Question- Can you entirely change the value of a council service by changing just one letter in its name?
Answer- There is no longer a Children's Play Area in Mile End Park: there is a Children's Play Arena. Actual facilities have not been affected.
Go Tower Hamlets Council, the masterminds who have renamed their libraries Idea Stores, their private police force THEOs (they're enhancing your Street Safety, dontcha know?) and rather beautifully adapted the Olympic Park to Olympic Parklands.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Back to school
‘Trop d'école tue l'école’ Potschke
Well I'm sorry it's been so long. I'd like to say that I've been busy, but quite the opposite is true. I have been simultaneously doing very little and living life to the max. It's been wonderful, especially on those rare occasions that the sun shone over Forest Gate this summer.
Also, I haven't had a cigarette since the 7th July. Well, I've had like one-and-a-half, but they didn't count. It hasn't been so tough, but I'm finding it very hard to work without smoking. Usually I have a cigarette every 200 words, or whenever I feel I've written something worth writing, or whenever I get tired. Nowadays I write 200 words... then I just stop writing. My My Documents is crammed with things I started working on, vowed to finish, deserted for one second to make a cup of NRT tea, and then abandoned. The time it takes for the kettle to boil is just long enough for me to lose concentration and/or interest.
Anyway, if I successfully complete any of these you can look forward to my opinions on everything from abortion to John Le Carré over the coming unspecified time-span. I'm back at university and so blogging will move up my priority list.
Summer Holiday Priorities
1. Lie in sunshine
2. Drink Polish beer in sunshine
3. Go camping
4. Watch the Ashes
5. Never get out of bed before noon, if at all
6. Eat 99 Flakes
7. Go to Proms
8. Do very little in Dalston
9- 42. Other activities
43. Blog
Term-time Priorities
1. Get up every day
2. Blog
3. Read books unrelated to my course
4. Look at Wikipedia
5. Find a new place to live
6. Spend hours in Drapers slagging off the beer, décor, ambiance, bar-staff
7. Pretend not to do very little in Walthamstow
8. Think about smoking with the cool kids
97. Actual degree-related work
I went back to school yesterday. It hadn’t changed much. People at my university tend to be monosyllabic, obtuse and smell of cheap wine, and the students aren’t much better boom boom. I picked up ‘Cub’, our student magazine. It had an expensive-looking new design and was printed on thick, matt, A5 paper. Daring. Inside, among a lot of faked ‘readers-write-in’ features stolen from London’s free papers, was an editorial by Sam Cunningham explaining to those of us who had forgotten why they were at university.
Whilst others sit around unemployed worrying about how they’re going to afford to pay the mortgage, you have the opportunity to relax and sit out the worst of the recession, and will be ready to walk into the influx of new jobs when the market picks back up again. There really has never been a better time to be a student and there may well never be another.
For your information, Sam Wanker Cunningham, I am at university for three reasons
1. To learn stuff- both the stuff taught on my courses and other stuff. Which I have time and energy to learn because I don’t come home from work exhausted at 7pm every day on a dangerously overcrowded tube train.
2. Because my pre-university job which I loved, although easy enough that an intelligent 12-year-old could have done it (not brilliantly as I did it, but adequately), refused to pay me a living wage unless I got myself a degree.
3. I was terrified that if I left it any longer the fees would go up even more. I’m already paying more than £3000 a year.
But mostly number 1 (I’m in a lists mood tonight).
‘Ride out the recession’. Huh. A student living in London can barely pay the rent with their entire maximum yearly loan. Afterwards they must rely on grants, or part-time jobs, or, more likely, on their parents, who are just as affected by the recession as anyone else. At the same time they’re likely to be racking up fees loan of over £10,000 for an undergraduate degree. Cunningham is talking nonsense, which is what I have learnt to expect. Students are poor. Like all poor people, they will suffer during a recession. And it’s painful to hear education dismissed as some kind of investment- we have nothing to invest! Except, like the princess in Rumpelstiltskin, our future first-born-child.
Anyway, plenty of people can give you the facts on student poverty and student debt. But I’ve been at university for over three years now, and it breaks my heart that I have yet to come across a decent, well-written article. I used to live with a woman who had been active on her student paper, and like the paper itself she was middle-class, middle-of-the -road, amoral and frankly boring. Call me a snob but that barely surprises me coming from Sussex University. But I don’t know any evil, selfish, reactionary, over-wealthy, flippant spoiled brats at Queen Mary (well, maybe a couple, but they all study Politics) and yet that’s all I see in Cub. These idiots are giving student journalism an even worse name than it already had (and then going on to fuck up the entire media, but you kind of expect that).
Student magazines could be almost-censorship free, and where else can that happen? (Except on my blog). Instead, students censor themselves, and student magazines end up not just bland and politically impotent, but also boring, ignorant and offensive to the majority of students who are neither of these things.
Well I'm sorry it's been so long. I'd like to say that I've been busy, but quite the opposite is true. I have been simultaneously doing very little and living life to the max. It's been wonderful, especially on those rare occasions that the sun shone over Forest Gate this summer.
Also, I haven't had a cigarette since the 7th July. Well, I've had like one-and-a-half, but they didn't count. It hasn't been so tough, but I'm finding it very hard to work without smoking. Usually I have a cigarette every 200 words, or whenever I feel I've written something worth writing, or whenever I get tired. Nowadays I write 200 words... then I just stop writing. My My Documents is crammed with things I started working on, vowed to finish, deserted for one second to make a cup of NRT tea, and then abandoned. The time it takes for the kettle to boil is just long enough for me to lose concentration and/or interest.
Anyway, if I successfully complete any of these you can look forward to my opinions on everything from abortion to John Le Carré over the coming unspecified time-span. I'm back at university and so blogging will move up my priority list.
Summer Holiday Priorities
1. Lie in sunshine
2. Drink Polish beer in sunshine
3. Go camping
4. Watch the Ashes
5. Never get out of bed before noon, if at all
6. Eat 99 Flakes
7. Go to Proms
8. Do very little in Dalston
9- 42. Other activities
43. Blog
Term-time Priorities
1. Get up every day
2. Blog
3. Read books unrelated to my course
4. Look at Wikipedia
5. Find a new place to live
6. Spend hours in Drapers slagging off the beer, décor, ambiance, bar-staff
7. Pretend not to do very little in Walthamstow
8. Think about smoking with the cool kids
97. Actual degree-related work
I went back to school yesterday. It hadn’t changed much. People at my university tend to be monosyllabic, obtuse and smell of cheap wine, and the students aren’t much better boom boom. I picked up ‘Cub’, our student magazine. It had an expensive-looking new design and was printed on thick, matt, A5 paper. Daring. Inside, among a lot of faked ‘readers-write-in’ features stolen from London’s free papers, was an editorial by Sam Cunningham explaining to those of us who had forgotten why they were at university.
Whilst others sit around unemployed worrying about how they’re going to afford to pay the mortgage, you have the opportunity to relax and sit out the worst of the recession, and will be ready to walk into the influx of new jobs when the market picks back up again. There really has never been a better time to be a student and there may well never be another.
For your information, Sam Wanker Cunningham, I am at university for three reasons
1. To learn stuff- both the stuff taught on my courses and other stuff. Which I have time and energy to learn because I don’t come home from work exhausted at 7pm every day on a dangerously overcrowded tube train.
2. Because my pre-university job which I loved, although easy enough that an intelligent 12-year-old could have done it (not brilliantly as I did it, but adequately), refused to pay me a living wage unless I got myself a degree.
3. I was terrified that if I left it any longer the fees would go up even more. I’m already paying more than £3000 a year.
But mostly number 1 (I’m in a lists mood tonight).
‘Ride out the recession’. Huh. A student living in London can barely pay the rent with their entire maximum yearly loan. Afterwards they must rely on grants, or part-time jobs, or, more likely, on their parents, who are just as affected by the recession as anyone else. At the same time they’re likely to be racking up fees loan of over £10,000 for an undergraduate degree. Cunningham is talking nonsense, which is what I have learnt to expect. Students are poor. Like all poor people, they will suffer during a recession. And it’s painful to hear education dismissed as some kind of investment- we have nothing to invest! Except, like the princess in Rumpelstiltskin, our future first-born-child.
Anyway, plenty of people can give you the facts on student poverty and student debt. But I’ve been at university for over three years now, and it breaks my heart that I have yet to come across a decent, well-written article. I used to live with a woman who had been active on her student paper, and like the paper itself she was middle-class, middle-of-the -road, amoral and frankly boring. Call me a snob but that barely surprises me coming from Sussex University. But I don’t know any evil, selfish, reactionary, over-wealthy, flippant spoiled brats at Queen Mary (well, maybe a couple, but they all study Politics) and yet that’s all I see in Cub. These idiots are giving student journalism an even worse name than it already had (and then going on to fuck up the entire media, but you kind of expect that).
Student magazines could be almost-censorship free, and where else can that happen? (Except on my blog). Instead, students censor themselves, and student magazines end up not just bland and politically impotent, but also boring, ignorant and offensive to the majority of students who are neither of these things.
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Barefaced
‘But Frances, what exactly were you so upset about last night ? ask Fausto kindly.
‘Huh?’
‘One minute you were drinking your beer, the next minute you were shouting like a crazy person.’ Ah yes. Sarkozy, of course.
We were sitting by the Loire on a rug, drinking cans of Braubergen and watching the river flow past. Enrique asked me what I thought about Sarkozy’s latest cheeky little sound-bite on the burka; I saw red.
It took me a long time to work out where I stand on the subject of Muslim women’s dress for two reasons. One is that I grew up in a very Muslim area and went to school with Muslim girls- there I learnt to look at the person behind the headscarf. You have to learn, because on a purely personal level someone with their face covered can be slightly –slightly!- daunting. It’s not very hard, though. In year 9, maybe year 10, half of my school friends began to cover their hair, and a handful started coming to school in head-to-toe black. At the same time I dressed mostly in trousers with holes in them and baggy men’s jumpers. We didn’t make an issue of it.
The other reason is that I’m not keen on organised religion and wholeheartedly reject most of the major religions’ customs and rituals. ‘Because God tells me to (through any of His mysterious channels)’ cuts no mustard with me as a reasoning device.
In fact, I would rather people didn’t wear the burka, but I would also prefer people not to wear Crocs, especially the trendy new ones in the shape of Mary-Janes, and am often slightly offended by white pedal-pushers, especially in conjunction with white sleeveless shirts. That’s my opinion. I don’t share these opinions with every girl who passes me in the street because my father taught me that my right to swing my fist ends where the other person’s face begins. Also, I don’t care that much.
Nicolas Sarkozy has no such reservations, and declared last week in a carefully calculated profile-raising broadcast that ‘The burka is not welcome in the territory of the (French) Republic.’ Super. The man’s simultaneously liberating women and integrating Muslims. Or is he in fact hiding an attack on women in general behind an attack on French people of African and Asian descent?
The way people –or, in fact, women- choose to cover their bodies is not a matter for government intervention. Maybe the burka, more and more evident in Western Europe these days, is a symptom of a malaise within Muslim communities, but it should not be a symbol of this malaise. You don’t solve people’s problems by making an issue out of women’s sartorial choices, however misguided. You don’t make people’s lives better by dealing in symbols. ‘It’s not a religious sign, it’s a sign of servitude, of abasement,’ continued Sarko. Well, in that case, there is either a problem of the servitude and abasement of women or there is not. I would argue that there is, and that this problem is not by any means limited to Muslim communities, although I am convinced that it is a serious problem within them, especially among the poor. How do we challenge the second-class status of women, whatever their religion and ethnic origin? By making them change the way they display their bodies?
Laurie Penny made some excellent points on the same subject- ‘One of the few things that nearly all nations have in common is ideological control over women's bodies as political territory.’ These days, middle-class white women would probably not stand for such an open attack on the way they choose to dress (although all of us are of course constantly being judged by our clothing and our bodies in barely disguised attacks by the media). Muslim women have perhaps less opportunity to resist such an onslaught, which makes it even more ironic that they should be presented as powerless under the pressure of Muslim men- what’s the difference between a woman’s husband telling her what to wear and Nicolas Sarkozy doing the same?
I really love two things about French society, though neither is problem-free. The secular state, and its insistence on keeping religion out of schools, jobs and government, is brilliant. The attitude that if you want to be French you must love France makes sense to me too. Maybe we could replace our bullshit citizenship test (The British Citizenship Test claims that Father Christmas comes from the North Pole- at some point I will write an entire blog on what this means for British society) in the UK with one question - ‘Are you prepared to try to love the place you live? (Often, people with immigrant backgrounds seem to be among the few who really do love the UK.) Of course, the all-encompassing nature of the officially-sanctioned view of French identity leaves very little room for manoeuvre.
(Digression: An English social geographer I spoke to last year described his research into migration to France and England from the West Indies. He asked for statistics relating to Jamaicans moving to London and was given the figures he needed. When he asked the French authorities for similar information he was told that the French government did not concern itself with French citizens who chose to move from the French domain of Martinique to the French domain of Ile-de-France. ‘What are the problems involved with this kind of migration?’ he asked. ‘There are no problems,’ came the reply. ‘So we keep no records.’)
However, loving your country has very little to do with your personal beliefs on other matters, and secularism has nothing to do with repression, until politicians decide to use it as such. (I had to read Rousseau this year, but no catchy quotes spring to mind, which you will understand if you too have ploughed through Du contrat social. Or maybe I’m a moron. Anyway.) ‘We are not threatened by clericalism,’ continued Sarko. ‘We are threatened by a form of intolerance which stigmatises all religious participation.’ (Intolerance by whom, exactly?) Well-said, but what’s that got to do with the way someone dresses? Yes, there is a school of Muslim fundamentalism that works by putting women in a lower position than men, but in a society which claims to have laws in place to protect gender equality, there is scope to change this. Where existing laws can’t protect women’s right to equality, let’s make some new laws.
Let’s try and get poor people living in the cités (urban areas with majority social housing, think La Haine), whether Muslim or not, whether men or women, into better jobs, better education, better social statuses. Let’s get more help for vulnerable women and women who are financially or emotionally reliant on men. Let’s help women (and men) who are victims of physical and psychological abuse. This is the road to better integration for French and immigrant Muslims, and the road to a France where it’s easy to love your country.
Do this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if fewer women wanted to wear the burka. And if they don’t, who cares? Ideas for how to stop people wearing Crocs on a postcard please.
Fausto nods. ‘You seem a bit calmer today, though.’
‘Huh?’
‘One minute you were drinking your beer, the next minute you were shouting like a crazy person.’ Ah yes. Sarkozy, of course.
We were sitting by the Loire on a rug, drinking cans of Braubergen and watching the river flow past. Enrique asked me what I thought about Sarkozy’s latest cheeky little sound-bite on the burka; I saw red.
It took me a long time to work out where I stand on the subject of Muslim women’s dress for two reasons. One is that I grew up in a very Muslim area and went to school with Muslim girls- there I learnt to look at the person behind the headscarf. You have to learn, because on a purely personal level someone with their face covered can be slightly –slightly!- daunting. It’s not very hard, though. In year 9, maybe year 10, half of my school friends began to cover their hair, and a handful started coming to school in head-to-toe black. At the same time I dressed mostly in trousers with holes in them and baggy men’s jumpers. We didn’t make an issue of it.
The other reason is that I’m not keen on organised religion and wholeheartedly reject most of the major religions’ customs and rituals. ‘Because God tells me to (through any of His mysterious channels)’ cuts no mustard with me as a reasoning device.
In fact, I would rather people didn’t wear the burka, but I would also prefer people not to wear Crocs, especially the trendy new ones in the shape of Mary-Janes, and am often slightly offended by white pedal-pushers, especially in conjunction with white sleeveless shirts. That’s my opinion. I don’t share these opinions with every girl who passes me in the street because my father taught me that my right to swing my fist ends where the other person’s face begins. Also, I don’t care that much.
Nicolas Sarkozy has no such reservations, and declared last week in a carefully calculated profile-raising broadcast that ‘The burka is not welcome in the territory of the (French) Republic.’ Super. The man’s simultaneously liberating women and integrating Muslims. Or is he in fact hiding an attack on women in general behind an attack on French people of African and Asian descent?
The way people –or, in fact, women- choose to cover their bodies is not a matter for government intervention. Maybe the burka, more and more evident in Western Europe these days, is a symptom of a malaise within Muslim communities, but it should not be a symbol of this malaise. You don’t solve people’s problems by making an issue out of women’s sartorial choices, however misguided. You don’t make people’s lives better by dealing in symbols. ‘It’s not a religious sign, it’s a sign of servitude, of abasement,’ continued Sarko. Well, in that case, there is either a problem of the servitude and abasement of women or there is not. I would argue that there is, and that this problem is not by any means limited to Muslim communities, although I am convinced that it is a serious problem within them, especially among the poor. How do we challenge the second-class status of women, whatever their religion and ethnic origin? By making them change the way they display their bodies?
Laurie Penny made some excellent points on the same subject- ‘One of the few things that nearly all nations have in common is ideological control over women's bodies as political territory.’ These days, middle-class white women would probably not stand for such an open attack on the way they choose to dress (although all of us are of course constantly being judged by our clothing and our bodies in barely disguised attacks by the media). Muslim women have perhaps less opportunity to resist such an onslaught, which makes it even more ironic that they should be presented as powerless under the pressure of Muslim men- what’s the difference between a woman’s husband telling her what to wear and Nicolas Sarkozy doing the same?
I really love two things about French society, though neither is problem-free. The secular state, and its insistence on keeping religion out of schools, jobs and government, is brilliant. The attitude that if you want to be French you must love France makes sense to me too. Maybe we could replace our bullshit citizenship test (The British Citizenship Test claims that Father Christmas comes from the North Pole- at some point I will write an entire blog on what this means for British society) in the UK with one question - ‘Are you prepared to try to love the place you live? (Often, people with immigrant backgrounds seem to be among the few who really do love the UK.) Of course, the all-encompassing nature of the officially-sanctioned view of French identity leaves very little room for manoeuvre.
(Digression: An English social geographer I spoke to last year described his research into migration to France and England from the West Indies. He asked for statistics relating to Jamaicans moving to London and was given the figures he needed. When he asked the French authorities for similar information he was told that the French government did not concern itself with French citizens who chose to move from the French domain of Martinique to the French domain of Ile-de-France. ‘What are the problems involved with this kind of migration?’ he asked. ‘There are no problems,’ came the reply. ‘So we keep no records.’)
However, loving your country has very little to do with your personal beliefs on other matters, and secularism has nothing to do with repression, until politicians decide to use it as such. (I had to read Rousseau this year, but no catchy quotes spring to mind, which you will understand if you too have ploughed through Du contrat social. Or maybe I’m a moron. Anyway.) ‘We are not threatened by clericalism,’ continued Sarko. ‘We are threatened by a form of intolerance which stigmatises all religious participation.’ (Intolerance by whom, exactly?) Well-said, but what’s that got to do with the way someone dresses? Yes, there is a school of Muslim fundamentalism that works by putting women in a lower position than men, but in a society which claims to have laws in place to protect gender equality, there is scope to change this. Where existing laws can’t protect women’s right to equality, let’s make some new laws.
Let’s try and get poor people living in the cités (urban areas with majority social housing, think La Haine), whether Muslim or not, whether men or women, into better jobs, better education, better social statuses. Let’s get more help for vulnerable women and women who are financially or emotionally reliant on men. Let’s help women (and men) who are victims of physical and psychological abuse. This is the road to better integration for French and immigrant Muslims, and the road to a France where it’s easy to love your country.
Do this, and it wouldn’t surprise me if fewer women wanted to wear the burka. And if they don’t, who cares? Ideas for how to stop people wearing Crocs on a postcard please.
Fausto nods. ‘You seem a bit calmer today, though.’
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Francie takes brief moment from 'real work' to shout at world
You know what doesn't cost much?
Bike ramps on steps. That's what.
Then you can have people able to USE their bikes, all around their city (both of these pictures are urban, one in Brussels, one in Tours) Then you get THIS (below). We should also get rid of Boris Johnson.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Psycho-somatic
I’ve been sick in bed since Friday afternoon with a mild fever and a serious case of self-pity. Other symptoms included a throbbing head-ache, undefined pains all over and disturbingly high (for me!) rage levels. Outside my tiny window the blazing sunshine mocked me as I shivered under my duvet. Finally I had finished my play, handed in my dissertation, been given my grades for the year and I had to start my holiday in bed.
I often get sick after long periods of sustained effort, especially when I don’t let my work-load stop me partying. (A maths friend: ‘Eight hours a day, six days a week, for a month? You call that a long period of sustained effort?’ ‘Well, I am taking literature. Things are different for us.’)
But personally I blame my sickness on the events of Friday morning, which was when that pain in my stomach set in. (I have such funny, funny buddies in Tours. This one: ‘Sure, Frances always ends up sick in bed when she has to get up before 9am.’ Ok, I know my weaknesses. I’m not cut out for the working world. Point duly noted.)
Yes, I had bought my croissant by 9. 15 on Friday. Me and at least 400 other students from Lettres et Langues. We had a rendezvous with Loïc Vaillant, le President of Université François Rabelais. The bastard.
If you read this blog (bless your heart) semi-regularly you’ll know that Loïc has already fucked my camarades over good and proper. He effectively broke the strike. He started last month by blackmailing teachers back to work, and carried on by blackmailing students into taking exams. Five weeks ago he and his Conseil d’Administration (French for pack of over-paid bastards) tucked their beer-guts under some meeting-table for long enough to decide that the semester should continue until the 12th June. We all got an email. Screwing. But not much anyone could do about it, and since said Conseil has insists that exams must take place, a necessary(ish) evil. Teachers reacted to the strike being broken by the pragmatic method of attending class, but not teaching. Students, whether pro or anti-strike, have however been forced to spend the last couple of weeks speed-revising a semester they have never been taught.
Now this week, a new offensive from Loïc. On the 27th May he emails students- not ALL students, just those in Lettres et Langues (Literature and Modern Languages), although ALL of Arts and Humanities has been blockaded for the same amount of time. NEW SCHEDULE for L&L students- an extra 2 weeks of ‘teaching’ semester, followed by an exam period from the 15th June to the 3rd JULY!!!!!
There is no logical reason for this. Two more weeks of term make no difference when teachers are at most pretending to teach. Loïc quoted ‘parents of students’ who were anxious that grades should not be given without due work. Complete bollocks? I think so. Especially since he added that teachers didn’t want students to pass exams they didn’t merit to pass. My arse. The only reason teachers are back at work at all is because they want us to pass exams for which we haven’t studied. This move is a deliberate plot to save face for the university’s academic reputation at the expense of its most vulnerable students. They can no longer punish strikers and pass anti-strikers. What they can and will do, is make it as difficult as possible for any student to actually attend exams, so that when they fail the rest, they can pretend those who passed were the only ones with the requisite academic proficiency. Academic proficiency, I repeat, my arse.
Some True Stories
Question: Which of the above is going to pass their year?
Answer: The one who has (or whose parents have) the most money. Everyone else is going to re-take the year or drop out, with the smug tones of Loïc ‘We gave you the chance to sit the exams with every regard for our academic reputation’ Vaillant ringing dourly in their ears.
So the swine, accompanied by his fat-jowled puppet, Heinz Raschel, doyen of Lettres et Langues, granted us a ‘meeting’ Thursday afternoon to discuss these changes. Meeting postponed at last minute after Monsieur le President had qualms about his personal safety in our building and was escorted back to his chauffeured silver Audi. New meeting- 9.30 Friday morning. Oh dear, I feel ill again already.
The hall designated for the meeting was far too small for the four or five hundred who showed up. The president and the doyen sat at the front, surrounded by students sitting up the aisles, on the stage itself and spilling for metres out of the double doors. Discipline there was none. Student after student explained their personal complete inability to attend exams after mid-June, and were met by LIE after LIE after LIE from the podgy mouths of the president and his toad. One thing is clear- the rhetorical powers of Arts undergraduates easily overpowers that of Loïc, a dermatologist by profession. One student finished his speech to overwhelming applause by saying ‘This faculty has developed an allergy to its own president- you should at least be able to understand that.’ Calls of ‘Demission!’ (resign!) turned into chanting. We sat in that baking hot hall for over FIVE hours.
How they had the EFFRONTERY to even address us is a mystery to me. Two fat old men, each on well over four grand a month, treating the student summer holiday as though it still really were a holiday, to be given and repealed at the will of a committee of other fat old men (there are also fat old women on the Conseil d’Administration). People were screaming, and in tears. Where were these bastards when we were on picket lines and marching for the independent status of the University system for the past 6 months? Some (five or six) presidents across the country made a stand for the strikers. It didn’t cost much. Loïc’s response has been a thin stream of emails urging us to attend classes that weren’t actually taking place in the Pharmacy campus way over the other side of town. And the day he brought in a team of security guards to unblock the faculty, easily outwitted by peaceful protests around the outside of the building. This man is meant to have the best interest of the... too depressed by managerial hypocrisy to even finish that sentence.
The lies they told varied across the five hours. It started with ‘teaching staff asked us to change the timetable’. Teaching staff were at that moment sitting in their offices in the same building so it didn’t take long for someone to pop and disprove that. Then it was ‘parents’ who had forced the semester to be pushed back. I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. (Whoever heard of people coming back from a strike because their parents told them to?) Next they said that the original email sent five weeks ago had warned the semester might go on until July. There’s wi-fi in the building! Five minutes later a girl was writing up the exact words of the original on the whiteboard behind their heads. They tried claiming it was the faculty’s right to examine students up to and including the 2nd July. A quick check of the university website proved that in fact it was the university’s right not to give grades until after the 2nd July, meaning that students were officially enrolled until then, not obliged to attend. The only people I’ve ever seen lie so barefacedly are politicians at the very end of their careers and small children.
After 5 hours the crowd was wearing almost as thin as Loïc’s lies. He kept the damn thing going so long because he would have wet his pants walking out of a hall so full of angry students. At nearly 3 o’clock, he made a sign to Raschel and the two of them ran in an undignified manner to the door. A throng rushed to stop him. He hadn’t even given us answers, let alone results. They pushed and shoved their way out. Loïc tried to stop outside the back door for an interview op with TV-Tours, but the cries of ‘demission!’ were too loud. His Audi backed up with a squeal of brakes- hopefully that’s the last I’ll see of one of the most disgusting men it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. And that’s why I was ill.
Report on Friday's meeting (in French) from TV-Tours.
I often get sick after long periods of sustained effort, especially when I don’t let my work-load stop me partying. (A maths friend: ‘Eight hours a day, six days a week, for a month? You call that a long period of sustained effort?’ ‘Well, I am taking literature. Things are different for us.’)
But personally I blame my sickness on the events of Friday morning, which was when that pain in my stomach set in. (I have such funny, funny buddies in Tours. This one: ‘Sure, Frances always ends up sick in bed when she has to get up before 9am.’ Ok, I know my weaknesses. I’m not cut out for the working world. Point duly noted.)
Yes, I had bought my croissant by 9. 15 on Friday. Me and at least 400 other students from Lettres et Langues. We had a rendezvous with Loïc Vaillant, le President of Université François Rabelais. The bastard.
If you read this blog (bless your heart) semi-regularly you’ll know that Loïc has already fucked my camarades over good and proper. He effectively broke the strike. He started last month by blackmailing teachers back to work, and carried on by blackmailing students into taking exams. Five weeks ago he and his Conseil d’Administration (French for pack of over-paid bastards) tucked their beer-guts under some meeting-table for long enough to decide that the semester should continue until the 12th June. We all got an email. Screwing. But not much anyone could do about it, and since said Conseil has insists that exams must take place, a necessary(ish) evil. Teachers reacted to the strike being broken by the pragmatic method of attending class, but not teaching. Students, whether pro or anti-strike, have however been forced to spend the last couple of weeks speed-revising a semester they have never been taught.
Now this week, a new offensive from Loïc. On the 27th May he emails students- not ALL students, just those in Lettres et Langues (Literature and Modern Languages), although ALL of Arts and Humanities has been blockaded for the same amount of time. NEW SCHEDULE for L&L students- an extra 2 weeks of ‘teaching’ semester, followed by an exam period from the 15th June to the 3rd JULY!!!!!
There is no logical reason for this. Two more weeks of term make no difference when teachers are at most pretending to teach. Loïc quoted ‘parents of students’ who were anxious that grades should not be given without due work. Complete bollocks? I think so. Especially since he added that teachers didn’t want students to pass exams they didn’t merit to pass. My arse. The only reason teachers are back at work at all is because they want us to pass exams for which we haven’t studied. This move is a deliberate plot to save face for the university’s academic reputation at the expense of its most vulnerable students. They can no longer punish strikers and pass anti-strikers. What they can and will do, is make it as difficult as possible for any student to actually attend exams, so that when they fail the rest, they can pretend those who passed were the only ones with the requisite academic proficiency. Academic proficiency, I repeat, my arse.
Some True Stories
- Student A, like many others, gave 3 months’ notice on his flat in March. His parents live in Bordeaux, 250 miles away. If he stays for the exams, he has to find a sofa to crash on- not ideal for revision.
- Student B has booked plane tickets to Cuba for herself and her boyfriend for the 1st July. Absolute bargain, only 750€ each, non-refundable. Either she repeats her year, or she misses out on her ‘graduation trip’ and loses her money.
- Student C would normally have a couple of weeks holiday between the end of exams and leaving for his summer job, in a hotel in Cannes. (All summer jobs in France start the 1st July, same as the school holidays.) He has signed a contract and his hotel boss refuses to allow him to start his post late. He must choose between exams and two months’ work. He needs the two months’ work because he lives off his grant, 500€ a month, 10 months a year.
- Student D has applied for masters programmes in several UK universities. They normally need her grades by the 10th June. Several weeks ago she phoned them up and asked for an extra two weeks to send the grades- three out of four agreed, but grudgingly. The fourth already told her they would not consider her application after that date: now she must phone the others and try to explain.
- Student E wants to be an English teacher, and had a placement in a school in Leeds for a month, starting mid-June.
- Student F has an interview in Lyon for the teacher-training Concours on the 17th June. Twenty people were selected out of hundreds for the interview stage, and they won’t change dates. However, if she doesn’t pass her exams, she won’t get in either.
Question: Which of the above is going to pass their year?
Answer: The one who has (or whose parents have) the most money. Everyone else is going to re-take the year or drop out, with the smug tones of Loïc ‘We gave you the chance to sit the exams with every regard for our academic reputation’ Vaillant ringing dourly in their ears.
So the swine, accompanied by his fat-jowled puppet, Heinz Raschel, doyen of Lettres et Langues, granted us a ‘meeting’ Thursday afternoon to discuss these changes. Meeting postponed at last minute after Monsieur le President had qualms about his personal safety in our building and was escorted back to his chauffeured silver Audi. New meeting- 9.30 Friday morning. Oh dear, I feel ill again already.
The hall designated for the meeting was far too small for the four or five hundred who showed up. The president and the doyen sat at the front, surrounded by students sitting up the aisles, on the stage itself and spilling for metres out of the double doors. Discipline there was none. Student after student explained their personal complete inability to attend exams after mid-June, and were met by LIE after LIE after LIE from the podgy mouths of the president and his toad. One thing is clear- the rhetorical powers of Arts undergraduates easily overpowers that of Loïc, a dermatologist by profession. One student finished his speech to overwhelming applause by saying ‘This faculty has developed an allergy to its own president- you should at least be able to understand that.’ Calls of ‘Demission!’ (resign!) turned into chanting. We sat in that baking hot hall for over FIVE hours.
How they had the EFFRONTERY to even address us is a mystery to me. Two fat old men, each on well over four grand a month, treating the student summer holiday as though it still really were a holiday, to be given and repealed at the will of a committee of other fat old men (there are also fat old women on the Conseil d’Administration). People were screaming, and in tears. Where were these bastards when we were on picket lines and marching for the independent status of the University system for the past 6 months? Some (five or six) presidents across the country made a stand for the strikers. It didn’t cost much. Loïc’s response has been a thin stream of emails urging us to attend classes that weren’t actually taking place in the Pharmacy campus way over the other side of town. And the day he brought in a team of security guards to unblock the faculty, easily outwitted by peaceful protests around the outside of the building. This man is meant to have the best interest of the... too depressed by managerial hypocrisy to even finish that sentence.
The lies they told varied across the five hours. It started with ‘teaching staff asked us to change the timetable’. Teaching staff were at that moment sitting in their offices in the same building so it didn’t take long for someone to pop and disprove that. Then it was ‘parents’ who had forced the semester to be pushed back. I laughed, but it wasn’t funny. (Whoever heard of people coming back from a strike because their parents told them to?) Next they said that the original email sent five weeks ago had warned the semester might go on until July. There’s wi-fi in the building! Five minutes later a girl was writing up the exact words of the original on the whiteboard behind their heads. They tried claiming it was the faculty’s right to examine students up to and including the 2nd July. A quick check of the university website proved that in fact it was the university’s right not to give grades until after the 2nd July, meaning that students were officially enrolled until then, not obliged to attend. The only people I’ve ever seen lie so barefacedly are politicians at the very end of their careers and small children.
After 5 hours the crowd was wearing almost as thin as Loïc’s lies. He kept the damn thing going so long because he would have wet his pants walking out of a hall so full of angry students. At nearly 3 o’clock, he made a sign to Raschel and the two of them ran in an undignified manner to the door. A throng rushed to stop him. He hadn’t even given us answers, let alone results. They pushed and shoved their way out. Loïc tried to stop outside the back door for an interview op with TV-Tours, but the cries of ‘demission!’ were too loud. His Audi backed up with a squeal of brakes- hopefully that’s the last I’ll see of one of the most disgusting men it has ever been my misfortune to encounter. And that’s why I was ill.
Report on Friday's meeting (in French) from TV-Tours.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Struck
We're officially fucked.
Teachers in our university have now voted to go back to the work. After 7 months of industrial action and 4 months of strike, they resumed teaching yesterday. They had been threatened with a 30% pay-cut, and most of my camarades are blaming this for their caving-in. I can't say for sure, not having been in their meeting (not invited) but if it's really that, it's a bit bloody low.
Due to the independent status of French universities, teaching staff can strike without any significant cut in pay for long periods as long as they fulfill certain provisos- attendance at university, continuation of research, office hours etc. (Beautiful thing about university systems, even independent-ish ones- they couldn't give a shit about teaching as long as research keeps bringing in the cash). Minister for Higher Education Valérie Pécresse is trying to attack these rights with great difficulty. But she's trying to attack a whole lot of university rights, and in a lot of her other nasty little plots she's succeeding.
Anyway, from this month teachers at Tours would be taking this pay-cut in order to carry on industrial action, and clearly there were just too many members of staff in the meeting who will only support industrial action if it doesn't affect how long they spend at the beach this summer. Maybe I'm being ungenerous- maybe they are trying to give students a chance to catch up on this lost semester. I'm guessing the same pressure is being put on teachers across the country as only between 6 and 10 faculties are still bloquées, down from 50 at the climax of the strike. University presidencies have panicked at the thought that the exam-diploma-job machine might grind to a halt and put the boot into what is now the weakest part of the strike- the teachers.
It's the worst possible time to cave in. We were in a fight to automatically give people a pass mark for the semester, and we might just have won it. They couldn't make everybody repeat the year, and as long as exams were properly blocked, they would have been forced to pass everyone. Why strike all year then stop striking two weeks before the end of the already lengthened semester? It just doesn't make sense.
I've passed the term. Not altogether honestly, but that's not really my fault. But my French friends are currently trying to learn a semester's syllabus in two weeks, having had about three weeks of class since Christmas. Usually they would already be on holiday. It's so unfair. I'm actually wasting valuable dissertation time worrying about their plight. This has effectively decimated the student side of the movement as well- no one can attend meetings or demonstrations now that they're suddenly under such exam pressure.
The LRU or Pécresse reforms are set to go through now anyway, and have already been passed in the National Assembly. No one really still thinks we're going to have any kind of significant victory there.
My major criticism of the movement all along (apart from that we didn't go far enough in our actions) was the lack of communication between staff and students. I think we got more and more divided, at least in Tours. We all started out in November fighting the masterisation of the CAPES and gradually we developed different priorities. Students went on to make demands for better benefits, grants, etc, whereas staff became caught up on the job losses and status changes alone. Students were generally a lot more radical in thoughts and actions as well, although there were certainly some very 'engagé' staff...
Now basically the presidency has capitalised on this division. Even students who didn't particularly support strike action are completely against going back to school at this point, because it's such a travesty of a semester that it's completely worthless as an academic marker, and therefore represents nothing but a demonstration of power by university bosses and the government.
I've been so excited all term to be part of such a huge movement- it seemed like in this country things actually got done, and the people had some kind of power. Now I'm completely deflated and miserable. No one takes my suggestions for bringing the great French tradition of boss-napping into the university. And no one seems to realise how badly they might be fucked- when students lose their power, the road is open for French universities to become English universities. If we lose the fight over masterisation, the next fight will be over marketisation.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Let no man tear asunder?
I went to a beautiful wedding last year. My friends had been together since secondary school, their kid was old enough to carry a bunch of flowers very nicely and young enough to be extremely cute. M and I were dolled up to the nines, hanging on the arms of handsome young men and drinking extra hard to mark the special occasion. When the lights dimmed and the bride and groom started to dance we clutched hands and held back tears. At some point before we had to start worrying about last trains back to civilisation (why can’t people tie the knot somewhere easily accessible, like East London?), I’m sure I gazed at my date through my beer goggles and indulged in a brief fantasy in which he figured as a minor character behind mounds of white tulle, giant cakes, and everybody knowing that it’s my special day...
Afterwards M and I were too starry-eyed to indulge in our usual benevolent character assassinations of everyone present. (We never say anything vicious about anyone, but we are fond of feeling deeply sorry for people’s manifold faults, and blaming any untoward behaviour on their secret sorrow/ insecurity/ as-yet undiagnosed mental health problems.) ‘It was just... magical,’ we sighed. ‘The bride was stunning.’ (She was.) ‘The whole thing was... perfect.’
That’s the problem with criticising marriage- weddings. They really are lovely. On the other hand, I went to a Catholic church service on Good Friday. A man in a purple dress, flanked by a bunch of suspiciously innocent-looking pre-adolescent boys, chanted in Latin about the events leading up to Jesus’ alleged crucifixion for three hours. It was lovely. I was secretly disappointed that the friend who had dragged me there couldn’t come back for the grand finale on Easter Sunday, so we could find out what happened next. (Like watching The Matrix and Matrix Reloaded and not Matrix Revolutions- is he alive? is he dead? are they going to save the world at the end? Actually I never bothered watching the last Matrix film, but I’m sure it all turned out just as happily for humanity as the New Testament did.)
My somewhat heavily made point is: just because it’s beautiful and moving doesn’t mean it’s not deeply sick and wrong. People aren’t idiots. You want to fool them into accepting an exploitative and enslaving institution, you got to put on a bit of the old razzle-dazzle.
I’m pushing on now into my mid-twenties, and while that couple was not the first of my set to tie the knot, they had a child young and came from a very Caflic background. Now more and more of my friends are settling into couples, and I’m shocked and disturbed that no small number of them are contemplating marriage in one way or another. As M said recently (rose-tinted wedding-y glow now wholly worn off) ‘Even the feminists are getting married!’ We shared some smug pity over the sad plight of our clueless acquaintances over a cup of tea.
So why on earth are people doing this? I don’t buy the ‘We want to share our love with everybody’ crap. No, you want to conform. In a big white dress. You want a party, have a party. Buy champagne. You want a wedding dress, buy a wedding dress. I have one. I have even worn it in public (on Halloween). You want a ‘special day’, wear the wedding dress in the street. Everybody will look at you, and probably think you look ‘glowing’. Where do the ceremony, ring, vows and licence fee come into sharing your love? I have regular parties to share my love. When I find a man that knows how to share his love in the same way, I’m gonna hang on to him. Double parties!
‘It’s not about the party, we want to commit to each other forever and getting married seems like the best way.’ When I was a teenager, I remember being very impressed that Fat Boy Slim and Zoe Ball just wandered down to their local registry office, clutching cowboy hats and a bottle of whisky, and pulled in a couple of strangers off the street to witness their marriage. ‘That’s real love- that’s not just for show- they’re only doing it for each other,’ Well, committing is not something you do for five minutes in front of someone with a really big desk. Committing is something you do every day, and all the time it’s because you choose to do it. It’s hard, I can tell you as someone who did it for a bit and then decided I wasn’t up to the task.
Doesn’t anybody ever think for a minute about this? Why the fuck have women (and men) been getting married for thousands of years? Uh, duh- because they weren’t allowed to have sex, live together or have children unless they did. Why not? because keeping people in small family units managed and controlled by the ruling powers was an important part of the feudal system, which remained useful to said ( albeit slightly different) ruling powers after industrialisation.
Then there’s the problem of the church. Yes, the wedding has been taken out of the church- the registry office ceremony loses all the ‘Who brings this woman to be married to this man?’ cant, and even in Church of England marriages the bride can now opt (as Victoria Beckham did) to cut out the promising to obey your husband bit. But choosing to get married at all seems to me like picking and choosing the bits you want from organised religion. ‘I don’t believe in God, but the ceremony He came up with (or didn’t) as honed and ritualised by generations of religious nut-jobs and tyrants, is just what I need to fix my life up. Just take His name out, won’t you?’ This is acknowledging the church’s cultural hegemony without accepting that other forms of almost identical manipulation are replacing it. In a world without God, why hang on to His ideas? Suckers!
Black slaves in America were not allowed any kind of formal marriage ceremony. Instead, to be allowed to live together in a couple, they were often made to ‘jump the broomstick’, a basic (and self-explanatory) rite. Props required- one broomstick, or other suitable pole. The happy couple held hands and jumped over a broomstick on the ground together. I don’t know the origins of this ‘ceremony’, but it served to satisfy slave-owners’ moral qualms about men and women living together and having sex with each other, without giving them any status as Christians, which would imply rather too much shared humanity with their owners to be quite safe. (Jumping the broomstick is apparently still common as a jolly end to American, or at least African- American, marriages. But that’s by the by.)
I would propose that when we read about sleb and royal marriages, when we’re conned into spending thousands we don’t have on imitations, even when we daringly run away to Vegas and tell the friends and family afterwards, we are still just jumping the broomstick for our masters. ‘But we’re not marrying for them, we’re marrying for us!’ Mmmm, love. Great stuff. I love a bit of love. I keep trying to tell myself it makes the world go round. But why do we still –even the feminists!- modify our ideas of love to fit in with what They want from young couples? (Sorry, keep meaning to stop capitalising that ‘T’ but can’t help myself). Marriage has far clearer advantages for the system than it does for the individuals concerned. It preserves class boundaries. Often it preserves gender roles which themselves preserve class boundaries. It locks people into their situation by law, and also by social opinion and peer pressure. It’s inextricably linked with a whole set of social mores and dictated behaviour that we might otherwise rebel against. I’m not saying anything against choosing a life partner, buying a house, and generally settling down eternally. Hell, have kids if that’s what’s gonna make you happy!
Whether marriage is still synonymous with a woman’s oppression by her husband is no longer clear. I would tend to say no, as a general rule. Of course there are far too many horrific cases of abuse and violence, and less well-documented cases of mental and spiritual domination, mostly by men towards women although also the other way, but I don’t know if there’s a great deal of difference here between married and ‘common-law’ cohabitations. What marriage does still always entail, on the other hand, is an apparently voluntary nod by two ‘free’ individuals to the power of the state, the Church, the press, and what I am thus reluctantly forced to term ‘the ruling classes’. I repeat. Why the fuck?
Afterthought
The gay marriage question is of course not a question. I fully support everyone’s right to have an equal access to a completely harmful and stupid thing, much as I support freedom of religion, freedom to read the Evening Standard and freedom to hold an opinion that differs from my own. (You’re all wrong, by the way.) The answer is the same as Bill Hicks’ on the subject of gay people in the army: ‘Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in.’
Afterwards M and I were too starry-eyed to indulge in our usual benevolent character assassinations of everyone present. (We never say anything vicious about anyone, but we are fond of feeling deeply sorry for people’s manifold faults, and blaming any untoward behaviour on their secret sorrow/ insecurity/ as-yet undiagnosed mental health problems.) ‘It was just... magical,’ we sighed. ‘The bride was stunning.’ (She was.) ‘The whole thing was... perfect.’
That’s the problem with criticising marriage- weddings. They really are lovely. On the other hand, I went to a Catholic church service on Good Friday. A man in a purple dress, flanked by a bunch of suspiciously innocent-looking pre-adolescent boys, chanted in Latin about the events leading up to Jesus’ alleged crucifixion for three hours. It was lovely. I was secretly disappointed that the friend who had dragged me there couldn’t come back for the grand finale on Easter Sunday, so we could find out what happened next. (Like watching The Matrix and Matrix Reloaded and not Matrix Revolutions- is he alive? is he dead? are they going to save the world at the end? Actually I never bothered watching the last Matrix film, but I’m sure it all turned out just as happily for humanity as the New Testament did.)
My somewhat heavily made point is: just because it’s beautiful and moving doesn’t mean it’s not deeply sick and wrong. People aren’t idiots. You want to fool them into accepting an exploitative and enslaving institution, you got to put on a bit of the old razzle-dazzle.
I’m pushing on now into my mid-twenties, and while that couple was not the first of my set to tie the knot, they had a child young and came from a very Caflic background. Now more and more of my friends are settling into couples, and I’m shocked and disturbed that no small number of them are contemplating marriage in one way or another. As M said recently (rose-tinted wedding-y glow now wholly worn off) ‘Even the feminists are getting married!’ We shared some smug pity over the sad plight of our clueless acquaintances over a cup of tea.
So why on earth are people doing this? I don’t buy the ‘We want to share our love with everybody’ crap. No, you want to conform. In a big white dress. You want a party, have a party. Buy champagne. You want a wedding dress, buy a wedding dress. I have one. I have even worn it in public (on Halloween). You want a ‘special day’, wear the wedding dress in the street. Everybody will look at you, and probably think you look ‘glowing’. Where do the ceremony, ring, vows and licence fee come into sharing your love? I have regular parties to share my love. When I find a man that knows how to share his love in the same way, I’m gonna hang on to him. Double parties!
‘It’s not about the party, we want to commit to each other forever and getting married seems like the best way.’ When I was a teenager, I remember being very impressed that Fat Boy Slim and Zoe Ball just wandered down to their local registry office, clutching cowboy hats and a bottle of whisky, and pulled in a couple of strangers off the street to witness their marriage. ‘That’s real love- that’s not just for show- they’re only doing it for each other,’ Well, committing is not something you do for five minutes in front of someone with a really big desk. Committing is something you do every day, and all the time it’s because you choose to do it. It’s hard, I can tell you as someone who did it for a bit and then decided I wasn’t up to the task.
Doesn’t anybody ever think for a minute about this? Why the fuck have women (and men) been getting married for thousands of years? Uh, duh- because they weren’t allowed to have sex, live together or have children unless they did. Why not? because keeping people in small family units managed and controlled by the ruling powers was an important part of the feudal system, which remained useful to said ( albeit slightly different) ruling powers after industrialisation.
“The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.” James ConnollyMarriage is an essential part of –and symbol for- the patriarchal system. Once, the only women who worked were spinsters, widows and the very poor. Even now, women’s jobs –often lower-paid and more casual- are among the first to go in the recession. Keep people locked into couples, where one has greater earning capacity, physical strength and social status than the other, and you have greater control over your workforce. If you need to, for example during a world war, you can get the women out too. In times of recession, send her back home and you know the family unit will still (probably) eat. (Taking your husband’s name is also still a sign that he has a higher status than you.)
Then there’s the problem of the church. Yes, the wedding has been taken out of the church- the registry office ceremony loses all the ‘Who brings this woman to be married to this man?’ cant, and even in Church of England marriages the bride can now opt (as Victoria Beckham did) to cut out the promising to obey your husband bit. But choosing to get married at all seems to me like picking and choosing the bits you want from organised religion. ‘I don’t believe in God, but the ceremony He came up with (or didn’t) as honed and ritualised by generations of religious nut-jobs and tyrants, is just what I need to fix my life up. Just take His name out, won’t you?’ This is acknowledging the church’s cultural hegemony without accepting that other forms of almost identical manipulation are replacing it. In a world without God, why hang on to His ideas? Suckers!
Black slaves in America were not allowed any kind of formal marriage ceremony. Instead, to be allowed to live together in a couple, they were often made to ‘jump the broomstick’, a basic (and self-explanatory) rite. Props required- one broomstick, or other suitable pole. The happy couple held hands and jumped over a broomstick on the ground together. I don’t know the origins of this ‘ceremony’, but it served to satisfy slave-owners’ moral qualms about men and women living together and having sex with each other, without giving them any status as Christians, which would imply rather too much shared humanity with their owners to be quite safe. (Jumping the broomstick is apparently still common as a jolly end to American, or at least African- American, marriages. But that’s by the by.)
I would propose that when we read about sleb and royal marriages, when we’re conned into spending thousands we don’t have on imitations, even when we daringly run away to Vegas and tell the friends and family afterwards, we are still just jumping the broomstick for our masters. ‘But we’re not marrying for them, we’re marrying for us!’ Mmmm, love. Great stuff. I love a bit of love. I keep trying to tell myself it makes the world go round. But why do we still –even the feminists!- modify our ideas of love to fit in with what They want from young couples? (Sorry, keep meaning to stop capitalising that ‘T’ but can’t help myself). Marriage has far clearer advantages for the system than it does for the individuals concerned. It preserves class boundaries. Often it preserves gender roles which themselves preserve class boundaries. It locks people into their situation by law, and also by social opinion and peer pressure. It’s inextricably linked with a whole set of social mores and dictated behaviour that we might otherwise rebel against. I’m not saying anything against choosing a life partner, buying a house, and generally settling down eternally. Hell, have kids if that’s what’s gonna make you happy!
Whether marriage is still synonymous with a woman’s oppression by her husband is no longer clear. I would tend to say no, as a general rule. Of course there are far too many horrific cases of abuse and violence, and less well-documented cases of mental and spiritual domination, mostly by men towards women although also the other way, but I don’t know if there’s a great deal of difference here between married and ‘common-law’ cohabitations. What marriage does still always entail, on the other hand, is an apparently voluntary nod by two ‘free’ individuals to the power of the state, the Church, the press, and what I am thus reluctantly forced to term ‘the ruling classes’. I repeat. Why the fuck?
Afterthought
The gay marriage question is of course not a question. I fully support everyone’s right to have an equal access to a completely harmful and stupid thing, much as I support freedom of religion, freedom to read the Evening Standard and freedom to hold an opinion that differs from my own. (You’re all wrong, by the way.) The answer is the same as Bill Hicks’ on the subject of gay people in the army: ‘Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in.’
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