My photography, ramblings about my photography, bits and pieces from my brain, and reblogging things that amuse me. Some content is NSFW - I've been told that I should clarify that this means full frontal male nudity! Some content is LARP, do not follow if you're offended by LARPing! :P
Section28 of the Local Government Act 1988 – commonly just referred to as Section 28 – was a piece of legislation which stated:
A local authority shall not—
intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality;
promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.
It was passed in 1988, and not repealed until 2000 in Scotland, and 2003 in England and Wales. It is, for my money, the single most spiteful and damaging piece of legislation to have graced the UK statute books since the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967. Other legislation, such as the lack of marriage rights and the unequal age of consent, tried to control what people *did*, but Section 28 tried to control what people *thought*. It denied vital information and reassurance to an entire generation of queer youth, and it threatened teachers and other council workers with the loss of their livelihoods if they tried to provide that information and reassurance. Not only did it harm gay people directly by making it a crime for them to learn about themselves and be told there was nothing wrong with them, it harmed straight people by denying them the same knowledge.
Recently, a then Tory MP and now member of the House of Lords tried to defend her support of Section 28 Twitter. In a response to a tweet which stated, “You voted for section 28 and against the equal age of consent. You are not an ally.” She replied:
“I am seriously thinking of you and those like you as wishful of AIDS unchecked! I voted for S.28 when there was NO immunisation nor cure. But you and yours wished schools to teach the very behaviour that was the only known cause of AIDS. I as VP of charity CRUSAID - did not.”
That was two weeks ago, and I am still livid.
Let’s be clear: unprotected sex was and is a vector for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The gender of the people having the sex is irrelevant. Section 28 did not do ANYTHING to combat this. By denying people education about homosexuality, it denied them important education about safer sex. Section 28 was not an inhibitor to the spread of AIDS; it was neutral at best and a contributor at worst.
More than this, being gay is not “a behaviour” as the Tory baroness puts it. Having sex is a behaviour but it is not – and this will shock you, I’m sure – a behaviour in which I spend much of my time indulging. When I’m watching the telly, or playing a boardgame, or cooking dinner, or answering a question about housing law, or popping to the shops, I am not any less gay than I am when I’m canoodling with a gentleman. The fervour with which homophobes try to reduce the state of being gay down to act of bumming – something I have never once done in 45 years of life – and cannot accept that it is so much more than that, about the full range of love and attraction, would be laughable were not so pathetic. And so damaging.
Section 28 has been off the statute books for over two decades now, but it and the dangers it represents is not a thing of the past. “Don’t say gay” bills are on the statute books in some American states today, as homophobes desperately pretend that if children don’t learn that gay people exist, gay people will stop existing. On both sides of the Atlantic, bills to try and restrict knowledge about trans people are a very real threat. People will NOT cease to be queer if they are not taught that queer people exist. But they will find it more challenging and frightening to live authentic, happy lives if they and their peers are not shown the simple, joyful reality of queer existence. These laws are a real danger, and they must be fought.
UK newspapers are reporting today on “reforms” made by the government to the legal protections afforded to LGBT+ people, the main bulk of which is removing such protections for transgender people. I’ve already seen friends of friends saying, “well, at least they’re banning gay conversion therapy.” Please don’t be one of these people.
Is it a good thing that gay conversion ‘therapy’ is to be banned? In principle, yes, absolutely. Do trans rights need to be eroded in order to do this? No, absolutely not – the two issues are utterly and entirely separate. This being so, and given the fact that until very recently the government has been vocally reluctant to ban gay conversion ‘therapy’, a cynical person might wonder if its inclusion in today’s announcements is motivated not by any kind of genuine desire to respect and protect gay people, but instead is an opportunistic grab for appearing more moderate than they truly are, while at the same time sewing division in the LGBT+ community.
A lot of the arguments used to advocate against trans rights are exactly the same as the arguments historically (and in some cases, not so historically) used to advocate against gay rights. It’s just a phase. This isn’t a real identity, they’re actually mentally ill. Giving rights to these people will endanger children. Giving rights to these people will put normal people at risk. Giving rights to these people will make normal people uncomfortable(!). Recognising their identity as real will destroy the meaning of marriage/the definition of gender/the very bedrock of society. These arguments were nonsense then, and they are nonsense now. And if you are a cisgender gay person who wants to argue against recognising, respecting and protecting trans people then good luck to you, because once trans rights and protections have been dismantled then sooner or later – and my money’s on sooner – then the people responsible will turn their attention back to us.
Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary and gender queer people are real and their identities are valid. Black lives matter. Why have I included that last sentence in a polemic about trans rights? Because these are all fundamental truths that our current government does not recognise – or, even worse, in some cases recognises but wilfully ignores because they would rather chase the votes of the rights than protect and safeguard the people in their care. If you are white and cisgender you may think that these issues do not affect you, but a society that will not recognise other peoples’ basic humanity is one that will harm every single person living within it.
A somewhat belated post - I started typing up my thoughts about Series 12 shortly after it ended, but only found the energy for a sustained bout of typing while taking a few days off work.
Season 12 of Doctor Who is now over. Readers may recall that I felt season 11 was pretty lacklustre. Season 12… has been an improvement, but a lot of the issues remain. The cast are great – Jodie Whittaker is fantastic, and I honestly cannot understand the vocal subset of fandom who insist on saying she can’t act – but there are too many regular characters, which means that none of the three companions get a decent share of screen time or character development. There’s been an improvement in the number and development of the guest characters, but many episodes have really suffered from the problem of scooping up all of the NPCs into the TARDIS and carting them along. As a consequence, a lot of episodes really struggle to cultivate a sense of location, and having guest characters in the TARDIS becomes run of the mill.
It’s also very interesting to me that, after making his first series almost entirely continuity-free, Chibnall’s second series is probably the most fanwanky we’ve ever had. Spoilers for all of the episodes follow.
Spyfall is a strong start to the series. The aliens were far scarier and better realised than anything for the preceding series, and part one benefitted from a strong sense of style and place, a slow build of the plot, and a genuinely shocking and tense cliffhanger. Part two floundered a bit by comparison, choosing to rattle through both Ada Lovelace in Victorian England and Noor Inayat Khan in Nazi-occupied Paris. Either one of these pairs of characters and settings would have been strong enough for an episode on their own; smooshed together, neither was really given a chance to develop. Still, the Doctor/Master scene on the Eifel Tower was very well done.
Orphan 55 seemed to go down very badly with my friends when it was transmitted, but I rather enjoyed it. It was a very trad base under siege story with a proper cast of supporting characters and some genuinely tense and scary moments. The “twist” of it being Earth all along, however, fell very flat – it’s a bit of a cliché by now, added nothing to the story, and has been done better before by earlier Doctor Who stories! The Doctor’s moralising speech at the end also made me grind my teeth – as others have said, it’s not that I disagree at all with the moral, but that we were bright enough to work it out from the episode without needing to have the Doctor break the forth wall to address the audience directly. I also question the logic of the Doctor taking the entire supporting cast, including a frail elderly lady and a young child, with her on her monster hunt, rather than leaving a group behind at the more defensible holiday camp.
Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror was really good, and felt like the most Doctor Who-y story of the Chibnall era by some margin. Great cast, great monsters (despite the usually reliable Anjili Mohnidra hamming it up as the scorpion queen) – all three of the main human guest cast were proper, fleshed-out characters – and a strong sense of location. The thing that struck me afterwards, however, as I rhapsodised about how much I’d enjoyed this episode and that it was the best new Doctor Who story in ages, was that in a Davies or Maffatt season, this would have been a good middle of the road episode, and not the showstopper it was here.
What can I say about Fugitive of the Judoon? The whole episode is one big slight of hand, which is pulled off very well – but as a consequence, it’s difficult to think on the plot as a whole. The Judoon are back as a returning monster at least in part to distract from the surprise reappearance of Captain Jack, which I suspect in turn was at least in part to keep the audience’s mind off of who Ruth could really be. The pay-off to that, when it comes, is a satisfyingly shocking moment that raises a lot of intriguing questions.
Praxaeus, sadly, was a bit of a damp squib. It’s one of the worst offenders for the Chibnall-era trope of gathering all of the guest cast in the TARDIS and setting big chunks of the story there. The idea of the Doctor and her companions investigating a global crisis at different locations around the world had a lot of promise, but because the Doctor was able to just swoop in and scoop them all up in the TARDIS whenever needed, that idea never really came to fruition. Because the guest cast were all thrown onto the ship, a lot of them never really got the chance to shine – and it’s never explained exactly how captured astronaut Adam is able to text his location to grumpy policeman husband Jake – though at least kudos goes to the episode for a really down to earth portrayal of a same-sex marriage.
Can You Hear Me? was hugely frustrating – this could have been a gem of an episode, but as it is it sinks like a lead balloon. The problem is that the writer has thrown far too many ideas at the story in the hope of seeing what sticks. A mental hospital in Fourteenth Century Aleppo being terrorised by monsters from the nightmares of one of the patients would have been a really good episode. The Doctor’s companions and their friends being trapped in their dreams in modern day Sheffield would have been a really good episode. A ship full of experiments orbiting two colliding planets would have been a reasonably decent episode – but by trying to do all three at once in fifty minutes, nothing is given any chance to breathe and develop. Again, supporting characters are just thrown into the TARDIS and moved from arbitrary location to arbitrary location, and then the monster is defeated by… the dialogue saying that they’ve been defeated. It’s such a shame, because there’s so much good stuff here – Ian Gelder is superb as Zellin, and could have easily been a great recurring villain if they’d chosen to make more than one episode from these ideas – but sadly the whole thing is so much less than the sum of its parts.
The Haunting of Villa Diodati, by contrast, is superb – one location, really well developed and realised, a strong, well-drawn cast of supporting characters (and some very handsome gentlemen as well!) and no TARDIS scenes. The early parts of the episode are fantastically tense and creepy, with the horror of being trapped in a moebius strip of a house very effectively portrayed. Like any haunted house story, it loses some interest once the reason for the “haunting” is revealed, but the second half remains strong not least because Ashad the emotional Cyberman is superbly well portrayed.
Ascension of the Cybermen/The Timeless Children is very much a game of two halves. Part one is pretty effective – Ashad continues to be an excellent villain (his big virtual confrontation with the Doctor is superb) and the grim reality of the Cyber Wars is very well conveyed. Showing the potency of the Cybermen by having them effortlessly destroy all the Doctor’s clever gadgets and scatter her companions is an excellent touch, and Graham and Yaz’s fight for survival is compelling and convincing. The wheels very much come off in part two, however – I like Dhawan’s Master (more on him later) but the fact that he perfunctorily kills off the far more interesting Ashad is a mistake, as is halting the episode for what feels like half an hour of tedious Gallifreyan story time. The “Cyber Lords” are a bad fan fic idea, look derisible and do absolutely nothing before they’re dispatched. The actual Cybermen, terrifying in small numbers last week, are unable to hit a single human with dyspraxia running away from them in their dozens this week. The big questions of the episode – why is there a magic portal to Gallifrey? How did the Master destroy the entirety of his own race singlehandedly? – are never even asked, let alone answered. And as for the awful deus ex “death particle” suddenly jumping out of the plot with no set-up – eugh! Pretty much the only thing this episode has going for it are the excellent Graham/Yaz scenes.
The two things this series is likely to be remembered for are the new incarnation of the Master, and the revelations about the Doctor. Sacha Dhawan is great in the role – his Master feels genuinely unhinged and properly dangerous, with a real predatory cunning – but given how perfect Missy’s arc and final scenes were, I’m genuinely a little disappointed to see the character back, especially in full-on villain mode. However, I will concede that jealousy over discovering that the Doctor really is “special” is a very in-character motivation for him to renew his vendetta.
As for the shock revelations – the idea of a secret incarnation that the Doctor herself does not remember is intriguing, and Jo Martin really makes the role her own. There was a lot of speculation at the time that she’s the “Season 6B” Doctor, between Troughton and Pertwee, and that’s still the idea that I like, and seems ripe for development. If she’s pre-Hartnell, then why does she call herself the Doctor, and why is her TARDIS a police box?
The whole “Timeless Child” nonsense however – why on Earth did anyone think that a protracted subplot to explain away a moment from the Brain of Morbius (transmitted forty-four years previously!) was a good idea? How alienating must this have been for casual viewers? As an idea, I think it stinks, not out of a slavish insistence that the Hartnell incarnation must have been the first but for the fact that the Doctor only really became the Doctor – the hero – as the series was starting. Chibnall tries to have his cake and eat it by erasing the Doctor’s knowledge of her previous lives, and reminding us on screen that the interesting thing about the Doctor is not her origins, but who she is now – but as that’s the case, why are we supposed to care about her Timeless Child incarnations? What was the point of it? Even if you subscribe to the idea that “who is the Doctor?” is an interesting and worthwhile mystery, the Timeless Child isn’t a mystery answered, just a mystery deferred. If I had to sum up my feelings in one word, it would be “meh.”
Recently, I’ve seen a lot of people talking about dissatisfaction with, and anxiety about, their body.
I sometimes visit a site called FM Forums, where people post photos of male celebrities, often shirtless or nude. And while the photos are fun, very often the comments just descend into vitriol about the person in the photo – he’s ugly, he’s too young, he’s too old, he’s too fat, he’s too thin, he’s too muscly, he’s too scrawny, he’s too hairy, he’s too smooth, his cock’s too small, he trims too much, he doesn’t trim enough, it’s disgusting that he’s circumcised, it’s disgusting that he isn’t. On and on and on, often with pretty much all of the above opinions about one image!
I take two things away from this:
Firstly, a lot of people have a completely unearned sense of entitlement about other people’s bodies, and are not afraid to be cruel and spiteful, especially if they believe that the target of their spite and cruelty isn’t around to witness it. These people are not worth listening to.
Secondly, there is no objective standard for beauty. There are people that I find hugely attractive that I have seen others decry as ugly; there are people who are just not my cup of tea who I’ve seen others utterly swoon over.
Your body doesn’t exist for anybody’s benefit or entertainment except your own. It’s absolutely fine to have preferences about other people’s bodies, but it’s not remotely fine to expect anyone else to modify their body to conform to your preferences. I realise that that may seem like an odd statement coming from me, given that a lot of my favourite pastimes involve people taking their clothes off, and most of my activity on here involves liking people's nudes, but I think – I hope – that I’m able to see the difference between appreciating a thing and wanting control of it. If I think that your body is aesthetically pleasing, then I honestly hope that that buoys you up and gives you confidence – but in either event, you are under precisely zero obligation to entertain me with it. And if your body isn’t my particular cup of tea, then that’s spectacularly irrelevant because your body isn’t *for* me, it’s for you, and someone else whose cup of tea it is will be just around the corner. (The metaphorical corner – I’m not suggesting that you’re being stalked.)
I understand that when you have body image issues – and goodness knows, I certainly have my share – having someone say “no really, you look great” is naff all help, but I hope that you are able to bear the above in mind. I hope that I am, too.
I think that there are plenty of circumstances where the old adage "if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" isn't true - the current political climate, for example :S - but when it comes to other peoples' bodies, kindness is so much better than vitriol, don’t you think?
Merlin: I blame myself for what you’ve become, Morgana—
*watching it for the 6926291819739393878918908th time*
Me: AS YOU SHOULD YOU IDIOT!!! HAD YOU TOLD HER ABOUT YOUR MAGIC AND NOT LISTENED TO THAT STUPID OLD DRAGON AND GAIUS AND NOT FREAKING POISONED HER IT WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED
We start with a slow pan down to Gotham as Oracle narrates
“Ask your average person who Gotham’s most famous citizen is, and you’ll get the same response every time: Bruce Wayne. Everybody’s heard of Bruce Wayne. You’ve probably heard his name a million times before. But there are some things that the average citizen doesn’t know about him. See, to the people of Gotham, Bruce Wayne is a rich kid who never grew up. They think he’s a buffoon, an airhead, a moron. But the truth is…”
*Batman bursts out of a window, screaming, on fire*
This is then followed by a series of clips from interviews with various Gotham citizens, all of whom give humorously ironic descriptions of Bruce Wayne’s idiocy:
“Bruce Wayne? I hear the guy gets through a super-car every month! Replaces every one, just like that!”
*Cut to shot of the Batmobile flipping end-over-end after slamming into one of Bane’s APCs*
“Wayne? Please! The guy would probably have accidentally killed himself years ago if he didn’t have that butler to babysit him!”
*Cut to Alfred physically restraining Bruce from going out to fight Scarecrow while having a broken arm, a concussion, and the flu,*
“I bet he throws away cash like it grows on trees!”
*Cut to Batman shouting “Hey, Lucius! Ask R&D to make some kryptonite/Nth metal alloy baterangs! Y’know, just in case!”
“I’m almost jealous. Super rich and he gets to hang out with gorgeous women across the world? Sign me up!”
*Cut to Bruce being slammed face first into a wall repeatedly by Lady Shiva.*
This post contains incredibly mild spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.
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I’ve seen a lot of discussion on-line recently about the moment of gay representation in Endgame, and about whether it’s a triumph or an insult. The reality, I think, is that it’s both.
Taken purely on its own merits, the scene is superb. We see a very honest portrayal of a man moving through the stages of grief and trying the rebuild his life, and when this man talks about the person he has lost, and the person he is now dating, he uses the word “he.” The scene would have been not one iota different if we had instead heard “she” and that’s exactly how it should be. We are shown that gay love is just the same as straight love, and that gay grief feels just the same as straight grief. I still hear people complaining when a character in a piece of fiction is depicted as LGBT+ “even though it’s not relevant to the plot” – I heard it an uncomfortable amount of times about Bill in Doctor Who, for example. But the reality is that people aren’t queer in real life because it’s “relevant to the plot”, we just _are_.
More importantly still, it is absolutely perfect that the person this man is talking to is Captain America, a person who very literally embodies the heroic ideal of America, and who lived most of his life when homosexuality was criminalised and taboo. He doesn’t bat an eyelid at the character’s use of “he” but is compassionate and supportive – clearly, this person’s sexual orientation is a complete non-issue to him, just as it should be. It’s really valuable to see this depicted.
However.
Taken as the sum total of overt queer representation in eleven years of major films, this scene is the very epitome of too little, too late.
This is the twenty-first film in the MCU, and it’s the first to have any overt on-screen queer representation. The fact that all we get is some unnamed rando in a thirty second scene, even a beautifully composed one, is frustrating to say the least. To an extent, I am sympathetic to the argument that none of the principal characters we’ve seen in the films are LGBT in the comics, and that it would therefore be too much of a departure change their orientation for the screen – but there have been some fairly major departures from the comicbook cannon, and there have definitely been enough supporting characters created for the screen that not everyone needed to be straight.
Also, I say “overt representation” because Valkyrie was intended to be queer, and her moment of same-sex affection ended up on the cutting room floor. While I don’t think for a moment that the Russo Brothers had any hand in her excision, it does make their trumpeting of the Endgame’s gay scene feel a little hubristic.
And while we’re here, lets talk about the awkward “she has help” moment near the end of the film, where all of the surviving female superheroes suddenly appear and pose for the camera. I absolutely loved the equivalent “she isn’t alone” moment in Infinity War – it felt empowering to see three kick-ass women take on one bad-ass woman; the line was great, being redolent of solidarity; but most importantly, it felt like a natural moment on the battlefield. This time round, however, it felt not at all like a real moment in a battle, but rather the filmmakers explicitly breaking the fourth wall to say to the audience, “Look! Look! We DO have plenty of strong female characters, we do!” – after the vast majority were conspicuous by their absence for most of the film. Marvel, we can tell the difference between representation and tokenism, and this was the latter.
I am still spitting feathers about Andrea Leadsom’s comments about parents having the right to “choose when their children are exposed to LGBT issues”. As though the very knowledge that we exist will somehow cause children to turn gay, or suddenly overwhelm them with graphic sexual information. Not one person would dream of suggesting that explaining to a child that Mr Smith (a man) is married to Mrs Smith (a woman) is indoctrinating children into heterosexuality, or involves having to explain the intricacies of cunnilingus to them. Yet, somehow, explaining to a child that two men might want to be married is somehow destroying their innocence.
The thing that makes me REALLY angry about this discussion, though, and the similar ones that have been held over the years, is the inevitable cry of “I’m not homophobic, I just…” fill in the blank as applicable. I remember a few years ago now reading an article by right-wing social commentator and alleged journalist Melanie Phillips about guidelines that advised schools to help normalise pupils’ perceptions of gay people by, for example, occasionally referencing a same sex couple in the text of a maths question. “What has maths got to do with gayness?” cried Ms Phillips. She then went on explain that she could not possibly be homophobic because of articles she has written in the past decrying the systemic murder of gay people in Iran, without ever considering that perhaps the reason why it is seen as acceptable in Iran to systemically murder gay people is precisely because there are no examples there or homosexuality being normal, unremarkable and everyday.
And to be clear, I am absolutely certain that when the Melanie Phillipses and Andrea Leadsoms of this world say that they are opposed to gay people being systemically murdered, they are being entirely sincere. I think that not wanting an entire class of people to be arbitrarily killed is a fairly low ethical bar, but I’m confident that they meet it. And they are homophobes nevertheless.
If you believe that discussing being gay necessitates some kind of graphic description of sex acts, you are a homophobe. If you believe that telling children that some of their classmates will have two mummies, or two daddies, and that that’s okay is disgusting, perverted, immoral, or just too sensitive for their innocent young ears, you are a homophobe. If you believe that that telling your children that being gay is wrong in the hope that they won’t turn out to be is better than telling them that you’ll still love them if they are, then not only are you a homophobe, you are not fit to be a parent.
And I’m not throwing around the word “homophobia” because I find these attitudes offensive (although they are) or because I am “triggered” but because these attitudes kill gay people. They kill as surely and as certainly as Melanie Phillips’s Iranian death squads. They kill by empowering the hate criminal, and they kill by feeding the despair of frightened, vulnerable gay kids who believe that this world has no place for them. These attitudes are dangerous; do not pander to them and do not allow them to flourish. Stand up to hate.
And, yes, everything I’ve said here about gay people applies just as much to bi and pan and queer people. And it applies doubly so to trans and non-binary people, who still face a horrifically hostile media landscape.
“You’d be surprised”, said Xaldien, who just lost four followers and received a lovely “men can’t be raped” anon shortly after reblogging this the first time.
Out of 19000+ followers I have, only one of you actually reblogged about this issue, yet a lot of you have reblogged and liked a picture by playboy about catcalling and that how men should never do it.
Additionally, I have received abuse in my ask box (which I will be answering when I can) and threats. In particular death threats and rape threats.
I can see the real problem here already. Male domestic violence and rape is just invisible in our society because we don’t want to talk about this because it just damages the status quo of this fucking website.
I’m a boy , and when i was younger I was sexually assaulted every damn day for three years by my younger step SISTER, So don’t go saying that ‘boys can’t be raped’ bull shit
It’s part of why male suicide rates are higher than women’s. They are raised and told by society that expressing emotion or sharing experiences makes them weak, and less manly, and that is such toxic bullshit. Like, if I was with a guy who’d gone through that, I’d want him to tell me, to be able to let himself feel the pain and the fear and the anger. Men have feelings too.
There is so much trouble keeping the men’s domestic violence shelter in town here open, no one is interested in funding it, no one is interested in hearing about these men, and it fucking sucks.
