And because now is the season of the primary, we can write letters to the 82681263 Democrats:
Dear Senator Warren,
I am considering voting for you in the primary but I want to hear you speak out against the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Mr. Soleimani was a leader in a sovereign nation. Iran will rightly perceive this as an act of war. Surely we’ve had enough of starting wars in the middle east? How many more lives will we sacrifice there?
I hope I can count on you to put the breaks on Trump’s reckless foreign adventure.
How you respond to this issue will determine whether or not you have my support. Thank you for your time and your service.
For this, I am using the form on her campaign site. With the other candidates, I will probably tweak the wording somewhat, as I don’t want to fib. The circumstances that would lead me to vote for Biden, for example, would be rather fantastical.
Trump wants a war. Fuck him. This is the letter I wrote for my liberal senators:
Dear X,
I was very disturbed to read that the Trump administration carried out an assassination of Qasem Soleimani. Mr. Soleimani was a leader in a sovereign nation. Iran will rightly perceive this as an act of war. Surely we’ve had enough of starting wars in the middle east? How many more lives will we sacrifice there?
I hope congress acts to censure the president and reclaim it’s constitutional mandate to be the only body allowed to declare war. I hope I can count on you to put the breaks on Trump’s reckless foreign adventure.
I live at Y and voted for you in the last election. Thank you for your time and your service.
Best Regards,
CCH
abc@def.ghi
I’m going to create a PDF of this letter to fax to my senators, using a free service. I hope they get a large pile of hard-to-ignore paper. It’s important to include my voting address so they know I live within their district and state.
My representative is actually a leftist and my letter to her will take a different tone about the immorality of drone strikes in general and wars of choice in particular. That will be sent by email. I trust her to do the right thing, but being able to cite the support of constituents is always helpful.
Letters to the editors of newspapers continue to carry a certain amount of weight, so I’ll send a few of those as well. Our congress is made up of cowards who will wait to see which way the wind is blowing before they act. We need to make out voices heard.
Like we did with the 100, we can set up an old school patch on the Doepfer. Here we’ve got a VCO going to a VCF, LPF, or low pass filter.
Then we can go from the LPF to the VCA
We’re going to use MIDI in this example, so we’re going from the MIDI to CV converter gate output to the ADSR envelope generator. We’ve also plugged the VCA output into the mixer.
We can use the CV output to control both the VCO and the VCF
If you want to use a keyboard or other MIDI device, you can use a MIDI cable. If you’re just using a laptop or a computer, you can also plug in a USB cable.
You can use the Doepfer to filter and process other sounds by going into the Ext Input module. You could plug in the DtoA converter of a computer to do things to a sound or could could come out of the Roland 100M’s mixer.
That module also does envelope following so if you want to use the Doepfer to do FM with a recorded sound, for example, you can follow the envelope, so the loudness of the source sound can be sent to the CV input to a VCA. This way, you have the sample amplitude profile as the source sound.
It’s ok to plug mixer output of the 100M into the Doepfer, but the CVs may have different ranges.
The typical way people historically played these in bands was with keyboards. The keyboard outputs two control voltages. One is the gate, which is open when a key is pressed and closed when one isn’t, and the other is a CV which corresponds to the frequency associated with the particular key.
You would send the gate to an envelope generator. This is a module that makes a nicer shape than on or off, For instance, the Roland 100 has an ADSR envelope – Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release which vaguely corresponds to the amplitude profile of striking a piano key. It’s really loud, then it gets quieter and then it sustains for a while until you let go of the key, then when you release they key it goes to nothing. You can see in the photo that we have fast attacks and decays, and an almost instant release. The sustain level is quiet.
You’d send the CV to a VCO – a voltage controlled oscillator. It controls the pitch of the oscillator. You also want to turn up that control input – in the picture, it’s turned down.
It’s also possible to plug in the keyboard so it’s output goes to all the modules on a row. This is by plugging in at the right hand side of the bottom section of any row.
The control inputs of the VCOs are at the bottom and the audio output is at the top of the module. Modern synthesisers usually do this the other way around.
The left slider is up, so the keyboard in combination with the tuning knobs control the pitch
You need to tune your oscillators. You’ve plugged in your keyboard which tells the oscillator how to move the pitch up and down, but you haven’t set the base frequency. Use the tuning knobs to get the frequency to match the keyboard key.
In traditional synthesising, you would probably plug the out put of your oscillator into a votlage controlled filter, or VCF, which I’ve done there with the grey wire.
I’ve plugged the output of the filter into the input of the VCA. The voltage controlled amplifier lets us change how loud the sound is.
The I plug the envelope output to the control voltage input of the VCA. That’s using the red wire in the photo. The colours of the wires correspond only to how long they are. Otherwise, they’re identical.
I’ve sent the VCA output to a mixer and the mixer is plugged into the amp.
This patch is quite boring. I could send the gate to a second envelope generator to control the filter. Or I could send the VC to a bunch of slightly detune oscillators. This can sound very nice with sawtooth waves.
There’s also the option to use one oscillator to modify another, which is FM or I could use an oscillator to modify an VCA, which is AM. Those make more complicated spectra for sounds.
Putting a complicated spectra or noise through a filter is called subtractive synthesis. People used to put synthesisers based on what their filters sounded like so they could do this kind of synthesis. Low pass filters were an especially popular way of doing this, but people also used other shapes like high pass, band pass and band reject.
The Roland has a lot of oscillators, so you can also do some additive synthesis where you take a bunch of waves (like detuned saws) and add them together, but sending them all to a module that takes multiple inputs, like a filter, mixer or VCA.
You can send any kind of audio into a filter, VCA, or mod input to an oscillator, if you want to change the spectrum of a recording using the synthesiser.
A word of warning on this particular synthesiser is that the arpeggiator on the keyboard is broken and it will sound weird if you try to use it. You’ll have to turn off the keyboard and let it cool down.
About two weeks ago, the very interesting artist, Sophie Hoyle approached me to code a video cutter and graphics display using theta brain waves. This was for a performance at the new Science Gallery in conjunction with their exhibit on anxiety.
I’ve done a biometric video cutting app for Sophie before, so I said ok, despite the quick turnaround. This fast time frame was not their fault. The first brain wave reader they ordered was stopped by UK Customs and returned to the sender. So they then ordered a more consumer-focused brainwave reader and hired me once it arrived.
Emotiv
The Emotiv is a very Kickstarter, very Silicon Valley brain wave headset. It comes with an iPhone app or Android app which asks for an enormous and completely unnecessary amount of personal data, which is sent back to the company in the US, where they can mine it in various ways completely unrelated to product functionality. People buy this thing to use it while meditating, to monitor whether they are getting the right brain wave shapes. Some might argue that this is, perhaps, a misunderstanding of the goals and practices of meditation, but those people have not spent enough time in corporate offices in San Jose.
When it launched on kickstarter, there was a community SDK supporting all the various operating systems, including Linux. This was since dropped in favour of an API for windows and a separate one for Mac only. It requires an API key to get access to the some the data. You can rent the API key from them for a modest fee that makes sense if you think you’re going to sell a lot of apps. The art and educational markets are kind of neglected. Nevertheless, some intrepid soul worked backwards to decode the data and built a python library to access it.
Python is really great to write, but the Python 2/3 divide has always confused me. Plus it’s very easy to accidentally get ten different versions of the same library on one’s computer. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get my python libraries under control.
Then I found that the reverse-engineered library was relying on a different version of the HID library. I started trying to work that out and ran into a wall. I started to try to update the emotiv library itself, but that way lies danger, so I quickly gave up and switched to a Mac I’d borrowed from my uni, so I could use the official API.
The Mac has a relatively new OS, but is 9 years old, so I had to download an old version of XCode. This is how I learned that old versions of XCode look like they’re available from Apple, but once you spend hours downloading them, something weird is going on with key authentication and they won’t unzip. I borrowed a laptop from Sophie and couldn’t get XCode on to it either.
There was always an option of doing things not-quite live where we could record a visualisation of the brainwave data, cut a video to that data and have live music based on the prepared video, so the music would react live to the brainwaves, but nothing else would. It’s sub-optimal, but time was running really short. I couldn’t get the emotive to pair successfully with either computer because it only works with extremely recent operating systems.
(The commercial world of software and operating systems is a hell-scape where people with more money than you try to prevent you from being able to use expensive things which you’ve already purchased. I cannot believe what people put up with. Come to linux. We want you to be able to actually use your stuff!)
I gave the device back to Sophie with intense apologies, saying I’d had no luck and they’d be better off doing their own recording and cutting the video to it, because there was nothing I could do. It was about 3 days before the performance. this was not good. I felt terrible. They were in a panic. Things were bad.
They found a computer with a new operating system and also could not get the device to work. They gave it to the sponsoring organisation who had purchased it and it didn’t work for them either. It was a £500, over engineered, under functional, insufficiently tested, piece of kick starter shit.
The Emotiv gets 0 stars out of every star in the galaxy.
Bitalino
About 2 days before the performance, they told me they still the bitalino from the last project of theirs that I worked on and would that work? I said it would, so, with less than 48 hours to go, I went and picked up the device.
Alas, I did not write down how to get it to pair from previously, so I spent a lot of time just trying to connect to it. Then I had to figure out how to draw a graph. The Gallery, meanwhile was freaking out. All I had was a white screen with a scrolling graph made up of extremely fake data that didn’t even look convincing. They wanted me to come in and show what I had. Nothing was working. I showed up an hour late and everything looked like shit.
Then, while I was there, I figured out how to get the bloody thing to connect. “That’s real data!” I shouted, pointing at the projection, jumping up and down. There were 24 hours left and I had 1.5 hours of teaching to do the next morning.
I went home and wrote a quick bandpass filter with OSC callback in SuperCollider. The Processing program would start a SuperCollider synth and reset an input value whenever it read data from the device. The synth would write that to a control bus. A separate synth read from the control bus and did a band pass filter on it. Theta waves are about 4 Hz, so hopefully this is good enough. I did an RMS of the filter output to figure out how much theta was going on. Then sclang sent OSC messages back to processing telling it the state of the amplitudes of the bank of bandpass filters.
In case the bitalino crapped out (spoiler: it didn’t), I wrote an emergency brown noise generator and used it for the analysis. Both looked great.
The I went to work on the video switching. It was working brilliantly, but at the size of a postage stamp. I got it to full screen and it stopped working. It was time for the tech check.
I went to the gallery, still unsure what was going on with the video switching. I finally discovered that Processing won’t grab images form the video file when Jack is running. SuperCollider relies on Jack to run it’s server even if, as in this case, it’s not producing any output audio.
I quickly set out to write a bandpass filter. I got a biquad programmed and got the right settings for it when I realised I didn’t know how to make brown noise to compensate for possible data dropout. I decided to declare a code freeze, rely on the SuperCollider and miss out on the video cutting and use a prepared video.
I started working out a protocol to ensure I could always get a good bluetooth connection, which worked.
The Sound Check went brilliantly, but they played for the full duration until just before the show was to start. I was worried about having time to reset the Bluetooth, but it was ok and I didn’t need to reset everything. Then Sophie went to the loo whilst still wearing the bitalino. The connection dropped.
The crowd was at the door. I rebooted everything and it connected, but the screens got reversed in processing, so it opened the waves in the wrong window. I rebooted again and it was wrong again! I dragged the window around to be full screen on the projector, but it was blank. However, if I put Gnome into that mode where all the windows are made small so you can look at them and fine the one you want, then you could see the graph. So the whole thing ran in that mode. The rendering was impacted, but the idea got across.
Aftermath
The sponsoring organisation and the gallery were both very happy. It was the most attended performance to date since they got the space. The audience seemed happy and I overheard some positive comment.
I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night for well over a week as a desperately tried to get this thing to work, so I was quite grumpy afterwards. I went home and slept for like 11 hours. I feel like a new man.
Lessons Learned
I didn’t know the Emotiv wasn’t properly supported because I didn’t properly read the support documents before accepting the gig. If I’d done adequate research before accepting, I would have known that I couldn’t deliver the original plan. Also, I should have noticed that their software store of third party apps has no content. That was a massive warning sign that I missed.
I didn’t know the actual Emotiv they got was broken because I always assume every problem is a software problem on my computer. This is often correct, but not always. It should have been a bigger red flag when it wouldn’t work with my android (which also often had software issues). I should have tested it with an iphone immediately straight after it failed to work with my android. I could have known within a few hours that it was fucked, but I carried on trying to figure out python issues.
Ideally, I’d like to get involved in future projects at an earlier stage – like around the time that equipment is being debated and purchased. I understand exactly why curators and artists don’t hire code monkeys until after they’ve got the parts, but knowing more about the plans earlier on could have lead to the purchase of a different item or just using the bitalino from the start.
It is a program that does FFTs of audio files to display a spectrum which you can then edit. It’s not as fully-featured as AudioSculpt, but it’s compatible with your new Mac and the price is right.
When you open a file, it starts by asking you a few questions.
Sinusoidal Partials Analysis window
One of the things it asks is the bin spacing for the FFT. This should be narrower for low pitched sounds and can be wider for higher sounds. If you have a stereo file, it asks which channel you want to process. It works best with mono, so if you have a stereo file, you may wish to mix it down to mono or to process the left and right separately.
Constituent frequencies of a given sound, if they’re loud enough to be important, are called partials. All of the lines in the big window represent partials. Ones towards the bottom are lower in pitch and ones above are higher. Time moves from left to right. The darker partials are louder.
If you want to hear the sound, press space bar. If you don’t hear anything check the preferences and make sure audio is going to to correct output.
The preferences window showing the audio pane, with Core Audio Built-in Output selected.
The transform menu contains a several things you can do to the sound. If no partials are selected, these will apply to every partial. Otherwise, they apply to only the ones which are selected.
The Transform menu
To select a single partial, pick the arrow in the tools menu, and then click on the partial. To select a rectangular area, pick the plus sign, to select a free area, pick the lasso. You can shift click or shift select to grow a selection area. Also see the edit menu for options like inverting your selection.
The tools window
When you hover over an item in the tools menu, the name of the item appears. These items include time stretching, moving, shifting, transposing and drawing in new partials. You can use the time stretch tool to just stretch selected partials in one part of the file.
You can save files, which are the analysis files that SPEAR has created and which you’ve modified. You can also save a rendering as an audio file. There are a few choices with this. You can do an additive re-synthesis using a bunch of sine waves or an IFFT. If unsure, experiment to see what sounds best with the particular file you’re editing.
The Sound menu
There is no manual for SPEAR, but there is a single webpage with some explanations. Or there are some technical papers you can fine on the program’s website.
This program has been written with GTK portability in mind, but I could not find a link to source code and no linux binaries seem to be available. I have written to the author to ask if he intends to make this a FLOSS project, as it seems like a really good fit for the Ubuntu Studio distribution. I’ll update if I hear back. Sending an email like this, is, of course, asking a favour, so I’m a bit worried that he might get this question a lot. In any case, releasing a mac compatibility update was definitely a public good.
I’m writing to ask for the Free Software Foundation remove Richard Stallman from your board.
You’re undoubtedly aware of the Medium article making the rounds, which provides excerpts of emails where RMS appears to minimise sexual assault against a minor. Alas, this is not a one-off. For example, on his blog in 2016, he defended the “right” of men to make rape threats online ( https://stallman.org/notes/2016-jul-oct.html#3_August_2016_(How_Facebook_troll_came_undone ). Obviously, this was after Gamer Gate.
Free Software is a great idea, but RMS’s public comments have become embarrassing to the organisation and the idea. I’ve advocated for Free Software for decades. If we’re going to succeed, we can’t immediately alienate 51% of the population. RMS has done great work in the past, but it’s time for him to step down.
There’s a joke among historians that masculinity is constantly in crisis. Indeed, this has certainly been true my entire adult life. This has been attributed during that time to changing gender roles, changing economic models, automation, the emergence of digital, gaming and lately it’s the fault of trans people. The crisis doesn’t change, and, on some underlying level, neither do the causes – it’s always caused by change and gains in power from people who aren’t men. When Hildegard of Bingen wrote about the crisis of masculinity in the twelveth century, she bemoaned that her time had become “womanish” (1178), effectively blaming shifting gender roles. Fortunately, in seeking to correct this, she chose not to lead by example.
While
I wish to affirm that masculinity does have aspects that are
valuable, there are many ways in which it works as an expression of
power. These facets of masculinity resemble a much newer idea –
whiteness, which it also interacts with. Whiteness (and race in
general), was a necessary by-product of slavery and colonial
expansion. If some people were marked from birth to be slaves, this
necessitated the creation of distinct classes of people – those who
could be subject to property confiscation and ceaseless violence and
those who were authorised to inflict violence. If slaves were black,
then their brutalisers must be something else, which could not be
simply thought of as non-black. The enslavers were the ones doing the
othering, so needed their own identity to other against. Thus
whiteness was born.
Some
aspects of masculinity also rely on a constant process of othering
and a continual assertion of power. Any changing circumstance has the
risk of reducing that assertion of power. However, change is
inescapable. Therefore masculinity is constantly in crisis.
Specifically, the supremacist aspects of masculinity are in crisis. A
masculinity that is not seeking to dominate is much less fragile and
much less toxic to the person who chooses to embody it.
Alienation and Right Wing Recruitment
The right wing has found fertile recruiting ground among young men who are hurt and alienated by the toxic masculinity that permeates our culture. Aimless young men, searching for meaning, have been radicalised. While this is largely the fault of social media corporations broadcasting far right recruiting points, the left has sometimes lacked an accessible and equally compelling counter-narrative.
An anonymous writer in The Washingtoniandescribed how her thirteen year old son joined the alt-right. He had been into meme culture and had mentioned an edgy meme to a friend at school. A girl who overheard him reported him for sexual harassment. Unfortunately, the school chose an entirely punitive response to this. He was socially isolated, alienated and depressed. He found the alt-right online. They told him he was ok and hadn’t done anything wrong. They treated him as if his ideas were worthwhile and they offered him leadership opportunities. What de-radicalised him in the end was meeting them in person at a right wing rally, in which he also saw a counter-protesting man, who his mother praised as brave. (Anon 2019) Thus a positive model of masculinity, which included real-life action in the face of risk, was able to supplant months of indoctrination into the far right.
Masculinity is often defined through struggle. Liberalism does not offer this, but instead has only capitalist alienation. Fascism, by contrast, offers an avenue to be constantly heroic. (Eco 1995) The left offers a better world for everyone, but is less immediately clear on what the role of these young men would be. While it identifies toxic masculinity as problematic, there is sometimes a lack of a positive counter example. What does positive masculinity look like? Who are good roll models? Mass media keeps making stories about toxic men who become only more toxic, making compelling anti-heroes. Stories about redemption have fallen out of fashion, but these are what we seem to need. Star Trek: Discovery, for example, does offer these character arcs for Ash Taylor and Spock (Fuller, 2017-), but this also relies on them belonging to a pseudo-military as a means of finding fellowship and working for the greater good. Crucially, these characters struggle against themselves as a necessary part of their struggle on behalf of their comrades.
Positive
Masculinity and the Left
The
heroism of fascism is ultimately empty. It is not based on
achievement or self-improvement, but rather on othering. One can be a
hero not because one has accomplished anything, but because of
accidents of birth. This is papers over alienation, but does not fill
the void. De-radicalising those in the far right is therefore
possible and necessary, but it requires
the left to offer something fulfilling to cis white young men. This
is tactical
and must never replace the goal of liberation for all, but it cannot
be neglected.
Some on the far left have been successful in recruiting disaffected young men, from those who are alienated and previously apolitical and also sometimes those who have previously been members of the far right. This is valuable, but without a means to de-alienation, the strategy is risky. Some of those recruits are not ideologically grounded. People who are attracted to what they perceive as extremism are often searching for a means to be heroic. Umberto Eco identifies heroism as a key feature of Ur-Fascism (1995). Those seeking a heroism as an end unto itself will tend to eventually (re)join the far right. Historical fascist figures, such as Mosley, have veered wildly from right to left before settling on the far right (Wikipedia 2019) as the more self-glorifying path. Leftist groups must be aware of these risks and take steps to counter them, by grounding new members ideologically and offering them positive ways to enact and embody inescapable aspects of their identities. It’s not enough to offer them membership and fellowship in an organisation. There needs to be included a path to self-improvement and some positive access to struggle against oneself instead of only against an other. Solidarity is key. Reading and discussion groups can help provide this grounding.
The
far right allows struggle
in physical terms (bro, do you lift?), but their
neglect of the intellect seems unfulfilling. We
must be careful not to replicate this lack. The
good news is that left groups ultimately offer more to alienated
people. Anti-fascism allows
physical heroism and real-life social bonds, but is also tied to an
opportunity for intellectual improvement, solidarity, direction and
leadership for all alienated
people. The
role of cis white men in these spaces should not be centralised, but
also it should be clear that all comrades are welcome on an equal
footing. Recruitment aimed at alienated cis white men,
unfortunately, does require some extra work as they have been heavily
indoctrinated against solidarity – it is up to white men to do this
work.
What is masculinity actually meant to be though? I think we have done some good work (which must continue!,) to gain understanding of what it should NOT be… but what SHOULD it be? Any opinions? (preferably from men/masc people, non-men welcome too). Asking As A Men.
My answer for this necessarily rests primarily on my own lived experience,as I’ve done little reading about masculinity. However, my experience has been unusual and instructive.
Binary Oppositions
The problem with looking for positives about masculinity is that exists within a power structure designed to promote it and men and the expense of femininity and women. This makes the question immediately fraught and difficult. Furthermore, cis hetero patriarchy is prescriptive (as opposed to descriptive) and imposes a very simple model of masculinity and gender. In the most basic form of this model, masculinity and femininity are a binary opposition inherently tied to physical sex. Hélène Cixous writes that all binary oppositions map on to this binary opposition – good vs bad, sun vs moon and so forth. Power, strength and goodness map on to the male half. Evil and weakness map on to the female half. (1997)
Some more progressive notions of gender attempt to detoxify this model by decoupling sex and gender and expanding it from a binary opposition to a one dimensional spectrum. However, this expanded model still has a notion of binary opposition embedded within it – if something is closer to the masculine end of the spectrum, it’s further from the feminine end. Thus any positives about masculinity are inherently sexist, as they imply deficits of femininity. Some take this to mean that gender itself is toxic and should be abolished.
Where do we go from here?
Firstly, we can say that eliminating gender is not a good or reasonable goal. It’s not a coincidence that this goal has been weaponised against trans people as we are those who most conspicuously align ourselves with gender categories. This aside, gender is a human universal. The specific expression of gender vary widely by culture, but there are no cultures I know that have no concept of gender. People, cis and trans, seem to seek out gender expression and perform it. Most people like having gender. What they don’t like is oppression.
It does show that talking about cis people illuminates very little about gender – they don’t know much about it and their experience is too limited and inappropriately universalised to draw conclusions from. By looking at trans and gender nonconforming people, we can learn much more about what gender is and isn’t.
People do not transition with the goal of shifting within a power hierarchy. Some people experience dysphoria related to social aspects of gender. Both these things show that gender is extremely important to people and that it has meaning outside of power relationships. Given this, how do we talk about masculinity decoupled from that power relationship?
Gender is not a binary
Non-binary gender identities show that the one dimensional model is too simplistic. While it might be tempting to say that they’re simply between masculine and feminine poles, this does not seem to reflect their experience or presentation. Some people have a lot of gender – masculine and feminine, for example bearded ladies in frilly dresses. Some people seem to have much less gender, for example people who identify as agender. Instead of seeing masculine and feminine as opposite poles, one can see them as distinct but related concepts. A two dimensional graph with a masculine axis and a feminine axis would be a somewhat less inaccurate model.
Therefore, masculinity is not the absence of femininity (or vice versa). But if it is not this and it is not (just) a power relationship, what is it? Looking for a universal answer immediately runs into the stumbling block of extremely divergent cultural encodings, which also vary over time. The current dominant mode of masculinity in the west posits masculinity as inherent authentic, unadorned and related to labour. But one only needs to look at portraits of French kings to see that the very opposite was once true. In those portraits, fills, leggings and leisure were signifiers of masculinity.
Embodiment
We’ve previously rejected embodiment as the basis of masculinity as this would seem to exclude trans and gender non-conforming people. But one of the examples I chose contained embodiment in terms of a beard. To pick apart this further – the decoupling of gender and sex is a relatively recent development, which has lead to extremely unhelpful educational aids like the ‘genderbread person’. (Gonzáles, Prell, Schwartz n.d.) (Killermann 2015) Treating sex and gender as entirely distinct is widely understood to be a form of allyship with trans people, but the problem is that it tends to lead to discussion of trans genitals. Rather than fall into this trap while trying to deconstruct it, I’ll just quote a trans woman on twitter who posted “sex is just gender with a doctor’s note.” (Anon n.d.)
While trans people certainly know a lot more about gender than cis people, the systems were created by and for cis people, so some talk about cis embodiment may be necessary. Which is to say that masculinity is not cock and balls, but is related to them.
In penetrative sex, a person with a penis enters triumphant, but exits deflated. A certain amount of identity seems to surround one’s cock, but one has almost no control over it.
Cis hetero masculinity is a struggle towards inevitable defeat.
Struggle
A defining notion of masculinity in my culture is struggle. One struggles against oneself, against society and against other men for social rank. This last one is generally toxic, but the others need not be. Furthermore, defeat is inevitable. One is never fully in control of anything, least of all oneself. Where masculinity becomes toxic or good I think may partially lie in how it copes with both defeat and victory.
One can have grace and humility or one can have terrified bravado. Good masculinity seeks self-improvement. (Recall that we’ve taken away the binary opposition and presences in masculinity are not absences in femininity.) Toxic masculinity seems to stem from fear of being unworthy. This leads to futile attempts to suppress parts of oneself and to inflate one’s perceived rank through unearned means, such as systemic power relationships.
Embedding masculinity within struggle tends to be compelling to people seeking direction. While I find this satisfying, it’s possible I’ve overly universalised my own experience. Masculinity has been a struggle for me, in that I’m not cis. It’s been a long challenge to be able to claim this space. I therefore believe that this was a worthwhile thing to do. Not just because it was hard, but because I felt compelled to do it. The result is that I’m a happier, kinder and more productive member of society. Therefore, from my own experience, I feel there must be something positive here. I fought for this, so it must be worth having.
The rise of fascism
Alas, the spectre of binary opposition always looms over discussions of gender, making them potentially harmful towards women and feminine people, however, it’s important to continue to have these discussions, while simultaneously rejecting the notion of prescriptive binary. If there are no positive discussions of masculinity, there will be only negative ones. There are a lot of young men searching for meaning and we can’t leave the conversation to Jordan Peterson.
Masculinity itself is morally neutral, but easy to weaponise. It’s important to speak about the positive factors and potential within masculinity without a binary opposition and without denigrating femininity. Genders are socially constructed, but, unlike other constructions, like, say, money, we can’t point at a time before they existed. Indeed, efforts to get rid of gender have not been emancipatory, but have been attacks on people with less gender privilege. With this in mind, discussing theoretical and practical aspects of masculinity in a public way is a necessity. It’s trite to say that young men need role models, but it’s nevertheless true. If we try to tell them that masculinity is shameful, this is a disservice to both young men and trans men.
Narratives about anti-heroes are extremely popular right now. These characters are made sympathetic in the telling, to make them compelling characters. Unfortunately, some take this to mean they should also be role models. If examples of toxic masculinity are ubiquitous and positive masculinity is taboo on the left, we are at a dangerous disadvantage.
Gonzáles, C; Prell, V; Schwartz, J. (n.d.) The genderbread person. [Referenced by https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/the-genderbread-person/ ] [Accessed 3 September 2019]
Killermann, S. (2015). The genderbread person v3. It’s pronounced metrosexual. [Web] https://itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2015/03/the-genderbread-person-v3/ [Accessed 3 December 2019] This content is plagiarised, but the original is not easily available.
As I was in Brighton on a short holiday, but it’s a constitutional crisis, I took some time out of loafing to go to the protest.
I showed up and it was a few hundred people and the PA was broken. However, they repaired it and the protest continued to grow for it’s entire duration.
There was already a protest scheduled for this time and date, about Climate Change and it’s links with imperialism and colonialism. This had been organised by QueerAF, a Queer and Trans activist group that engages specifically with the rights of migrants and people of colour. They felt that the emergency of an anti-democratic (and possibly pre-fascist) PM was very strongly related to the event already planned and so the protests were combined.
These are the notes I took during the speeches:
The PA is fixed. The speaker is making the point that we are responding to an attack on democracy and not (just) Brexit. We are in solidarity with all who want to protect democracy.
The next speaker calls for unity. “We are in a pre-fascist situation.” Everyone concerned about this must work together.
Queer AF speaking about the importance of being inclusive to trans people and BAME. Johnson is a threat to all marginalised people. A hard Brexit is a threat to the LGBTQ community. Parliament cannot raise these issues of its suspended. The queer comity is dependent on European civil rights laws and courts. #QueerAF is asking for allies. The crowd is enthusiastic.
Caroline Lucas is enormously popular. She calls the current government “No deal, Trump-first.” She pledges that parliament will meet in the house of commons or elsewhere. “This viscous form of brexit was never on the ballot. Johnson has no mandate for it.” She pledges solidarity with EU migrants. “We will use every peaceful easy we can to oppose that culture capitalism.” Of US companies asset stripping post-Brexit. (The PA dropped out on “peaceful”)
Lucas calls further for a written constitution and a people’s vote
A union organiser says this is no longer about leave or remain, but about democracy and the rights of workers. Unions must strike to protect workers. We must be on the streets. This cannot be soon from above, but from the grassroots. We must say to our colleagues and neighbours, “I don’t care how you voted in the referendum.” I want to protect us from neoliberalism. Unions have power to act.
Feminists Against Fascism says the government is white upper class men who don’t represent us and don’t care about democracy. It is fine now for us to stand up and be counted. England has been a great democracy and is at risk of losing that. We must take to the streets.
Extinction Rebellion says this is an attack on our last chance to act on climate change. We are at risk of fascism, which will cause climate chaos, floods, does and droughts. Our freedom will enable us to defend the planet. We need to act now. We need to defend democracy and the climate. Extinction Rebellion shows that protest works. They can help train people in effective protest. Rebel Rising is a set of upcoming training events.
On The 20th, they’re will be a big event. Protecting democracy and protecting the planet are the same fight. We are together. A child next to me has become alarmed and is crying.
A small child is speaking from the stage. Boris Johnson is very annoying and must be stopped. Parliament has not actually been porogued yet. There’s still time A council member says the EU had prevented war for 75 years. An unelected PM has used royal prerogative to undermine democracy and attack the post war consensus. He calls upon MPs to occupy parliament. They must injunction the PM. A general strike is called for. The ruling government loves history, so let’s telling them of Charles I.
QueerAF is also doing a demo right now about climate change and the Amazon. Climate change is happening everywhere. Capitalism is harming people everywhere. We colonised the world and trashed things for everyone. Democracy is needed everywhere. They’ve got bust cards. This card tells you what to do when cops try to interact with you or arrest you.
Now somebody is saying cops are great.
A representative of the elderly is saying that Brexit is sexist. She says she thought this was going to be settled when she marched in the 70s. This is a nationwide demonstration and a national issue. Our democracy is under threat. Donald Trump loves Johnson. England is not for sale. The new MP this area is a remainder.
An Irish person says we are Europe. This is an infrastructure to create peace, to bring people together. Brexit will trash the Good Friday Agreement. We worked for peace in Northern Ireland and we cannot allow it to be trashed.
We are all EU nationals! The next speaker is an EU migrant. She represents CASE, which helps EU migrants with their legal rights. They aid people getting settled status, but old, retired migrants have failed in their applications. They have no where to go. Even settled migrants are having their rights reduced. EU laws defend the rights of British workers. All of us are at risk.
An Amazon protestor from QueerAF is also from Paraguay. The Brazilian fires have reached Paraguay. The leader of Brazil has not been fighting fires and is on record of wanting to genocide indigenous people. Colonisation is ongoing. Indigenous people are at the forefront of fighting climate change. They are fighting for their lives. We must stand with them. Europe is profiting from South American deforestation. We must become sustainable.
We must fight for democracy everywhere. Let’s not forget that the Amazon is not just an ecosystem or a source of oxygen, but also people’s homes. Standing for our own democracy must also mean standing against colonialism. 900k people’s lives are at risk in the Amazon.
A queer tabs sex workers co-op is showing quietly about colonialism and borders. We don’t know or history. There were hundreds of slave owners in Sussex. 70 million people are refugees in the world. We are safe to demonstrate here, but most refugees cannot. We must be on solidarity. Brexit is racist against people of colour. The Windrush scandal is not confidence. We must stand in solidarity.
We then lined up in a march which was big enough that it took quite a while to get out of the park.
We marched down to the Brighton Pier and then turned left. The MC was keen that people play instruments if they had them. There was one very nice trio who did have instruments.
I would estimate that there were a couple of thousand people marching? I was very near the back and could not see the front.
Shortly after we reached the pier, I peeled off to go join my friends and to get some of the holiday I’d come down for.
