It's Always More Complicated

There is annoying WOEZ WOEZ PC article criticising the protest against pink girly Lego ('celebrating not architecture and action but beauty salons, cupcake bakeries and poodle parlours': pass me a sparkly pink sickbag) in today's Guardian.

It is particularly irksome because Hannah Betts goes ' the one area we should never seek to police is [children's] imaginations'.

How is this ghastly, from what I hear, practically universal gender essentialism in children's toys and other paraphernalia, not a mind-forg'd manacle upon their imaginations and sense of the acceptable and appropriate?

I don't think little girls should be forcibly prevented from indulging any taste for pastels and sparkles and ponies and fairy princesses (any more than little boys should).

I think they should be allowed to know that there are other options available and pink is not the only colour they are allowed.

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And Amazon have actually sent me a promotional email for the notorious Bic for Her Amber Medium Ballpoint Pen pack. What fresh hell is this? Do they not get the mockery and sarcasm all over teh intahnetz?

I did not watch Episode 3 of The Sex Researchers last night. Episode 1 pretty much turned me off.

However, someone left a message on my voicemail indicating that there was something in it of possible interest, so I started watching it via 4D on their website.

Well, actually, listening with half an ear for thing of interest to manifest, and doing other stuff the while.

And at one point they appeared to be talking to some guy, who purported to be A Scientist, whose research was apparently revealing that you can tell Teh Gayzz because they walk differently. Which he seemed to be claiming was some inborn genetic Thing.

A position not entirely remote from Inversion Theory - had they pulled him a hundred years forward in time via a Time Machine? I think we should be told, if so. Apparently, gay men have a certain effeminacy, and lesbians a certain masculinity, in their gait.

Whereupon I am all, Wait right there, how have you defined and identified your population? And are not habits of movement and bodily presentation fairly strongly socially mediated anyway, rather than Formed In the Genes and the Womb? We feel that your alleged gaydar may be wrongly calibrated.

But, on top of this fatuous stereotyping, he was also saying (at least, I think it was him, but they had a plethora of Problematic Research on this programme) things about gay men and sex which were buying into the most simplistic of essentialist ideas about the male (and female) sex drive - it sounded awfully like that hetboy envy notion of gay men's sex lives and what they must be like, because there are no women being gatekeepers, and The Menzz will do it with anything, anytime.

Plz 2 B passing a) sickbag and b) codfish.

One of the very many things that is annoying about this programme is that they are yay condescending to the pioneering figures of the past, and then they give airtime to this kind of thing, on account of wot it is being SRS Modern Skientifik Resurch, with brain imaging and stuff.

When people say (the period is around 1930s/40s) things like:

Orthology flies the same flag, and is in fact based on Yuan Shan's contention that Chinese and Negro thought cannot be interpreted in current Aryan grammatical categories.

I agree with most of your strictures on concocted languages - particularly how tied down to Aryan models alien to Eastern ways of putting things they are, one and all.

Also, still on language, is it at all true to state that

No-one will ever want to make love or describe a sonnet in a pidgin language. There is no Esperanto anthology.