Biology of the Worst Kind

Rape-Rape

This is part of my Diary piece in the latest London Review of Books: Read all of it here

(See also the latest from Bernard-Henri Lévi in the Huffington Post)

In 1961 I was raped by an American in London. I was 14, a year older than the girl Polanski gave half a Quaalude and champagne to, then had oral, vaginal and anal sex with. In defence of Polanski, various people have pointed out Geimer was a teenage model and was doing a photo-shoot her mother had fixed up with Polanski, who said he wanted to take the pictures for Vogue. As further evidence to mitigate Polanski’s crime people have pointed out that after she had been drinking champagne (encouraged by Polanski during the photo session) Polanski got into a jacuzzi and suggested she join him, but she said she had to go home. He phoned her mother and said she would be late, then he let her speak to her mother. Geimer replied ‘no’ when her mother asked if she wanted to be picked up and taken home, and she consented, according to one telling, though this isn’t clear in the grand jury transcript, to oral sex. She also told the judge that she’d had sex twice before with her boyfriend, who was around her own age.

What got my interest finally and fully engaged was the idea of a 13-year-old consenting to have oral sex with a 44-year-old film director. Not, of course, that children aren’t sexual or even apparently complicit sometimes in sexual play. She was clearly not an innocent. (Though previous sexual experience is not a bar to a rape conviction even where the victim is over the age of consent.) Nevertheless, in order for her to consent to oral sex, Polanski must have asked her. How did he ask? Some questions are more like questions than others. What is it like to be 13, a wannabe movie star (nearly all 13-year-olds are), in the presence of a powerful movie director in the house of a famous movie star (Jack Nicholson), being given a powerful drug and alcohol and then invited to give the great man a blow job or make yourself available for cunnilingus?

I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14 – I was embarrassed into it. I was walking along the street, one Friday morning, on my way to the Notting Hill Gate library, feeling cross after a row with my father, when a man with an American accent, in his twenties, suddenly appeared and started walking beside me. He asked my name. I ignored him. He repeated his question over and over again. That stuff happened. You just kept on walking when strange men spoke to you or exposed themselves. But this one was really persistent. He marched alongside me and then said that he was a singer and he’d written a new song. He wanted to know what I thought of it. When I said piss off, again, he started to sing. Loudly. These days, of course, I might well sing loudly in the street myself and not give a toss. But 14 is different. I was excruciated. A man singing to me full-throatedly as I walked down the road made me publicly ridiculous and clearly everyone on the planet was turning their head to stare at me. And laughing. I was beside myself with embarrassment. That, at any rate, was what my 14 was like. I hissed at him to stop and he said he would if I went to the recording studio where he worked and listened to him singing his song properly. It was just round the corner, a few minutes from where I lived. Then he started to sing again. He was amiable and quite funny, not frightening, if much too insistent....(The Whole Article)

Every Little Hurts

Obviously I had no intention of going, but The Poet set off and I cheered him on from my sofa in the solitarium.  It was the Stop Tesco Opening in Mill Road March, yesterday.  Mill Road, I learned, is called 'the most multi-cultural street in Britain' by The Telegraph - in what tone I can't say.  And I live directly off it.  It is a very fine road, full of shops selling ingredients for, or the food of every cuisine under the sun, well, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, American, New Zealand; and bicycles, old fashioned hardware, electrical bits and pieces, organic this and that, as well as booze, printer ink, computers, electronic music stuff, toys.  There's a mosque, a couple of chapels, and a new age bookshop.  And Tesco has just discovered a triple fronted vacant shop to begin the ruin of it.

But my foot doesn't walk half a mile without pain, I've got a streaming cold that's refused to go away for a week, and as well as being entirely idle, I've got an aversion to crowds, actually an aversion to more than three people on the street at the same time.  I've avoided demonstrations, though mostly they have my whole-hearted blessing, since that march on Grosvenor Square in 1968 (was it?) when they got the horses and backed us up against the trees in the square and I was anyway speeding and it was all a bit much quite honestly.

But the drums and whistles of the Mill Road march could be heard all the way up in my solitarium.  Really great drumming, and I'm a sucker for anything with a powerful beat.  After about half an hour, I couldn't bear it, and headed off down the road, just like one of the rats in Hamelin, inveigled by the Pied Piper towards the river Weiser deep and wide.  And there I was on my first march for 40 years or so (OK there were a couple since). 

Actually, the march had just reached the top of my street when I got to it, and the proposed Tesco site is about 100 yards away from it, so to say that I marched would be stretching it.  I found The Poet, who waved me towards him in the crowd of a good few hundred.  I got there in time to hear the man from Al Amin, grocer and post office, make his speech and to  cheer, though I declined the placard The Poet offered me, even though it said  'Every Little Hurts'.  We reminisced with a couple of friends about the old days of throwing ball-bearings under the horses' feet to unseat the police, but decided that animal welfare considerations over rode such behaviour.  Anyway there weren't any horses, there were community police officers who for the most part were taking photos on their phones - not for the records, like they used to - but to take home to show their mums.  And then the crowd gradually dispersed to do their Saturday afternoon shopping in the deli, Al Amin and the co-op, or have a coffee in the Black Cat Cafe; the dreadlocked, the pink-haired, the grey haired and the bald went their amiable ways.  And, unless Tesco have not been cowed and continue their vile plan to ruin our excellent street, I have had my quota of exercise and activism for another forty years. 

Toolbelt Manhaters - A MetaFilter Mystery

Sometimes you have to reinvent the wheel because it turns out it never got invented in the first place.  An object lesson over on these two MetaTalk  threads of MetaFilter, about which I wrote an LRB article  recently.  The subject is whether or not men dominate the space and how they do it.  I got involved reading a conversation started by a post about a flasher.  Women were talking about their experiences.  Very rare to see so many women involved in the comments.  Suddenly the thread wasn't there any more.  The moderators had deemed it a bad post, which always overrides a good discussion.  So I was told when I set up another post on the same topic which was deleted because it was 'making a point' and that isn't what MetaFilter was about either.

My mistake.  I didn't remember that you have to accept the rules of a place when it isn't collectively run.  But the complaint threads developed, and women began to say how uncomfortable they felt with the 'boyzone' talk, and some of the men fought back with talk of zealots, how women always make victims of themselves instead of getting on the right wavelength...oh god, all that stuff, decades and decades gone by, and there it all is.  Someone suggested I was having a fit of the vapours (and the thread is headlined 'Hysterics') and when I objected was told that it was a joke, ironic, dontcha get it. 

There are a handful of men who are agreeing that the ethos is bad, and fighting their corner, insisting that women claiming they find it hard to participate ought to be listened to.  It's a proper discussion, dismal in places, but as clear a description of how not very much has changed since the Seventies as can be got.  The discussion that eventually is being had is the upside of MetaFilter, just as, it seems to me, the privileging of 'best of the web' posts over debate is the downside.

Worth looking, if you're feeling strong.  But I think I've done with the site.  I'm 60 years old, and it's too tiring (actually shocking) still to be told that a discussion by women about their experiences of being flashed is 

like manna from Heaven for the toolbelt manhaters that roam Metafilter with a fried chicken leg in one hand and Camila Paglia's panties in the other. More succinctly, it massages their prejudices.

Stupid in Pink

It's 35 years since the last outbreak of feminism, when someone mentioned, I believe, that what little girls were made of might depend to a large degree on what was made of them.  And much longer since it began to be understood that human beings are cultural creatures. Yet today, on The Today Programme we are told that there is an evolutionary reason why women prefer pink.  A study in China has discovered that more women than men choose red colours over any others and the woman who conducted the study explained in all seriousness that the reason was 'millions of years old'.  Women at the dawn of time (I love the dawn of time - not 6 in the morning when the alarm goes off, but so long ago that we don't have to say when it is or if we actually know anything about it) - I say, women at the dawn of time were gatherers of roots and berries while men hunted meat.  Weren't they?  We're absolutely sure about that, are we?  Men brought home the meat for the pot, women poked about in the soil with sticks and things and picked berries so that the kids could have their five veg portions a day, and thereon hangs the tale of human culture. 

Well, berries, says our scientific lady, are red, and therefore that is why women prefer pink.  It gave them an evolutionary advantage.  She means that women who preferred blue or yellow back in the dawnoftime failed to find as many berries as those with leanings towards pink, and so failed to reproduce and therefore died out.  'Nah, I'm not gonna pick that raspberry, I'll wait until I find a gooseberry, or - wait for it, a blueberry.  Nothing will make me pull that white turnip from the ground.  I'll keep looking till I find a cherry.'  What man worth his weight in roast beef would want to mate with such a hopeless gatherer?  It makes losing your cherry an even more serious business.  Even if they did find some low life hunter, the children of such a union would fail to thrive on the wrong coloured berries as well as having the blue preference (which, for some reason has now become genetic)themselves which they passed on to their girl offspring, and so their pink loving sisters' children's children would prevail.  Which is why us modern girls can't help but take the pink lavatory roll from the supermarket shelves.

Actually, there is at the very least doubt that the simple division of labour of men into hunters and women into gatherers was actually so simple a split. And it was taken as read way back in the 80's, when I was studying anthropology, that human cultural behaviour exponentially overwhelmed 'natural behaviour'  if such a thing actually exists.  Still, here we are in the 21st century and women the world over still feel pretty in pink, and that proves it.  The girl can't help it.  And god knows what the man can't help.  Evolutionary psychology holds out no hope for the human race.  It offers no expectation that we can learn, or develop beyond pre-determined survival advantages and disadvantages.  Worse than that, it tells half-truths about the past and then uses them to determine the present.  Even if it were true it would be so dull, so intellectually bereft, that we might as well all curl up and go to sleep until the dusk of time. All of which doesn't matter much in the larger picture, but the incorrigibility of it all it pisses me off.  And maybe the larger picture does actually depend on being about to think well or poorly about the way and the why people are.

Dead Dictators, Turning A Profit and A Dwindling Sense of Humour

Pinochet is dead.  Good.  An absurd response, though we all deserve a little cheering up.  The problem was with Pinochet alive.  All the people who are no longer around as a result of him, are still not around and won't be coming back.

And we were informed this morning by clipped and matronly Patricia Hewitt that the NHS must not only clear its debts but must achieve a surplus.  As I understand it, a surplus is a profit.  What is the National Health Service supposed to make a profit on?  Its purpose is to make people better.  Is Hewitt expecting tips from grateful patients?    An organisation that does not produce anything can only make a surplus by cutting costs: getting rid of staff, buying outside cheap labour and supplies, cutting corners, making patient turnaround faster.  Get them in and out of the operating room and hospital and back home before the bleeding stops.  Not so many sheets to wash, fewer nurses to employ.  Why must there be a profit?  Of course, it's nonsense, because the money is state money, or should be.  And if they do make a surplus, the NHS will be told it doesn't need so much funding.  I can't be bothered to find the figures, but I have a strong intuition that the cost of updating and maintaining Trident, and the shortfall in funding of the NHS that causes it to be in debt may have a relationship to each other.  A moral one, if nothing else.  I loathe this government.

I've just read Kurt Vonnegut's  A Man Without a Country.  I've never read any of Vonnegut's books without a)smiling and b)weeping quietly to myself.  This time is no different.  I suspect I recognise a fellow depressive who knows exactly what there is to be depressed about.  Laughter is how depressives survive, when they do survive (though the Prozac helps).  But Mr V suggests that eventually the laughing stops.  He's in his mid-eighties now and working on a novel about a comedian living at the end of the world, which he can't finish.  The problem is:

              'Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too awful, and humor doesn't work anymore.  Somebody like Mark Twain thought life was quite awful but held the awfulness at bay with jokes and so forth, but finally he couldn't do it anymore...It may be that I am no longer able to joke - that it is no longer a satisfactory defense mechanism.'

I really hope he finishes his novel.  But I know what he means.  I can feel the sadness seeping up through the Prozac like slime through floorboards.  Still, Pinochet's dead.  Hey ho.