After coming up with the gears metaphor, I thought I’d sketch out what the gears might be for me. I imagined them something like this:

0 Not moving. I could have called this “neutral”, but somehow that seems like the wrong word. Stuck isn’t neutral. Exhaustion isn’t neutral. Moping around being mopey and miserable isn’t neutral.

On the other hand it could be a kind of relaxed resting peacefulness - but in that case, I’m probably not stuck, and some other metaphor would apply.

1 Minimal engagement. Playing computer games or just slightly pottering about e.g. tidying up. If this is the aftermath of some intensity, then I might be “processing” in the background. (Simple computer games can be a form of meditation, I think - they occupy the surface of your mind while things happen under the surface.) If pottering about, still feeling like each new thing is a re-start - not really any momentum from one task to the next.

2 Beginning to build momentum. Tidying could still be in here as long as it’s just putting things away that have an obvious home, or straightening up. Sewing or making badges as long as the process doesn’t really take any thought. Tinkering with writing (though not the process of deciding that something’s finished - I need to be more awake for that and it would be more like 4th gear).

3 Ordinary sized tasks. Returning emails, going to the library, sorting possessions, putting a wash in. Maybe some DIY that only requires repeating what I’ve already done, with no original thought.

4 Thought and organisation. Things that require more thought and a certain amount of awakeness. E.g. interesting DIY, planning. If I’ve had a day in 4th gear, I’ll almost certainly finish the day with a nice sense of satisfaction about what I’ve accomplished - which often involves some kind of tangible result in the 3d world.

5 Tricky interface stuff. Anything involving making arrangements with people I don’t know, especially if it involves some kind of time pressure and especially if I have to actually talk to them. I often have a sense of needing to “gear up” & “get my head in order” to do that kind of thing, but sometimes if I “get on a roll” it seems easy.

6 Immersion time. Song recording, coding, or any other complex task like accounts. This is often stuff that takes a while to reload into the brain, so that fitting it into “too small” chunks of time is very inefficient, and to me tends to feel intuitively like “there’s not even any point starting”. (And “too small” varies with the task - anything from half an hour to a day might feel that way.) Often, though not always, it’s the kind of thing I can “get lost in” so that time disappears.

This 6th level isn’t necessarily any harder than 5th gear; it’s the “chunk size” which distinguishes it. It needs to be preceded by ensuring that if I do give it that much time, nothing’s going to go wrong while I wasn’t paying attention to all the other stuff. Perhaps it’s more of a turbo button than another gear.

Writing

One thing which surprised me in a good way when I thought this through is the fact that tinkering with writing comes out so low-gear for me. I lucked into a good “effort-to-satisfaction ratio” there. The point is that despite being quite easy to do, it’s also quite satisfying to me, which helps me to move up through gears. I thought “Must remember that”.

This insight was definitely part of the source of the new era of “more than one blog post a month” :-) I realised that as a rule of thumb, “if in doubt, do some writing” had a lot going for it. And around Christmas and New Year I did have a successful gearing-up on the writing front.

Different cars

What was interesting, though, was that after a week or two of that, I realised that (slightly contrary to my expectations) my writing momentum hadn’t transferred onto the DIY. I was just doing more and more writing!

I found that to get going on the DIY, I had to give that a separate gearing-up all its own: starting with a bit of tidying, then assembling the tools and resources I’d want, and only then actually embarking on the work itself.

Not definitive

Of course everyone’s list of gears would be different - and the above isn’t the definitive list of gears even for me, just an approximate sketch. And there are different ways to apply the metaphor - including, as I’ve said there, considering each field of endeavour as its own separate gear system.

But the basic metaphor seems to be working well for me so far. Regardless of specifics, I can still tell myself: “Don’t bother trying to talk yourself into tackling big things. And don’t sit around waiting for the desire to tackle them to return. Instead, get stuck into the little things within easy reach. And trust that in a while, when you’re more rested and have some little accomplishments to be satisfied with, the desire to tackle big things will return of its own accord.”

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

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At the start of 2009, I never guessed how much of it I’d spend on home ed activism. It’s not something I wanted or went looking for; it feels more like something that the universe decided to put in front of me, like it or not, and a case of “choose what you’ve got”.

It was 1995 when I recognised/reclassified myself as bi and jumped into queer politics, and I’ve always lived as approximately female (even though I rarely feel gendered in & of myself). But for whatever reasons (which is probably an article in itself, and certainly including significant amounts of racial/ability/financial/educational privilege), I haven’t generally had an acute visceral feeling of those oppressions like I’ve had this year with the home ed stuff. I’ve been present at times to other people’s fears and hatreds of gay people and other people’s misogyny, but until this year I’d very rarely had the sense of being a tiny inconsequential ant under the big oblivious looming boot of the State.

Section 28

Jill wrote an essay recently about the parallels between Section 28 and the current anti-home-ed legislation plans, and the similarity had occurred to me too. Lying lies, taking advantage of the general public’s ignorance of gayness to misrepresent our real lives and make prejudice look reasonable (to some people). And, in the guise of “protecting children”, in fact betraying them.

(In my opinion, schools still haven’t recovered from how wary teachers were in those years of doing anything to challenge homophobic bullying. My heart goes out to the young lesbian/bi/gay/trans people who survived school in those times - and the ones still in school now.)

But at the time of Section 28, everyone I knew agreed that it was completely wrong! (Or at least, that’s how it seemed.) And even when homophobia and biphobia were very obvious in the world, it mostly felt like “This will get better; the work is being done; prejudice is slowly slowly being overcome”. The Labour Government were less homophobic than Mrs Thatcher’s lot too, so that felt like an improvement. (In fact I often had a sense that they’d be doing even more to help if they didn’t have to take into account the power of the Daily Mail.) So I was always cushioned from despair by a sense that the climate was changing in our favour - as well as by having a strong community around me.

whereas now in 2009 when the Government or the media tell lies about non-school education, I don’t have the same sense that most people “get it” or realise how much misrepresentation is going on. (or indeed how close to their own families the Govt are skating, with their plans for us; the phrase “First they came for the home educators…” has gone through my mind many times in recent months.)

And although it’s true that home ed is widely misrepresented and often thought to be a bit weird, still I don’t get any sense that the Govt is being pushed by public opinion into its present agenda of top-down control and interference; on the contrary, they’ve been doing a pretty effective job of manipulating public opinion by publishing lies.

A new dawn

I still remember how elated I felt when Tony Blair’s government got elected. After Section 28 and the Poll Tax, it seemed like a new dawn. I’d stayed up all night at a friend’s house nearby at a watch-the-election party, and walked home along a nearly-deserted street in the early daylight. And this bloke was coming the other way, no-one I knew, and as we got near each other we both just grinned in sheer delight. Hurrah!

To give them credit, they did bring in the Civil Partnerships legislation; it’s not equality, but it’s enabled some good friends of mine to transform an international relationship into a happy domestic one. Can’t knock that.

But oh Labour. Little did we know. Little did we guess of your titanic databases and micromanagement and ingenious dossiers of misleadingness. On that day of joy and optimism in 1997, this is not what I thought we were getting.

Buddhism

I was reading some books about Buddhism this week. I’d written down a title of Pema Chödrön’s (maybe a recommendation from a friend, can’t remember now) and so ended up looking on that shelf at the library, and found some other interesting things while I was there.

The Buddhists say suffering is part of life - although I didn’t realise till I read these books that the word used for “suffering” could equally be translated as “pervasive unsatisfactoriness”. For some reason that amuses me! and makes more sense as well.

Anyway, so a big theme of Buddhism is how you relate to suffering (or “pervasive unsatisfactoriness”) in all its forms. And one of the things mentioned a few times was how, if you have grief or pain or any other feeling that’s hard for you to be with, one of the ways you can transform it is by thinking of all the other people around the world who are having the same feeling, and sending them loving-kindness. It’s not that that’ll necessarily make you feel better - although it might - it’s that your suffering becomes a channel towards more compassion for, and connection with, other humans.

I like that idea. I like the idea that when I feel despair about the whole situation, I can send love to everyone having the same feelings. There are so many people round the world struggling to make themselves heard in the face of unlistening power over their lives, some in much more terrible circumstances than this.

Learning

Actually I had already been doing something a bit similar to that with the home ed stuff. When I’ve awoken at night thinking “This is heading in a bad direction, and the Government isn’t listening to us” or being angry/upset about the lies, every now and again I’ve been remembering to think “This is what it’s like to be oppressed; remember this situation, remember this feeling.” Like a sort of “This will not be wasted if I can learn from it.” And thinking of other oppressed people, and telling myself “You’ve never really known this feeling before, and that’s how privileged you are; well, now you know, and don’t forget.”

A silver lining

An unexpected silver lining for me is that in the last few weeks I seem to have really “got on a roll” with writing for this blog. That’s something else that I hadn’t foreseen at the start of 2009; I’d settled into a rhythm of maybe one post a month or so.

I was reasonably content with that, but it wasn’t quite how I’d originally envisaged the blog. Part of the original point of it was so that not so much of my daily online writing would happen in ephemeral contexts where neither I nor anyone else would be likely ever to re-read it (such as in comments on someone else’s friends-locked post).

But what I noticed was that even when I had the blog, I was still doing most of my writing in other places. What I hadn’t taken into account was the degree to which my writing is in response to other people’s. Often what I was writing was an answer to someone else. And then its natural home was in the thread with the other person’s writing, and not here. And if I posted here, I thought “people reading here won’t have the context, so it won’t be as good”. So in fact not a lot had changed.

Somehow in the last few months, and especially the last few weeks, I’ve stopped worrying about that. I’ve had things to say, I’ve wanted to use the blog to publish them, and I’ve switched my default position to “I will write, and people will get it, or they won’t”. I mean, I’m never oblivious of my audience’s various points of view - that’s partly why it takes me so long to write things - but I’m trusting that the people reading here will either have enough background context already to make sense of things, or be able to make a reasonable guess, or learn it as they go along.

So I feel like some kind of change has been catalysed there in my relationship to the blog, and I’m thinking there’s a good chance that I’ll continue to publish more even after the wave of urgency/intensity passes which is associated with the current Bill. If my writing takes another channel, that’s fine too, but I like the idea of cranking out more of it, one way or another.

Sustainable activism

Something else I found a while back (and have already shared with a few people) is this extract from a speech by Linda Bacon. She’s an advocate of “Health at every size“, and wrote a book of that name. You can find the whole speech at her web site.

I forget how I happened upon this speech exactly, but it might have been via Charlotte Cooper’s blog Obesity Timebomb (which I recommend b.t.w.). But anyway, it has some wise things in it about sustainable activism.

It may just be that we don’t eradicate fat oppression. I’d like to have faith in the inevitability of justice being done, of good triumphing evil, but I need to be honest here and acknowledge that I’m just not confident that’s going to happen. The civil rights movement based on race began long ago, and while some of the more explicit forms of racism are less tolerated, racism still permeates our psyches.

…

But before you get down on me for pessimism, I challenge you to look at it in a different way, because it can be very liberating to reframe it. Maybe the point isn’t victory, as much as we would like to see that done. Maybe the real issue is that through the effort to achieve freedom and equality we get our humanity.

Desmond Tutu offered this advice as rationale for the work of a freedom fighter: “You don’t do the things you do because others will necessarily join you in doing them, nor because they will ultimately prove successful. You do the things you do because the things you do are right.”

I don’t know the future of fat rights. I don’t know whether anything I do, or write, or teach, will make a difference. But I do it, write it, teach it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do. And as uncertain as the outcome may be, the outcome of silence is clear. Change doesn’t happen if you don’t try. And given the choice between the uncertainty of taking action and the certainty of non-action, I opt for trying. It allows me to sleep at night and it gives me hope.

Letting go of the preoccupation with outcome, even while we fight for it, makes us more effective. If you require payoff, you’ll burn out quickly. But if you are committed to the struggle, you can keep on keeping on. Even when you don’t “win,” there is fulfillment in your involvement in something worthwhile.

So here’s the final advice I’d like to leave you with. Your primary source of power lies within you. Strive for integrity. Your value system has to come from you, not just something you’ve absorbed from your culture. Exorcise the oppressor’s values lodged in your psyche.

This is not an easy task I am recommending. It is tough sifting out what’s legitimately right and good and in the best interest of you and our community, and ridding yourself of the ugliness of fatism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all the other toxins in our environment. Have compassion for yourself throughout your journey. Recognize that it may be a destination you never get to, but it is the journey that is important.

Remember that those that have power currently are really quite vulnerable. Their power depends on the obedience of others. The military cannot be sustained if the soldiers refuse to fight. And each soldier that opts out weakens the troop. Your individual journey is important. When you take pride in your beautiful body, you opt out of the war. It will have its impact. Clichéd as it may be, Ghandi was right: we need to be the change we wish to see in the world.

Here, have an index…
Top of page
Section 28
A new dawn
Buddhism
Learning
A silver lining
Sustainable activism

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

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I was thinking about the ways that information gets lost. Sometimes it gets handed on and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it gets written down and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes people forget, and sometimes they remember till they die, but then they die.

Histories and skills

There’s a story that because so many builders died in the second world war, some of the previously-common knowledge about how traditional UK brick houses are “supposed to work” was lost with them. So some of the houses built in the 50s and 60s had problems, and lots of the houses built pre-war aren’t being maintained optimally.

[E.g. my house has some damp at the back, which is probably because (a) someone's put down a concrete back yard and it doesn't slope away from the house sufficiently, and (b) it's now got rendering over some of the brick, so the brick can't "breathe" as well as it would have originally. 100 years ago when it was new, it would have had blue brick paving sloping away from the walls, taking the water quickly away from the house, and it wouldn't have had the rendering. Whoever made those changes probably had no idea that they were interfering with the house's functional integrity. Some practical info on this subject, for anyone who's interested.]

I’ve heard it said that queer activists are particularly prone to not knowing their own history, sometimes attributed to the fact that each new generation of queer people is mostly born to non-queer parents.

Or take the example of NHS midwives and breech birth (where the baby comes out bottom-first or feet-first rather than headfirst). As more and more breech babies are born by Caesarian surgery, so midwives get less and less opportunity to learn from the older midwives who know how to manage a natural breech birth safely.

Come to that, NHS midwives nowadays have less and less opportunity to see any birth without some kind of intervention, even if the intervention is as seemingly minor as “internally examining” the labouring woman. (An experienced old-style midwife will usually be able to tell from observing the woman roughly “how far on” she is.) The art of “not interfering unless necessary”, and the observational skills which support it, are still kept alive by some radical woman-centred midwives, but I don’t get the impression that their knowledge is highly valued within the NHS.

From me now to me later

On the other hand, the handing-on of information doesn’t have to be from one generation to another or even from one person to another. It could be from the me of now to the me of later. Sometimes I have an insight but then after a while I forget it again, and then later I have the same insight again and think “Hang on! I knew that! how did I forget?”

Either way, the question is: how do you capture that information - ideas, insights, experience, skills - and make it available for later?

Dynamic and static Quality

In Lila, the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig describes what he calls Dynamic and static Quality.

To give a tiny bit of context to the following quote, what he means by “static quality” is something like: traditions, rituals, rules, documentation and so on.

Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.

Somewhere, I’m pretty sure he uses the metaphor of a ratchet to describe the working-together of static and dynamic - dynamic new development as the turning, static the holding steady so it doesn’t turn back. But can’t find that quote now. (Every now and again, I wish I could use a search engine on a paper book, and this is one of those times - I could do a search on “ratchet” and I bet that bit would come up. Unless of course he used a different word.)

(As an aside: I highly recommend both books. They are stories, but full of ideas that go beyond the stories.)

Branching

Another metaphor I’m thinking of - this one more relevant to communities or organisations evolving over time - is the one of “branching” software. Some existing software is developed in two or more initially-incompatible directions, and the code bases may or may not ever be merged again.

I was thinking at first that the “branching” analogy was meant to be with tree branches. But then the metaphorical parallel would have to include sometimes merging two tree branches back together.

I’m not sure that’d be impossible - I think it would be a bit similar to the grafting of fruit tree branches onto root stock - but at any rate it’s hardly a common sight.

Closer might be a canal splitting into two different channels, or a railway with different branch lines, which may or may not rejoin further along.

Or, in the case of merging software, perhaps a yet better metaphor would be a piece of weaving - since an important part of rejoining the weave would be to decide which pieces of yarn to weave where, which is a bit like the art of deciding which code to keep.

Anyway, the point is that sometimes different people continue a chain of ideas in two or more different directions, and they don’t reconnect further down. Then, sometimes you get one side continuing to develop and be handed on, whereas the other channel peters out into a dead end (like some kind of silted-up backwater). So for example with software, a version which is no longer maintained might contain a cool feature, which the main trunk had never developed.

There are parallels to this in activism, I think. A project ends, a group stops meeting, people move away, and sometimes the experience and knowledge along that branch is lost.

Retrieval of insights

For myself, I do write things down. I’ve usually got things stuck on my wall, and a few key files on my Psion which I re-read every now and again. But writing has limitations.

One is that retrieving an insight from something I’ve written down relies on re-reading it at the appropriate time. And I’ve written a lot of stuff down :-)

Another is that it seems to be easier to document practical stuff than emotional findings.

The ideas I lose tend to be not so much the kind like “Oooh! Wouldn’t it be cool to do this!” but more the kind similar to “If you are feeling mopey, here are some probable reasons why, and here are some ways which may work for getting unmopified”.

One of the things which works best for me is having thinking sessions, as invented by Nancy Kline and described in her extremely marvellous book Time to Think.

Thinking sessions seem to provide an environment where I’m better than usual at retrieving useful stuff from memory. It’s not quite just remembering it, though, either. Accessing a thought during a thinking session is more like recreating it. Re-finding it on a bit of paper doesn’t necessarily have the same emotional resonance.

Writing for remembering

A lot of my ideas for future blog posts (and a few of the existing ones) are in the category of “I want to remember this - maybe if I write it down here I’ll make it a bit bigger in my landscape!”

Some of the more recent posts haven’t been that kind. There’s always some thinking involved in writing them, but at heart they’ve been more motivated by “I have some thoughts that I want to tell to other people”.

But I like the idea that over time this blog could become a sort of documentation of “what works for me”, that I could consult for my own benefit in future.

Here, have an index…
The art of remembering
Histories and skills
From me now to me later
Dynamic and static Quality
Branching
Retrieval of insights
Writing for remembering

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2009. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

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I rarely watch TV, but I knew about this particular programme from reading Bitchy Jones’ blog, and I was interested.

To begin with a one-sentence evaluation: I didn’t think the programme itself was that great. (TV rarely is, i.m.o., which is partly why I watch it so little.) This is no disrespect to the bloggers who appeared on it, who of course weren’t in charge of the editing or the voiceover narrative.

But the area it was about, I think is pretty fascinating. So I thought I’d write about some of the things the programme makers didn’t say, as well as pick holes in what they did say (and show).

Back-story

A key event which the programme covered was the outing of Zoe Margolis as the writer of the “Girl with a one track mind” blog, and the book of the same name. She originally wrote under a pseudonym, but a mainstream UK newspaper named her in in 2006 - for no good reason i.m.o., but we’ll come to that.

By way of back-story, here are a few links to places in her own blog where she talks about it: (a) shortly afterwards, (b) a year later, (c) quoting an email sent to her at the time by the newspaper in question.

Off topic in a way, but it’s probably a good place to say here that I have a lot of respect for Zoe and her parents for how they dealt with the “outing” and its results.

Web anonymity

Now I want to talk a bit about the politics and practicalities of writing anonymously. I felt that this area didn’t get much attention in the programme - and some of what they did say about it, I think they got wrong.

It seems odd to me in a way that they didn’t take the opportunity to talk about that more, because it’s an area that’s only recently become potentially relevant to so many people. For anyone with an internet connection, the chance to communicate anonymously can potentially become part of daily life - which, for most people, is unlikely to have been the case pre-internet.

There are lots of people on the net now who are known by pseudonyms for lots of different reasons, and with varying degrees of anonymity. (One example is the common situation whereby your close friends know it’s your blog, but you aim to ensure that your workmates don’t find it. You can also get into conversation with readers without them necessarily ever knowing your real name.)

I think that’s an interesting area even when those people aren’t writing about sex.

Web anonymity and me

When I was planning this blog, I did quite a bit of thinking about whether I would ever want an anonymous blog, or at least an anonymous identity to comment on other people’s blogs from.

If I did, it would probably mainly be in order to talk about sex. I think sex is a valid topic of conversation, and I’m interested in the politics around it. And I’m not ashamed of my sex life; I just happen to have this compelling sense that it’s none of your business, unless you’re someone I’m having some with.

(Plus there’s the tricky issue of protecting other people’s privacy, of which more below.)

But I came to the conclusion that long-term anonymity would be unsustainable for me. I foresaw the likelihood that one of the following things would eventually happen:

1. Someone would go to the trouble of doing back-end internetty analysis stuff, or some other kind of deliberate snooping, in order to out me.

   Probably not very likely unless I got famous.

2. Or someone would just “twig” from the writing style that it was me.

   I could avoid that by deliberately writing in a different style under my pseudonym. I’m fairly sure I’d be capable of that. But that would be annoying to have to do.

3. Or, by far the most likely: I would get into an interesting conversation with someone under my anonymous identity, and then I would want to say: “Here is some other stuff I wrote”, and it would be something I’d written under my ordinary name. (When starting this blog, I already had a fair amount of similar earlier writing up on the web.) Or I would get to be friends with someone under my anonymous identity, and want to meet up with them.

   And gradually there would be more and more people who knew who I was, and it would be more and more of an “open secret”.

To sum up points 2 and 3 above from a slightly different angle: How I think about sex is indivisible from how I think about everything else, so writing about sex would naturally connect up with all the other writing I do. So to keep them separate I would have to do quite a major amount of “reining myself in”. Otherwise, a post that started off about sex would evolve into being about all the other stuff, and to anyone who knew me, it would really obviously be me!

And if I were convinced (as I pretty much am) that the two identities would eventually join, then even under my anonymous identity, I’d still have to be careful of what I said. So in that case it makes more sense just to get my “what I will and won’t say in public” boundaries clear in the first place.

Those same factors wouldn’t necessarily apply to everyone, or lead to the same conclusion for everyone. I’m just saying I know myself well enough to see which way the wind would blow.

Web anonymity and other people

But at the same time, I think it is an excellent & cool thing that some other people are taking that opportunity which the net provides, and using it to talk honestly about sex and sexual practices and the politics thereof.

Note that what I’m talking about here is not synonymous with porn, and I’m not saying I think all porn is excellent & cool. (In fact, I don’t even think it’s possible to say very much useful about porn-as-a-whole at all. If I get around to doing an article about that, it’ll mainly be about not lumping together all porn, and how I think that different types of it are very different phenomena.)

On the other hand, there could well be some things in the “Honest talk about sex” which some people find sexually arousing; so that and porn aren’t entirely separable, either.

But what I’m enthusing about here is the “Honest talk about sex”, especially coming from women and queer people, unbiased by commercial considerations and unedited.

My favourite articles and blogs tend to include some element of political analysis, too - but even without that element, the very fact that these experiences and descriptions are being written down for public reading is political.

Is it a revolution?

The voiceover towards the end of the programme suggested that if people can still only write about this stuff anonymously, then not much has changed. We’re talking about a question of scale here (how big a change counts as a revolution?), but this swerve towards dismissing its significance struck a false note for me. I think this is one of the places where the programme missed the mark.

OK, anonymous writing is not new. What’s new is the sheer number of people participating anonymously - in not only blog articles, but the discussions that arise in comments, and the resulting nodes of community and mutual support. (And that’s just within the territory of blogging, which is a small subset of all the places on the net one might choose to be anonymous.)

Sure, it would be good if the social cost for putting your name on honest writing about sex weren’t currently so high. But the fact that people are writing it at all, and putting into words different truths which haven’t been said before, is still progress worth having.

In any case, as the Girl says (in the first of the three articles I link to above), you simply can’t write in the same way if everyone knows whom you’re describing, because other people’s privacy is involved as well as your own. So although obviously there is some connection, the desire to write anonymously for some purposes doesn’t always measure the liberation of society.

Motives

To elaborate on that a bit: The idea that any use for anonymous writing would disappear “come the liberation” seems to imply that the only motives for desiring anonymity are shame or fear. This reminds me of an argument for Big Brother-esque cameras and databases: you’d supposedly only care if you were doing something wrong or illegal.

What about the idea that people want to keep some things private because they’re special? Or because people have affirmed that the right to a private life is a human right? Or just for no reason?

Or, as is an aspect of the case here: because you want to share your experience of being with someone, for reasons which have nothing to do with them personally, and therefore without attributing the description to them, which might be unfair or burdensome to them?

I’m not saying that the results of anonymity are always good. It can be a way of avoiding being held to account for what you’re saying, and for what your words cause in the world.

But in the area of non-commercialised talk about sex, I think it is (and has been) on the whole a good thing.

Silencing

This is partly why I think the outing of Zoe/Abby was such a pernicious act: it’s obviously going to squash that conversation down significantly, by scaring off potential writers who can least afford to be outed. We’ll all be paying a hidden cost of that, in the loss of voices silenced before they were ever heard.

See, to get people to shut up, you don’t have to go round dealing with them all one by one. You just have to make an example of the one who steps out of line. You can bet the rest will be paying attention.

So, yeah, bit of a gaping political hole in the TV narrative on that front.

I was pleased that they did include one interviewee’s opinion (which I share) that there was no public-interest justification for ending Zoe’s anonymity as a writer.

(”In the public interest” doesn’t mean “Some members of the public might have been interested” - it means “For the good of all of us in the long run”.)

But i.m.o. there was a whole other programme there waiting to be made - about the people who decided to out her, the justifications they came up with in their own minds, the commercial pressures on them, and so on, analysed critically via other interpretations of what happened (e.g. societal policing of women’s sexuality).

It was not foredoomed

Also, in an early bit of voiceover, there was a reference to Zoe/Abby’s “leading a double life”, which from its tone, seemed to imply that her actions were (a) sinister, and (b) foredoomed to a nasty come-uppance.

That was drama at the expense of accuracy: in fact, (a) there was no ethical reason why she shouldn’t write anonymously, and (b) she was sensible and consistent about protecting her anonymity, and it was only destroyed in the end by deliberate snooping.

At the beginning, she never expected to be famous; it would have taken quite some foresight to imagine what eventually happened.

We are not all the same

The programme commentary also included references to “revealing the true nature of women’s sexuality”.

Do all women have the same sexuality? No.

Are these few specific people, writing in the main about their personal experiences, revealing the hidden nature of all of us? No again.

Hard though it might be for some people to believe, not all women are exactly the same as each other.

Breasts in question

And as for that headless naked typing woman…

Well. I am curious. Does anyone want to pipe up here and say “Don’t be so cynical Jennifer, I am a sex blogger and I really do all my writing with no clothes on, even in the UK in winter, it’s a fact”? (And if so, do you live in a really well insulated house or something?)

Because I must admit my initial interpretation was more along the lines of

Person A: Oh dear! We have “sex” in the title and our programme is not sexy enough!

Person B: Don’t worry - I have the solution! We’ll find a thinly-plausible excuse for some recurring naked breasts! That will fix it!

(Not to say there is anything wrong with breasts. Breasts are wonderful. But hey, there is a time for looking at breasts, and a time for not looking at breasts. And also I like it more when the whole person is there, not just the breasts and no head.)

Yay pyjamas

But, on the other hand, and not to end on a down note, let’s celebrate Bitchy Jones’ pyjamas - well, not the real BJ, the person playing BJ in the “reenactment”.

“Finally, a woman like me has got an unprecedented 3 seconds on the telly.” - BJ’s pointy and entertaining commentary on the representation of women in the programme and of dominant women in the media generally.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2007. All rights reserved.

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Or perhaps it’s more like when you’ve got lots of pieces of string tangled together in a big ball. Quite a lot of loose ends are sticking out, but the challenge is to find one that doesn’t lead right into the middle of the tangle, and can be separated off and wound up by itself.

Or like when you get a load of washing out of the washing machine and go to hang it up, and you find that the long sleeved shirts have tangled their sleeves together. I just want to get one shirt out by itself so I can hang it on the line!

Of course, I can go back to a post later and put in more links. But there’s still the interim challenge of writing the first few posts so they make sense without those links.

I don’t think the problem originates from the nature of blogging (e.g. how long to make the posts). There is an element of that, but actually I think writing a book would be similar. I think part of its underlying source is the problem of communicating a 3-dimensional landscape in a linear medium - the landscape being the metaphorical one of how I map things when I think. In my mind, it’s all integrated, but I can’t transmit the entire map in one go. I’ve got to start somewhere :-)

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2007. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.