“If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: ‘God, I’ve got to get my fucking rocks off’, or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it.”

Fry, 53, continues: “I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want,” he said. “Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, ‘Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!’ But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?”

so sayeth mr. stephen fry. (and also here) now, i have no personal affection for mr fry, unlike much of britain. nor do i think as a public persona he is required to be infallible.

but i find his continued perpetuation of this stereotype of women as frigid to be insulting (and even potentially dangerous) for a few reasons:

a) it’s just flat out archaic – what’re we, in the 1950’s?

b) he’s a gay guy, speaking on something he knows nothing about

c) it insults women everywhere by implying that we only have sex either passively or manipulatively

d) the implicit passive role of women in sex is something we have fought long and hard to overcome – women have a right to their god-given built-in sexuality, including enjoyment, exploration and initiation of sex. reinforcing lazy stereotypes undermines that message, and diminishes the work of sex-positive feminism.

e) viewing women as undesiring, apathetic, or averse to sex *as part of their biological makeup* undermines the power and necessity of women’s active, engaged, willing consent as part of sex.

and if society don’t take women’s “yeses” seriously – how do we expect them to take our “noes” seriously?!

women have enough messages out there about how they can’t/shouldn’t/mustn’t enjoy sex. we don’t need another clueless voice added to the chorus.

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so he hadn’t eaten all day – no kibble/wet food/treats/cat milk. i’ve never known Zeke to turn down a morsel of food in my life, and he was just so listless, and hiding under the bed

i ring up to make an appointment with the vet for tomorrow, and they’re booked for tomorrow but have an opening for tonight. I figure it’s best not to let this go over the weekend, and take the slot.

we take him there in his crate. the vet pokes and prods him, checks his eyes, mouth, nose, ears, temperature, gait, belly, everything. says if we didn’t tell him he was ill, he would never know it. says we can do some more tests, or wait and see if he feels better. we go home, £30 lighter.

walk in the door, try to give him some food – and MIRACLE OF MIRACLES…. he’s suddenly eating.

the moral of the story: Zeke is a drama queen.

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the “it gets better project” was launched in response to the recent tragic rash of lgbt youth suicides. but you know, you don’t have to be gay to have been tortured by bullying, and you don’t have to be gay to have felt suicidal.

i wasn’t the only kid who got bullied, and i wasn’t the only kid who ever considered killing themselves – but it felt like it at the time. i didn’t have the internet to help me feel less alone – but watching these videos now, “it gets better” is a truth that resonates so deeply.

yet it angers me that millions of adults have experienced this, survived it… and it still continues to happen. every day.

every day there are children on their way to school whose sense of worth is so low, their alienation and pain so great, that they want to end it all. and there are adults who see this and do nothing. there are teachers who see this and “try to stay neutral”. there are people with the power to make things better who fail to act.

it is fucking unconscionable that any child should ever, ever feel life is not worth living. it is disgusting that there is any adult who could help, who chooses not to. dan savage said it best: fuck you, children are dying.

it is lovely to know that there are strangers who are reaching out to convince kids to hang on. that it gets better – and it does. it so does.

yet it’s horrible to know that kids need strangers reaching out on the internet to convince them to hang on. when is it going to get better?

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so: changes.

thanks to the lovely new conservative government, there are cuts to be made in the public sector. big cuts. on the order of 20-40% cuts. this is what’s happening at my work right now. the first round of cuts are being made, and it’s got us all running around nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

and even where there are no official cuts, there are “efficiencies” to be made. translation: doing even more with the same (or fewer) people. no regard for actual capacity or resource – simply a mandatory understanding that however overworked you are, however thin you are spread, you *will do more* and you will like it and be thankful you weren’t part of the cuts.

what this all means for me is that my team is getting “restructured”. someone has decided that things would work better if a bunch of my team went into this other team and did something completely different. and in this reshuffle, i am likely to lose my team manager job, and get forced back into the kind of job i left last time. the worst of it is the way in which it has been handled – with completely inhuman disregard for people’s feelings. we all know the score and we are all grownups, yet it’s all been done in such a callous way, without even a pretense or nod toward acknowledgement of people’s distress. we were brought into a boardroom, and had some papers shoved at us. even knowing it was coming, i found myself getting emotional and angry, and angry at being emotional.

the job i mostly really liked and believed in and was told made a real difference, didn’t actually matter after all. what i do is not valued enough to merit the consideration of a genuine discussion. my team (or what will be left of it) is just expected to pick up and carry on and no one has given a moment’s thought to how they will continue to do the work, or why they’d even want to stay in an organisation that didn’t bother to think about them. no one ever talked to us about what we actually do – we are just bodies to be moved somewhere else as they see fit.

it hurts, dammit.

never one to leave my fate in someone else’s hands, i’ve decided it’s time to leave. rather than be subject to this fucking chess game being played with people’s careers and lives, i’m opting out. i’ve let my boss (who, bless, has tried her best to manage the proposed changes, but the ball was never in her court) know that at the beginning of next year, i’m gone.

all that talk about moving i’ve done in the past few years? my hand has just been forced. january/february. that’s not that far away. and what comes next remains to be seen. j and i have a half-baked notion that i’ll go to vancouver and try to get a job. i don’t really know how that will work, but i’ve always seemed to manage to sort something out before – pulling up sticks and moving seems to be my thing. i’ve moved to new york, boston, and london without a job or much planning, and somehow always managed to land on my feet. mind you, none of that was in the midst of the worst recession in 80-some-odd years. that’s a daunting prospect – we’ve got a little savings but not enough for me to stay unemployed for too long.

oh: and no, there’s no backup plan.

i am angry and sad about my job. terrified and excited about the future. (and sad too, as well, for all that i will be leaving behind – something which i have not even allowed myself to begin to think about or feel yet.) amongst all that are a million logistical nightmares to be sifted through one at a time, and some belt-tightening to do, now that the countdown is on.

dear readers, i am predicting a bumpy ride ahead.

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this post started as a comment conversation on facebook, and i thought it was worth sharing here.

it’s all about new york city mayor bloomberg’s plan to ban people using food stamps from spending them on soda.

“In spite of the great gains we’ve made over the past eight years in making our communities healthier, there are still two areas where we’re losing ground — obesity and diabetes,” the mayor said in a statement. “This initiative will give New York families more money to spend on foods and drinks that provide real nourishment.”

although many in the public are cheering it, this initiative is problematic, to say the least. it is punitive, paternalistic, and unrealistic.

currently in almost any american grocery store, you can find a two litre of soda for under a dollar. now walk over a few aisles and take a look at the price of milk, or fruit juice. there’s simply no comparison. soda is the cheaper option by far.

the reason that soda remains so cheap, is because it is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. and the reason that corn syrup is so cheap is because the government pays for it. it is the very height of hypocrisy that with the one hand the government is pumping massive amounts of money into corn subsidies that make syrupy drinks dirt cheap, and with the other hand, slapping the poorest people on the wrist for buying it.

of course, people are quick to point out that food stamps are public monies, and tap water is both healthier than soda and free from the kitchen sink. soda, on the other hand, has lots of unneeded calories and no nutritional value. and also, shouldn’t we be encouraging healthy choices by the poorer population, who have disproportionately higher rates of obesity, diabetes, etc.?

they’re right of course. tap water is free and healthy. i, however, don’t drink it. i don’t drink water because i don’t like it, and as someone who is not subsisting on public generosity, i get to make that choice without any public critique because i’m rich enough to not have the morality police breathing down my neck. no one looks askance at the 12 litres of soda i buy weekly. no one tells me i should be buying milk or drinking water instead. it is only the poor who have their food choices scrutinised by government, it is only the poor who are restricted to choices that we deem nutritionally worthy. and where does it end? pop tarts are nutritionally worthless as well. so is ice cream. so are chips. so is table sugar. some “juices” are actually far worse than sodas in terms of sugar and calories. yet these are not coming under fire – soda is a completely arbitrary political soapbox.

but it’s *public money*. surely by accepting public money, you agree to sacrifice some level of personal choice?

i don’t know – does trying not to starve mean you forfeit your right to a little human dignity? does it mean that you agree to a level of paternalistic intercession by the state which no one else is subject to? people are not poor by choice, and they’re generally already further punished by substandard housing, substandard education, and substandard healthcare. so we’re not bothered that our tax monies pay to warehouse people in conditions you wouldn’t let a dog live in, and that our tax monies pay for a school system that cranks out barely literate 18 year olds (let alone being able to budget, shop for, and prepare balanced meals) – but *god forbid* people buy soda!!

soda is a bandaid on a cancer. soda is something we can easily demonise and easily deal with. soda is something that makes us feel like we are doing something, without ever addressing any of the root causes. people who live in a state of food insecurity biologically crave immediate, palatable, calorific foods – in other words, junk. but we tell them, no – if you’re poor enough to need food stamps, you can’t buy a coke. not on our dime.

we can get all righteous about people on food stamps buying soda, without ever having to examine why people in the richest country in the world are on food stamps to begin with.

this initiative is not about actually *improving* poor people’s health. if that were the point, they’d do something about making sure you could get fresh vegetables in all inner city areas (you can’t), or making sure that the free lunch program didn’t serve processed junk foods (it does), or making sure that urban kids had safe open spaces to play outdoors and didn’t have pollution-induced asthma.

but health is a performance which expected of poor people (and other groups), not for their benefit, but for ours. their health belongs to the wider culture and society at large, and if they do not perform as expected, it is considered a moral failing. they receive public monies – they are expected to be healthy.

and if the point were actually about improving *everyone’s* health, then they’d just ban or heavily tax soda for everyone. which i wouldn’t like either, but at least it would be fair.

yes, poverty and poor health are desperately intertwined. but it’s not because of soda.

the other thing to consider? the profile of people on food stamps is changing. a lot of people on food stamps these days are not the most impoverished in society – they’re people who’re having a difficult time keeping food on the table because they’ve been laid off, or lost their house in the recession. they’re trying to scrape by, and ending up short of cash at the supermarket checkout. they’re not on the lowest economic rung of the ladder – they’re trying to avoid falling off the one’s just above. these days, in this economic climate, it could just as easily be you or i who find ourselves struggling and hungry. now think about telling me, or your neighbour, that we can’t buy a soda. society makes assumptions and judgments about people on benefits that they would never make if they knew the reality, and that gives them license to act in paternalistic ways that they would never accept for themselves. the general public gets to have an extra slice of cheesecake after a stressful day – someone on food stamps can’t buy themselves a mountain dew.

let’s call this what it is: punishing people for being poor, assuming that because they need handouts they are moral failures and that they are unable/unwilling to make healthy choices, and therefore making those choices for them – even when they are not healthy choices the general public themselves make. because the proportion of people on food stamps who are overweight and drinking too much soda is only a small slice of what is a huge national pie.

ultimately this is a public policy based on *one thing* – it is making an entirely ineffectual and symbolic stand against *one choice*. it’s like looking at the scraps of the thinnest security blanket we choose to give people who don’t have enough to eat, and arguing over *one thread* of it. and i’m not willing to argue over one thread when the real problem is the size of the blanket, or even more critically, the need for the security blanket in the first place.

so when you sit at your desk in the morning with a diet cola, or need a noon caffeine pick-me-up, or are thirsty after a long day at work, imagine finding yourself on food stamps and pouring yourself a nice big glass of tap water instead. think about how important that cola you’ve just been deprived of becomes – not because it’s that important in the grand scheme of things, but because mayor bloomberg said you can’t have it.

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i know i haven’t been here recently. guess that’s likely to happen when you’re not sure what to say.

i’ve often claimed to be an open book, but the reality is, there are just some things taking up most of my brain space at the moment, that i’m not going to share with the world. maybe when they’re in the safely in the rearview mirror, but not right now. i need time to process, decide and act, and that’s not best accomplished in front of others, nor is it interesting to others. so i’m mulling behind the scenes tending to my life and letting the weeds grow where they will.

none of which is helped by my homesickness. usually around this time of year i head back to boston and cape cod for a visit with the family, but due to the fact that i went in april, and the afore-not-mentioned current stressors, i’m not going this year. i miss it desperately.

new england fall is one of my favourite joys in life, something i don’t think i’ll ever get out of my system. pumpkins and cranberry bogs, apple picking, chilled salt air, riotous coloured leaves, empty beaches, woodsmoke, early morning fog, the first frost. they have seeped into my bones over the years, and looking out on the wet grey and brown cityscape that is a london autumn (not “fall”, but “autumn”), casts an additional dreariness over my mood. fall always makes me wistful and nostalgic, but missing out on it even more so.

so that’s where i’m at at the moment – my absence has been noticed, and unfortunately it’s not because i’m too busy frolicking in fields of unicorns, rainbows and fuzzy bunnies.

my mom always said that if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing. sage advice, and i’m following it.

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