Interstices

miércoles, 17 de abril de 2024

When they get a hard-on, we get beaten

In neighbourhoods where Islam predominates the control exercised over Muslim girls is continuous and effective.

[From EL PAÍS]

Najat El Hachmi

12 APR 2024 - 05:00 Updated:12 APR 2024 - 15:57 CEST

Public opinion in France has recently been appalled by two cases involving assaults on teenagers. One resulted in the unfortunate death of a 15-year-old boy after he disobeyed another boy's order not to talk to his sister. The other victim is Samara, a student at a school in Montpellier, who has recently woken up from a coma resulting from a brutal beating by three minors. According to her mother and grandmother, the reason was that the girl was dressed “in the European style”.

We don't really know what this means, since the inhabitants of this part of the planet are so diverse in their dress sense, but it's not hard to imagine what dressing like a good Muslim girl means for fanatics: no makeup, no loose hair, no tight clothing and not showing a single centimetre of skin. That we are in Ramadan only makes tempers flare. If during the rest of the year, the intolerant are unbearable, that is as nothing compared to what they are like when they are hungry and thirsty. That Ramadan is a month of contemplation and reflection, peace and harmony is a mere fairy tale. Before, to comply with this fundamental pillar of Islam it was sufficient not to put anything into the body during the day: no food, no water, or that other thing, but Islamists have plucked thousands of more bans out of thin air, many improvised on the spot regarding women, who are asked to do their best not to attract male attention. Why is that? Well, because according to many sex-obsessed scholars, if a man’s member gets hard during a day of “contemplation and peace” and he ends up ejaculating, he will have lost the day of fasting.

Good Muslims do their best not to fall into temptation until “you cannot distinguish a white thread from a black one” but, of course, if they are surrounded by girls with bare arms, hair blowing in the wind and tight T-shirts, the task becomes more difficult. The obvious solution would be for them to stay at home, but how would it be possible for women to freely roam the streets while they are locked up at home? It makes more sense for them to ask girls to cover up and not tempt them. I don't know if this is the reason why Samara was almost killed, but control over Muslim girls in neighbourhoods where Islam predominates is continuous and effective, and it means penning girls in and turning them into no-go zones in the heart of a free Europe. And this is not only in France, many Spanish Muslim women live under the same fanatical and misogynistic surveillance.

They loathe women’s freedom.

[As translated by me, any mistakes or errors are entirely mine]

jueves, 11 de mayo de 2023

New First Steps: The Last Dance by Mark Billingham

By now, Mark Billingham must be even older than me, his first novel "Sleepy Head" featuring his seminal detective, Tom Thorne, of the London Metropolitan Police Murder Squad, was published in 2001, 17 more followed, the last published in 2022, but he's had the audacity to seek a fresh start, and a very fresh start it is too!

At the beginning of the novel we walk in on a middle aged guy getting ready to go to work saying goodbye to his two pet rats and climbing onto his putt-putt scooter. At the office, his colleagues are rather taken aback to see him... Welcome to the world of Declan Miller, devout ballroom dancer, inveterate joker, Detective Sergeant in the Blackpool Murder Squad, and, following the very recent murder of his wife and fellow police officer, Alex, bereft widower.

For those that do not know, Blackpool is like the Benidorm of Britain, but far seedier and with much less sun. I've never read a crime novel set there, but it is a location ripe for the genre, comparable to Brighton, the setting of Graham Greene's grim thriller, Brighton Rock.

Two men are shot one night in contiguous rooms in an upscale hotel with the same weapon. One is the unfaithful scion of a local criminal gang, the other an IT nerd. What, if any, is the link between them and who wanted them dead?

DS Miller with his new sidekick are put on the case. DS Sara Xiu, of Chinese ethnicity and in her early thirties, is a brilliant foil for Miller, initially she comes over as cautious and introverted, perhaps a little shy, but she soon flowers into a lightly cynical counterbalance to her exuberant partner and we discover she has a rather racy private life.

Borne along by Miller's countless dad jokes which adeptly conceal a very sharp mind and a broken heart, leavened by the setting (one of the rival gangs' godfathers is actually a drag queen), and a think tank comprised of erstwhile coppers, now keen ballroom dancers, this is a thoroughly entertaining read, funny without being silly, with a solid plot and a great final hook.

This is a brilliant beginning to a new saga, I need more.

[Many thanks to NetGalley for making this ARC available to me]

lunes, 20 de marzo de 2023

A Bloody Civil War: Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke

"War", Bertrand Russell said, "does not determine who is right - only who is left." and if war is violent, incoherent and hell a civil war is even more violent, more incoherent and more hellish. Many of James Lee Burke's previous novels have dealt tangentially with the scars left by the American Civil War on Louisiana, his home state, to my knowledge, this is the first novel in which he addresses this issue front on.

We find ourselves at the tail end of this bloody brutal conflict, there are a whole range of characters as our narrators: the spoiled son of a plantation owner and something of a pacifist scarred by a chance encounter with the enemy, a man employed to resolve conflicts involving slaves, an enslaved black woman desperate to find her child, lost during a skirmish, and a deranged, diseased Confederate Officer. If Louisiana is a jigsaw, at this point in time all the pieces have been tossed into the air and left to land where they will, so the characters find themselves desperately scrabbling between them, attempting to make sense of their new situation and lives. The Union has now occupied most of the state but is still allowing slave trading to continue, some renegade confederate units still hold out, but their savagery causes as much fear among those supposedly on their own side as in the enemy. In this context a slave unjustly accused of the murder of her brutal owner attempts to escape the help of a brave female idealist, the constable has a disastrous duel with the plantation owner's son and careless words cost innocent lives.

This novel is as visceral and as garish as the uncertain times it set out to portray so well, it is not for the fainthearted, sometimes I did feel it was a bit much, and the characters larger-than-life, a little too strident, detracting from credibility, but there's no denying that James Lee has verve and he takes us on one hell of a ride, and it will keep you riveted until the end. As to what that end is... I would refer you to the quote at the beginning of this blog.

sábado, 11 de marzo de 2023

Child beds and battlefields, House of the Dragon

There have been several reviewers, mostly men, but some women, who have criticised the abundance of childbirth scenes in HBO's fantasy series.

In episode 1 Queen Aemma tells her daughter Princess Rhaenyra "the child bed is our battlefield..." and House of the Dragon plays out that metaphor to the full. All those stunning, callous, sensitive, passionate, obtuse feuding princes and princesses have to be birthed and the way they are birthed has significance and impact and will influence subsequent events... Just as battles, tournaments and council sessions do. And especially since the civil war has its origin in the rival dynastic claims between the offspring of two singular women.

But I would argue that you might as well complain that battle and fight scenes, of which there are a great many in House of the Dragon, in fact, far more than childbirth scenes, are "gratuitously insensitive" because, indeed, they are. But due to the fact that men tend to be their main protagonists, there is therefore hardly a series, book or picture that doesn't feature such battles, duels, skirmishes and violent deaths, and we have all become inured to them.

Obviously it is disturbing seeing women giving birth, and the pain, trauma and angst childbirth entails, especially when several of the would-be mothers and the would-be babies, die. But like war, or even more so than war, this is a fact of life that we tend to hurry by... As we do the fact that before the advent of modern medicine childbirth had a mortality rate of approximately 5%, that's without taking into account the possible serious injuries to the woman's health. To this should be added that deaths in infancy were very high and there were no reliable forms of anti-conception available which led to many women having multiple pregnancies and thus increasing their possibilities of death or injury. But again, most fantasy fiction skates over this.

I would say that it is to its credit, that House of the Dragon does not.

lunes, 22 de agosto de 2022

The House of The Dragon, Episode One: A Sick Kingdom

Let's get something out of the way first, I am no neutral spectator. I am a fan. I have read the books. I loved Game of Thrones the series. And I did not think that the ending was as bad as many garment rending drama queens would make out.

I was, however, watching with my husband who although he is a Game of Thrones series fan has never read the books.

There are going to be many, many reviews written about this first episode in the coming days. So I only have a faint hope of adding something original to what better people have may have to say.

The first thing that struck me was the colour blind casting of one of the nobles who sits on the small council. Of course, it is not actually colour blind. He is Black and the rest of the cast are varying shades of white.

But how appropriate was it that opening the first Council discussion scene he is very learnedly reviewing a matter of international politics. And no one is paying him the faintest bit of notice. Thus Westeros is a great reflection of our current society. If you are female or if you are Black the white dudes are going to be deaf to what you have to say, however important it may be.

Lord Corlys of the Driftmark to give him his full title, is something like the Lord Admiral of the fleet. It seems no one is interested in what he has to say because everybody is very busy looking at their own Westerosi bellybuttons, the Queen is pregnant, and everyone is hoping for a boy that will clearly mark the line of succession.

Not that the king doesn't already have successors. He, in fact, has two. A beautiful daughter and dragon rider, , and a mercurial brother, who is also a dragon rider, Daemon.

In the episode’s intro we clearly see how the current king secured the iron throne, he was chosen to sit on it in preference to his older sister because he is male. Said older sister, Princess Rhaena, the queen who never was, is now married to Lord Corlys, so this middle-aged couple, the thwarted queen and her Black husband are the clear outsiders in the upper echelon of this society.

Prince Daemon, on the other hand, takes charge of the city watch and carries out a clearance of the slum areas with hideous brutality. When he is reprimanded for this he claims it is to ensure that Kings Landing will be safe for the great tournament his brother is about to hold to celebrate the birth of his supposedly male child. I did like this because I was reminded off how certain regimes do exactly the same thing when they are about to hold some international event. I like seeing the resonance in Martin’s writing to our current day society, look no further than the organisation behind the Football World Cup to be held in Qatar later this year, or the slum clearances in Brazil for the 2016 Olympics.

Yes, good King Viserys is counting his heirs before they are birthed, and we all know that does not go well.

Queen Aema in the final throes of a trying pregnancy warns her daughter that birthing children is the female equivalent of waging war. This is not a new theme in literature (“I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once,” says Medea in Euripedes’ play of the same name), but again I enjoy it when these points which I think are valid are emphasised in fantasy writing. So scenes of a very bloody tournament which takes place in a venue which we see from above is shaped very much like a woman’s genitalia (reminiscent of the architecture of Zaha Hadid?) are intercut with those of the queen attempting to give birth. At this point my partner had to get up and leave his chair because the birth scene is one of the most disturbing in this episode and so it should be.

The king leaves the tournament to be at her bedside he is portrayed throughout as a good and sensitive man who loves his wife and is attentive to her, but the moment he gives his permission for a caesarean he doesn't stop them treating her with extreme brutality. As soon as he gives his consent her ankles are tugged, she is pulled off the pillows down the bed and the physician cuts open her belly, suddenly she ceases to be a queen and a person and becomes a mere receptacle for a Prince. Obstetric violence Westerosi style. As predicted by the physicians she dies, and the Prince she births dies a day later.

Meanwhile shortly afterwards Daemon disgraces himself and is called to order by the king and sent back to the wife he cannot stand in another part of the country. Daemon's relationship with his niece is very manipulative and they solely seemed to address each other in private in High Valyrian. I love these scenes; it is like those scenes in The Americans where the characters start talking Russian, it gives you a flavour of a people living apart from the people surrounding them, from another culture and with another mindset… plus of course the dragons only respond to orders delivered in High Valyrian.

Yes, Prince Daemon seems to be a bad ‘un but Matt Smith is an able actor and there are a few glimpses that seemed to signal that he actually loves his niece and his brother, and it is almost certain he would do anything to prop up his house. Before being sent into exile he tells Viserys he should have been given a chance to be his hand, i.e. his second in command, because he would have been able to do the things that Viserys, who is essentially kind, is unable to do in order to govern, for once we feel he is telling the truth and he may have a point.

In the last scene still suffering from the death of his wife and child, King Viserys makes a decision Princess Rhaenyra will be his heir and the final scene is of all the Lords of the kingdom being compelled to get down on their knees and swear their fealty to her, we are clearly shown how many of them are unwilling to do this.

The costumes, the scenery, the actors the writing, are all excellent, as is, of course, the music.

What I liked most though was the sense of underlying tension. The sense that a society that treats women as vastly inferior to men, as objects to be moved out of the way, ignored, and treated like receptacles, is always going to be a sick one and one which will pay dearly for that choice.

Me: 7.5/10

Husband: 9/10

sábado, 18 de junio de 2022

Why so called “TERFs” do not exist

By El Común

[Translated from Spanish by Clariana]

27/03/2022

[Keep away, TERF!]

Amparo Domingo, is a feminist activist and representative in Spain of a worldwide feminist organisation promoting the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.

The Patriarchy is given to manufacturing insults to apply to rebellious women who do not obey gender mandates, the latter being understood in the only sense possible as a social hierarchy impose between men and women which dictates that women’s only option is to submit and shut up.

We have been called witches, frigid, feminazis, and more recently “TERFs”.

“TERF” is an acronym of the English expression Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, which despite having been repeated endlessly in every corner of the world, makes no sense whatsoever.

Radical feminism is not called such because it is extremist but rather because it seeks out the root of the structural inequality of women in patriarchal societies, which is none other than our sex. It is sex and everything deriving from it (pleasure, reproduction) which has led men to seek to dominate women from the beginning of time. Forms of exploitation of women such as prostitution or surrogacy are clear evidence of this fact.

Why do I say that it makes no sense to refer to radical feminists as “trans exclusionary” (“TERFs”)?

For three reasons:

Radical feminists believe that every person of the female sex is a subject of feminism, independently of whether at any point in her lifetime she may allege that she has a “gender identity” different to her sex, a declaration that would make her “trans” in the eyes of “gender identity” believers.

Therefore, given that radical feminism does not take into account, either for good or for bad, that a women may decide to call herself “trans”, it cannot be considered “trans exclusionary”.

As our English-speaking colleagues may jokingly describe us, we are not “TERFs”, but “MERFs”. This is an ironic acronym of Male Exclusionary Radical Feminist, a pleonasm equivalent to saying “climbing upwards” or “descending downwards”.

Radical feminists, likewise, coherently, also do not take into account that a male person may declare that he has a “gender identity” different to his sex.

Once again, this information has no relevance for us, and we are neither for nor against it.

This does not imply an aversion towards or fear (“phobia”) of anyone, it simply means that feminism is a movement by and for women.

We can explain it using an analogy, for example with the dissimilarities between basketball and football, two sports that work very differently. In basketball points are scored by passing a ball through a hoop suspended at a specific height. In football, on the other hand, points are scored when the ball passes a line delimited by a structure called a goal.

If we had to refer to basketball applying the logic of trans activism, would we say that basketball is a “goal exclusionary” sport? Or that people who play basketball are “goal phobic”?

Or is it that they simply practice a sport that pays no heed to the rules of football?

Feminists have always defended women’s freedoms and to that end we have fought against any sexist stereotypes and restrictions imposed on us by patriarchal societies.

Therefore, any movement or theory defending the existence of “pink or blue brains” or of some form of sublime essence of femininity cannot, by definition, be called feminist. To assert that sexist stereotypes are in reality part of the “true nature” of what it is to be a woman is to walk back decades the progress made by feminism and once again fall into an absurd essentialism, which only differs from the one before it in that its idea about our “true nature” - this ineffable “identity” -, has no connection whatsoever to the body which we inhabit, but is rather a feeling inside us.

A world-view that seeks simply to restrict the sphere of action of women, limiting them to the world of emotions, care delivery or superficiality (a pre-eminent interest in their appearance), while it sets aside for men the sphere of rationality and public life, as well as qualities like valour and strength, cannot by any stretch of the imagination be classified as feminist.

Rather, quite to the contrary, transgenderism/transactivism is an anti-woman ideology as can be seen every day in its attempts to erase us from our language using expressions such as “menstruators”, “people with cervices”, “gestating people”, “lesbian people”, “bodies with vaginas”, “birthing bodies”, etcetera. Nothing properly relating to our biology can be named just in case it makes those men who say they “feel like women”, sad, because it reminds them of their true sex. We must “be kind” and prioritise their feelings above our rights when it comes to naming our reality.

However, it is apparent that they do not have the slightest consideration for our own feelings. They do not seem to worry about the dehumanisation that it entails to say that our vaginas are “front holes”, nor does it concern them how sportswomen, despite tough training regimes and all the effort invested, may lose a competition to a mediocre male benefitting from the natural advantages which his masculine biology offers him.

All this shows us that what really concerns transactivism is how those people who have or had penises may feel: Patriarchy 2.0.

Thus, it is not feminism that excludes transactivism, rather #TransactivismIsMisogyny, something in complete opposition to our values.

I insist, due to what I have set out above, it makes no sense to talk about “TERFs”.

Those who are not part of feminism have no rights regarding our movement and their desires do not constitute orders for us.

lunes, 23 de mayo de 2022

El desastre sanitario

No quiero que sea personal, pero claro es personal, y también político. Llevo en este pueblo desde marzo 2019 y en ese tiempo en mi centro sanitario he tenido al menos 4 médicos de cabecera. La última empezó hace un par de meses y al estar de baja de maternidad, y no la han sustituido. Hace 3 semanas tuve un trombo en la rodilla derecha, es mi tercer trombo y su origen, a diferencia de los otras dos, está sin identificar. Tengo 58 años y la suficiente capacidad para saber que esto no es bueno. La falta de continuidad con un médico de cabecera está afectando directamente mi vida, quiero cambiar de hematóloga, pues tengo que pasar por el médico de cabecera, ¿que quiero renovar una receta? Médico de cabecera. ¿Que quiero que alguien valide las recetas que me ha hecho el hematólogo privado? Médico de cabecera y así…

No entiendo cómo esto se pueda justificar. Pero sin embargo en la Comunidad Valenciana parece que es normal y a nadie importa, parece que les importa más el nivel de valenciano de los médicos que el bienestar de sus ciudadanos. Huelga decir que a mí que mi medico hable o no valenciano me importa un Amaranthus blitum. Recientemente se ha retirado la ministra de sanidad del gobierno regional y ha sido sustituida por otro tío, pues a ver si hace algo porque aquí los que estamos sin un cuidado de primaria decente estamos sufriendo y muriendo.