Now, I am no stranger to folk music; I’m well aware that there are about a bajillion versions of every song, especially older ones, and that they vary considerably in both words and music. This, however, was a broader divergence than I ever would have expected. The very story changes dramatically! The basic story of a man called Geordie being condemned, and then his wife coming to beg for his life is the same, but they diverge in almost evey other aspect. And I know they are supposedly the same song, as well, since the songbook lists the ‘Silly Sisters’ album as an example recording!

In Prior & Tabor’s (which turned out to be this version, originally transcribed by Robert Burns), Geordie was a nobleman framed for the murder of another. His lady rides to court and is told his life will be spared if she collects a ginormous ransom, which she does, and so buys his freedom. In the Rise Up Singing version — as in most other, especially English versions, it turns out — Geordie is a poacher, and when his wife comes to beg for his freedom, she is turned away, and he dies. Talk about alternate endings!

A musician, identified only as ‘Ian’ in this Mudcat thread describes his own recording of the song as “an English song about a disproportionate punishment for a crime which evolved from a Scottish song about a frame-up”. The Scottish versions do seem to generally pre-date the English ones (though they also seem to have become less common), and I guess changing the condemned man to reflect a common-ish crime in your area, for which the punishment is widely seen as vastly unjust, does make a sort of sense. As, given the former, does having him actually die rather than get ransomed at the last minute. But at this point, is it even still the same song? Could there have been some other English song (or several) that got morphed into this one because the tune was catchy and the story was distilled and familiar?

Oddly, this recording by Ewan MacColl seems to combine elements of several versions, but seems mostly drawn from this one, known as Gight’s Ladye. Geordie’s wife is still a noblewoman of some sort, but Geordie’s crime is poaching. She isn’t turned away out of hand, though, and goes through with the begging for ransom money as in the other Scottish versions. However, it seems to me that her success in this is left ambiguous while the narrator is distracted by telling the tale of her verbal harrassment by a bawdy lord. Though, granted, my impression of ambiguity could merely be from an inferior understanding of Scots; it’s certainly not ambiguous in the ‘Gight’s Ladye’ version given on Mudcat. But why this “Bog o’ Gight” stuff? Well, a little googling proved illuminating: ‘Bog-Of-Gight’ is an old name for Gordon Castle, and the earliest historical event to be associated with this song/set of songs was the story of a George Gordon, who would have been lord of said castle at the time — although the actual events of his life, at least as given on Wikipedia, don’t quite line up with the song, and they CERTAINLY don’t line up with the ‘Gight’s Ladye’ version, though at a stretch they could be described by Burns’ ‘Geordie’.

So what is going on here? It seems unlikely that an earl — who’d have his own hunting preserves, after all — would be brought up for poaching. Yet the ‘Gight’s Ladye’ version preserves an awful lot of specific names and places, far more than Burns’ ‘Geordie’. Could the crime have been changed to make the song more populist in one area, while in another the events were recorded more faithfully even as the names all dropped away? It’s nearly impossible to tell. Though for those who feel like making minute comparisons between versions (woefully void of any information about where or when or how they were collected), it turns out Wiki has transcriptions of all of Child’s collections.

Meanwhile, a few thoughts on the Burns/Child A version. In it, Geordie is framed (or blamed for the death, anyway, regardless of guilt), and his lady, upon receiving the news of his captivity, rushes to Edinburgh with all of her men. Later on, after she’s made her tearful case to the king, but before the aged lord suggests a fine instead of death, we get this verse, which on first listen seems to break the pattern of the story considerably:

The Gordons cam and the Gordons ran,
And they were stark and steady;
And ay the word amang them a’
Was, Gordons keep you ready.

Then we see the king’s advisor suggesting that a fine might be the wiser course of action. Because this lady brought a freaking army with her to “beg” for her dearie’s life. Conclusion: the ‘fairest flower o’ woman-kind’ is a lot more badass than you might expect.

StW, or at least my acquaintances within it, seemed to be made up mostly of anti-nuclear activists, longtime pacifists (obvs.), socialists (or at least sellers of The Socialist Worker), and the regrouped remnants of the anti-globalization movement. Most of these, having found common purpose, seemed to share a collective scorn for the ‘Identity Politics of the ’90s’, which had so divided and derailed the movement from fighting the real enemy: capitalism, neoliberalism, the military-industrial complex. My memories of the ’90s include an awful lot of people emphasising their racial, gender, and sexual identities, and terms like ‘political correctness’ and ‘affirmative action’ were forever on everyone’s lips; and so I took these older campaigners at their word — their narrative certainly made a lot of sense, and helped me explain to myself how I could have reached the age of 18 without knowing that living socialists existed in the West, or how academics like Fukuyama could write bullshit like “The End of History”.

However, I am starting to grow skeptical of my activist elders. I know that, for all intents and purposes, I just wasn’t there in the ’90s, and therefore can’t really comment on what it was like, but when I see things like discussions about women’s safer spaces within the occupy camps repeatedly derailed by comments like “let’s not let this movement get bogged down in identity politics like the protest movements in the ’90s did”, I start to wonder. Did they? WERE the ’90s a time when anti-capitalists laid down their ideologies in order to focus on the colour of their skin or the composition of their genitalia, as the mainstream narrative would have us believe? Or was it simply that women, people of colour, and queer people of all acronyms looked around them and saw that the broad left, just like the rest of society, was silencing their voices and their concerns, patronizing them, and telling them that their problems would be dealt with after whatever other big problem they were protesting had been solved? The ’90s, after all, saw the rise of the anti-globalization movement, in opposition to the towering capitalist globalization movements coming out of the most powerful world government and inter-government agencies of the day (and now), as well as the same old pacifists and hard-bitten anti-nuke campaigners and all the other “yes that’s what I’ve been saying all along” fringe activist movements that are always with us. They clearly weren’t a time when no one was focusing on ideology. But, you know, what do I know. I was only a kid; I wasn’t really “there”.

However, I have also been disappointed by the response of some of those who have been similarly appalled by the situation. Sadly, many of the articles and commentaries voicing a strong critique of the sexual safety within the camps, and the camps’ responses to them, have proposed the same dead-end solution: end the occupations.

This response seems kind of bizarre when you compare the situation to many analogous ones, which don’t involve protests. If someone is sexually harassed or assaulted within a company, for instance, no one expects that company to be dissolved; they expect the perpetrator to be dealt with and the organization itself to continue. Or at more physically similar events — say, a large outdoor concert, or one of these music festivals the kids are all so fond of these days — when someone is raped or sexually assaulted, the situation is dealt with, and the show goes on. And in ordinary life, if, say, one person rapes another in a dark alley, WE BLAME THE RAPIST, NOT THE DARK ALLEY. Or at least we should, because blaming the physical situation is really, really uncomfortably close to blaming the victim h/erself.

Furthermore, it is not clear to me what, exactly, ending the occupations would accomplish other than muffling the voices of thousands of rightfully angry citizens. The sad truth is that, in a misogynistic society such as we live in, any situation in which women are placed in vulnerable positions, in crowds, and especially where they are sleeping in relatively exposed places, many will take this opportunity to sexually assault them (and some men, too). I am not a fatalist; I do not think this is in any way ‘inevitable’, nor do I think that the fact that it does happen is an excuse for allowing it to. However, it is important to acknowledge that it does, and that these atrocities are not unique to the Occupy camps. People are sexually assaulted all the time — at concerts, at festivals, at parties surrounded by friends and acquaintances. And no one would argue that this is a reason not to have concerts, or festivals, or parties; nor should they.

I am skeptical, too, about some of the outrage against the anti-police sentiments of many of the Occupy protesters. Personally, I would never condemn someone for calling or going to the police when they felt their safety was in danger, quite simply because that is how we are taught to react, and for most people, reaching for these perceived authority figures is an act of self-defence. At the same time, it must be acknowledged that the police and the courts have an extremely bad track record when it comes to dealing with rape reports — often harassing survivors so badly that they have sometimes said that the results of making the report were almost as bad as the rape itself — which is among the reasons so many rapes go unreported. Unless there happens to be an officer on hand to actually stop the assault from taking place, there’s probably not much they’re going to be able or willing to do to help you. The system of legal redress for sexual crimes is hopelessly broken (if ‘broken’ is even a term that can apply to a system that has been weighted against the victims from the beginning; that has never brought anything like justice or healing to survivors, delivering only petty vengeance at best, and a humiliating ordeal at worst or in addition). Given this inefficacy, and the fact that many people — especially long-time activists, the poor, and people of colour — have either been physically or sexually assaulted themselves by police, or have had it happen to those close to them (not to mention the police violence that has already been inflicted on several of the Occupy camps themselves), it is hardly surprising that many wish to find other ways of dealing with the problem of sexual attacks in the camp communities that they are creating, to develop their own systems of security.

What, then, is the solution? I have to admit, I don’t really know. It’s easy enough to name the source of the problem: patriarchy, misogyny, and (duh) the perpetrators of sexual attacks themselves. But I have no more idea of how to prevent sexual attacks in the Occupations than in any other area of life. The basic advice seems to be the same: 1) Don’t sexaully harass, assault, or rape anyone (simple!); 2) If you witness a sexual attack taking place, INTERVENE — say something, do something, call for help, call the attacker out on their behaviour, even (or especially) if it is as “subtle” as leering, making inappropriate comments, or using sexually threatening body language and the like; 3) When you see your comrades (or “passers-by” or “free lunchers” who are, like, totally unconnected with the camp, obvs) engaging in sexist language or behaviour, or voicing sexist opinions, CALL THEM OUT ON IT. This last is the more long-term solution, as obviously calling someone out on their sexist language today is probably not going to stop them raping someone tonight, but if complete non-tolerance of sexism becomes the norm, then (and only then) we will have hoisted ourselves out of the rape culture, and THAT will have a serious impact in reducing rape and other sexual assault and harassment.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that, as spaces in which people are trying to build an intentional sense of community and communitarian spirit, the Occupy camps are exceptionally good places to practice this sort of community-based rape prevention. They’re certainly better suited to tackle sexual assault problems than, say, a music festival or a concert or even most larger house parties. The first step, though, is for the protesters to acknowledge the problem and tackle it head-on; if they continue to equivocate and distance themselves from those who have been sexually harassed and attacked within the camps, then they will only perpetuate the rape culture of the wider world. They will sow discontent among themselves and, ultimately, the movement will fail. There can be no class liberation without women’s liberation. We can’t wait until after The Revolution to tackle patriarchy. We have to do it NOW.

I’ve also been watching lots of Star Trek lately, which, like most sci-fi, has a tendency to play out weird ethical thought experiments. Viz.:

The captain always defends the deontological position; the first officer, the utilitarian.

(Drawing is from Hourly Comics Day, which I did not complete with enough pizzazz to share any but this.)

There are questions, of course, about the extent to which Kant’s metaphysics were important to his ethical theories, but I maintain that in the most important ways they are effectively separate. Kantian ethics can be effectively summed up in his Categorical Imperative, which is to “Act as if the maxim of your actions were a universal law” or various other effectively similar formulations. It is commonly dismissed for the somewhat ironic reason that it is often impossible to know the consequences of one’s actions. And of course for the impossibility of correctly formulating “maxims” by which one purports to act.

Meanwhile, at work, I have a copy of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice reserved for myself, so that if I ever get around to reading it all the way through, I can disagree with it more intelligently. In a nutshell, though, Rawls provides the last possibly defensible gasp for Social Contract Theory, via a thought experiment in which one is meant to defend the state which one would find most palatable even if one did not know which position one would hold within it. We are meant to hedge our bets, of course, because we want it to turn out that, even if we were the lowliest of the low, the society we “chose” when we were in the “original position” (from which one sets the parameters of the society) would not be so bad. It is a fine thought experiment, except for the conclusion that the obvious choice of society would be a liberal state. When I run the experiment in my own head, the society I imagine is an anarcho-socialist one.

This idea of testing has been at the centre of most of the more civil debates I’ve had or seen about herbal medicines, and it’s an important one. Many arguments are marred throughout by both sides’ tendency to argue as though more committed to being on a side than to striving towards Truth, no matter what they may claim. That is: typically, someone on the anti-herbal side will point out that little or no medical testing has been done for most herbal remedies. Then someone on the pro-herbal side will either bemoan the lack of funding for testing in most places — at which point arguments usually end because the opponents see that they are on the same ‘side’ really, the side of scientific testing, they are just coming into it with differing hypotheses — or else the pro-herbalist will question the validity of medical testing itself. And that is when it usually gets nasty.**

It’s this sort of oppositional attitude, I think, that leads people to ridiculously extreme positions of either disregarding all scientific research, or blindly accepting it all just because it’s *~*~science~*~* (though it’s worth noting that the latter view seems to be much more prominent among rationalistic non-scientists than practicing scientists or especially scientific researchers). The trouble, of course, is that a lot of scientific research, and — this excellent article in this month’s Atlantic magazine leads me to believe — medical research in particular, is often filled with methodological flaws. Some are the result of bias or fraud, but many are simply unavoidable, and probably many more are simply oversights. It is simply not healthy — literally or figuratively — to accept all research uncritically.

In the above-linked article, meta-researcher Dr. John Ioannidis claims, and has come up with a mathematical proof to demonstrate, that under normal conditions, most medical research turns out to be wrong. Moreover: “His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials.” And yet, of course, it would be wrong to say that this is a reason to automatically distrust all medical research — though it certainly appears to be a reason only to trust randomized trials, and even to take those with a grain of salt. It is still less reason to think we should abandon the concept of medical research altogether. It just means that we need to work to make that research better.

An example from my own life has been niggling at my conscience for years now. St Andrews is a major centre for certain kinds of psychological research, as well as having a host of psychology grad students with their own research projects, and as such it is fairly common for students to earn bits of extra money by participating in experiments. Now, St Andrews is also a small town, and the university is small, and quite a lot of students know each other, and even more students, I would think, will know each other within the set of current students who participate in these experiments, because a lot of them find out about them through friends who’ve done them too — I mean, really, what student anywhere would give up the chance, or fail to pass on word of the chance, to earn almost minimum wage for pressing buttons for 45 minutes?

For most experiments, the fact that a lot of participants know each other is surely a non-issue. But one of the bigger labs within the department is one that researches perceptions of faces. This surely must be affected by the participant’s familiarity with the faces they view within the experiment. In the one I did, I was first given a basic colour-blindness test and then asked to rate how “healthy” various faces looked. There were fifteen or twenty faces in the cycle, and I knew close to a third of them. Two were close friends! I’m sure this must have made a difference, because I could tell where my friends’ faces had been digitally manipulated or stretched or discoloured, which I generally couldn’t with the strangers’.

I tried to tell someone this at the time, but they were all so busy and I was so shy that I didn’t work up the courage to demand one of their attention long enough to point out this potential (and potentially serious) methodological flaw. Then they took my picture to add to their database, gave me my handful of coins and sent me on my way. Ever since, I’ve been idly wondering whether or not I should email someone, but I don’t know who I would email, and the more time passes the more embarrassing it would seem to be, to initiate the discussion. But REALLY. It’s probably not something that most experimenters would need to think to control for, if they were in larger cities or had larger or older databases or whatever, but in that particular situation, it seems like a gross oversight — and one quite easily corrected within the experiment, with just a button or something the participant could click if the face generated was an acquaintance’s. Or by having a time lag of a good few years in between entering a participant’s photograph into the database and having it show up in experiments. Or something.

The good news, though, is that Dr. Ioannidis’ work has been exceptionally well-received by the medical community. Yet there is apparently controversy within the meta-research community for exactly the reasons described above: some fear that seeding public doubts about scientific research will simply drive people to seek “alternative” therapies or ignore the medical establishment, or their own health, altogether. I much prefer his proposed solution. To quote the Atlantic article: “We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough.”

* As well it should.

** Let us be clear: it also gets nasty because of the anti-herbal camp’s tendency to lump herbal remedies together with all other “alternative” therapies, like homeopathy and crystal healing and bullshit like that, and equivocate between them in their refutations; and by the tendency of many proponents of herbal remedies to also believe in bullshit like homeopathy and crystal healing.

Something’s been bothering me, though, and it’s not just the utterly nonsensical physics, or the ideological mallets banging through the plot of every show. Well, related to the latter. Closely related.

See, the original Star Trek was intentionally cast with a crew that was racially and sexually diverse, the better to display Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a socially egalitarian future society. See above: first interracial kiss on television (though for some reason the many inter-species kisses did not cause such a stir… presumaby because the actress playing Uhura really was black, while all the ubiquitously blonde aliens were obviously just safe white girls with a little bit of facial putty.) I read somewhere that in the pilot episode, the First Officer was played by a woman, though this was changed for the series because network execs didn’t think a 1960s audience would find a female commander plausible. This changed over the course of the series, of course, with Star Trek: Voyager even having a female captain. (And, for what it’s worth, in TNG we are introduced to a number of female admirals in Star Fleet.)

So as far as women having the same economic power as men, the show does okay — though, I’m not sure whether ‘economic’ is an appropriate term here, since the show seems to operate in a (blessedly) post-capitalist society where money does not exist. In terms of sexual politics, however, the 24th Century appears to be gloomily like the 20th — and, though the makers of the show may perhaps be forgiven for their lack of prescience of their own near futures — to have even lost some of the advances of the 21st. I am talking, of course, about gay characters. Or, more accurately, the total lack thereof.

It’s hard to criticise something for an absence. It could be incidental. However, it’s pretty hard to stomach a show that tries so hard to be ‘inclusive’ in the ’90s Liberal sense of the word, with its many Powerful Female Characters and racially diverse crew (albeit mostly-white main cast — and, for that matter, a crew only ‘racially diverse’ by the standards of the United States, not the globe. But nevermind.) Homosexuality seems conspicuously absent. And it’s not like they haven’t given themselves opportunities to talk about it.

In one episode, Dr. Crusher, one of the ship’s Powerful Women, falls in love with a visiting science officer, who turns out to actually be a symbiotic parasite living inside the body of the ‘person’ she had fallen for, and when that body dies it has to be temporarily housed in Commander Riker’s body, while it awaits a new host body from its home planet. Yet, through a bit of personal angst, Dr. Crusher finds that she can still love this person, even when it is in the form of her (male) colleague, and not the body she originally fell for, because love conquers all!. Skip to the end: Dr. Crusher sits in a room awaiting Her Love, which has just been installed in a new host. A woman enters. Female: INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLE! So she breaks it off. She, uh, just can’t deal with all of this constant changing of her lover’s body — despite the lack of any indication that this body will last less than a good few decades; the other had only been lost due to a freak accident. The End.

Another episode (117: ‘The Outcast’ — Spoiler Alert!) seems like a clear allegory for the repression of sexual ‘deviants’ in our own society. The Enterprise meets a totally androgynous race of aliens, one of whom feels like she is, deep inside, really a woman (and thus, of course, falls in love with Commander Riker). This genderedness is heavily repressed in her society; she is discovered, and psychologically “reprogrammed” to “fix” her gender back to neutral. But… the episode does nothing with this potential allegory, and if anything, allows it to re-enforce the heteronormativity that permeates the entire show.

Because, of course, it’s not the lack of any non-heterosexual characters that makes the show heteronormative. That, as mentioned, could simply be incidental — in the same way that there are not representatives of every human ethnicity among the crew of the Enterprise; identity politics can get a bit silly that way, and I want to be clear that that’s not what I’m criticising. Rather, it is the fact that, as evidenced by their conversation, the questions they ask alien races, and the questions that alien races (even androgynous races!) ask them, all characters are automatically assumed to be heterosexual. The mere possibility of a female being attracted to other females, or a male to other males, is never broached. Not even once. Granted, I have a few more seasons of TNG left to watch, and I haven’t seen most of Deep Space Nine or Voyager… but given the Very Traditional nature of what few actual relationships and marriages exist in Star Trek thus far, I don’t have much hope.

Thus, having discussed at length the relative merits and pitfalls of the various systems, I have a new proposal of my own: Negative Voting. It goes like this:
- Voters are given a ballot paper with a list of all the candidates/parties they are being asked to choose between (these can be selected by whatever method is normal for the given system). Beside each candidate/party name is a box.
- Voters mark the box beside every candidate they do NOT want to see in office.
- The candidate with the fewest marks across all the ballots is the winner. (In the event of a tie, a runoff election can be held.)

This started off as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more I think would actually seriously support a system like this. Yes, it would probably tend to punish the incumbents. But incumbents are often punished in every electoral system, and usually the only result of that is that whatever next-strongest party gets voted in, even if the voters don’t actually like them very much, just on the grounds of being not-them. Hell, even Nick Clegg’s angelic rise to prominence in this campaign (despite his net loss of seats) seems mostly to have been on the platform of being neither Cameron nor Brown.

On the other hand, it also seems likely to discourage tactical voting. If, in this last election, some hypothetical generally-lefty voter would’ve really liked to vote Green, but didn’t think they’d win, and was trying to decide between voting for Labour or the Lib Dems instead (a question I’m sure many in my constituency wrestled with!) In this system, they could simply blot out everything but the few they would’ve been satisfied with. Of course, this wouldn’t get rid of tactical voting altogether. Supporters of larger parties who might be likelier to win would probably just blot out everyone but their one preferred party, and encourage others to do the same.

It obviously still needs a bit of thinking-through, and I’m still not convinced myself that it would be a preferable system to STV, which similarly discourages tactical voting, but with the added bonus of making well-liked but “unelectable” small parties actually viable. But… but… just imagine a system in which voting for ‘none of the above’ was a legitimate vote.

For one thing, I never noticed before just how very very dated these stories are. It’s not just that the people in them are the people of Asimov’s time, transported to random future-times that seem absurd now that we’ve had 50 years of social change in between. He also (inadvertantly) draws attention to that fact in his introduction — which is essentially an essay about what he calls ‘the Frankenstein complex’, in which he states his intention that his robot stories would be different to those of his predecessors. Instead of a fist-shaking ‘what hath man wrought??’ ethos of Man’s Abominable Creations Run Amok, his would be logical, useful machines that only ever harmed anything through human or mechanical error.

He ties it back to Faust, of course, and the ancient human obsession with the Dangers of Forbidden Knowledge, a criticism with which I very much agree. However, the ordinary folk in the stories still react to the robots as though they were rampaging Frankenstein’s Monsters. I get that Asimov was most likely trying to make a point by showing such reactions (though of course it is also the point of dramatic tension on which several of the stories turn), but having every lay-person in every story react with the same comical, mindless terror upon encountering a robot just drives home the inevitable observation that these are not modern people. We’ve had 50 years of development. We’ve grown into our technology slowly. We don’t have positronic brains just yet, but if and when we do develop Asimov-style robots, they are not going to be terrifying except to a Luddite few, and even then the repugnance is more likely to be based in hatred and an abstract Fear for Humanity than in animal fear.

Some of the dated-ness is more humourous, of course. The final story in the book, “Galley Slave” was written in 1957 while the author was in the midst of proof-reading a biochemistry textbook. It features a proof-reading robot. “Congratulations,” says any modern reader, “you’ve invented spell-check.” Although of course, the robot is much more attuned to the nuances of language than MS Word, and never makes mistakes. There is, however, a minor typographical error within the story.

Finally, on the subject of printer’s errors, the back of the book is the most hilarious of all. It is a 1976 reprint of a 1968 edition, and I guess Asimov was pretty justified in his writing of the human characters for decades after their initial publication, because Panther describes it as “Isaac Asimov’s final, classic, terrifying picture of robotic developments in the future — here in paperback for the first time.” Emphasis mine.

My brother did not. It didn’t matter. I mean, obviously if a male child discussed the issue, it was seriously discussed with him (my cousin Alex used to say he wanted 12 kids), but the matter never seemed to be pressed on them if they didn’t bring it up.

As I got older, the messages started to change, for a while. The topic of procreation became more about how it worked and how to prevent it, and for a while it seemed that we females were on somewhat equal footing with the males; our bodies were different, but it was impressed upon us that we had equal responsibility for preventing unplanned pregnancy (a stance that older feminists inform me is a recent one).

… But a few years later, as the conversation turns towards the question of having kids rather than preventing them, all the weight is shifted back onto the women. Women are encouraged, at every stage of their fertile years, to think about their potential to have children, and the consequences thereof. In particular, we are asked to consider how to “balance” this with our desire for a “career”. Countless articles are written about it, ranging from go-getter encouraging to pessimistic and downright demeaning. And, of course, we talk about it with each other.

A (nominally feminist) message board I frequent, which is about 98% female, and mostly teens and 20-somethings, discusses the issue with some regularity. It’s not like we talk about nothing else (like, to another woman, about something other than a man), but childbearing comes up a lot. A recent thread included the serious suggestion — discussed at some length! — that women should start thinking seriously about this around age 16 or 18, when they are deciding on what life-paths to take, career-wise, because some professions are much more compatible with child-rearing. Within the safe space of our discussions, this is a valid and potentially helpful point to make. But a part of me still wants to shout “COME ON, MY SISTREN! Do whatever you want with your uterus! Have your kids then let’s fight like hell to make sure you have the opportunity to continue your career if you want to! To make sure that your partner is equally able (and feels equally obliged) to bear half the burden of caring for them! To achieve a gender-equal society!”

Because, honestly, while a small part of it all makes sense, biologically speaking — women are the only ones who are physically obliged to take at least some time off work to accommodate the actual birth of the child — there’s no reason why all of the intellectual labour of pondering these questions should be done by the ones who incubate the foetuses. When was the last time you heard a group of young men discussing the relative merits of different career choices based on their potential to accommodate any hypothetical future children? Where are all the op-eds telling young men how to plan their lives around their reproductive capacities? A google search for ‘men career children’ first asks if I meant ‘women career children’ (and gives the top two results for that), then shows a whole bunch of pages about how the career-vs.-children issue is an issue for women and not for men. Big news there. I mean, I know writing this isn’t going to tell anyone anything new, either; but I’m not informing, I’m just ranting.

By way of further research, I asked a male housemate if anyone had ever asked him to consider the potential effect of children on his career. It was a small sample size, I know, but the research was purely rhetorical; of course no one had. To be fair, he said, ‘career’ itself was not much of a consideration for him, either — which is about the answer you’d expect from an anarchist. However, it gets to what I think is the real root of the problem: that we, not as women but as people, at least in the time and place these words inhabit, are encouraged to think of “careers” as the be-all end-all of identity. Not just what we do but who we are. If “careers” were not hierarchical, and if “advancement” didn’t matter so much, then it wouldn’t matter so much if someone — male or female — decided to take one or three or fifteen years off to raise their families, and return to them later. Obviously in something like research there’d be some catch-up work to do, but in most cases it would simply mean that you ended your ‘working life’ with a few years’ less experience than your peers. Is that such a bad thing?

Unfortunately, I think that kind of paradigm shift is going to be a lot harder to achieve than simple in-system (but still necessary!) steps like paid paternity leave.

A storm out at sea has washed thousands of starfish onto a beach, and a man is walking along the beach, picking them up one by one, and flinging them back into the sea.”What are you doing?” asks an incredulous passer-by, “You’ll never save them all! There are thousands of starfish on the beach, and you’re only one man; you’ll save maybe a hundred, tops. You can’t possibly make a difference!”

But … what if storms like that are totally uncharacteristic for the area, but are becoming more frequent (and thus likely to kill many, many more starfish) due to global warming, which is contributed to, in part, by, say, offshore oil wells near these folk’s seaside town? And all of this is allowed (and even encouraged) by their government? Wouldn’t it be more productive for citizens to spend their time lobbying their government and campaigning against the oil drilling, rather than throwing starfish into the sea? Or at least for that man to say “Hey, I’m gonna handle these starfish right here, why don’t you go fight the oil companies?”

Okay, maybe not in this particular instance. A storm is, after all, a one-off event, and the man only has a limited time to throw the beached starfish into the sea, after which he can go campaign and lobby and whatnot. In an acute crisis, charity is crucial and probably a moral duty. But what if the crisis is protracted? What if it’s not a one-off natural disaster, but a protracted famine caused by economic instability? What if there’s a much more direct cause or set of causes to follow and fight? Then where does one best direct one’s energies?

What if, for instance, the UN World Food Programme buys food for impoverished people in poor nations, while, due to a right-wing consensus among economic superpowers, the IMF and the World Bank “strongly discourage” those nations from setting price caps on anything, including vital staples like rice, as prices have more than doubled in the last two years? The left hand giveth, and the right hand driveth more people into poverty.

I’ve been meaning to make a post along these lines for over a year and a half now, ever since someone linked me to www.freerice.com, a “vocabulary-game” website that donates 10 grains of rice for every correct answer you provide on their game. It’s basically like a less-fun, solitary version of The Dictionary Game, except that the “synonyms” they provide are often not technically synonymous, being either examples within a category or in some cases only loosely related words. This led to exasperated ranting on my part (e.g. ‘Lynx’ does not equal ‘wild cat’! A lynx is a type of wild cat!)

Pedantry aside, though, a lot about the website just bothered me, in the same way that similar sites where you click on things to donate things all bother me. I think it’s the self-congratulatory ethos around them. I dunno. I mean, I guess it’s always a ‘good thing’ to donate money to any particular charity; that the work that any particular charity does is always good, in particular for the people they help — in the same way that it’s good for those hundred or so starfish that get thrown back into the sea. But the implication of these websites seems to be that, by generating donations by clicking on things, you are somehow solving the problems they are set up to address.

And that’s just… not true. No more than music can save the world, throwing money at problems without implementing structural changes seldom solves them. Granted, the UN WFP’s website indicates that they do do some campaigning, but as the limp left hand of Worldwide coordination, they are doomed to be forever thwarted by the dextrous IMF and World Bank.

I… I thought after more than a year of mulling I would have a way to finish this rant — that I would have come to some sort of succinct, easily-verbalised conclusion. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Instead, I’ll leave you with someone else’s frustrated wisdom:

“When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food , they call me a communist.”
– Dom Hélder Câmara