When I was a lad I served a term

Oh dearie me, I really shouldn’t be giving Dr John Crippen the oxygen of publicity should I. However not satisfied with being one of the factors (there were others) leading the Burning Times to close he’s still blahing on about “medical rape”. His latest effort can be summarised as follows.

A doctor is attending a birth which requires a forceps delivery ( on a side note I thought they preferred suction cups nowadays, but am hardly an expert, since the mere mention of childbirth is enough to make me turn slightly green). The woman giving birth starts to protest (both she and her partner are, handily, barristers) and tells the doctor to stop. Ignoring this, the doctor continues. Three days later the doctor is arrested for “indecent assault and possible rape”. Dr Crippen asks how the putative doctor is to defend themselves.

Well first of all Doc C, the incident, though it may be regarded as assault, would need to be one which is regarded as sexual to be a sexual assault. So under the sexual offences Act 2003, it is very unlikely the police would take any action, as it is hardly likely that a jury would regard the action as sexual. And it is extremely unlikely that the CPS (crown prosecution service) would take such a case forward. And if you don’t believe me look at the case of Ian Huntley, who was accused of rape and underage sex 9 times in total, and in each instance the case never got to court because the charges were dropped - mostly on the advice of the police or CPS.  Since he then went on to murder two girls, we may wonder whether or not this was entirely a good idea.

Secondly Doc C, there is, arguably, a defence of necessity in English law, and assuming this action is necessary to avoid the death or serious injury of the baby this would be available to the innocent maligned doc in this case. In the prosecution that would never happen anyway. If continuing without the mother’s consent is not necessary to avoid death or serious injury, why would a reasonable doctor not stop and try to re-establish consent?

Now the curious thing about Dr Crippen, as we learn from centre right  is that he is a former lawyer. So I don’t know why he can’t work the above out for himself. Or indeed why he seems so bothered by the whole topic of ‘medical rape’. If I was a member of a supposedly caring profession and people had awful experiences I’d want to make it better, not start obsessing about the terminology they use. But the most curious thing about Dr Crippen, is if he is a GP and as overworked as they all claim they are, how can he spend so much time on the internetz? (no doubt he’ll pop over and tell me).

Is this the way the future’s really meant to feel

On Friday night/saturday morning I was at Stonehenge for Solstice. It pissed it down and was cloudy, as it has been on the previous two occasions I’ve been there.  So I failed to see the sun hit the heel stone again. However when there is a clear sky, this is what it looks like.

Laugh and the world laughs with you.

I had a plan to not write anything on this blog for a while, because I’m spending too much time doing it. But then I keep reading stuff like this.

Nurses to be rated on how compassionate and smiley they are

Nurses are to be scored on how compassionate they are towards patients as part of a government plan to improve quality in the NHS to be unveiled in the runup to the 60th anniversary of the health service next month, the Guardian can reveal.

The health secretary, Alan Johnson, wants the performance of every nursing team in every ward across England to be measured, with the results published on an official website.

He believes putting a smile on the face of nurses and encouraging empathetic care is as important to recovery as the skill of doctors in the operating theatre. The proposal is to be announced in Manchester today at the annual conference of the NHS Confederation, the organisation representing NHS managers and trusts.

Now surprisingly most nurses are already highly regarded for being compassionate - I’m sure there’s the odd tough nut in there, but routinely when someone has been in hospital you will hear people say “the nurses were marvellous”. When my mother died (unavoidably) in hospital, members of my family donated money to the ward in recognition of the outstanding care she’d received.

But smiley? Smiley? Are doctors going to rated on how ’smiley’ they are? Are they fuck. Because they have “skills in the operating theatre” - they’re busy and important, and don’t have to do stuff like being nice to people.  No nurses have to smile because they’re predominantly women. And (low status) women are meant to smile all the time to gain approval and show their low status. That’s why men feel perfectly entitled to shout ’smile’ or ‘cheer up it may never happen’ at some random woman they don’t know walking down the street. They’re knobs. And Alan Johnson is just a knob who made it as a cabinet minister. Well I hope that nurses collectively form a “friendly rivalry” as to who can tell him to stick his initiative up his arse  most loudly.

Because I’m worth it (part 397)

Yes it’s yet more science bits about brains again, as The Guardian reports that gay men and heterosexual women have similarly shaped brains. Is this sounding familiar at all? Now how the Grauniad latched onto this one before the Male is a bit of a mystery  - we can only assume The Male was filled with important news about whether members of Girls Aloud are too thin, or slimming pants or some such like. You’d hardly believe the Grauniad runs a column called Bad Science sometimes.

No what the Grauniad are on about is research at the Stockholm Brain Institute as published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The abstract reads as follows:

Cerebral responses to putative pheromones and objects of sexual attraction were recently found to differ between homo- and heterosexual subjects. Although this observation may merely mirror perceptional differences, it raises the intriguing question as to whether certain sexually dimorphic features in the brain may differ between individuals of the same sex but different sexual orientation. We addressed this issue by studying hemispheric asymmetry and functional connectivity, two parameters that in previous publications have shown specific sex differences. Ninety subjects [25 heterosexual men (HeM) and women (HeW), and 20 homosexual men (HoM) and women (HoW)] were investigated with magnetic resonance volumetry of cerebral and cerebellar hemispheres. Fifty of them also participated in PET measurements of cerebral blood flow, used for analyses of functional connections from the right and left amygdalae. HeM and HoW showed a rightward cerebral asymmetry, whereas volumes of the cerebral hemispheres were symmetrical in HoM and HeW. No cerebellar asymmetries were found. Homosexual subjects also showed sex-atypical amygdala connections. In HoM, as in HeW, the connections were more widespread from the left amygdala; in HoW and HeM, on the other hand, from the right amygdala. Furthermore, in HoM and HeW the connections were primarily displayed with the contralateral amygdala and the anterior cingulate, in HeM and HoW with the caudate, putamen, and the prefrontal cortex. The present study shows sex-atypical cerebral asymmetry and functional connections in homosexual subjects. The results cannot be primarily ascribed to learned effects, and they suggest a linkage to neurobiological entities.

You have to pay to read the whole thing, so relying on the Grauniad summary to translate, what this apparently showed is this:

Savic and her colleague Per Linström took MRI brain scans of 90 volunteers who were divided into four groups of similar ages according to whether they were male, female, heterosexual or homosexual. The scans showed the right side of the brain in heterosexual men was typically 2% larger than the left. Lesbians showed a similar asymmetry, with the right hand side of the brain 1% larger than the left.

Scans on homosexual men and heterosexual women revealed both sides of the brain were the same size.

Now leaving aside all the obvious questions and problems with this - that are nevertheless posed here by some equally sceptical Grauniad readers. I would love to know how the Grauniad uses this research on a relatively small sample of 90 people (25 self defined straight men, 25 self defined straight women, 20 self defined gay men, 20 self defined lesbians) performed once, to draw the following conclusion:

The results could explain a University of London study earlier this year that found gay men and straight women share a poor sense of direction compared with heterosexual men, and were more likely to navigate using landmarks alone.

Or maybe it couldn’t - it is a very small difference, found in an experiment that hasn’t been repeated, once. And that’s meant to explain gender  and sexuality based differences in behaviour is it? Particularly since every heterosexual woman I asked in a totally unscientific study at lunchtime at work claimed to be excellent at map reading. Could this difference maybe be learned behaviour? I mean gay men don’t emerge from the womb camper than a row of tents do they, but I’ve still met a few who are in my time. Just as the young would be lesbian doesn’t pop out with a mullet and boy fit jeans and an obsession with Pink (the singer, not the colour). How about this study for instance also reported in the Guardian:

A report from the American Psychological Association shows how sexualisation harms girls - and it’s getting worse, more of it and more extreme. One study showed how anxiety about appearance harms brain function: girls were asked to try on a swimsuit or a sweater in a private dressing room, supposedly to give their opinion. While waiting they were asked to do a maths test. The girls given swimsuits did much worse than those in sweaters, as thinking about their bodies, mostly negatively, undermined their intellectual self-confidence.

Or this one which showed that girls in more gender equal societies are better at maths.

For decades, researchers and educators have debated why boys tend to perform better than girls in math. Are men naturally more logical creatures and thus better at scientific endeavors? Are girls not encouraged by their families, their friends or society at large to pursue scientific careers?

Researchers believe they may have found at least one answer: where girls live. Girls living in countries where there is more gender equality perform better in math, sometimes outpacing boys, than girls who live in countries with more male-dominated societies.

No, Grauniad, what the study shows, is that in the sample of 90 people studied, there was a very small overall, average difference in the size of parts of the brain between (self defined) heterosexual people and (self defined) homosexual people-  I always wonder where all the (self defined) bisexuals are in these experiments. Or indeed the (self defined) asexuals or would they just muddy the waters horribly?  Now I’m not enough of a statistician to tell you how significant, or otherwise the results were, even in terms of brain size, but even if they do establish beyond a reasonable doubt that yup(self defined)  gays have (on average) very slightly different brains from (self defined) straights (on average), that is all they have proved. Nothing else.

So yet again. Why are Swedish scientists so keen to prove this? What are we going to do with the information if it is proved? It seems the most pointless endeavour on the face of the planet. It’s not going to cure cancer, or feed the starving, or make a better mousetrap. “we are gay because we are, that’s all anyone needs to know. “

Call this justice?

Amy and Owen Philcox were murdered by their father, yesterday, on Father’s Day. Apparently because he had been undergoing an ‘acrimonious divorce battle’ and had been in contact with campaign group Fathers 4 Justice.  Now am I the only person who thinks that a man who is capable of killing his children just to get revenge on his ex wife, is hardly a good advert for their cause?

French criticised for being sex negative

The Handmaid’s Tale

Is it justifiable for feminists to criticise women? Well this blog (which is of course the incarnation of evol) has criticised quite a few women (and men, of course) if you have a read through. And not everyone likes it. But evol is as evol does. And so my answer - predictably -  is yes, it is justifiable for feminists to criticise women who uphold the patriarchy.

The argument against this is that women did not create patriarchy, and that men are still its major beneficiaries. And that the women who uphold patriarchal values are in the end only acting out roles created for them.

Up to a point Lord Copper. But only up to a point. The Handmaid’s Tale  by Margaret Atwood is a dystopian vision of a future USA which has been taken over by the religious right. Due to (unspecified) environmental factors there is also mass infertility. So the few fertile young women are corralled to act as surrogates (handmaids) for rich powerful couples, most of those women who are not either married to powerful men, domestic servants or handmaids are banished to their fate in the regions which are afflicted by the environmental disaster. The only other women who are allowed to remain are the ‘aunts’ who are in effect jailers for the handmaids who groom them for their future role.

Margaret Atwood seems to have  a fondness for characters in her books who are like the aunts - women who hold up the established social order, are repressive of other women. Some see this as anti feminist. Atwood herself, though she would probaby define herself as feminist,  says she has never been fond of following party lines. We can see the aunts in two ways - as either upholding and supporting the oppression of the handmaids, or as victims themselves, whose only chance of survival is to take up that role. But Atwood does seem to view them fairly unequivocally as oppressors.

Personally I define my politics as being about opposing patriarchy, which doesn’t necessarily involve  having solidarity with/approving of every other woman on the planet earth. Because patriarchy (like capitalism, like white supremacy) is a political system of oppression. And it is perfectly possible for those who are oppressed by patriarchy (women) to nevertheless actively prolong its existence. I’ve had plenty of women pressurise me to conform to patriarchal values   - which would have been to my detriment - if I’d listened. And I’ve had men promote feminist values to me.

But women in the public sphere whether they’re business women - Jacqueline Gold (could a man sell the “vibrating mini slut” and still claim to be “woman friendly”?)- in the media -Ruth Fowler  -(would Ruth Fowler’s anti fat women article be published in a left leaning newspaper if it was written by a man?) or in entertainment - Madonna (don’t get me started) -  have a special responsibility if they promote patriarchal values, which I’d argue all three of those women do. Because all three of them have a choice - they don’t have to uphold patriarchy, they chose to, because it makes them a fast buck. Their position is in no way ambivalent, as it may be in the case of  less privileged women who promote patriarchal values as a matter of survival. They could all survive without upholding patriarchy, but their privileged position means that not only do they profit from doing it, they prolong patriarchy’s existence. And the fact that they are women means their misogyny is less visible, it is assumed a woman must support women. There’s a reason why female barristers are always chosen to defend rapists - think about it.

To believe patriarchy is inevitable and we can do nothing to resist it is a counsel of despair. The actual fact is that patriarchy is a hegemony - it is dependent on (manufactured) consent. And that consent can only continue to be manufactured while the ideology of patriarchy is promoted. And everyone who promotes that - male or female - is individually responsible for their part in upholding patriarchy.  But women’s promoting of patriarchy is particularly powerful because it enables patriarchy to silence the voices of resisting women.

And finally - there’s a reason in case you’re wondering, why there’s a picture of a statue of Abraham Lincoln at the top of this piece. The statue was erected as a memorial to cotton workers who refused to handle cotton grown from slave labour - endangering their own lives and those of their families - unemployment was rife and could literally mean starving to death. Yes I’ve harped on about these cotton workers before and I’m going to do it again. Because abolishing slavery held no personal advantage for them and opposing it literally risked their lives. But they still did it - they were only one step up from slaves themselves of course. And that’s why they did it. They realised they had common cause with the enslaved people, even if their fates weren’t directly linked. And if they could do that then rich privileged Western women can say no to oppressing other women. And more to the point they have a moral duty to do so.