Pharmakeia's Spring

http://www.theworld.org/2011/11/joumana-haddad-jasad-scheherazade/

"Lebanese Writer Joumana Haddad’s Call to Arab Women" -

Lebanese poet and writer Joumana Haddad is used to controversy.
She’s the founder of a print and online magazine called Jasad (“Body”).
It’s the first erotic magazine published in Arabic for women in the Islamic world.

Just because I inhaled a bit of dust I will now suffer infections by any respiratory virus that wanders by and settles in my nasopharyngeal area. Excuse me while I take millions of anti-histamines and wear a dustmask for the next three days *cough*.

I officially rescind my assertion that pain is not one of my kinks. Or at least add the corollary "unless it's done in a particular way". I was pretty sure this was a genuine occurrence, but also fairly certain I'd never experience it. Wrong.

Ah well, you live and learn.

is the most beautiful twitter I have yet found. It is a sparkling white lily of indian culture and philosophy in the sea of the gaudy tulips of celebrities talking about their gadgets and families, gritty british politics, and factual scientific updates that is my twitter feed.

Goodbye NHS. We had a beautiful, functional, good value for money, accountable, high outcome system for a while. Back to the Dark Ages of healthcare for the rich/employed/non-disabled only. Here's hoping the death toll of people who can't afford to get life-saving surgery when their GP consortium decide to refuse funding for it doesn't climb too high.

Here's hoping we get back in next election and undo some of this damage.

I am now officially a dirty socialist. I sang the Red Flag at a Labour party conference.

NOW I MUST SLEEP FOREVER....

You know, sometimes gentlemen, I do wonder if I am a sexual predator. Or a cougar, or whatever they call it. Does one have to be over forty for that title? Can I be a puma or an ocelot or a leopard? Maybe a shoving leopard. Lately I seem to be hitting on/getting involved with people significantly my junior, usually undergrads. Usually Newcastle undergrads. Usually Newcastle Rock Soc members. I find very little attractive about most Durham undergrads, as there are only a few flowers amongst a sea of horse-faced gilet/rugby shirt-sporting children of the defunct upper class. Durham's Rock Society are far too genteel for my liking, it's not a decent rock society unless there's at least one vendetta ongoing between former or current members of the committee. Now, it's possible this is just droit de grad student, but I've honestly never been the one in the student union during fresher's week keeping a tally chart. Hopefully so far I have been obeying the campsite rule - leave them in a better condition than when you first...er...pitched. Oh, the plethora of possible tent peg jokes.

One of my friends on livejournal is suffering from what I think of as bi-inadequacy. She thinks she has to sleep with a woman to prove her bisexuality. By that logic, every basement-dwelling faggot-yelling-over-Xbox-live thirty-year old virgin should be in a state of not-heterosexual-until-proven-so-by-baptism-in-Skene's-fluid sexual limbo. This I know, but I used to suffer something of the bi-inadequacy myself, or rather assumed-bi-inadequacy. Someone confiscate my hyphens. I remember some years ago whilst enduring another undignified jaunt to London the utter fool who sang in my ex's band thought would get them noticed, we spent the evening sitting in the East End summer with the scents of Brick Lane curry wafting over Commercial Street blah blah etc. out the back of the grubby tenement Fool-of-a-Singer's current girlfriend was living in. My ex, F-o-a-S and their mutual friend decided to speculate on my bisexuality, how kind. Ex, having denied me women so far in a sort of wishy-washy manner and his friends maintained that since I had never slept with a woman I was clearly not bisexual. Nonsense, said I, and I would prove it. With Ex's permission I would kiss Fool-of-a-Singer's current girlfriend, who, when sober, is quite nice, or at least she was when we last spoke. This was not because girlfriend had been flirting with me - I am still very bad at telling when someone is flirting with me. When I flirt with someone it consists of my talking normally and then deliberately performing primate vulnerability gestures and sexual signals at them, crossing physical boundaries and the like and watching out for their body language shutting down. I never learned it instinctively - Desmond Morris taught me to flirt. Girlfriend was not flirting with me to the best of my knowledge. She was just a convenient and drunk demonstration model. Ex, to my surprise, gave me permission, to my further surprise so did Fool-of-a-Singer's Girlfriend. And so, I proved it. Fool-of-a-Singer, in his usual fashion, then complained that his girlfriend hadn't sought his permission. Perhaps he was under the mistaken impression that she was his property. I asked permission of my Ex because I was considering his feelings, not because he had veto rights. He lost those considerations and exclusive rights to my body a few years later when he started hitting me. That, curiously enough, was the first time I kissed a woman. Later, when the girlfriend in a half-drunken stupour had fallen asleep on the cold concrete outside and I tried to wake her, she told me not to touch her and muttered something about being afraid I would rape her. And that was very informative.

Let me put it this way, by now, I know the kiss of a woman who is doing it to titillate their partner, I know the kiss of a woman who's thinking "This could be interesting..." and I know the kiss of a woman who enjoys an occasional wander in the Garden of Venus. Those people who never leave said garden, I know nothing of, due to pure statistics. I move in the circles of very few of them, and those I know are happily monogamous and partnered. And far as I know, the one time I kissed my friend with bi-inadequacy, there was nothing pretend there. I would say this to her, but the complaint about her bi-inadequacy was with one about other people gloating about their sex lives and I know how it would be read. I'm thinking about all this because I lately was considering the fact that because of various social nonsenses it appears to be necessary for me to make the first move, taking a role more traditionally thought of in those social nonsenses as "male". Then lately I extended the thought that those social nonsenses sometimes make it so that some women do not resist sexual advances because they are afraid of making a fuss, appearing frigid, and so on. Who knows how that works with a woman who thinks she will turn on her boyfriend by kissing me (and they are rarer than some seem to think...). This reminds me that it is absolutely vital at all times, whether making an advance on a male or a female to check that the person is okay with it. Unfortunately I think those checks can't just be verbal. And I still cannot instinctively read body language. Minefield.

In other news, last night I watched what Amy refers to as "The Matrix Reformatted" which is all the Matrix films one after the other, the second and third heavily cut to trim out extremely tiresome mobile suit battles. It was still four hours long, but still not as difficult as watching anything by Tarkovsky as I have stated before. Do you ever get that feeling, when people are saying things like "You do know now...but you will.." in mysterious tones, that you're looking at a sandpit from your childhood that children are playing games in? Or when people talk about Aleister Crowley as if he was a demon lord, or talk about homeopathy as if the laws of pharmacological efficacy were some kind of a personal choice that water makes. Or misquote that Hamlet line about open-mindedness. Stop fucking gilding refined fucking gold and sprinkling fucking perfume on the fucking violet. And then I think to myself "By Cassiopeia's heavenly cucking stool, I'm an arrogant hubristic bitch for thinking that".

Critically panned, as they say, this film appears to be a lot like marmite (sorry non-brits). You don't like it or you do like it, and the persons expressing the latter are clearly in the minority. Rotten tomatoes gives it a 23%. The general feeling appears to be is that Mr Snyder dropped the ball he had been so skilfully juggling with Watchmen, 300 and that film about the owls in a well so deep no prince-temporarily-imprisoned-in-anuran-form could possibly retrieve it for him.

I understand the criticisms - it was fairly hard to follow and required a lot of guesswork. I was force to wonder whether Babydoll's retreats into deeper levels of less bleak reality represented psychotic breaks due to intensive therapy, or some sort of wish-fulfilling depersonalisation during traumatic sexual encounters. Some things I guessed must have been wrong. For instance, when the faux-Russian psychiatrist is questioning the brothel owner about Babydoll's readiness to dance, I wondered if she was truly questioning the correctness having her lobotomised - this can't be correct as she wasn't aware the request had been put in. However, compared to say, Primer, a film I honestly cannot watch without a physics textbook in front of me, it was a walk in an extremely linear park. I read one reviewer complaining it was a whole two hours long. Try watching Tarkovsky's Stalker. Or the original Solaris. Then tell me about long. If you still have a sense of self.

The film certainly exploits and objectifies women. I see short skirts, I see girls fighting in heels, a thing I can assure you is near impossible. However, as this reviewer points out; http://blogs.indiewire.com/spout/archives/sucker_punch_debate/ apart from one character who I was mentally referring to as "Chuck Norris the Guardian Angel" the film exploits and objectifies men - characterising them all as vile abusive rapists, indiscriminately killing girls in a way that would satisfy even the most misoandristic hairy-armpitted stereotypical uberfeminist that the status quo was being represented. Not all women are pretty innocent girls, we know this. Not all men are violent rapists. We know this. Realism clearly is not the order of the day here. You can tell by the dragons. This is a brightly coloured, katana-wielding, FPS-perspective-shooting, orc-fighting comic book in film form. In one particularly fun semester of my undergraduate degree, I studied mental health provision between the nineteenth and twentieth century. It would be difficult to find a more appropriate era and situation to set your fable of female oppression. The contrast between spangly orc-fighting fantasies and the monochrome One-Flew-Over-The-Cuckoo's nest reality is as jarring as the bullets Blue nonchalantly plants in the back of the heads of the two supporting least-fleshed-out girl characters.

Another reviewer complained that Babydoll and Sweet Pea were not Ellen Ripleys or Sarah Connors. Of course not. Are these girls mothers? With the exception of Sweet Pea's protectiveness of her sister (and it is this that makes her the one character most like a Ripley or Connor), are they exhibiting the desperate strength of a parent's desire to protect her children from monsters? No. As the film states at the end, like the concentration camp survivor who realised the last thing he had control over was how he felt about his situation, all these girls have is themselves and all they can protect, or choose not to protect, is themselves, and each other. There is no escaping the helplessness of their situation , except by escape or self-sacrifice. Not even in the deepest levels of Babydoll's fantasies. The dialogue is horrendous, and delivered inexpertly in places. Yet, somehow this fits, these oppressed and imprisoned girls parroting parodies of gung-ho cliches and platitudes of sisterhood. The girls' bravado is as empty as the faceless robots and hollow as the Steam-Bosche's heads, as easily exposed as Blondie's "secret". Even in the deepest levels of her giant-Tengu-Oni-fighting fantasies helplessness breaks through - the mother dragon rages over her slain offspring, the bomb still goes off taking Rocket with it.

This is reality - sometimes we cannot win, sometimes not everyone gets out alive. Sometimes the Alien Queen bursts out of your stomach as you fall into the boiling lead. Some of us will succumb to the bloody trochar of unfeeling procedure, unmitigated by hollow happy ending of a discovered forgery and the lobotomised smile of a bought chance (I like to think the nice gentleman was sent to the electric chair, by the way). Empowerment =/= winning.

And then sometimes the mysterious bus driver risks his job by claiming to the police that you've been on the bus since Harford. At the same time, this is still fantasy.

For the court's further consideration, your honour, there were a selection of particularly nice bottoms in this film. In the end, isn't that what truly matters?

Today I learned that liquid nitrogen is not to be trifled with. In fairness, I already knew this (so many training sessions), but nothing hits it home like frantically trying to turn a stopcock whilst wearing oversized comedy yellow cryogloves, because a frothing -80 degree liquid is spilling out of your metal container and freezing the kerb wildlife, and threatening to asphyxiate you with clouds of nitrogenous smoke.

Hehe. Stopcock.