It's Always More Complicated

Dept of, inventing the city: Fake History: Some notes on London's bogus past. (NB - isn't Nancy murdered on the steps of a bridge in the 1948 movie of Oliver Twist? or do I misremember.) (And as for the Charing Cross thing, that is the ongoing 'London remaking itself and having layers', surely?)

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Dept of, smutty puns, classical division: Yet More on Ancient Greek Dildos:

Nelson, in my opinion, has made a solid argument for his conclusions that, while “olisbos” was one of many ancient Greek euphemisms for a dildo, this was not its primary meaning, nor was it the primary term for the sex toy. Rather, this impression has been given by an accident of historiography.

Dept of, not silently suffering for centuries: The 17th-century woman who wrote about surviving domestic abuse.

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Dept of, another story involving literacy (and ill-health): Child hospital care dates from 18th Century - study:

"Almost certainly she was taught to read and write while she was an inpatient."
He suspects just as part of the infirmary's remit was to get its adult patients back to work, by teaching children to read and write it would increase their employment opportunities.

Dept of, I approve the intention but cringe at certain of the suggestions: How To Raise a Reader in an Age of Digital Distraction:

Active engagement is crucial. This doesn’t mean turning every book into an interactive multimedia experience. Rather, it means ensuring that children are mentally participating in the reading process rather than passively consuming. With toddlers, this might mean encouraging them to point to pictures, make sound effects, or predict what comes next. With older children, it involves asking questions that go beyond basic comprehension: “What do you think motivates this character?” “How would the story change if it were set in our neighborhood?”

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Dept of, not enough ugh: Sephora workers on the rise of chaotic child shoppers: ‘She looked 10 years old and her skin was burning’

The phenomenon of “Sephora kids” – a catch-all phrase for the intense attachment between preteen children, high-end beauty stores and the expensive, sometimes harsh, products that are sold within them – is now well established.... The trend is driven by skincare content produced by beauty influencers – many of whom are tweens and teens themselves.... skincare routines posted by teens and tweens on TikTok contained an average of 11 potentially irritating active ingredients per routine, which risked causing acute reactions and triggering lifelong allergies.

Wo, wo, 'tis the EndofaNera.... street performers rue end of busking at Leicester Square. You know, having some acquaintance with a) colourful Victorian streetlife and b) historical studies of the policing of same I bet there were people bemoaning the loss of those colourful if dodgy characters, though I also have some distant recollection of people going spare over e.g. barrel-organs and other street music at a possibly somewhat later date, rather like the occupants of Leics Sq businesses who cannot hear themselves think, let alone make phone-calls.

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More from the Cambpop people on the latter end of life over time: Did anyone “retire” in the past? and How did the elderly poor survive in the past?

For centuries, the elderly were regarded as the category par excellence of the ‘deserving poor’, and charitable aid took a broad spectrum of forms. Begging, while not necessarily condoned, was often regarded as an acceptable and unthreatening pursuit when undertaken by the aged. One longstanding area of philanthropy specifically focused on the elderly were alms houses. These were funded by voluntary donations (rather than through the poor law) and usually offered separate private accommodation for older people. At most, 2-3 percent of those over 60 secured an alms house place. There was great geographical variability, but alms house inmates were disproportionately selected from the ‘respectable’ female and church-going elderly.

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Cassie Watson, whose work on murder some of you may have read (it's excellent), has turned her attention to violence short of lethal: Investigating the ‘Assault Deficit’ - assault was in fact a vague and ill-defined term:

By 1861 when the Offences Against the Person Act came into effect, the word assault was not actually defined. Instead, it was used to designate a variety of specific acts that might cause physical harm to another person. It was left up to judges to decide what was meant by ‘harm’. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word ‘harm’ was typically associated with the effects of physical assault, and so the phrase ‘bodily harm’ was used more regularly than ‘harm’. However, it seems likely that the wider concept implied in today’s usage — encompassing both emotional harm and negligence — was understood. However, if the harm took some other form, for instance disease or mental trauma, an indictment under the 1861 statute could fail.

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This is a reasonable account of the problem with 'simple' solutions - 'if you just only....' whether the solution is some tech fix or Returning to 'Nature' and 'the Natural Way': The Flawed Ideology That Unites Grass-Fed Beef Fans and Anti-Vaxxers.

As somebody who has been wont to point out that actually getting Drs Ehrlich and Hato's magic bullet to where it would do some good was a complex process, I am on board with being v sceptical of solutionism.

Channeling (though one suspects that the Channel/La Manche is perhaps not actually in play here?) the spirit of Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford's work, the following from a recent post in agonyaunt:

When I was 28, I did a last-minute flight to Paris with friends. The very next day, my sister conferenced my mother into a call to berate me for putting myself at risk for rape and kidnapping.

We rather suspect that these are people that had little sis been going to London (Eng), their vision would have been of dystopic hellhole of gang violence and knife-crime (looks out at peaceful leafy streets, where, we may add, the rubbish is currently being collected).

Anyway, okay, assuming this is not just about 'Abroad is dangerous and full of violent criminals', and specifically about Pareee, we wonder what they are drawing on to come up with this? Victorian pornos? or early C20th horror-mongering sensationalist literature about the Dangers of White Slavery? - and the pervasive myths around same that were familiar to the Mitford sisters, Decca records that she and Debo were constantly on the watch for white slavers while the family was resident in Sodom and Gomorrah London, and even identified a friend of Nancy's who smiled and said hello thusly. And in The Pursuit of Love when Linda has bolted from Christian and finds herself changing trains in Paris and Fabrice makes his first approach, her inital instinct is to inform him that she is not 'un esclave blanche'.

We concede that Les Messieurs have a reputation for being, shall we say, oncoming, such that it is within living memory (well, mine) that a French woman politician claimed that she had long supposed all Englishmen to be gay on account of they did not routinely harass women in the streets. But I think that, while tiresome -

- though in my own experience, and I will admit that these experiences were a decade apart - I got a lot more of that in New York c. 1970 than in Paris c. 1980 -

- is not quite the same thing as the sensationalist narrative of 'completely disappeared from the face of the earth'.

Okay, these two go together, red in tooth and claw, what:

You thought Watership Down was grim: how about the bloody life of the alpine marmot?

The creatures’ cuddly reputation... belies a vicious reality. The life of an alpine marmot is a never-ending bloody battle for dominance.

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The rodents live in family groups with one dominant couple and a clutch of subordinate offspring who help with raising young and providing much-needed body warmth during the long winter hibernation. Only the dominant pair may reproduce: they bully the other family members into sterility, the youngsters’ stress hormones maintained at too high a level to bear young of their own. If a subordinate of either sex wishes to reproduce, they must leave their family group and challenge another dominant marmot for its territory – or kill their parents. When a marmot wins the battle for new territory, its first act is mass infanticide. “The new dominant will kill off that year’s young so as not to have to look after them – no investment, no parenting for young that are not his own[.]”

Students made Oxford medieval capital of murder, says Cambridge research - we should note that they have not run the figures for Cambridge at the period and it's not clear that equivalent documentation survives anyway.

The team has mapped a combined 354 historic homicides across Oxford, London and York. All three cities have their darknesses, but the picture painted of Oxford in the 14th century is particularly grim. On the face of it, the city was filled with young men affiliated with holy orders and studying towards careers in the priesthood, government or other great fates. However, this system saw boys as young as 14 being let loose in a city flooded with booze and brothels. On top of that, the overwhelming majority would have carried knives.

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Oh, and on the apparently fubsy, George Formby; Anti-Apartheid Hero - Formby is I daresay best known for leaning on lamp-posts and cleaning windows:

The cheery banjulele player’s anti-fascist credentials were long established.... His affinity with the common man and underdog, whom his screen persona owes a great debt too, was just as well known. During his ENSA shows for the troops, he would famously make the officers move from their front row seats to allow the humble privates the better view of the show, whilst in 1942 George fell foul of proponents of the Lord’s Day Observance Society because of his commitment to entertaining the troops.

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I think the letter to The Guardian from Some Ancient Dinosaur Medic who claimed that women who ventured into practising Ye Healing Artz should expect This Sort of Thing has been taken down - claims about it all being about the stressful environment of medical training, they should toughen up etc. This piece suggests that that very sort of dynamic is universally damaging to medics: US surgeons are killing themselves at an alarming rate. One decided to speak out. There's also a looooong history of substance abuse issues.

Whale freed after being stranded at lock along River Thames in London – video

But having been freed it now seems to have got stuck again: [S]potted near Teddington lock just after 10.20am, heading downstream towards Chiswick and back towards Richmond:

“Its condition is deteriorating. It’s not acting the way it did last night. It’s basically lost any energy that it had left in it. It’s also got another stranding injury, which, along with ones from yesterday, all adds up really. “We’re just going to make it a little bit more comfortable and we’re going to have a veterinarian come down and take another look at it, and then they’ll make a decision. It’s not looking like we’ll be able to refloat the animal.”

How does a whale find itself 90 miles from sea? And are such incidents becoming more common?

Minke whales are common in the UK, in open water. The juvenile minke could have been separated from its mother and become disorientated in the enclosed estuary.
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Reporting of strandings of cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) have been on the increase for the past five years, according to the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme, run by the Zoological Society of London. CSIP scientists believe the increase is due to increased awareness and ability to report, rather than a rise in numbers.

In other signs and portents, Eight people have been arrested after a brawl inside Selfridges in central London. (Selfridges being an upmarket department store at the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street.)

50 years eh? and some of these things are still having to be reiterated/rediscovered/restated, SIGH: The clitoris, pain and pap smears: how Our Bodies, Ourselves redefined women’s health. But what is great about it is that it did change, that it didn't fossilise, and that editions in other countries were adapted to their particular circumstances - I reviewed Kathy Davis's history of OBOS some whole since.

A couple of other links about the dear despised 70s came up this week: Grass Roots Babies: Lesbian Artificial Insemination in Manchester throughout the 1970s and 1980s:

[I]n Manchester at least, most of the active donors were leftist men. To these men, sperm donation was a political act in support of feminism, their way of helping break down oppressive societal attitudes dictating only heterosexual, married women should be allowed to mother. To some, as Sue suggested, donating sperm for free was part of a wider commitment to radical leftist activism, a rejection of sperm as property and, by extension, capitalism.

Which sort of segues into this: Lucy Delap (who is working on the 1970s men's anti-sexism movement): What men’s roles in 1970s anti-sexism campaigns can teach us about consent:

My research on the anti-sexist men’s movement has uncovered men who identified with feminist goals who established groups such as Men Against Violence Against Women, active in Cardiff in the 1980s. They picketed films that they felt glorified violence against women, daubed graffiti onto sexually objectifying adverts, and handed out stickers that declared “rape is violence not sex”. In discussion groups, anti-sexist men scrutinised their own behaviour and criticised their own relationships. In Bristol, London and Nottingham, men also worked with the MOVE (Men Overcoming Violence) network. MOVE offered counselling to violent men through probation and social work referrals, challenging both sexism and homophobia.

(For an example of toxic masculine behaviour: Man sentenced for shooting protected elephant seal dead on California coast:

Gerbich told prosecutors that he shot the seal after being challenged to do so by an intoxicated friend, “as a kind of grotesque test”, court documents show. He also told investigators he had a history of substance abuse and had suffered physical abuse as a child, which is why he struggled with the need to seek approval from others. He has expressed regret for the incident, saying that he knew the act was wrong, court documents show. Gerbich’s attorney said his client viewed the act as “so unusual and troubling”, but prosecutors emphasized that it was premeditated and “did not happen by accident or on a whim”. Gerbich and the friend who told him to kill the seal drove out to the area where the mammals rest and give birth, to shoot the animal.

And to circle back to questions of translation: “Every Choice We Make Is Political”: Natasha Lehrer on Translating “Consent” and “I Hate Men”

It's all over the place, that thing about 'it doesn't have to be Lord of the Flies if you have young boys marooned on a desert island':
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months.

There were six of them and they were already a group. Whereas what you had in Golding's book - and I'm prepared to concede that that was at least to some extent about his own demons - there were different groups and different ages and a whole lot of factors that might militate against cohesion. And of course there were - even if they were ineffectual - characters who didn't buy into the aggression and violence.

Perhaps what's actually wrong is people taking LofF as deep statement about the human condition rather than a narrative about boys of a particular background at a particular period, filtered through the consciousness of somebody who taught in a boys' school and (I have a recollection of reading somewhere) hated it?

Not to mention reacting against a whole swathe of Boy's Own Adventure-y narratives about Coral Islands, in which any threat came from cannibals without rather than dark forces within.

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On Edens, however, this is rather lovely: Lizards, vines, papayas: working solo in the Eden Project during lockdown.

- and it holds annual conferences.

Because, my dearios, imagine my shuddering horror when I glanced down a list of forthcoming conferences and discovered that not only was there one impending on - wait for it - should I put in a Content Warning? -

Norman Mailer

- and that it was the 17th of that ilk.

There is, indeed, dr rdrz, I am sorry to say, a Norman Mailer Society.

Among the things it discusses is the reputation of that late writer.

Who, you know, even as A Man Of His Day was considered a bit extreme and out there as A Bad Boy, with the stabbing of his wife and the novel in which wife-murder was posited as an act of existential heroism.

I will confess, that in a world with so many books to read, I have not, since an adolescent attempt to get through The Naked and the Dead - and even in those days, when I would read just about anything, I bogged down - ventured upon Mr Mailer's works (though I think I have encountered extracts in ? works by Mary Ellmann? Kate Millett?).

Perchance this is weak and womanly in me. Or perhaps it is a sound decision.

Making generalisations about why Other Wymmynz consume the media they do, without, as far as I can tell, actually consulting them (or indeed having any very deep or nuanced knowledge of the media in question), for coming up for 50 years (see her assumptions in The Female Eunuch about why gurlyz read romance - which she seems to think pretty much co-terminious with Cartland).

Are women responsible for all the extreme sexual violence on screen?

I think that article goes in the wrong direction anyway, in interrogating The Meaning of Rape Fantasy, rather than how and why women consume certain genres, and whether there are bits of them they feel obliged to put up with in order to get the things they are really after in the narrative?

I might also remark, does no-one ever consider those protags of male thrillers who get Orribly Tortured, or at least threatened, by the villain: but seem to recollect, back in the day, somebody pointing out the very homoerotic scenes between Bond and various Big Bads. What about all those women consuming Dick Francis thrillers, in which the male protag invariably gets nastily done over at some stage?

Women readers, after all, have been for centuries profitably reading things that were not written by or for them and which often contain messages that are entirely obnoxious about their gender. Also, e.g., all those women sitting in the stalls at the movies, silently cheering on the noir anti-heroine, and NOT celebrating her final come-uppance, doncha think?

Accidents and essentials, perhaps.

Not to mention, how do people read, and do they 'identify' with particular character/s (and if they do, is it the obvious one? not necessarily) or are they as it were observing the unrolling of the story?

Thinking of the things I read, and that many of my dr rdrz read, where a straightforward identification is not on the cards.

Let's not go with wild and unhelpful generalisations about 'women' and the media they consume.

No, honestly, one thinks that one has heard it all concerning bizarre things that judges do and say, but, really:

Student who stabbed boyfriend may avoid jail as it would ‘damage her career’.

That would be a career in which the practitioner is exhorted 'first, do no harm'.

And honestly, would you want to be in the hands of a heart surgeon who had form of this kind?

We are talking serious anger management issues*:

Aspiring heart surgeon... punched and stabbed her boyfriend during an alcohol-and-drug-fuelled row at Christ Church College

[She] stabbed her then-boyfriend in the leg after punching him in the face. She then hurled a laptop, glass and jam jar at him during the attack.

Okay, one is infuriated when some privileged bloke gets off very lightly on a rape or domestic violence charge because of his promising career -

- but I don't think somebody's potential 'promising career' lets them off the hook for this sort of behaviour whatever their gender.

I will concede that I have no time for the concept that this sort of thing is worse in a woman, because stereotypes of gender (have we not lately been seeing, yet again, the instance of Myra Hindley?), or the use of ideas of female instability to plead diminished responsibility, but this particular argument strikes me as entirely pernicious.

*Though surgeons have a rep for hair-trigger temper and one might argue that she's entirely modelling herself on the paradigm for a still very male-dominated area within the medical profession.

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In other, unrelated news, I have posted my Wiscon schedule on the Wiscon filter: if you can't see it and would like to, let me know.