It's Always More Complicated

Happy birthday, Doris Lessing! (a 'Today's Birthday' which doesn't seem to be anywhere on the Guardian website), b. 1919 in Persia. Refused to be a Dame, but is a Companion of Honour.

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Ronald Pearsall, author of dubious 'classic' work on Victorian Sex, The Worm in the Bud, dies. This is a maddening work, for which RP must have done massive amount of primary research, but since there are no notes and no adequate bibliography, one can't tell, and has no idea where some intriguing items might be located. Obituary makes clear he was pretty much a hack.

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Three items which seem to me to have cross-currents of resonance and synchronicity:

Stomach-turning article on 'lad mags': Janice Turner, 'The misogyny of the new breed of lads' mags is breathtaking'. 'It's just fun' is surely a common get-out phrase of sexual harassers? so I hardly think it's a legit excuse for these guys. 'Health is boring' - and the target group is the peak at-risk for testicular cancer. I am creeped out by the 'women as consumer objects for the male' attitudes described (flashing back to my post earlier in the week about prostitutes and punters). And the attitude to sex which is about large fake boobs (these must lack sensation? inquiring minds would like to know) and how to 'get' women to perform certain acts for the male. The emphasis on women conforming to certain norms of attractiveness seems to me to be about the woman as object to show off to the other lads - this week I had a spam which seemed to me to encapsulate what this is all about 'Is yours bigger than all your friends?' (cue Woody Allen comment about the revisionist approach to Freud which attributes penis envy to males...)

And why are women willing and even eager to be photographed for these noxious emanations of sexist culture? I can think of several reasons: a) they've bought into the idea that it's all fun, or at least that it would be boring and uncool to have any objections b) we are constantly being told that women today are in a constant state of anxiety about the acceptability of their bodies: so being acceptable to this picky audience might actually be experienced as affirmation of attractiveness c) well, maybe they are doing it in a spirit of irony, which just goes to show that irony is an inflection that many people are insensitive to (is there something people can take for irony-deficiency?).

A very different view of the female body in interview with artist Jenny Saville:

( 'Could I make a painting of a nude in my own voice?' )

And yet another review of Strauss's The Game, along with something called The Layguide, by Steven Poole, who deems them to be 'present[ing] themselves as geeks' guides to seduction, but... actually faintly homoerotic':

Women are trophies or tokens in an endless quest for esteem and standing between the adherents of "pickup", both in real life and on the internet message boards where people post tips and stories.

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More cheeringly, Lyndall Gordon on ' the creative power of sympathy' and bonds between women.

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The pleasures, as opposed to the pains and problems of motherhood: 'Jackie Clune feels like cracking open a bottle of champagne every time she looks at her gorgeous triplets. So why do other mothers think she has suffered some terrible misfortune?'

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'Will the lemurs, man's long-lost cousins, survive the destruction of Madagascar's forests?'