Recently I’ve been thinking about different components of sexual orientation, and how it is effectively formed of both internal identity and external behaviour. It’s interesting that, without a detailed conversation with other individuals, we can only assume their orientation and identity on the basis of their external behaviour, which is all that is visible to us.
For example, if someone is in a long term, committed, monogamous relationship with a member of the opposite sex, they are assumed to be straight, and their behaviour is interpreted as representative of heterosexuality. But they might be bisexual. If someone is in a long term, committed, monogamous relationship with a member of the same sex, they are assumed to be gay/lesbian, and their behaviour is interpreted as representative of homosexuality. But they might be bisexual.
In this context, what external behaviour could someone exhibit that would lead to the assumption they were bisexual, and therefore that their behaviour is representative of bisexuality? They’d have to be engaging with the same sex and the opposite sex more or less simultaneously in order not to be assumed to be straight or gay/lesbian. How might that work?
They could be having regular sex with multiple people of both sexes (bisexuals are promiscuous, bisexuals are easy, bisexuals are sluts). They could be having multiple consecutive and short term relationships with people of both sexes (bisexuals can’t commit, bisexuals will leave you for a member of the other sex). They could be having sex with people of both sexes at the same time (bisexuals are kinky, bisexuals have group sex, bisexuals want to have threesomes all the time). They could have a committed relationship with a member of one sex, and affairs with members of the other sex (bisexuals CHEAT). They could be non-monogamous and having various relationships with members of both sexes (bisexuals can’t be satisfied with just one person).
So. In order for other people to recognise you as a bisexual person, you have to be engaging in some form of stigmatised and nonconforming sexual activity, all of which just happen to be typical stereotypes about bisexuality. The only way to be perceived as a bisexual person is to conform with bisexual stereotypes. A bisexual person who doesn’t conform to a single bisexual stereotype cannot be perceived as a bisexual person, and therefore cannot disprove or undermine those stereotypes in the mind of the person perceiving them. Because if they don’t conform to a single bisexual stereotype, they are perceived as heterosexual/homosexual, and their nice, conforming, virtuous behaviour is ascribed to that perceived monosexual identity. Even if they had previously exhibited bisexual behaviour (bisexuality is just a phase, they’ll eventually pick a side).
Alternatively, they could verbally assert their identity regularly enough to offset the assumptions others make on the basis of their behaviour (bisexuals are self-obsessed).
There is no way of being consistently perceived as a bisexual person, in the current landscape, without reinforcing bisexual stereotypes in the minds of those perceiving you, because if you don’t align with and reinforce those stereotypes you are unperceivable as a bisexual person.
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She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
"[fictionalization of life at a notorious radical all-female protest camp] dw uhm the thing is that this all really helps the male parent on a journey of self-acceptance !!! #NotATERF!!!!" can we not have anything
Your therapist asks you "Who in this image do you see yourself as?" and then shows you a drawing of two shirtless skinny anime catboys with a thread of saliva going between their lips
My prank demonstrated how our minds can adversely affect our health, and scientists are increasingly showing that negative thoughts can prod
“You may have heard of the placebo effect, when positive expectations lead to positive health outcomes. But my interest is in its evil twin. The nocebo effect occurs when dismal expectations lead to negative health outcomes. The phenomenon can create, exacerbate and prolong symptoms. When these symptoms coalesce, people become ill – not from disease, but from the intimate relationship that exists between mind and body…
You don’t just have to take my word for it. There is a plethora of peer-reviewed studies confirming this idea. In one, patients fresh from minor keyhole surgery received a harmless saline infusion that they were told would temporarily increase their pain. It did just that. In another, 40 asthmatic adults breathed in water vapour from an inhaler they were told contained an irritant. Nineteen went on to feel wheezy. Twelve had a full-blown asthma attack…
Thoughts and neural activity can and do precipitate physical change. The work of Harvard’s Ellen Langer has shown, for example, that when people with diabetes are made to sit in front of a clock that runs at double, regular or half speed, their blood glucose levels rise and fall with the perceived passing of time, rather than the actual passing of time. Alia Crum at Stanford has shown that when people drink identical milkshakes labelled as “high-calorie” or “diet”, levels of the “hunger hormone” ghrelin drop three times faster after consuming the drink they believed would make them fuller faster.”
Melissa York meets the pioneering pals who designed their own housing co-op for the over-50s — no men allowed. Ten years since New Ground op
A group of female friends are gathered on a balcony covered in purple wisteria. Laughter echoes around the communal garden as 96-year-old Hedi Argent, the eldest of 26 residents, poses for our photographer below.
“The price label is still on!” yells her neighbour, Angela Ratcliffe, 92. Another woman rushes out to snip the tag from the back of Argent’s top as teasing cries of “Who are you wearing?” and “How much?” ring out.
This is no ordinary housing development. It is Britain’s first all-female cohousing community for older people. Ten years ago, 26 women ranging in age from their early fifties to their mid-eighties moved into this three-storey brick block, which they had co-designed on the site of an old convent school tucked behind the local high street.
New Ground housing development in High Barnet, north London, is not an old people’s home — the women like to say they “look out for each other, not look after each other”. Twenty-one of the original 26 still live here today. They come from vastly different walks of life but are united by one radical idea: what if we didn’t have to grow old alone but were able to share a home with our friends?
“Most women say it,” observes Argent, a former social worker who is Jewish and fled to Britain from Vienna to escape the Nazis when she was ten years old. “Men a little less, I think. But women very much say, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to live together? We’ll buy a big house…’ ”
“ ‘… and we’ll have a kitchen in the middle and we’ll always have wine,’ ” Jude Tisdall, a 74-year-old resident, pitches in.
“But very few people are able to realise it,” Argent finishes.
All of female life is here: about nine different nationalities, workers and retirees, people who left school at 15 and people with a PhD. Some of the women are widowed after happy marriages, some are divorced after unhappy ones. There’s a lesbian couple sharing one apartment, a few who are dating or have long-term partners and others who prefer to stay single.
Men are allowed to visit — there’s a guest suite for friends and relatives — but they cannot own or rent a home here.
“It’s about taking control of our individual lives. It’s not a rejection of men,” Tisdall says.
The seeds of New Ground were planted in 1998 by Maria Brenton, now 80, who at the time taught a master’s course in women’s studies at Cardiff University. In the late 1990s she had visited North America, Denmark and Holland with a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a policy research organisation working to end poverty, to find out how different countries looked after older people.
“I was able to stay in a fantastic cohousing group of older women overlooking a canal in the middle of Amsterdam,” the academic recalls. “Holland was contemplating the ageing of its society in an inspiring, progressive way that the UK wasn’t back then and, let’s be honest, still isn’t today.”
With an ageing population and higher female life expectancy, about 2.7 million women aged 65 and over live alone in the UK, compared with 1.5 million men.
In the late 1990s, in contrast to the UK, the Dutch government was already allocating grants to help the 55-plus generation plan ahead and live communally.
One warm June day in 1998 in a pub in King’s Cross, Brenton shared the findings from her trip with a group of women from various feminist and housing networks she was involved with. She’d circulated an advert for the event around the different groups and in newspapers.
A core of women who attended that meeting became fixated on the idea of living together as they aged. One of them was north Londoner Shirley Meredeen, a former journalist, teacher, feminist activist and divorcee with two grown-up sons, who was part of a movement called Growing Old Disgracefully (GOD).
“I don’t think she would have minded me saying that she was a bit of a battering ram, which is exactly what the project needed,” Brenton says in a new book, Our Later Years, which documents what the women achieved in their own words.
Meredeen joined forces with Madeleine Levius, another feminist activist, counsellor and teacher, to form the Barnet-based Older Women’s Co-Housing group, or OWCH, because they “loved the idea of being a thorn in the side”, with the aim of developing accommodation with shared facilities, which they would control.
The women spent 12 years searching for a suitable site in London close to hospitals, public transport links and shops. Time and again they were disappointed. When the group turned down one site on a busy crossroads early on, they were labelled “difficult” by some in the housing sector.
But with the help of Hanover Housing Association, a non-profit provider of accommodation for older people, they eventually found an ideal plot: St Martha’s, a former convent school in Union Street, an easy walk from the shops and cafés of High Barnet high street.
Hanover was prepared to finance the purchase and build upfront. But then came a five-year planning battle with Barnet council. Argent recalls how, initially, planning officers said there were already “too many old people” in the borough and that they were worried this new project, which was attracting interest from women across London, would overburden their social care services.
Also, she says, the local authority “just didn’t understand” why the women wanted eight out of the 25 proposed flats to be for social housing tenants. “The women who started this didn’t want it to be seen as a place of privilege just for women who could afford to belong to this kind of community,” explains Tisdall, who had experienced living in a squat when she first moved to London from Dublin in 1971.
Including social housing in the project created a logjam that took eight years to break. But the women stuck to their guns. A London-based charity, Housing for Women, came on board. Hanover covered the £7.4 million development costs. OWCH lined up 17 women who were willing to sell their homes to buy flats for themselves. The remaining eight were sold to Housing for Women, to rent out for social housing.
Funding came close to unravelling on a number of occasions, but the project was thrown a lifeline with a grant of about £1 million from the Tudor Trust, a charitable organisation with a history of supporting equitable housing projects.
Hanover allowed the women to choose the architects. They went with the London-based Pollard Thomas Edwards (PTE), who armed them with disposable cameras to explore the local conservation area, noting roof angles, tile colours and brick types to inform the design. The women remember that PTE thought gathering 26 opinions might be like “herding cats” — but the group had already spent the best part of a decade honing their ideas and had chosen two of their number to liaise with PTE.
They settled on a design of 25 apartments with their own kitchens and “wet room” bathrooms, connected via corridors and walkways to a shared common house with a kitchen, a large table for communal meals, a screen for movie nights and plenty of bookshelves. When I visit, a work-in-progress puzzle is out on a table overlooking the walled garden — a riot of wildflowers around a sun-drenched pergola.
The whole place was future-proofed with extra-wide doorways and automatic doors to accommodate wheelchairs should they be required as the women aged.
The women moved in over two days in December 2016. Madeleine Levius was not among them: she died aged 78 in 2005 and never saw her project finished. Maria Brenton chose not to live in the development she inspired, preferring to move on to other projects. Shirley Meredeen was able to enjoy six years living in the home she fought to create before she died in 2022. There is a prominent plaque by the front door in her memory.
“Right up until her dying day she said to me, ‘You’ve got to keep this going. You’ve got to encourage the next generation of women,’ ” Tisdall says. “We want them to use our experience and to take this over one day.”
This wish is a big part of the reason why the women of New Ground wrote Our Later Years — a manifesto but also a collection of incredible personal stories.
One resident, Lida Mansourian, 65, was a political activist in Tehran who survived the notorious Evin Prison. She later escaped Iran on a camel to reach the Afghan border before seeking asylum in the UK.
Ann Beatty, the youngest resident at 60, was raised in West Hampstead, north London, by an illiterate father and a mother with bipolar disorder. She left school at 15, had a daughter at 18, moved to Sierra Leone to set up a safe house for 65 young girls and now serves as the chief executive officer of an international educational charity.
The corridors that link the apartments are decorated with personalised art, including a huge mosaic of the Thames made from pottery found by 86-year-old Rachel Douglas, a keen mudlark. Another is artwork by 74-year-old Hilary Vernon-Smith, who spent 28 years in charge of set painting at the National Theatre. The postboxes in the mail area are painted in the suffragette colours of green, purple and white.
But with 26 people living together, surely it can’t have been harmony and laughter all the time? “It’s not utopia,” Tisdall says. “It’s not always easy to live with 25 other women. We deal with ageing, illness and disagreements. We’re not Stepford Wives, we have to work at it and negotiate.”
Disagreements can occur over issues as small as whether a wall should be painted pink or green, or sensitive topics such as the selection of new members.
To help them with decision-making, the women underwent formal conflict resolution training. All decisions are made by consensus and if that cannot be reached, there is a vote requiring an 80 per cent majority to pass. If a decision is blocked, the opposing group has one month to present a workable alternative.
The women share responsibility by volunteering for task groups based on their skills, and they handle everything including finance, building maintenance, gardening, housekeeping and communications. There’s an annually elected committee of seven members who report to a monthly meeting attended by all New Grounders.
They employ a managing agent on a flat annual fee, solely to handle health and safety and building regulations, and to collect the service charge, which is set by the residents.
Women wait years for a flat to become available, so the group runs a non-resident member system where those interested can spend time at New Ground.
Over ten years, only five of the flats have changed hands. Two women died; one moved to the coast to be closer to her sister; another resident became too ill and moved to a care home nearby (but still joins the women for days out); and one simply “decided it wasn’t for her”.
“I have friends who hate the sound of this, but they can see why it works for me,” says Anna Watkins, 72.
Some of the women have regular carers, but there’s no hard-and-fast rule that determines when someone is too ill to live there independently. It’s an ongoing discussion, usually with family and friends.
However, there is a “health buddy” system: small groups of three or four who agree to do the shopping or pick up a prescription if their “buddy” is feeling unwell. When Sue Tubb, 79, fell and broke her hip, her neighbours waited with her for five hours until an ambulance arrived.
Another resident had heart surgery and needed no professional aftercare because her neighbours helped her. The group estimates this saved the NHS about £5,000. This is ironic considering the local authority’s initial scepticism about building new senior housing. “I’m quite certain that we have asked less from the local council than an equivalent number of women living alone,” Argent says.
There are only 31 established cohousing communities in the UK and just a handful designed with older people in mind, according to the UK Cohousing Network.
By 2065, 46 per cent of people in England will be aged 50 or older, the Centre for Better Ageing predicts, yet only about 3 per cent of the country’s total housing stock is built for senior living. Instead of waiting for somebody to ask them how they wanted to live, the women of New Ground built this place for themselves. “I don’t think we ever thought of it as a problem to be solved,” Argent says. “We thought about it as an exploration of what was possible.”
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