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The Times 07.03.2015 body and soul supplement page 15 has an article suggesting that an individual may be asexual, and references AVEN several times, but includes some inaccurate data. This article may be available online.
Unfortunately this has only been brought to my attention today otherwise I would have raised it when the paper was still on sale




Sex counsel: I’d like a relationship but I don’t want sex

Suzi Godson
Published at 12:01AM, March 7 2015


Q. I’m a 24-year-old girl and have never been sexually attracted to anyone, however I would like to experience a romance. I’ve had a couple of relationships that involved sex and they didn’t work because being sexually intimate turned me off. Friends have suggested it could be because I’m gay but I’ve never been attracted to a woman either. How can I find a romantic partner who will accept me for who I am?


A. You don’t identify yourself as “asexual” but your description fits the definition of a person who does not experience sexual attraction. Asexuality is a difficult concept for people to understand as it challenges the universally held assumption that sex is a biological necessity. In its most rigid interpretation, asexuality is “nonlibidoist”, which means the person never experiences sexual desires.

You would be more correctly defined as a heteroromantic asexual; someone who seeks romantic relationships with the opposite sex for companionship, affection and emotional intimacy, but does not experience sexual attraction. Asexuals can also be homoromantic (romantically but not sexually attracted to people of the same sex), biromantic (romantically attracted to people of either sex). This tendency for asexuals to try to microdefine their nuances is problematic. It creates a confusing lexicon of sexual labels. However asexuals define themselves, their lack of interest in an aspect of intimacy that is fundamental for the majority is always going to limit their romantic options. Experts also identify another category, demisexual (someone who only experiences sexual attraction to a person after forming a strong emotional bond with them). Such people generally realise that they have this potential before they meet someone new, but I’m not sure that you fall into this category. Since you have already experienced several relationships where attraction has failed to develop, the chance is slim that you will find a partner who magically unlocks an aspect of yourself that has not yet materialised.

Most asexuals realise that their sexual orientation is not straightforward, but until recently it was difficult for them to work out why. The American activist David Jay realised that he was asexual at the age of 15 and set up the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (Aven), which is a fantastic resource and has more than 1,200 members. No one is sure how many people are asexual, but in 2004 Professor Anthony Bogaert at Brock University in Canada worked out that 1 per cent of people in a sample of 18,000 UK residents clicked on an option that indicated that they had “never felt sexual attraction to anyone at all”.

Despite this, a third of the people who defined themselves as asexual were in a long-term relationship and another 11 per cent had experienced at least one long-term relationship, although they reported low levels of sexual activity.

Last year Aven built on this research by conducting a survey of 10,880 asexuals. The relative youth of the respondents is notable; the median average age is just 21.

Most participants had never engaged in sexual activity, 12.4 per cent were sexually active and nearly a quarter had been sexually active. The most commonly cited reason for having sex was “to please a partner”, but sexual generosity can only go so far. It is hard enough for couples to negotiate sexual relationships, but when one partner wants sex and the other is indifferent or repulsed by the idea, it is almost impossible to make things work.

Aven has a large online community so you should join some of its forums. Being able to understand your experiences within the context of asexuality will be liberating. The site also features links to asexual dating sites such as Acebook, Platonic Partners and Asexualitic.

Because asexuality is a minority orientation, searching within a community of like-minded people is your best chance of finding emotional intimacy without sex.


Send your queries to weekendsex@thetimes.co.uk or write to Suzi Godson, The Times Weekend, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

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The Times 07.03.2015 body and soul supplement page 15 has an article suggesting that an individual may be asexual, and references AVEN several times, but includes some inaccurate data. This article may be available online.

Unfortunately this has only been brought to my attention today otherwise I would have raised it when the paper was still on sale

This one? http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/relationships/article4371988.ece

Anyone has access?

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Moved from Visibility and Education Projects to World Watch

Lia

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ithaca, that is the article I am referring to.

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  • 4 weeks later...

More articles from The Times, sometimes with just a mention:

-"Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan" - 22 February 2015 http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/article1520354.ece


Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan

This life of Kinks frontman Ray Davies reveals a band that never stopped fighting each other
John Walsh Published: 22 February 2015

STL2242KINKS_1130072k.jpg
Tantrums and tears: from left, Ray and Dave Davies, Mick Avory and Pete Quaife from the Kinda Kinks album, 1965 (GAB Archive/Redferns)

THE British summer of 1966 was a glorious dream of sun, glamour and success. The nation basked in a heat wave, boutiques flourished, late-night music clubs opened, Playboy bunnies served drinks and England won the World Cup. The song that summed up the national mood, kicking the Beatles’ Paperback Writer off the No 1 slot, was Sunny Afternoon by the Kinks. Its air of languorous self-indulgence seemed an echo of popular contentment.

Closer inspection of the lyrics, however, revealed a dark subtext. The singer’s money has gone to the taxman, a “big fat mama” is trying to “break” him, his girlfriend’s taken his car and gone back to her parents, “telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty”. Far from a song of sunny euphoria, it’s a cry of despair, a dream of escape from the “big fat mama” of the English Establishment.

This vast biography of Ray Davies, the Kinks’ singer, front man and songwriter, tries to explain the chronic angst that lay behind his terrific songs. Davies has always seemed a misfit in the rock pantheon (troubled, awkward, asexual, malcontent, a bit superior) and his songs deal with subjects other bands would deem uncool: unpunctuality (Tired of Waiting for You), transvestism (Lola), dandies (Dedicated Follower of Fashion). Johnny Rogan’s book masterfully teases out the warring impulses wrestling in his psyche.

Davies was born in 1944 into a working-class family in Muswell Hill, north London. Every Saturday, the family enjoyed beery, post-pub Cockney singsongs round the piano. Ray’s father Fred, a slaughterman, would climax the evening with Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher. Gradually, songs by Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins started to feature in the repertoire. Davies empathised with American culture and rock’n’roll, but spent his musical life trying to rediscover the lost world of pub/music-hall/vaudeville conviviality.

He had six elder sisters and a younger brother, Dave, the Kinks’ guitarist. From boyhood Ray was plagued by insomnia and depression. The death of his sister Rene (a heart attack on the Lyceum ballroom dance floor)in 1957 hit him so hard he didn’t speak for a year. At Hornsey College of Arts and Crafts, he took up the guitar, and a chance encounter with Alexis Korner of Blues Incorporated got him his first job as a musician. Dave raided the shops of Carnaby Street and the Kinks made their television debut on Ready Steady Go! in February 1964, wearing thigh-high boots, leather jackets and tweed. They were soon talked about as the No 3 group in the land, after the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Class is a huge theme in this book. Davies could never reconcile his humble background with his love of aristocrats. He was embarrassed by the former and wary of condescension by the latter. The band’s managers, two public-school City types, impressed him with their confidence and sophistication. Many early gigs were played at the homes of their society chums. But the more Davies embraced middle-class respectability with a wife and children, the more he satirised bourgeois complacency. It became a form of self-laceration.

Another theme is sibling rivalry. The mutual dislike of Ray and Dave makes the Gallagher brothers look like the Waltons. They were temperamentally miles apart, Dave cheeky, mischievous and confident, Ray quiet, anxious and alienated. When young they savaged each other with boxing gloves. On stage they liked undermining each other for the audience.

The Kinks’ early hits, such as You Really Got Me, were riff-tastic bursts of R&B, but critics could detect dark shadows in the words (Burt Bacharach thought All Day and All of the Night was “very neurotic”.) After some disastrous misfires, Davies found his true voice in calmer, reflective pieces of social mockery and everyday epiphanies, including that immortal hymn to solitude, Waterloo Sunset.

Sad to relate, the chronicle of the band’s fortunes behind these terrific songs is often dismal — rows, fights, smashed windows, flying furniture, cancelled gigs, contractual disputes, and a slew of later albums whose reliance on music-hall jollity shocked the fans. Disappointment and frustration took its toll. The band members regularly attacked each other on stage. In 1965, the drummer, Mick Avory, whacked Dave with a high-hat cymbal and nearly decapitated him. The Kinks couldn’t tour the UK because no hotel would have them. Their first American tour was a nightmare of tantrums, aborted concerts and a fight with someone from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists that put the band on an unofficial blacklist for four years.

Rogan is the author of a score of rock’n’roll guides and biographies. He has been working on this book since 1981, and interviewed everybody who ever came in contact with its subject. For a rock writer he employs a curiously fusty writing style. Davies didn’t just go for long walks, he “took sporadic constitutionals”. But he’s adept at relating the social history of the 1950s and 1960s to Davies’s brooding character and lyric obsessions. Rogan can make the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and the end of tea rationing all seem vitally important in building Davies’s attitude to England, class and culture. He uncovers psychological traumas everywhere and is fascinating on the bitchy rivalries between 1960s pop titans. When the Kinks opened for the Beatles in Bournemouth in 1964, John Lennon evidently thought they were mimicking the moptops’ sound. “Can I borrow your song list, lads?” he asked. “We’ve lost ours.”

Such tales make this unfeasibly long, oceanically researched biography go with a swing, even though Davies’s life story is a tale of class-obsessed, self-destructive woe — with regular heartening flashes of song-writing genius. When, to borrow a Davies lyric, he turned his sorrow into wonder.

Bodley Head £25/ebook £13.99 pp758

Buy for £20 (including p&p) from the ST Bookshop

Ebook price £13.99



Family ties
Ray Davies always felt out of step with the 1960s music scene, and while the Who, for instance, were talking about dying before they got old, Davies, endearingly, insisted he was trying to reconnect with his past. ‘I wrote Sunny Afternoon when I was 21 years old, and I wrote it so my grandad could sing it.’



-About Gandalf, two articles on the same date: "Ian McKellen on Tom Daley, The Hobbit and Gandalf’s sexuality" and "Gandalf the Gay? It’s possible, says McKellen" on December 7 2013

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/article3942262.ece

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/film/article3941753.ece


Ian McKellen on Tom Daley, The Hobbit and Gandalf’s sexuality

Stefanie Marsh
Last updated at 12:06AM, December 7 2013

The actor explains why he admires Tom Daley, how he regrets that he did not come out earlier himself - and whether Gandalf, the role he returns to in the new Hobbit film, could be gay

Peace-loving wizard WLTM like-minded wizard for fun times, and maybe more . . . Twelve years ago, when Ian McKellen first won the role of Gandalf, there were not a few Tolkien-heads (mostly Americans from the Bible Belt), aghast that the greatest wizard in literature should be played by an openly gay man. Well, how time has moved on. Not only have such protests withered into insignificance, but McKellen has made such a success of Gandalf that when filming of the epic came to what appeared to be a standstill, anxious Hobbit-watchers launched campaigns on the internet, lest they should lose the great actor to pastures new. The main thing Tolkien screen buffs seem to pick fights about now is how superior their wizard is to that young upstart, Dumbledore: OK Dumbledore’s pyrotechnics may be more impressive, but for loyalty, sheer goodness and, considering the apocalyptic intentions of his foes, Gandalf cannot be matched.

“When I became Gandalf, I think I was the only gay member of the cast,” McKellen says. “Now there are two gay dwarfs. There’s a gay elf. There are six openly gay actors.” It’s a happy turn of events — unexpected, but also a sign of the times. And, when he comes to think of it, why stop there? “Who’s to say,” McKellen speculates, on the brink of launching a wonderful little bombshell, “that Gandalf isn’t gay anyway? He seems to be quite asexual.” Dumbledore, he points out, is gay, according to his creator, JK Rowling. Why not Gandalf? One imagines, that, armed with this observation of McKellen’s, the producers of the endless Potter and Tolkien franchises will now invent new ways of forever sequelling and prequelling the series: “When Dumbledore Met Gandalf: the Rom-Com” etc. The fictional possibilities of a gay Gandalf aside, McKellen finds it startling that such a key perceptual change took place in Hollywood, of all places. “You don’t look to Hollywood for advancing social issues. Hollywood didn’t stick up for black people. Didn’t stick up for women. It hasn’t stuck up for gays. It’s a fantasy industry.”

The Hobbit, though almost entirely bereft of females, comes to our screens this time in 3-D. The second of three films shot by Peter Jackson (the third is out next year), the imminent Hobbit film is called The Desolation of Smaug, Smaug being a dragon with the face and voice of Benedict Cumberbatch. Smaug is a baddy. Gandalf is a goody. It’s strange, McKellen says, usually baddies are more interesting to play. And yet . . . Not long ago he received a fan letter from a boy whose parents had divorced. “We had to face a lot of difficulties,” the letter reads: “Our father left us and there was a huge void in my life. That’s when I looked up to Gandalf to fill in that void. It’s childish but I just wanted to say thank you to the person who in many little ways helped me through the many big changes in my life.”

“Usually,” says McKellen, “the Devil has the best tunes, you know. Iago was the great part. Easier than Othello, perhaps, to bring off. Richard III is a dreadful monster but the best part.” (McKellen has won six Laurence Olivier Awards — one of them for Richard III; as well as a Tony and a Golden Globe, and been nominated twice for Oscars, four times for Baftas and five for Emmys). “But Gandalf is not a villain. He is actually trying to do good. He’s got some very good qualities. He is a good friend to people, and tries to help people and to guide. And that seems to come over particularly to younger members of the film audience. Gandalf has always been someone you can rely on and trust. He’s such a popular figure, it is quite heartening really. And I would much rather be associated with that sort of character than some monstrous villain.”

McKellen has played Adolf Hitler on screen though says he knows actors who wouldn’t have done it, for fear that, in sympathising with the character (an actor’s job) they would be excusing the deeds. “I wouldn’t do a script that seemed to be in favour of something I wouldn’t approve of, but that doesn’t mean to say you can’t play someone who is monstrous, like Richard III. These characters are so rich and Shakespeare is so understanding of why people behave as they do.” As a public person, he says, “everyone has a responsibility to behave well. I try not to be photographed with a drink in my hand.”

McKellen was born in Burnley and grew up in Wigan. His father, Denis, was a civil engineer, lay preacher and, with his wife, ardent theatre lover. His mother died when he was 12. Later, at Bolton School for Boys, the young Ian became emergency head boy when the incumbent left after a term. He got into Cambridge, but never went to drama school. He is now 74. He was knighted in 1991 and in 2008 was made a Companion of Honour for his services, not only to the performing arts, but to activism. “It’s been one of the great joys of my life of late that the world is rapidly changing in regards to people’s view of gay people. We [gay people] always knew we were right but to now be accepted as right is very gratifying.”

Within his circle McKellen never hid his sexuality. But he kept quiet about it in public until he was 49, in 1988 – he came out on Radio 3, the prompt was Section 28, legislation that stated a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality”. He should have come out sooner, he says. “I’ve never met a gay person who has regretted coming out, though I’m very sympathetic to people who find it difficult. It’s much easier than it used to be because you’re not a criminal. Britain’s a very good place for gay people to live now. And that’s reflected in Tom Daley coming out a few days ago. When I was Tom Daley’s age it was against the law for me to have sex, full stop. I could have gone to prison. To be gay in the Fifties, when I started out . . . if I had become a politician. Or a teacher. It’s not long since they were sacked for being gay. They were thought to be dangerous.”

Rarely idle, McKellen is currently on stage, being showered with rapturous reviews, in New York. He’s in two plays: Waiting for Godot and No Man’s Land. Once they’re over, he will finally return to London, shoot another film (he plays a mature Sherlock Holmes) , and complete a second series of Vicious, with his old friend Derek Jacobi. As a young student, McKellen nursed a silent crush on Jacobi: “We were quite friendly. Derek was very attractive — still is a very attractive young man to me. He wore rather fashionable clothes and was very careful in a way I wasn’t with how he looked. He was wonderfully coiffed and I think that was very appealing to me. It was a sort of character I hadn’t met before.” McKellen kept his feelings to himself: “It’s hard to understand but you did not, in the late 1950s, talk about your sexuality unless you felt very, very secure and I didn’t feel secure about myself. It was hard.”

Perhaps it is trite to say that my favourite of all McKellen performances is his turn as a thespy dishevelled con artist in Coronation Street. It was ingenious star casting: brief, but very arch, very funny. He regards having worked out how to make an audience laugh among his greatest achievements. The Corrie turn is so magnificent because it says so much about the actor. Enormously talented, but . . . would Anthony Hopkins stoop to Corrie?

A co-founder of Stonewall, McKellen supports the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity that finds accommodation for men and women who have lost their homes after having come out. “Homophobia is a horrible thing because it can make people who are victims of it believe it, and hate themselves. That’s why it’s so cruel. Because what’s somebody meant to do if they’re gay? Go and be turned straight? That’s no more possible than the reverse.” The cost, of not coming out, “is that you accept other people’s judgment of yourself. That you are ‘queer’ — that was the old word for being gay — you’re born ‘queer’. No you weren’t born ‘queer’, you were born yourself.” Coming out can be difficult, “and I think you should come out a little bit at a time. You tell your best friend and hope you get a good reaction. You tell your siblings, you hope you get a good reaction. You then go on to tell all your family and hope that goes well. And then you get to the point where you don’t mind anybody knowing. It’s a journey. It’s gradual. You don’t just put a notice in the front window saying, ‘I’m gay’. ”

It’s interesting, he says, how Tom Daley described his relationship with another man: “He said that he feels ‘safe’. He hadn’t felt that before.” This observation leads McKellen to delve into the secret of his own happiness. “That’s when I am happiest,” he decides: “When I feel safe. I do know that when I go walking in the Lake District, which I like to do, I’m excited, I’m nervous when I set out: will I get to the top of the mountain before it starts to rain? Have I remembered to bring a compass? Have I got the whistle in case it comes down? It’s excitement but it’s a little bit nerve-making. But the minute I decide to turn around — to the evening meal, the warm bath — I feel much more relaxed and happy when I return.”

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (3D) is released on Friday
The Hobbit — Did you know?
• The book began when the first line popped into Tolkien’s head: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
• There would be no Hobbit were it not for the ten-year-old Rayner Unwin. He was the son of the publisher Stanley Unwin and was paid a shilling to review the book for his father. His found that Bilbo “had a very exiting [sic] time fighting goblins”.
• Gandalf and 11 of the dwarfs in The Hobbit borrow their names from the 13th-century epic Norse poem Poetic Edda.
• Tolkien, as a professor of Anglo-Saxon philology and literature at the University of Oxford, had many illustrious students, including W H  Auden, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. Amis once described Tolkien as “incoherent and often inaudible”.
• Don’t expect a Saving Mr Banks-esque film about Disney’s wooing of Tolkien. When the writer sold the film rights to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, his main stipulation was that Disney would never get its hands on the material.
• Tolkien’s son Christopher has lambasted the film versions of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, claiming that the director, Peter Jackson, has sacrificed meaning for action. He said the only solution was “to turn my head away”.
• Jackson’s decision to reshape the original story of The Hobbit — and swell it to trilogy length — is in fact a nod to Tolkien’s own rewrites of the book. Attempts to update The Hobbit to fit in with his later work, The Lord of the Rings, led to many added appendices, which Jackson has rewritten into the narrative.
• There isn’t a single female character in The Hobbit. In the interests of gender equality, Peter Jackson included cameo spots for Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel as well as creating the elven character of Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly.
• In order to cast Martin Freeman — Jackson’s No 1 choice for Bilbo Baggins — the entire production of The Hobbit closed down for four to five months so that the actor could shoot Sherlock, for which he had already signed up.
• Freeman took to shaving his legs to make the prosthetic feet slightly less painful .....
• Speaking of prosthetics, four tons of silicon were used to make 100 hobbity feet for Bilbo Baggins and many elf ears for Tauriel (her first pair melted).
• The actors playing Bilbo’s dwarf companions weren’t chosen for their height. The Dwarf King Thorin Oakenshield is played by Richard Armitage (6ft 2in). They did, however, have to be trained to “walk short”, with weighted belts.
• Barry Humphries voices the Great Goblin in The Hobbit. Of the technology used to create his character, he said, “I always thought motion capture was something you did when taking a specimen to a doctor.”
• Elijah Wood, now 32, was 19 when he first played Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings. Reprising his role in The Hobbit required him to play a younger Frodo, so Jackson employed some digital trickery to create a fresh-faced Wood.
• Stephen Fry makes a brief appearance in The Desolation of Smaug as the shabby Master of Laketown.
• Creating Smaug’s lair for the film required so much gold paint that New Zealand had a run on it. The designers had to get more from Germany.
• All 13 of the dwarf wigs were made of yak hair. These were held together by 4.45 miles of toupee tape.
• The Hobbit was the first film to be shot at 48 frames a second. Early screenings reported that audiences experienced feelings of motion sickness, but Warner Bros denied that the film could cause side effects of nausea.
• Jackson’s decision to turn Tolkien’s book into a movie trilogy meant an extended production schedule. To keep everyone alert, some 140,000 coffees were brewed during the two-year shoot.



Gandalf the Gay? It’s possible, says McKellen

Simon de Bruxelles
Published at 12:01AM, December 7 2013

Professor Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter’s music-loving head teacher, was “outed” by his author J.K. Rowling, but we will never know for certain about Gandalf, the wise, white-bearded wizard from The H obbit and The Lord of the Rings.

His creator, J.R.R. Tolkein, gave no clues, but Sir Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf in the series of Middle Earth films, was in a teasing mood when he was interviewed for The Times’ Review.

The actor, who “came out” in 1988 at the age of 49, told his interviewer, Stephanie Marsh, that if Dumbledore was gay, Gandalf could be too. He said: “Who’s to say that Gandalf isn’t gay? He seems to be quite asexual.”

It is a subject that will be debated endlessly by fans of Tolkein, and just because Gandalf the Grey wears a rather natty hat does not mean that he swings either way.

As Sir Ian has previously pointed out, Gandalf is 7,000 years old, so he may not swing at all.

What is certain is that the Britain of today is a much more welcoming place for homosexuals than the one in which McKellen came of age in the 1950s. He contrasts the respect given to Tom Daley, the Olympic diver who revealed this week this he is in a relationship with a man, to the fate that would have befallen a gay man of his own generation had he done the same thing.

Sir Ian, a founder member of the gay rights pressure group Stonewall, said: “When I was Tom Daley’s age it was against the law for me to have sex, full stop. I could have gone to prison. To be gay in the 50s, when I started out... if I had become a politician. Or a teacher. It’s not long since they were sacked for being gay. They were thought to be dangerous.

“You did not in the late 1950s talk about your sexuality unless you felt very, very secure. It’s been one of the great joys of my life of late that the world is rapidly changing in regards to people’s view of gay people.”

Sir Ian plays Gandalf in the three Hobbit movies filmed in New Zealand by Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings. The second, The Desolation of Smaug, is released on Friday.



-"Playing to the Gallery by Grayson Perry" - August 23 2014 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/non-fiction/article4181809.ece


Playing to the Gallery by Grayson Perry

Melanie Reid
Published at 12:09AM, August 23 2014

Grayson Perry, artist, cross-dresser and broadcaster, is a likeable curiosity and a great communicator. He is, one suspects, not that far from a national treasure: one in a line of authentic British eccentrics who defies categorisation.

His Bafta-winning Channel 4 series, All in the Best Possible Taste, proved him to be clever, funny, warm, engaging and accessible. Above all, it demonstrated there was, to use the sweet old expression, absolutely no side to him. He is classless, asexual and delightfully non-elitist, which is why, when he gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures last autumn, exploring the art world, they were a rip-roaring success, the most popular since the series began.

This slim, read-in-one-sitting book is based on those four witty lectures, with the bonus of being illustrated by a couple of dozen of his wry felt-pen cartoons, amusing enough to be marketed as postcard art.

The lectures thrive in written form: punchy, mischievous. Declaring, basically, come on in, everyone’s welcome to the art world. Not often are we shown round such a pompous, baffling and contradictory place by a successful member of the arts establishment, explaining and gently mocking as he goes. Perry’s tour de force — particularly to the outsider; the visitor sweating in the queue at a summer blockbuster; the non-expert too terrified to ask “what is art?” — is hugely entertaining.

You could, genuinely, take an aphorism or a quote from every second page. Perry is a terrific polemicist. “God help you if you’re popular with the general public” ; “it is always safer to slag something off rather than eulogise it”; “if Michelangelo was around today he wouldn’t be painting ceilings. He’d be making CGI movies or developing 3D printing”; “the nearest thing to an empirical measure of art is the market”; “since the 1960s art has become a baggy idea. To frame something as art has become the get-out-of-jail-free card”.

Perry identifies what he calls IAE, International Art English, the language of gobbledegook and pretension. “You think you need IAE to pass judgment. I just want to tell you now, you don’t.” He warns the unwary to be very careful of the word “beauty”.The poster boy of the cognoscenti, Marcel Duchamp, said: “aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided”. So, say something’s beautiful and join some discredited, fusty hierarchy, tainted with sexism, racism, colonialism and class privilege.

This is splendid, transgressive stuff and a delight for the many Radio 4 listeners who responded enthusiastically. “Enjoyed the lectures immensely . . . I’ve even revised my approach to modern art: much less cynicism and much more affection and understanding.”
Perry’s contention is that the avant-garde no longer exists; art can no longer shock or do anything new. Everything that was bohemian, shocking and dangerous is mainstream. He labels Tate Modern a “cult entertainment megastore” and peels back the cynicism of the artist who now aims at “the anti-marketing market, because that’s a great market”.

Detached irony has become the default mode in today’s art world — look at Tracey Emin supporting the Tories. As if in validation of Perry, as I write this review, Damien Hirst has just bought a £34 million Palladian mansion in Regent’s Park.

Maybe, as Perry says, the most shocking tactic left for an artist is sincerity. A gentle, non-cynical man, this is his approach; his book is not spiteful. He genuinely believes that art’s role is to make meaning. In writing, he seeks to protect the personal in a deeply caustic art world, but in doing so also writes a love letter to art.

Some art critics hated the Reith Lectures and will hate this book. “Handed the opportunity of a lifetime, he played it as panto,” sneered a Daily Telegraph critic last October, fatally undermined mid-review by a poll conducted for his own paper in which 87 per cent said they loved Perry’s observations.

As do most of us. Perry has demythologised, warmly and wittily, contemporary art. He allows us to understand that art snobs are insecure people: that the problem is theirs, not ours. It would be a crime to acquire his book only on Kindle, for it’s a thing of pleasure: petite, luxuriously printed, a mischievous little hymn to 21st-century inclusivity.



-"Jonathan Swift: His life and His World by Leo Damrosch" - November 30 2013 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/non-fiction/article3933611.ece


Jonathan Swift: His life and His World by Leo Damrosch

George Walden
Published at 12:01AM, November 30 2013

“My hieroglyphic friend,” an acquaintance of Jonathan Swift called him, alluding to the secretive persona behind the blisteringly outspoken satirist and pamphleteer. From birth to death mysteries and ambiguities hang over his life, and they begin and end with women. For reasons unknown he was brought up away from his mother and when he died, at 77, and was eventually interred alongside his great love Stella, we can’t be certain whether they had ever married, or been lovers in the full sense.

Speculation has not been wanting, on this and his equally opaque relationship with another attractive and intelligent woman, Vanessa, whose physical passion appears not to have been returned. Damrosch is refreshingly restrained, sticking to what is known, which is remarkably little. It is 300 pages before we learn that Swift, who delighted in women’s company, beauty and wit, and whose surviving letters to Stella can read like a sort of erudite flirtation, was probably asexual.

One thing we know is that he had a morbid fascination with bodily functions. A late, scatological poem, The Lady’s Dressing Room, concerns a young man who, coming across the chamber pot of his lover Celia, steals away “Repeating in his amorous fits/Oh Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” In a Swiftean riposte the redoubtable Lady Wortley Montagu, pioneer of inoculation, knew where to inject her barb: “Perhaps you have no better luck in/ The knack of rhyming than of ——”

To complicate his problems with physicality (Swift was a cleanliness freak) he suffered from Ménière’s disease, an ear condition causing giddiness and nausea — and in his writings about the human condition there was to be plenty of that. All this suggests a morose, introverted temperament, yet until late in life he was sought after for his learning, scabrous wit and good company.
This was the time of Congreve, Addison, Pope, Defoe, the Tatler and TheSpectator, and Swift mixed with the stars of his brilliant era. Again, though, there was an anomaly: the wonderfully entertaining writer and talker was uninterested in the other arts, whether painting, music or theatre.

In religion too there were contradictions. The Anglo-Irish scourge of Catholicism who angled tirelessly for a sinecure in his church could be viciously satirical about the Christian faith. His Tale of a Tub (1704), mocking all schemes of government and religion as hollow, was full of irreverent parodies and anarchic digressions that brought suspicions of atheism.
Meanwhile the failed careerist had to live. His patrons included the diplomat Sir William Temple, who did not permit his brilliant secretary to sit at his table, and Robert Harley, Lord Treasurer and Earl of Oxford, who promised money and preferment but never delivered.

His politics could be as singular as his faith. The lifelong Tory could sound like a militant peacenik, railing against ambitions of empire or plutocrats doing well out of the war of the Spanish Succession. And the inveterate cynic about humankind was an early opponent of the slave trade.

On his native land he was as passionate as he was incoherent. Contemptuous of everything Irish (“Conforming to the tattered rabble/ He learned their Irish tongue to gabble”), for want of anything better he settled for the position as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral “in wretched Dublin in miserable Ireland”.

Yet it was the Irish depression that brought him back to politics. He did more than denounce English wrongs: generous towards beggars and the sick, he helped to found and administer hospitals, especially for “idiots and lunatics”. The unsentimental language is revealing; for him, charity alone was not the answer. The indigent Irish, he wrote, were mostly “thieves, drunkards, heathens and whoremongers, fitter to be rooted out off the face of the earth than suffered to levy a vast annual tax on the city”.
In the same breath, and in terms that seem startlingly topical today, during the South Sea Bubble he raged against greedy moneymen and stock-jobbers as little folk lost their savings and the Government was forced to bale the company out. Swift, of course, was an investor.

Immersion in the politics and finance of the day did not prevent his writings veering into fantasy, and after five years’ work Gulliver’s Travels appeared. Yet even A Modest Proposal, his most extravagant work, remained grounded in reality. Published after the catastrophic Irish harvests of 1728/29, the premise was that if the wealth of a nation is its people, when times are hard what more natural than for the hungry to consume their children? “A young, healthy child, well-nursed ..... will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout.”

His irony and playful scepticism have encouraged us to see him as an early post-modernist, but then the same could be said of Cervantes (Don Quixote was Swift’s favourite novel), or later of Sterne and Tristram Shandy. So perhaps all we are saying is that post-modernism is more passé than we think.

Was he a confirmed misanthrope, plagued by self-revulsion? Despairing of humanity, logically he could only be repelled by what he saw in himself and others, but Swift had an answer: “I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas .....”

Damrosch’s approach is forensic, to the point where some may object that Swift the man is reduced to a summary of evidence for and against (“We murder to dissect”, as Wordsworth was to say.) For me the Swift who emerges from these patient investigations is a more rounded personality, though ultimately as mysterious as before.
Jonathan Swift: His Life and His Worldby Leo Damrosch, Yale, 573pp, £25. To buy this book for £20, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134

Further reading

From A Modest Proposal
“I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed . . . That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune, through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled . . .

Infant’s flesh will be in season throughout the year, but more plentiful in March and a little before and after; for we are told by a grave author, an eminent French physician, that fish being a prolifick dyet, there are more children born in Roman Catholick countries about nine months after Lent, the markets will be more glutted than usual, because the number of Popish infants, and therefore it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the number of Papists among us.” — A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being Aburden to their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick



-"The Plankton: It’s some pathetic chasing on my part of lost youth" - February 25 2013 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/relationships/article3697810.ece


The Plankton: It’s some pathetic chasing on my part of lost youth

The Plankton
Last updated at 12:01AM, February 25 2013
One divorcée describes life at the bottom of the sexual food chain

When I was young, I remember complaining that if I went to a party of, say, 100 people, there would be 60 people in couples, 35 single women (including me) and five “available” men. Two of these would be gay or asexual; two commitment-phobes or emotionally incompetent or obsessed with their mothers or thick as pigshit or famously cruel, or some other complex variant which was a nigh-on terminal bar to romantic possibility. The last one, always the most handsome and attractive, would invariably trap me in a corner and look piercingly into my eyes and tell me how madly he love he was . . .with a woman who had the physical attributes of Brigitte Bardot in her prime, the intellectual ones of Simone de Beauvoir and the heart and soul of a goddess.

I mention this because another younger fellow has hoved into view, handsome and brilliant and talented and I see him a lot and we stay up drinking and smoking (what on earth has come over me!?) and talking all night. Oh, it’s some pathetic chasing on my part of lost youth, and a desire to live a life that at least has some edginess to it, in the absence of any hope of what I really desire once more, or at least think I do, namely long-term married intimacy and companionship.

Anyway, during one of these all-nighters, at about 4am, Dave told me he would ravish me in a moment. I thought, gosh, men are like buses: none for several years, then two (young ones) come along at once! There might be something in this infuriating cliche about giving off the “right vibe” after all.

Well, up to a point. SYT has not “materialised” again although we still see each other and despite Dave’s conviction and bet that he will. And Dave, for all his flattering talk, is not about to ravish me, alas, because he is dedicated to his passion for Mimi, the most perfect and beautiful creature that ever graced the earth. Apparently she shares the passion but doesn’t entirely know it, and so for the moment it is impossible, but were he not to remain true to her, always and for ever, his whole life would be meaningless and a lie.

When he told me he would ravish me all night — though he used a somewhat earthier term — were it not for Mimi, I took it as a compliment and thanked him politely as if he had given me a pot of home-made jam. I meant it too.

Once a plankton, if you’re anything like me, you clutch at any straw going and are preposterously grateful for the merest crumb.



-"The prime secrets of Miss Jean Brodie" - 16 November 2014 http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/article1483811.ece


The prime secrets of Miss Jean Brodie

A vast sealed archive of papers belonging to Muriel Spark may soon offer new glimpses of the author’s tangled love life and the wounding relationship with her son, says Gillian Bowditch
Gillian Bowditch Published: 16 November 2014

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The year was 1974 and Elizabeth Taylor was on the brink of divorcing her fifth husband, Richard Burton, after a rollercoaster decade of marriage. Her box office pulling power was beginning to dwindle, but her celebrity was at its height. She was, simply, Hollywood royalty and had the jewels to prove it.

But Taylor knew when she had been upstaged in the diva stakes. “Dear Mrs Spark,” she wrote to the author Muriel Spark after she landed the role of Lise, alongside Andy Warhol — who was incongruously playing an “English lord” — in the film version of Spark’s disturbing, intense psychological thriller The Driver’s Seat. “Thank you so much for your lovely letter and your enthusiasm at the idea of my playing Lise. I cannot tell you how pleased and flattered I am . . . Richard and I are, and always have been, great fans of your enormous talent . . .”

Taylor was not the only one paying homage to the Edinburgh-born author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Memento Mori. In the seven decades in which Spark obsessively and lucratively ferreted away every scrap relating to her life and work — from library cards and ration books to the A4 notebooks she had shipped from the Edinburgh bookseller James Thin and in which she wrote her original manuscripts in longhand — a succession of world-famous authors and actors lined up to genuflect at the altar of her genius.

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Spark counted author Graham Green as a mentor (Brian Seed)

John Updike and Iris Murdoch revealed themselves to be wide-eyed devotees. “Dear Mrs Spark, just a fan letter from an admirer . . .” wrote Murdoch in an effort to set up a lunch date. The admiration was not entirely reciprocated, with Spark complaining of Murdoch’s lack of observational skills.

“If you do not ring us, we will assume a) you are busy, b) you are out of town, c) you are writing a new novel. In no case will we be offended by a lack of response,” writes Updike seeking a meeting with her.

Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, with whom Spark shared a spiritual affinity having converted to Catholicism in 1954, acted initially as mentors — and in Greene’s case an early benefactor — before becoming lifelong friends.

“Dear Mrs Spark, I am enclosing herewith two Polish translations . . . Would you please read these for me and let me have a report. I am enclosing a cheque for £30 . . .” writes Greene in 1956, two years after Spark’s “nervous breakdown” as a result of dextroamphetamine poisoning. So slender were the author’s means at that time that she was popping slimming pills in part to suppress her appetite and reduce her food bill.

The paranoid delusions she suffered as a result meant that she believed TS Eliot, on whom she was writing a treatise, was sending her threatening messages in code and had infiltrated her friends in disguise in order to rifle through her papers. It was Greene, among others, who came to her rescue, funding her until she recovered and augmenting the donations with the occasional bottle of red wine to soften “cold charity”. She never forgot his kindness and sent him a copy of every book she wrote.

By 1965 Greene’s tone is less formal. “Dear Muriel, we can’t go on using double names,” he writes. He amused her in 1970 by recounting in a letter his response to The Driver’s Seat.

“I enjoyed it thoroughly, beginning it suitably in a restaurant crowded with old American couples on a cruise except for one solitary middle-aged woman who waited for me beside the lift & pounced — but I was warned by your book & saw the headlines American Hostess Found Strangled in Author’s Bed & left her coldly at the door — on the same floor as mine, a sinister Sparkian coincidence, & I finished your novel in my bed — safe.”

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Spark with live-in companion Penelope Jardine (NICK CORNISH)

Waugh, who believed her prayers to be particularly efficacious, told his children to protect her because she was “a saint”. But he was not beyond correcting her syntax, to Spark’s annoyance. “If I write it, it’s grammatical,” she later dictated. She bonded with the lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith over a shared love of a cat called Spider and invited herself to lunch with the poet John Masefield, telling him: “I can be recognised by my green coat, small stature and, as I am told, bewildered air.”

Such letters form the core of an archive that lurches from the rackety days of Spark’s work as general secretary of the “poisonous” Poetry Society in London — the seam from which she mined some of her most vivid characters — to a kind of virtual literary salon through which all the literary greats of the 20th century wafted.

Her first novel, The Comforters, which drew on her breakdown, was not published until she was 39, but the transformation in her fortunes thereafter was as dramatic as anything she ever wrote. By 1965, four years after the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and living in New York, she was earning more than $1m (then about £360,000) a year.

Spark’s private papers are in the process of being acquired by the National Library of Scotland (NLS), a project that began in the 1990s when Spark, who died in 2006 at the age of 88, was able to strike a keen bargain.

“She was very aware of her own value,” says Sally Harrower, curator of modern literary manuscripts at the NLS. “She was a businesswoman as well as a writer. She liked the good things in life and her writing paid for it.”

The NLS is about to start raising the £250,000 needed to purchase and catalogue the final tranche. Before us on a table Harrower has placed four large boxes tantalisingly trussed up with Tuscan string and sent from Italy by Penelope Jardine, Spark’s live-in companion, literary executor and keeper of the flame, whose relationship with Spark was the subject of much speculation. The boxes cannot be opened until they are paid for. Only Jardine knows what they contain.

The race is on to raise the money in time to open the boxes and sift through the secrets inside ahead of the centenary of Spark’s birth in 2018, which is set to see an upsurge of interest in her work. Lois Wolffe, head of development at the NLS, is starting to approach wealthy benefactors who may be given the opportunity to open the sealed boxes in return for a significant donation.

The archive runs to 150ft of material, only a third of which has been catalogued. Thus it remains a potential treasure trove for literary sleuths. Harrower believes there are further letters from Greene in the unopened boxes. But Jardine, whose presence hovers like a ghost at the feast, retains a vice-like grip over the material, dictating everything — from what can be published to how a certain image of Spark must be cropped.

In the thin gruel of 20th-century Scottish writing, Spark’s books are the crème de la crème; rich, nourishing and floating on the top. But Spark herself was more complex, paradoxical and fascinating than her memorable and mesmerising characters, pioneering a form of postwar female literary celebrity that, to her irritation, saw her written about as much for her private life as her fiction.

Like Taylor, Spark loved jewellery, fast cars — a silver Alfa Romeo was purchased with the proceeds of the David Cohen prize — designer clothes and grand parties. She thought nothing of splashing out £400 on a Dior dress in the mid-1960s. The archive contains a selection of glamorous black-and-white photographs. She had a languid beauty in her early days that belied a steely interior. Gore Vidal and Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jackie Onassis, attended the grand soirees she threw in Rome.

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Son Robin with Muriel Spark

“She loved playing with disguise, putting on lipstick, combing her hair or doing it in a different way,” according to Jardine. “It was vanity, yes it was, but it was also a game I think.”

The personal papers reveal she was as manipulative and protective of her own image as any Hollywood star. She had a remarkable sense of her own destiny, knowing from the age of nine that she would write, keeping every copy of the school magazines in which she featured.

One of the most fascinating and masochistic items in the archive is a dispatch book detailing every poem or story she sent for publication. Beside entry after entry she has written the word “rejected”, until a single “got it” for The Seraph and the Zambesi, for which she won The Observer’s Christmas story competition in 1951. It was her first published piece.

In 1967, on Spark’s receipt of the OBE, Pamela Snow, the author and wife of C P Snow, gets up “a rumpus” with “Rebecca [West?], Vera Brittain and John Carter” on Spark’s behalf because the award is not grand enough. “You richly deserve a CBE . . . Of course you’ll be a Dame some day, if you can bear it!” Snow writes.

Spark was not beyond imperious gestures, checking herself into the local hospital in Rome when she needed peace to write — or on one occasion, allegedly, because her fridge was broken — a practice she justified on the grounds that healthy patients were so “much less trouble” for the nuns.

According to her biographer Martin Stannard, in 1963, with America in mourning, she refused to let the critic Frank Kermode cancel a party he was throwing for her on the day after the assassination of President Kennedy on the grounds that it would be “ridiculous” to stop having fun because the president was dead when his death was obviously God’s will.

Sex, death, the supernatural and the sinister are recurring themes in her writing. “I still size people up sexually, as well as in every other way, but it’s not quite so personal,” she said two years before she died. As a teenager she wrote letters to herself from imaginary admirers and tucked them between the sofa cushions for her nosy mother to find. “Dear Colin,” one of her fake responses began, “You were wonderful last night.” But Spark was a poor picker of men.

Her teenage marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark (Solly), a maths teacher 13 years her senior and father of her only son Robin, saw her escape the confines of her Morningside upbringing to live in Southern Rhodesia. But Sydney was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had a tendency towards paranoia and violence. On one occasion he produced a revolver and held her at gunpoint for 20 minutes before shooting her in the foot.

Her relationships in the 1950s with the minor writers Derek Stanford and Howard Sergeant were equally disastrous. “I really don’t know why, but I do pick ’em,” she told me when I interviewed her in Arezzo in 2001. Jardine mooted that it was a form of self- protection and Spark agreed: “I don’t really want to be married. I suppose.”

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Patricia Highsmith was also a friend of Muriel Spark (PICTURE BOX)

There was no lack of proposals for a neat, intelligent redhead in receipt of a small fortune and a taste in good frocks. “I could have got married again if I’d put my mind to it,” she said. “I’ve shared the last 30 years of my life with Penelope and I often feel I’ve messed up her chances of marriage.”

Spark always denied there was a sexual side to her relationship with Jardine, although in Bang-Bang You’re Dead, one of her most disturbing but revealing short stories, the narrator ruminates over her lack of interest in sex and wonders if she has a “suppressed tendency towards women”, a notion she rejects in favour of a realisation of her asexuality. But, as Harrower observes, her relationship with Jardine was her most fulfilling.

“Penelope gave her the space to write, which was something she craved all her life, and maybe that was why the relationships with men didn’t work out so well,” she says. “They wanted more of her than she could give.”

But despite the flaky lovers and the storing up of grudges against former friends whom she felt betrayed her or did not appreciate her enough, it is her relationship with her son which left lasting wounds. She left him in Africa for 18 months when she returned home and then saw him only occasionally. Spark was living in London trying to make a name for herself as a poet and Robin was brought up in Edinburgh by her parents. The seeds of a tragic relationship had been sown.

By the time she died, mother and son were wholly estranged, ostensibly because of a row about identity and origins. Robin is an Orthodox Jew and wanted to prove that his mother was “a full Jew” not the “gentile Jewess” she claimed. It was obtuse and difficult for outsiders to understand, but the perfect metaphor for their relationship. Spark could no more be a full mother to Robin in an emotional sense than she could be a full Jew. There seemed to be something missing from her genetic make-up.

“Looking back, I often wonder if I could have done more, but I don’t really, deeply think I could,” she told me. “I don’t think giving up any of my creative work would have helped him at all. Far from it. I gave up worrying about it when he got to be 40. I just thought, I can’t take this from a man of 40.”

By far the saddest part of the archive are the letters from Robin to his mother, which she donated rather than sold to the library, but few have set eyes on them. They cannot be viewed without joint permission from him and Spark’s literary estate, which for the time being means Jardine.

“They really worked at retaining a mother-son relationship over distance and time,” says Harrower, who has read the letters. “She sent gifts. She wrote. He sent gifts to her. She is trying to encourage and support him as much as she can without actually being there.”

But as time went on, the bitterness grew and the tension escalated. Spark failed to invite Robin to Buckingham Palace when she was awarded her OBE. He continually disappointed her. She returned his letters unopened and cut him out of her will, leaving everything to Jardine. “It’s a sad story, really,” says Harrower.

A control freak to the end, Spark’s most intimate and revealing letters are the ones she wanted nobody to read. Not even she could prevent the final chapter in a glittering, caustic, witty and extraordinary life ending on a tragic but all too human note.

@GillianBowditch

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-"Removing the veil" - April 25 2015 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article4417297.ece


Removing the veil

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Mona Eltahawy
Last updated at 6:17PM, April 25 2015

When she moved from Britain to Saudi Arabia as a teenager, Mona Eltahawy began wearing a hijab in order to avoid being harassed by men. Here she talks about why, at 25, she decided to stop wearing it

Nothing prepared me for Saudi Arabia. I was born in Egypt, but my family left for London when I was seven years old. After almost eight years in the UK, we moved to Saudi Arabia in 1982. Both my parents, Egyptians who had earned PhDs in medicine in London, had found jobs in Jeddah, teaching medical students and technicians clinical microbiology. The campuses were segregated. My mother taught the women on the female campus, and my father taught the men on the male campus. When an instructor of the same gender wasn’t available, the classes were taught via closed-circuit television, and the students would have to ask questions using telephone sets. My mother, who had been the breadwinner of the family for our last year in the United Kingdom, when we lived in Glasgow, now found that she could not legally drive. We became dependent on my father to take us everywhere. As we waited for our new car to be delivered, we relied on gypsy cabs (unlicensed taxis) and public buses. On the buses, we would buy our ticket from the driver, and then my mother and I would make our way to the back two rows (four if we were lucky) designated for women.

It felt as though we’d moved to another planet whose inhabitants wished women did not exist. I lived in this surreal atmosphere for six years. In this world, women, no matter how young or how old, are required to have a male guardian – a father, a brother, or even a son – and can do nothing without this guardian’s permission. They cannot travel, open a bank account, apply for a job, or even get medical treatment without a man’s stamp of approval. I watched all this with a mounting sense of horror and confusion.
I would mention voting rights, but when I lived in Saudi Arabia, no one could vote. King Abdullah had said women will be allowed to vote and run for office in the 2015 elections, but it remains to be seen if clerics – such as the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who believes that women’s involvement in politics “will open the door to evil” – will scuttle that promise as they did in 2009, when only men were enfranchised in Saudi Arabia’s first ever municipal elections.

When I encountered this country aged 15, I was traumatised into feminism – there’s no other way to describe it – because to be a female in Saudi Arabia is to be the walking embodiment of sin. The country follows an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam known alternatively as Wahhabism or Salafism, the former associated more directly with the kingdom, and the latter, austere form of Islam with those who live outside Saudi Arabia. The obsession with controlling women and our bodies often stems from the suspicion that, without restraints, women are just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability. Yet while clerics busy themselves suppressing female desire, it is the men who can’t control themselves. In too many countries in the region, sexual harassment is epidemic.
It was soon after my family arrived in Saudi Arabia that I first wanted to wear a headscarf. I was 15 years old. Religion was everywhere. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – the official Kafkaesque title of the morality police, also called the Mutaween or the Haya’ – badgered shopkeepers and shoppers alike to attend prayers, and chased after women, urging them to cover up. I needed something to defend myself from men’s roving eyes and hands, and I thought the hijab, a form of dress that covers everything but the face and hands, would. When I told my parents of my decision, they said I was too young to start wearing the hijab and suggested I wait a year or so.

Less than a month after we arrived in Jeddah, we went on haj, or pilgrimage. Up until then, Mecca, the birthplace of Islam and the site of the Ka’aba, the cubical structure towards which Muslims pray five times a day, was a place I’d seen only in pictures hanging on the living room walls of family and friends. This trip was the first time I’d worn any kind of veil outside prayer time. I looked like a nun dressed in my white pilgrimage clothes.

One of the rituals of the pilgrimage is tawwaf: circling the Ka’aba in order to pay respect to this sacred place and signal your intention to perform the haj. As I slowly walked around it, reciting prayers along with my family, a moment of great significance, I felt a hand on my bottom. I had never before been touched on that part of my body (or anywhere else, for that matter) by a man. I could not run, and even if I had possessed the courage, I could not turn around to confront the man who was groping me because the space was so crowded.

I could not put into words what was happening to me. I could not understand how, at this holiest of holy places, the place we all turned to when we prayed, someone could think to stick his hand on my bottom and to keep it there until I managed to squirm away. He was persistent. Whenever I broke free, he persisted in groping me.

I burst into tears, because that’s all I could do. I couldn’t tell my parents the truth; I told them the crowds were getting to me. We went up to an inner level of the Grand Mosque, one storey up, to complete our tawwaf. Then we returned to the lower level and the Ka’aba once more to kiss the black stone, another ritual of the pilgrimage.

My mother and I had to wait for the women’s turn. A Saudi policeman who was standing there signalled to the men to wait while we kissed the stone. As I bent toward the stone, the policeman surreptitiously groped my breast. Surreptitiously: I came to learn during my years in Saudi Arabia and then in Egypt that this was how men did it. You ended up questioning your own sense of having been violated; did fingers actually poke through the underside of your seat on a bus or lightly brush against your behind as the man to which those fingers belonged looked away?

It took me years before I could talk about being groped during haj. Even now, when I do, I get accused of making it up. Yet several women have told me of similar violations as they performed holy rituals.

One evening, back in Jeddah, we took a cab for our weekly shopping trip. The young man who dropped us off at the Jeddah mall insisted on waiting so he could take us back home.
“Uncle, I want to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage,” the driver, who was in his twenties, told my dad, who sat next to him in the passenger seat on our ride home.
“But she’s 15.”
My mother, brother, and I were in the backseat trying very hard not to laugh.
“That’s OK. I still want to marry her.”
“In our family, no one gets married until they finish university, my son.”

We laughed a bit more when we got home, but the “She’s 15,” followed by “That’s OK, I still want to marry her” was not the stuff of humour. Soon after, a much older man, who caught me browsing the noticeboard in a supermarket while my parents were paying for their purchases, asked me if I was alone. After I told my parents what had happened, I was not allowed to go anywhere alone again. My brother had to be with me at all times – an early lesson in restricting a woman’s freedom of movement in the name of protection.

By the time we went for our second haj, a year later, my mind was ready to surrender and my body was desperate for invisibility. It felt as if everything was haram (prohibited) in Saudi Arabia. I was descending into my first of several depressions; I felt I was losing my mind. I didn’t talk to anyone about how I felt or get any help. I struck a deal with God: they keep saying a good Muslim woman covers her hair, so I’ll cover my hair if you save my mind. I decided to wear the veil, and this time my parents accepted my decision. But the hijab did not make me invisible. I had decided to hide my body the way 16-year-old girls, newly aware of male attention, sometimes take refuge in baggy clothing. Still, the garments I wore did not protect my body from wandering fingers and hands. If I were to use paint to indicate the places where my body was touched, groped or grabbed, even while wearing the hijab, my torso, back and front, would be covered with colour.

Despite my depression, I was doing well at a school for Muslim expats in Jeddah. I wrote an essay about the ubiquity of women’s head coverings across different faiths, which argued it was unfair to associate the veil exclusively with Islam. What about nuns, or ultra-Orthodox Jewish women? I was keen to defend my commitment to the headscarf, and to connect to other religions the notion of modesty to which I had submitted.

I have never written before about my experience of either wearing or giving up the headscarf. It’s always been a difficult subject, and for many of the years following my decision to stop wearing a headscarf, I was so ashamed that I preferred not even to mention to new acquaintances that there was a time when I wore the hijab.

Hijab is an Arabic word meaning “barrier” or “partition,” but it has come to represent complex principles of modesty and dress. The interpretation of the Koran’s instructions on modesty is supported with Hadith literature in which Muhammad is said to have instructed women to cover all of their body except for the face and hands. But veiling has never and will never be as simple as these passages seem to suggest.

There are various explanations for why women veil themselves. Some do it out of piety, believing that the Koran mandates this expression of modesty. Others do it because they want to be visibly identifiable as “Muslim”, and for them a form of veiling is central to that identity. For some women, the veil is a way to avoid expensive fashion trends and visits to the hair salon. For others, it is a way to be left alone and afforded a bit more freedom to move about in a public space that has become increasingly male-dominated.

In recent decades, as veiling became more prevalent throughout the Arab world, the pressure on women who were not veiled began to increase, and more women took on the veil to avoid being harassed on the streets – in a 2007 article The New York Times claimed that up to 90 per cent of Muslim women in Egypt wear some kind of headscarf. Some women fought their families for the right to veil, while others were forced to veil by their families. For yet others, it was a way to rebel against the regime or the West.

So the act of wearing the hijab is far from simple. It is burdened with meanings: oppressed woman, pure woman, conservative woman, strong woman, asexual woman, uptight woman, liberated woman. I chose to wear the hijab at the age of 16 and chose to stop wearing it when I was 25.

It is no exaggeration to say that the hijab has consumed a large portion of my intellectual and emotional energy since I first put on a headscarf. I might have stopped wearing one, but I never stopped wrestling with what veiling means for Muslim women.

I wore a headscarf for nine years. It took me eight years to take it off. My escape route was to emphasize the idea of “choice”. If a woman had a right to wear a miniskirt, surely I had the right to choose my headscarf. My choice was a sign of my independence of mind. Surely, to choose to wear what I wanted was an assertion of my feminism. I was to learn that choosing to wear the hijab is much easier than choosing to take it off.

When I returned to Egypt at 21 to study journalism at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the hijab became a full-time job, the duties of which I had not anticipated. Back then, in 1988, before neon-pink and orange hijabs and skinny jeans, there were more fixed ideas about what a woman in a hijab could and could not do. The strange combination that I represented complicated that equation: an Egyptian woman with a very English accent and broken Arabic, who danced along to music on campus in her hijab. Back then, that was not a comfortable combination. But trying to persuade people I could make it work became an obsession.

I’d think to myself, I can’t let the team down. What will people think about Muslims if I take my headscarf off after all I’ve said and done to prove you can wear one and still be an extrovert and a feminist?

One day, I interviewed a veteran journalist who was doing exactly what I aspired to do: using her writing to fight for women’s equality. “Why are you covering your hair?” she asked me. “Can’t you see you’re destroying everything we’ve worked so hard for?”
At the time, I could not.

“But I’ve chosen to dress like this,” I replied. What finally helped me part ways with the hijab was an anecdote my mother relayed from a conversation about me she’d had with a doctor, a colleague of my father’s. It helped put to rest my conflict over that word, choice. The doctor, asking after my brother and me, wondered if I was married. When my mother told him I wasn’t, he replied – as she conveyed to me – “Don’t worry, she wears a headscarf. She’ll find a husband.” Just like that, a piece of cloth had superseded me.

Then I understood, as this man’s patronising confidence in my scarf had shown, that I wasn’t the Hijab Poster Girl I thought I was. I was just a hijab.

When I so quickly replied, “But I’ve chosen to dress like this,” I had not considered men, such as that doctor, for whom my choice was irrelevant (just as my choice was irrelevant to the journalist). I realised the journalist and the doctor were on opposite sides, and I knew I did not want to be on the doctor’s side.

The week I decided to stop wearing a headscarf, I had just finished my graduate studies in journalism at AUC. You could count on maybe two hands the number of women in headscarves at my university during the time I studied there, from 1988 to 1992. In those years, I was in the headscarf-wearing minority off campus as well.

My two biggest challenges were telling my family, who had pressured me to keep the headscarf on during those eight years of struggle, and getting a bad haircut. I did not want anyone to think I’d taken it off for vanity’s sake. At the time I did not wear any make-up, did not pluck my eyebrows and rejected “femininity” with a passion.

Those final days of my struggle with the headscarf took place during a heatwave, and I used the weather as an excuse to hide at home for a few days. I finally forced myself to go to AUC, my friends, both male and female, were split between the “You look so much better!” camp and the “What have you done? You’ve made us look so bad!” camp.

I felt guilty for years. I assuaged it somewhat by continuing to wear my old hijab-appropriate clothes, minus the headscarf. I was so ashamed that I’d taken it off that I would never tell new acquaintances that I used to wear the hijab. I didn’t wear make-up, my hair remained short, and I had to reckon with a new body consciousness. Wearing the hijab for nine years had been my way of trying to hide from men, but in the end it had only hidden my body from myself.

I have heard from several women in Egypt who stopped wearing the headscarf or the niqab after the revolution that began in January 2011. I was living in the United States then [having married (briefly) an American and become an American citizen in 2011]. I did not have enough money to fly back to Egypt to join the hundreds of thousands who marched on Tahrir Square. But I returned in November 2011 to take part in the subsequent protests in Mahamed Mahmoud Street. During the five days of clashes that occurred between demonstrators trying to protect Tahrir Square and the soldiers and police, I was sexually assaulted by security forces – beaten so severely that my left arm and right hand were broken – and detained, first by the Ministry of the Interior and then by military intelligence, for 12 hours, two of which I spent blindfolded. Only by virtue of a borrowed mobile phone was I able to send an alert on Twitter about my situation. At least 12 other women were subjected to various forms of sexual assault during the protest in which riot police attacked me. None of them has spoken publicly about her ordeal, likely due to shame or family pressure. At first, I spoke out in order to expose and shame not just the men who’d assaulted me but also the regime that had trained them to do so.

When the riot police stormed the street on the second night, I ended up alone in an abandoned shop. Four or five police surrounded me and started beating me with nightsticks. I raised my arms to protect my head and they broke my left arm and my right hand in two places. I had hands all over my body, on my breasts – I was literally taking hands out of my trousers. They were calling me a whore. Pulling my hair. They dragged me to the interior ministry past men in plain clothes. Their eyes, dead to my assault.

Divide and conquer takes on a new meaning when you tug on the jacket of the supervising officer who, as he witnesses his men groping every part of your body, assures you nonetheless that you are safe because he will protect you. Then, after he says he will protect you, in the very next breath he threatens you with gang rape by another group of his men, amassed close by and gesticulating at you. It was an older man, from the military, who ended it, shouting, “Get her out.” I thought that meant let me go but it would be 12 hours – 6 hours being interrogated in an office at the interior ministry and 6 hours at the military intelligence building – before I was released and finally received medical help.

The details of what happened to me mattered little to the triage nurse in the emergency department of the private hospital where, about 16 hours after riot police had broken my arms and sexually assaulted me, I was trying to get medical care.
“How could you let them do that to you? Why didn’t you resist?”

She might as well have asked me where my shame was. How could I “let” riot police sexually assault me, and how could I so brazenly describe what had happened to me? It had been many years since I was a virgin, but she was chiding me for my lack of moral virginity, if you will. A good virgin, a good moral virgin, would have “saved” herself from those men’s hands; a good moral virgin would not have been there on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in the first place. Finally, a good moral virgin would not have so openly described her sexual assault.

“When you’re surrounded by four or five men from the riot police, and they’re beating you with sticks, there isn’t much ‘resisting’ you can do,” I explained to the nurse.
––––––––––
I actually “resisted” sex for a long time – too long, I believe when I look back now. I guarded my hymen like a good virgin until I was 29.

Just as it had taken me eight years to take off my hijab, it took me a long time to overcome all that I had been taught about sex and what I should and should not do with my body. Unlearning cultural and religious lessons and taboos can involve a radical turning against all that you have been taught.

I had spent most of my twenties working hard at building a journalism career. Channelling all my energies into work was also a convenient way to avoid marriage, which at the time was the only way I could conceive of having sex. I had avoided marriage because I feared I would not have the strength to fight the religious and cultural disadvantages with which I felt a wife must wrestle.

By the age of 28, I was fed up with waiting. I met an Egyptian man I was attracted to and who would become my first sexual partner. I asked him out; he accepted, and we began to date. He was a few years younger than me and was not a virgin. He was patient. Just after my 29th birthday, we finally had intercourse. He went on to propose several times. Each time I would say yes, then renege.
Not long after I broke up with that first lover, I married a white American. Those turbulent two years of marriage also sealed for me the issue of children. I learnt that I did not want any. I am happy to be child-free. I do wonder, sometimes, if I had had a daughter, how I would have brought her up. Would I have raised my daughter to disobey?

I’m 47 now, living and working in Cairo. But sexual guilt still lingers – I fought hard to write this, knowing my family will read it and disapprove, but this is my revolution.



-Just a couple brief mention related to Hitler (which isn't particularly new) in "Cheltenham diary: seen and heard at the literature festival" - October 5 2014 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/cheltenham-festival/article4227565.eceand column "The good wife" 26 October 2014 http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/style/article1473355.ece


Cheltenham diary: seen and heard at the literature festival
Fiona Wilson, Jack Malvern
October 5 2014

Come back daily for an update of gossip from the year’s most vibrant books festival

Sex between Hitler and Eva Braun probably happened without them touching each other or even taking off their clothes, according to Martin Amis. Speaking about his new Nazi-themed novel Zone of Interest, Amis said that while the truth about Hitler’s sexuality was unknown, he believed that the Nazi leader was “so fanatical about cleanliness” and such an asexual person that he would keep Braun at arm’s length and achieve an orgasm just by watching her lift her skirt.



Victoria’s secret
Another week, another hysterical theory about Hitler’s penis. According to the writer Martin Amis, the “asexual” Nazi leader could only perform the act “fully clothed” after “fortifying his underpants with clean serviettes and napkins”. Eva Braun would keep “a safe distance” before she “lifted her skirt”, and then “there would be some sort of soggy climax on Hitler’s part and that would be that”. I’m sorry, but isn’t this exactly how every member of the Tory cabinet behaves, or even every white British male? Hitler does not have a monopoly on “sogginess” or “napkins” or “skirt-lifting”, any more than he has a monopoly on vegetarianism or crap dogs. No: the pervert of the week is clearly Queen Victoria, whose knickers recently went for more than £6,000 at auction. She once gifted the enormous pants to a member of the royal household “in gratitude for loyal service”. I mean, what?



- "asexual" used in an article on yoga, to explain the attitude the teacher should have: "Can I — or Pippa — handle hands-on yoga?" - January 13 2015 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/diet-fitness/article4321458.ece


Can I — or Pippa — handle hands-on yoga?

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Helen Rumbelow
Last updated at 12:01AM, January 13 2015

With Pippa Middleton reportedly seen in his yoga classes, Stewart Gilchrist’s hands-on approach is attracting attention
There is an abundance of etiquette guides that attempt to apply British politesse to modern situations, but nothing so far on coping with the new and increasingly popular style of yoga: one where the teacher routinely applies his body to your upturned rump or bestrides you to yank your lower regions apart with the force and authority of an emergency obstetrician. These situations are not covered by Debretts.

This need is more urgent than ever with the news that Pippa Middleton, sister of our future queen, has been sighted in the class of Stewart Gilchrist, one of London’s most popular yoga teachers and also, according to reviews, one of the most “hands on”. With his fierce Scottish accent and flowing white beard Gilchrist is the Billy Connolly of yoga.

But Pippa, do not be afraid of this euphemism “hands on”. We both know what that means: “body on”. I have enjoyed years of classes in Ashtanga yoga, where “adjustments” from the teacher may stretch out your hamstrings but knot your British inhibitions up into a tight ball. I catch up with Gilchrist between classes: he teaches about 500 people a week in groups of up to 70 (he has assistants that allow everyone to get personal attention).

I share with him my and, I’m only imagining, Pippa’s problem. Namely: you signed up to yoga because you wanted to de-stress and, Pippa, as stressful as it is to own the world’s most coveted bottom, imagine how much more stressful it is to be the custodian of my rear when there is just so much more of it. Anyway, you are there to relax when your yoga teacher folds themselves on your haunches, inhaling deeply and noisily while sending every personal space alarm in your head jangling. Just when you are determinedly not deciding whether the sweat is yours or theirs, the teacher applies a burst of pressure. An involuntarily grunt breaks the silence of the class. Was that you? You hadn’t expected that. How is your typical Brit supposed to cope? “It is an un-English thing,” says Gilchrist, “but so is mud-wrestling and that happens at most pop festivals.”

Gilchrist explains that yoga has been associated with hands-on support from teachers since the founding of the Ashtanga method in India after the Second World War. In India, he said, teachers are far more confident of pulling and pushing any student into position and it is a vital part of the training of that style of yoga teacher. “In India they adjust much more — my teacher in India was severe — but in America, where I’ve taught, you don’t adjust, or you only do so if you ask, ‘Do you mind if I adjust you?’ ” says Gilchrist.

This actually makes Britain a more relaxed yoga environment than America, where people are both more litigious and worried about both injury and sexual impropriety. Some studios in America even offer a disc called a Flip-Chip you put by a yoga mat to signal whether you are open to adjustment. Gilchrist says that in this country most teachers in yoga classes work on instinct to determine how far they can help someone to stretch, unless expressly told not to, “although it’s not uncommon to ask, ‘Do you mind?’ ”

This moves me on to an issue that makes me feel disappointingly unevolved. On more than one occasion I have found the teacher leaning on me in reverse, their head dangling between my legs like a plumber peering under the sink, and realised I have never been so intimate with another human as this stranger I just paid £10 for the pleasure. When the teacher is a woman it feels unnerving; when it is a male teacher, in classes that are typically mostly female, the sexual politics unavoidably swirl. This can feel like a congregation of 19th-century women overly eager for the blessings of the vicar, except in Lycra hot pants.

“A good teacher is asexual when they are teaching,” Gilchrist says. “I’m as asexual as an osteopath or a chiropractor. I can think of a large number of occupations who have more hand-on contact that the brief adjustments of a yoga teacher.”

Finally, and after spending some time talking to Gilchrist, I can anticipate the answer before I ask it: is Pippa a regular student? “I don’t really know who she is,” says Gilchrist. “I’m not really interested in that sort of stuff. I know who she is as of this morning, when my girlfriend told me about it, but I teach so many people. I treat everyone the same.”



-Theatre review: "Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre, NW3" - December 18 2014 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/stage/theatre/article4300112.ece


Tiger Country at Hampstead Theatre, NW3

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Sam Marlowe
Published at 12:01AM, December 18 2014

“Try not to care so much.” That’s the most memorable piece of advice given to a rookie doctor in Nina Raine’s intense, frenetic drama. Set in an NHS hospital during the run-up to Christmas, Raine’s own production, first seen in 2011, is rich in atmosphere and meticulously researched detail. It’s a whirling cacophony of stress and suffering, of ambition frustrated and dedication viciously undercut by scant resources, workplace rivalries and bureaucratic idiocies.

Decisions — always influenced by systemic limitations, often based on little more than a hunch — are naturally a matter of life and death. This is a gripping anatomy of an institution where crisis is the norm and chaos permanently threatens, but Raine gives her characters little room to breathe and the wider political context in which the hospital operates remains a blur.

The traverse staging offsets graphic scenes of surgery with break-room banter, delicate patient consultations and surreal choreographed linking sequences in which beds whizz in and out and medics skate by on wheeled drip stands. Ruth Everett is Emily, newly arrived in A&E, whose passion falters in the face of bitterly compromised reality, while Indira Varma’s Vashti, an Asian registrar dubbed by a disgruntled subordinate “an asexual surgical bitch”, battles the double whammy of sexism and racism in her bid to become a consultant.

Detached professionalism is stretched to the limit when a cardiologist becomes a patient and Vashti finds a relative on the ward deteriorating rapidly owing to staff errors. The impact of the job on mental health and personal lives is sharply emphasised.

Raine’s tone is self-consciously soapy — there’s even an elderly medical-drama actor on an oncology ward — and she never quite justifies her appropriation of that overfamiliar TV format by putting enough additional flesh on its bones. Emily’s romance with a colleague is clichéd and the dialogue is sometimes stilted. Still, a hurtling, galvanising energy ensures this vivid portrayal of an emotive and essential service retains a strong pulse.



-"The Making of Markova by Tina Sutton" September 13 2014 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/non-fiction/article4201144.ece


The Making of Markova by Tina Sutton

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Debra Craine
Published at 12:18AM, September 13 2014

All biographers strive to make their subjects as interesting as possible. In her new biography of the British ballerina Alicia Markova, who died in 2004 at the age of 94, Tina Sutton didn’t have to try too hard — Markova’s life was quite simply amazing.

Ask anyone to name the most famous British ballerina in history and most of them will cite Margot Fonteyn, but Markova got there first. She was only 14 when she was hired by Sergei Diaghilev in 1925 to join the Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo, then the most famous dance company in the world. After he died in 1929, she forged a career in Britain, using her new celebrity to help to launch the fledgling Vic-Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) and, many years later, co-founding what would become English National Ballet.

Dame Alicia was a relentless globetrotter who danced well into her fifties; an international icon who helped to popularise the nascent art form of ballet across Britain and — especially during the Second World War — across North America. She was a consummately ethereal Giselle and a sparkling Sugar Plum Fairy, while she created roles for some of the 20th century’s most important choreographers, including Frederick Ashton, Léonide Massine and George Balanchine. All of this is charted exhaustively in Sutton’s hefty biography.

A tiny north London Jewish girl (she never weighed more than 7st), Markova possessed a powerful technical facility and exotic dark looks and was often compared with Anna Pavlova, to whom she bore an uncanny resemblance (and whom she idolised). At the Ballets Russes, this shy and obedient little English girl worked hideously long hours, was separated from her beloved mother and sisters, and when she wasn’t performing or rehearsing was kept a virtual prisoner in a cramped Monte Carlo flat by a mentally unstable governess.

Yet Markova was educated by some of the greatest artistic minds of the age. She took ballet class with Cecchetti, learnt about music from Stravinsky, studied art appreciation with Matisse, got fashion advice from Coco Chanel, and was moulded by Balanchine’s groundbreaking modernist choreography. No school in the world could have given her that and she, in turn, was generous about giving back to ballet the benefit of her privileged experience.

She was anything but a snob about her art form, wanting to bring it to the masses both in Britain and America. She had no qualms about performing in arenas and school gymnasia, in cinemas between film showings or in panto. She was one of the first British artists to see the value of television in the 1930s, and throughout her life was an eloquent — and elegant — spokesman for the dance.

Sutton, an American arts and fashion writer, had access to the ballerina’s personal archive of letters, diaries, theatre programmes, newspaper cuttings and transcriptions of radio interviews, held by the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Centre at Boston University. Using this treasure trove of material, Sutton paints a picture of a woman who was kind, considerate and passionate about her art, but also a woman who was aloof, lonely, seriously depressed and occasionally resentful of having to support her siblings and pander to her colleagues’ unreasonable demands. She felt unappreciated and taken for granted, a person who gave all and received less in return. Sutton takes such great pains to be on her subject’s side, to whitewash the infelicities, that The Making of Markova has a whiff of hagiography about it.

There is little of the dancer’s private life; indeed only at the end does Sutton suggest there might have been a string of love affairs, none of which lasted. During the war Markova carried on a long-distance romance with Stanley Burton (he was in Britain, she was across the Atlantic), but he went on to marry someone else (and then promptly returned her love letters, a gift to posterity). She never married, never had children, and the impression we get is that she was an asexual creature with a nun-like devotion to her career.

This is a biography for balletomanes, who will gain most from its historical insight and its backstage anecdotes. Such as the time when Markova received a written death threat — probably from a rival ballerina — and the impresario Sol Hurok was forced to hire detectives dressed as stagehands to protect his star. Her male stage partners were no less dangerous: the poisonous Serge Lifar fractured her foot, very likely on purpose; Anton Dolin — her longstanding dancing partner — often savagely betrayed her loyalty.

What is less satisfying in this hefty biography is the lack of more critical and insightful personal analysis. It’s clear from the title that Sutton is not promising a comprehensive examination of Markova’s life outside ballet, yet it’s still tempting to want one.

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Way older (after The New Scientist's boom of October 2004) but quite on topic:

-"In the professional press" November 2 2004 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/publicsector/article1835013.ece

In the professional press

Published at 12:00AM, November 2 2004

TRIPLING the number of members in one week is something most groups and charities could only dream about. But it actually happened to the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (Aven). An article in the New Scientist produced a huge amount of interest and the group was swamped with new members, reports Third Sector (Oct 27). The article drew attention to the finding that 3 per cent of people questioned for a survey in the UK had no desire for sex. The resulting coverage in the national newspapers threw Aven, which raises awareness of people who identify themselves as asexual, or lacking the urge to have sex, into the limelight. The 250 to 300 new members have prompted the organisation to revamp its website and organise its first convention early next year.

People Management (Oct 28) also concerns itself with minority groups, but from an employer’s perspective. It carries an article on the new recruitment strategy of Royal Mail. It has joined with employment and disability groups to find new recruits among people with learning or physical disabilities, former service personnel and homeless people. “This is about achieving a psychological contract,” says Martin Blake, the head of social responsibility at Royal Mail Group . . .

. . . which makes about as much sense as the speech of Yorkshire patients to their Austrian GPs. In fact, the doctors have been having such trouble with understanding their patients’ gripes and “ ‘ey ups” that they appealed to their primary care trust for help. Doncaster West PCT duly obliged by compiling a glossary of terms to avoid crossed wires and embarrassment in the consulting room, says GP (Oct 29).

Getting the wrong end of the stick is the subject of a rather more serious article in Community Care (Oct 28). It highlights a worrying tendency for children with Asperger’s syndrome to be misdiagnosed as being subjects of abuse. Some of the symptoms are the same — dislike of close physical contact, low self-esteem, delay in language or motor development — and some social workers without experience of Asperger’s and related conditions may not recognise it. An opinion piece in the magazine blames a general lack of understanding and awareness of autistic spectrum disorders and the assumption that all people with autism act in the same way.

Lack of understanding and awareness of the lessons to be learnt from the towns built since the 1950s are threatening the Government’s current policies on creating new communities. Regeneration & Renewal (Oct 29) highlights the successes and failures of new towns such as Skelmersdale, Peterborough and Milton Keynes. It points out some obvious failings: low-density housing makes it difficult to sustain local transport and community links in some new towns; “local roads in Skelmersdale lack any pavements for pedestrians”; and most new towns are more deprived than the surrounding area. However, ministers should take note of community-building lessons to be learnt. New residents, for example, were welcomed by committees and linked up with local services and groups. This, it is claimed, did a lot to reduce the sense of isolation that people felt moving into a new area.

-Advice column: "Sex with Dr Thomas Stuttaford and Suzi Godson" April 23 2005 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/article1787949.ece

Sex with Dr Thomas Stuttaford and Suzi Godson

Published at 12:00AM, April 23 2005

I’m a man who’s had chronic eczema all his adult life. As a result, I’ve always avoided sex and, though I’m nearly 40, I’m still a virgin. Recently, my condition has improved but I feel it may be too late for a love life. Can you live a full life without sex?

Many people have a full and happy life without sexual partners. Photographs of millions of people, paying tribute to the late Pope and celebrating his life, confirm this. Recently, there has been much discussion about people (asexuals) who say they have no feelings of attraction either to those of their own or the opposite sex. They also claim to have a full life and not to feel the absence of sex.

However, it is difficult to assess the significance of your eczema in your reticence to have sex without knowing the extent of the skin lesions, and which parts of the body were affected. It would also be interesting to know what precipitated the eczema. And if either your treatment or your lifestyle changed before the eczema went into remission.

Forty is not too late to find a partner and although virginity at your age is now unusual, in stricter and more religious times it wasn’t. Fifty years ago it was common to meet adult men who were virgin at your age. In unmarried women of middle age and older, the majority were virginal. But, for those who began their sex life late, once they had crossed that bridge there was no return and they seemed to relish it.

Most doctors of my age remember embarrassed couples consulting them because they were unaware of the basic mechanics of sexual intercourse.It now seems incredible that some people thought that the anus was the reproductive orifice and wondered why they weren’t celebrating a pregnancy. One bemused pair had been doing their best with the umbilicus (belly button). Similarly, about 40 years ago I was called to a recently married pair of Cambridge postgraduate students. They had hired a boat on the Broads for their honeymoon but the marriage was unconsummated because they didn’t know what went where. I had to explain, with the aid of diagrams, the basic facts of life.

You have to ask yourself why you have allowed eczema to rule your existence. Eczema can often be absolute hell: the irritation is distressing, embarrassing and unsightly. However, if your libido and the rest of your life were in other ways fulfilling, and you can express your feelings and personality, it shouldn’t have proved an insurmountable obstacle.

Many people, both men and women, have co-dependent tendencies, that is to say they seek to be needed and feel fulfilled only when they are. Some women might find your neediness a bonus.

Research has shown that disabilities are not necessarily a sexual turn-off. Women, for example, with a congenitally dislocated hip — a condition now rarely seen as it is corrected after birth but one that used to cause considerable disability and an ungainly walk — were statistically more likely to have a boyfriend and to marry than normal women.

If you decide not to seek sexual experiences, it would be a good idea to extend your social interests; but you may find that nature will take its course. If not, your life, even if not as full as that of the late Pope, may still be rewarding.

On a logical basis, it is difficult not to conclude that sex is something best avoided. Those who pass on penetration don’t have to worry about sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy, infidelity, impotence, premature ejaculation — not to mention who sleeps on the wet patch. They avoid potential rejection and save themselves the cost of dates, mini-breaks, wedding rings, relationship counselling and divorce settlements. In fact, arguably, celibacy has so many advantages that its practitioners ought to be entitled to a life-insurance discount.

However, in answer to your question, although a life without sex is feasible and less risky, I’m not sure it could ever be described as “full”. Relationships are invariably a roller-coaster of love, hate, obsession and indifference. But life without the highs and lows of lust and loathing is just a long, flat and predictable path to a final destination. And what about the desire to procreate? As Samuel Johnson said: “Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures.” So I think it is terrific that you feel ready to join the fray.

However, I am worried that the visibility of your skin condition will make forming romantic attachments difficult for you. Given the shortage of Florence Nightingales, finding a partner who understands your condition and is sympathetic during flare-ups might prove both challenging and demoralising.

Fortunately, help is at hand. The National Eczema Society (NES) runs local support groups around the country and they have suggested that you give them a call on 0870 2413604 so they can put you in touch with a branch near your home. These are legitimate gatherings where eczema, dermatitis and sensitive skin sufferers share their experiences (ie, not an opportunity to pull). But getting out and meeting people is the first step to broadening your social horizons, and you are bound to be less self-conscious if you are mixing with people who know what you’ve been through.

You might also want to investigate Outsiders, a members-only group that offers isolated people with social and physical disabilities the chance to meet new friends. One of their first success stories was a marriage between a girl with mild learning difficulties and a teacher with chronic eczema. Outsider runs monthly events up and down the country and they also run a Sex and Disability Helpline (0707 4993527; www.outsiders.org.uk). Once you join you will be sent a list of the other 600 members and their contact details.

Unfortunately, because women with disabilities tend to be less assertive and are often more controlled by their parents, the number of female participants is never as high as the number of males. I am mentioning this in the hope that female readers with social or physical disabilities will decide to abandon the long, flat and predictable path and chance a fling on the rollercoaster of love. With you.

-Advice column: "Boys are just so boring..." July 8 2006 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/health/article1789216.ece

Boys are just so boring...

Published at 12:00AM, July 8 2006

Sex advice from Dr Thomas Stuttaford and Suzi Godson

Q: ‘My daughter is 16 and has no interest in boys. I’ve tried to introduce her to sons of friends but she refuses to meet them. Should I worry?’

Dr Thomas Stuttaford : Last year there was a lot of publicity about men and women who had no interest in sex either homo or heterosexual. Some of those interviewed were almost certainly secretly homosexuals, but most doctors have had patients who, however carefully questioned, are obviously asexual.

Casual observers of humanity at the time of Alfred Kinsey in the early 1950s would have been content to accept that sex was a non-event in these people’s lives; today the grandchildren of mid-20th-century commentators would say that Jack or Jill, Fiona or Fred just didn’t do sex. Kinsey introduced a scale by which people’s sexual response, whether totally heterosexual or homosexual or somewhere between the two, was measured. He also accepted that some people had no sexual interest whatsoever.

Kinsey reported that the percentage of women who had experienced an orgasm, through petting, masturbation or intercourse, at the age of 16, was low. Only 22 per cent of 16-year-old girls in the early 1950s had ever reached an orgasm and even by the age of 20 only 47 per cent had. In Kinsey’s time, only 15 per cent of women between 16 and 20 had had intercourse, and only 18 per cent of adolescent or young, adult women had been involved in petting with the opposite sex to the stage of an orgasm. These figures would be very different now. Not only are women reaching the menarche (the start of their periods) progressively earlier, but changes in modern mores have revolutionised the pattern of heterosexual relationships in women of this age group.

The relevance of these statistics is that they demonstrate that 50 years ago your daughter’s behaviour would be normal. Not all 16-year-old girls then dated men. In all probability, there is nothing unusual about your daughter, other than that she has perhaps been brought up in a house with deeply embedded opinions on sexual behaviour that stem from an earlier age.

There are all sorts of details about your daughter, yourself and your husband that would have been interesting to know. In clinical practice it would be impossible to give a good opinion unless the doctor had an opportunity to judge a girl’s parents, their relationship to their daughter and their own approach to adolescent sexuality. Adolescents who had a difficult or, paradoxically, too close a relationship with either parent may find that having heterosexual relationships with contemporaries is difficult.

Is your daughter at a mixed or single sex school? If at a mixed school, would a dispassionate observer find her attractive and charming? In a mixed-sex school, it can be hell for a girl who is beautiful and sexy.

The problems this causes can turn heterosexual friendships into a minefield. Does she have close friendships with girls or even crushes on those who are perhaps a year or two older? Whatever the answer, 16 is too early to be dogmatic about sexual preferences.

Possible psychiatric and psychological causes for her lack of interest in boys include social phobia (extreme shyness). Shyness is usually no more than a fear of being appraised physically, intellectually and emotionally; judgment in a sexual relationship is one of the most testing of all. Occasionally, excessive shyness is a symptom of more serious psychiatric problems. Or it could be that fear of physical sexual activity is blighting your daughter’s relationships.

Suzi Godson: No, you shouldn’t. You can’t be sure that your daughter has no interest in boys. Teenage girls are notoriously uncommunicative and, for all you know, she is madly in love with an equally reticent boy whose mother is experiencing a similar bout of anxiety.

If my memory serves me correctly, at 16 the prospect of sharing anything as deeply personal as my sexuality with the woman who gave birth to me would have been abhorrent. As for those “sons of friends”, that’s wishful thinking, love. Billie Double Barrelled might seem like the perfect date to you, but being a teenager is about separating from your parents, so anyone who is linked to them in any way is automatically off - limits. As such, your daughter probably views all “sons of friends” as pond life.

Every mother knows that although 16-year-olds should, in theory, understand something about sex and relationships — because, legally, they could go out and get married — it is asking a lot to expect someone who can’t cook, or clean her room, who can’t drive, drink alcohol or vote, who can’t make a decision, or get her homework done, or string two words into a sentence when granny comes to visit, to know which end is up when it comes to falling in love.

Over the next two or three years your daughter’s feelings are likely to change as often as the weather; and even if she does develop a crush on another girl, there is no reason to believe that it will amount to anything. In the same way that snogging your arm gives you some idea of what it feels like to be kissed, a girl crush provides a butterfly glimpse of the excitement that awaits when you can graduate from loving the one you’re with to having the one that you love.

Many people have same-sex experiences but very few of them would describe themselves as gay. Statistics from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (a survey of 19,000 people carried out in Britain between 1999 and 2001) indicated that 9.7 per cent of women have had a sexual experience with a partner of the same sex; however, only 2.5 per cent of girls of your daughters age have had sexual intercourse or genital contact with another girl. Though it is difficult to get an exact figure, currently, just 6 per cent of the UK population are gay and the vast majority of that percentage are homosexual men. Having said that, because homosexuality is stigmatised it is more likely to be under-reported, particularly in younger age brackets.

If your daughter doesn’t demonstrate some heterosexual tendencies by the time she is 18 then you should start thinking about how best you can support her. The decision to come out is is difficult and the more that you can do now to show her that you will accept her in any circumstances, the easier it will be for her to move forward. Sadly, despite better support for gay men and women, the murder of the gay barman Jody Dobrowski on Clapham Common, South London, last year is a harsh reminder of the homophobia that still thrives in our society.

If you want to talk to your daughter about homosexuality, you can download the book Talking about Homosexuality in the Secondary School free from the education section at www.avert.org/hsexu1.htm. And if you, or any other members of your family, need help coming to terms with your own expectations you should contact Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (www.fflag.org.uk).

Newer:

- A letter to the editor: "Middlesex" July 28 2012 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/letters/article3489345.ece

Middlesex

Published at 12:01AM, July 28 2012

It is hard for this reader to understand why some churchmen and churchgoers cannot see that God designed people differently

Sir, Dr Jeffrey John is understandably frustrated by the lack of progress on gay issues and gay marriage in the Church of England (“Don’t judge God by the Church, says gay dean”, July 24). Given the complexity of this debate and the strong feelings it generates, surely one way forward is to adopt the simple and generous understanding that human variation is the natural principle by which people were designed by God.

Within this principle of natural variation, heterosexuals and homosexuals alike show great variety in their sexual behaviour and preferences. There are, at least, homosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals, and transsexuals, and almost certainly other variations, too. Also, as doctors in this field know, one in 100 people is born with some biological characteristics of both genders.

It is hard to understand why some churchmen and churchgoers cannot see that God designed people to exhibit a huge range of physical, gender, biological and sexual characteristics.

Elizabeth Oakley

Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

-"For men or women, the front line is traumatic" May 12 2014 http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article4086874.ece

For men or women, the front line is traumatic

Libby Purves

Last updated at 12:01AM, May 12 2014

Arguments about the female role in combat should make us think harder about how we support males who go to war

‘The infantry,” said Colonel Richard Kemp CBE, “is very different from any other job.” He commanded our forces in Helmand in 2003 and knows that “the essence of infantry soldiering is to close with the enemy and kill him face to face with bullets, bayonets and grenades. . . it is not a right nor an ‘opportunity’, as the defence secretary suggests. It is a dreadful, gut-churning, traumatic and incredibly tough job.” Another senior officer questioned whether female soldiers, super-competent in other roles, could yomp miles over rocks with an 80lb pack and then bayonet people, as men did in the Falklands, and may have to again.

General Lord Dannatt (speaking, I think, for his generation) says that it is a matter of principle that women, though competent when caught in a fight by chance, should not serve in small units designed to attack. Others remind us of old arguments, from upper-body strength to team dynamics and rape; on the army forum a voice from the ranks muses: “War punishes stupidity, and it seems ironic that, having worked so hard and so long to eradicate the contribution of reactionary stupidity to military incompetence, we have only succeeded in replacing it with an even more dangerous ‘progressive’ stupidity.”

These were responses to Philip Hammond’s proposal to offer close-combat frontline roles to women — not, he says, that thousands would want to, but he wished to counteract “the message that the army is not fully open to women. . . I am looking for a way forward that signals the army’s openness to all who can meet the standards required.”

Hmm. Mental klaxons sound when anybody in charge of a practical matter such as soldiering starts talking about “messages” and “signals”. That’s politics, PR, puffballs. Nor can you ignore the timing of it, just as our troops pull out of Afghanistan and thus are temporarily unlikely to do much face-to-face killing. One could also suspect that it is a desperate recruiting lure: women have proved competence in every other war role, including killing at a distance, and the removal of something seen as a block to promotion may tempt the ambitious. US, Canadian, Australian and Israeli armies allow women in close aggressive combat units, and in Nato only Turkey and Slovakia still ban it.

Forgive me for wasting your time here, but I have no verdict, only respect for both sides. However, it is no bad thing to be reminded in detail of something that those of us who don’t read Andy McNab all the time can easily forget: that, even aside from civilian “collateral damage”, modern wars should not be obfuscated by prim, Blairish weasel-words such as “intervention” and “surgical strike”. Be frank: we ask young men to spill others’ blood and brains, face to face, in a task Col Kemp calls “dreadful, gut-churning, traumatic”. We require actions that in civilian life would win them horrified nicknames such as “skull-cracker” and have us all trembling. Then we bring them home and expect them to be OK as long as they’re not actual amputees or willing to admit to mental troubles (hard for a tough guy). We act shocked when too many drift, doubt, divorce, break out in impotent anger and become 4 per cent of the prison population and 6 per cent of homeless people.

So let the present arguments about women remind us that men are human beings too and, for all the macho movie nonsense boys are fed, most human beings are shocked and traumatised by contact with death, still more by causing it. Artifically inflated bloodthirsty language traditionally tells one tale, but in reality, for all but a few psychopathic personalities, blood-lust is as much a fantasy as is princessified romance for silly women. The posing and preening is self-defence, a mechanism displayed rather than negated by incidents such as that RAF Regiment soldier posing with thumbs up beside a dead enemy. Does anyone really think those guys won’t shake in lonely nightmares later, whatever they pretend and hope?

War poetry and memoirs tell a more honest story. They speak of sudden kinship with the dying enemy, haunting regret, decades of silence, painful private flashbacks. I remember my young son doing a Second World War homework project and trying to question a farmworker who had served at Monte Cassino. Old Dilly did his best (later, he came with us to the battle site and shed a tear for the sergeant who died in front of him on the hill). But even after half a century, the old man found even cautious description “impossible” in the presence of a child.

So let some of the arguments about women’s fitness for close killing contribute to better empathy and support for the men. Despite our froth of porny pop culture and the atavistic bigotry of militant Islamism, there is a growing and useful awareness that physical gender is only a marker on a long, subtle scale between extremes of masculinity and femininity.

Humanity is a rainbow of shades, temperaments and abilities. There are tough, aggressive women and gentle, maternal men; there is homosexuality, bisexuality and asexuality. All are fine. And good luck to Tom, aka Conchita, the guy with a beard and evening gown who has just won the Eurovision Song Contest while all of Europe laughed at and booed bare-chested gorilla Putin and his minister Milonov for being so scared of the human rainbow. Tear down the barricades, share the humanity.

A few British women may or may not soon start fixing bayonets as well as loosing missiles and flying fighter-planes. But that is, paradoxically, less important than ensuring that the rest of us don’t blind ourselves to the gentleness and griefs of even the toughest men and boys.

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catsaregood

^^^ Ok, lots of reading for me there! :) :cake::cake::cake:

I love this bit of the article: "This tendency for asexuals to try to microdefine their nuances is problematic. It creates a confusing lexicon of sexual labels." But then: "Experts also identify another category, demisexual..." - it's ok as long as the experts are defining things for us! :D

Agree SkyAwesome, some inaccuracies, but not bad overall, a nice sensible answer to a sex question in a paper - unusual thing, that! :O :D

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