitation’ of the mentally ill, in other words, has been taken to an absurdist and potentially dangerous extreme, a point made Professor Peter Morrall in Madness and Murder. There are no easy solutions here and, like Liddle, I’m certainly not advocating that mad people should be victimised or discriminated against. There simply needs to be a lot more vigilance, an understanding not clouded by official lies and dissimulation, the sort of thing, to use a word, which drives me mad. :-))

Beauty is not in the Eye of the Beholder!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is it? I’ve seen this tired platitude repeated here time and again. But beauty is not in the ‘eye of the beholder’; beauty is a social and historical construct, it always has been, it always will be. In the past, though, it was considered dangerous; now it is empowerment.

People, artists and poets, all sorts and all types have always been fascinated by physical perfection. Superstition, blended with classical philosophy, gave rise to the supposition that a person’s character could be read in their face. In the fifteenth century it was declared in Certayne Rewles of Physnomy that;

Ye face that es plane with outen rounde hilles, signifies a strydeful person, traundous wrongwyse and uncleane.

The ugly and the deformed, by this measure, were considered capable of all sorts of villainy.

Even Plato was enamoured of beauty, simple beauty, which he touches on in Georgias, the Greater Hippias, the Phaedras and Symposium. In Hippias when Socrates asks what beauty is, Hippias replies, with some very modern overtones, that ‘A beautiful young lady is a beauty’. Socrates responds by saying that the even the most beautiful of mortal women are nothing compared with the beauty of the gods, but, even, so, it’s clear that the Greeks had a clear understanding of forms of earthly beauty, that a common standard was in operation.

It was the Christian moralists who attempted to negate these perceptions by emphasising that beauty does not just fade, it rots. But even as revered figure as St. Augustine makes it clear in his Confessions just how much he succumbed to the temptations presented by good-looking young women. He even wrote a book about them, entitled On the Beautiful and the Fitting, alas now lost, either by accident or design!

We judge people on the basis of their looks; we always have, we always will. Beauty is power and more besides.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know

Or maybe that urn is just a vase in the eye of the beholder!