Amendment

I have to admit that the picture choice yesterday was my own, so here are a couple of decidedly un-camp blokes to make up for it...

I'm sure the media do prefer to show the more outrageous parts of these parades, but equally, the participants dress for attention.

This was actually one of the things I liked about the Pride march. Whenever I see environmental or political rallies, the activists seem to adhere to a uniform of old hippy rags, which always strikes me as a bad move. It gives the impression that only dreadlocked stoners care about these issues. The Gay Pride folks might have camped it up a bit, but they did it in a tongue-in-cheek way and were clearly ordinary people with a serious message, trying to engage us with humour rather than anger.

Pride

Do you know the Pedigree Chum adverts that say "We're for dogs"? Well, I have a friend who says that she's "for humans," and I am too.

Given all the doom and gloom going around, I particularly like it when we humans take the time to simply celebrate ourselves, our differences and our unitedness. After all, if we don't feel good about ourselves, we're not going to do much to help our world. So I was overjoyed by the huge Gay Pride festival yesterday. Plenty of environmental and political rallies come and go in Brisbane, but never have I seen a group make their point with such enthusiam, humour and peacefulness, and in such force!

Regardless of sexuality, it made me feel proud to be human.

Why I am not a Satanist.

I'm having a bad day.

I've come across almost nothing intelligent in the last 24 hours, and much that is infuriatingly stupid.

I was first infuriated last night, when I was reminded of this wonderful man, James Randi. Randi has been offering a substantial cash prize since 1964 to anyone who can experimentally prove paranormal abilities. For many years now, the prize has been $1million U.S., and still no-one has passed even the preliminary tests. Here is a log of correspondence between Randi's institute and the most recent applicants. The key point to note is that they are all completely insane. They cannot produce coherent sentences, let alone a conclusive experimental proof. Obviously, the sane, intelligent "psychics" are sane, intelligent con-men and -women, who stay well away from this prize. The only people it attracts are those who actually believe in their own abilities, who are all insane. Surely the mere existence of this annually unclaimed prize should prove to any reasonable person that there are no people with genuine paranormal abilities?

My second gripe is with academia. I came across a well-written journal article yesterday. I've lost the link, and besides, it was some obscure piece of sociology about the "Ur-myth of revolution." The content may well have been drivel, but man, it had style! Every word was faultlessly chosen and impeccably placed. It was deliciously well-written. Which alerted me to fact that, out of every twenty-five journal articles I read, only one of them is likely to be even fairly well-written. I've come to accept that in most articles I'll have to read many of the sentences over twice or thrice before I get their meaning, and that there will be mistakes in the spelling or grammar. Science student friends assure me it's even worse outside of the Arts. Why? The people who write these things are the people we're paying to be well-educated. They're the appointed thinkers of our society. Why should we accept that the average newspaper article 100 years ago was better written than a modern doctoral thesis?

Maybe the declining standard of academic writing has something to do with the declining standard of students? I picked up the latest copy of my uni's student magazine today, and I found:
3 pages of "best procrastination websites" (myspace, youtube, stuffonmycat....)
2 pages of spoilers for American TV shows
2 pages about how funny goats are
5 pages of CD reviews
2 pages of "campus fashions"
and 3 pages of ads.
And this in a 32 page magazine. Thank god I didn't pay my union fees, if this is what they're being spent on.

Oddly enough, one of the least benightedly unintelligent (to quote Marvin the Paranoid Android) things I've encountered is the Satanic Bible. I like it. It's full of good solid humanism, and a sensible rejection of Christian self-hatred. What I don't like is the religious aspect. Posing himself the question "why call it Satanism? Why not just Humanism?" Anton LaVey responds that humanism is not a religion. While we might have intellectually outgrown Christianity, he says we still emotionally need the ritual and dogma of religion.

I say the last thing we need is comforting fictions. If we're going to make any progress, we need to be serious and ruthless with our faculty of reason. So much time and effort are being wasted by accepting low standards and continuing to debate what should be long-dead issues. I wrote a letter last month objecting that one of my uni courses "lacked intellectual rigour." Recently, it seems it might just be that most of the things we do lack intellectual rigour.

God and dieting, knitting and feminism.

Uni holidays have just begun, which means I now have time to tackle that list of "stuff to do." Yesterday I started (arbitrarily) with items 3 and 8:

"Take up knitting."

and

"Learn about feminism."

(Remind me to write a blog one day about my thoughts on self-consistency...)

Having been born only recently (21 years ago), and living in Australia, I've never thought much about sex discrimination. Schools and universities have judged me by academic ability, and the various menial jobs I've had have all been pretty indifferent to my gender, so long as I could count change. To be honest, feminism has seemed like a distant, dead issue. Sure, there are feminists on campus, but they tend to be the ones with shaved heads and Che Guevara T-shirts smelling vaguely of pot. They're just too stereotypical to take seriously. But I'm reminded every now and then that the worlds my mother and grandmother were born into were unimaginably different from the one I take for granted now. For example, just fifty years ago airline stewardesses were compulsorily fired when they reached the age of 32, or got married, or gained too much weight, or appeared "frumpy"...

So I thought it was about time that I introduced myself to proper feminist theory. I have the Female Eunuch waiting on my bookshelf, but I decided to ease my way in with the Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

Written in 1991, the thesis of the book is that while the political and economic oppression of women has mostly ended, there is a new, subtler, psychological oppression. Namely, the myth that a woman's worth is dependent on how closely she conforms to this culture's idea of beauty. It's a persuasive argument, because the media do seem bent on encouraging an almost insane obsession with appearance, and it seems to be working, too. By being so neurotic about beauty, Wolf's argument goes, women harmlessly fritter away energy that would otherwise be spent challenging the male power structure.

She also addresses my usual unease with feminism - that I don't find it possible to believe that men are "bad", or are deliberately conspiring against women. No, she says, they don't have to be. Just as an individual or a family can prefer illusions to facing truths which threaten their way of life, so too can a society. True equality, Wolf thinks, would destablise the whole structure of society. The beauty myth is the result of "a collective panic reaction on the part of both sexes."

I particularly like her chapter on how the dieting and beauty industries have appropriated Christian notions of guilt, self-punishment, purity, sin and so on. One of the things which motivated me to study religion was a sign in a Subway outlet advertising some new sandwich as having "half the fat, none of the guilt." Perhaps if you slipped up on your diet you might feel annoyed or frustrated, but guilty? Guilt seemed like a peculiarly religious response - as though you were letting down not only yourself, but God as well. Or, as I suppose Wolf would suggest, sinning against the rules that women must be concerned at all times with their appearance.

I'm not sure I agree with everything in the book (and I don't like how it's written, but I'll let that one slide...), but it's showing me interesting new perspectives. I can look back on gender roles 100 years ago and see them as wrong and ridiculous, but the women of the time, mostly, accepted and agreed with them. What makes me think that imbalances nowadays would be obvious? Just as a person should never stop analysing themself, neither should a society.