Meandering Vaguely Around Timnah

Has anyone else noticed that the Radical Feminist view of sexuality is heteronormative to the point of almost Victorian in its need to fit everything into its box of allowable causes and effects? Be it denying that trans people exist or denying that straight women use porn, it's starting to look like the creationist wing of feminism.

"Here is our scripture, it consists of men victimising women. These two groups and the power relationships between them are fixed and immutable. Anything that happens which doesn't fit the theory will be regarded as the universe deviating from the fundamental truth, probably due to sexism, and summarily ignored."

This post was originally started as a response in a comment thread about Pornography at Sian and Crooked Rib. Unfortunately, as well as being tangential to the broader thrust of the thread, it has become rather longer than the 4096 blogger comment character limit, and it feels politer to pull it out into its own place..

The "Swedish Model" is very popular with people who — for any number of perfectly acceptable and admirable reasons — wish to end the existence of sex work but who still want to acknowledge that simply making prostitution illegal is a self-evident non-starter if you have any kind of sympathy for the lives and safety of women. The solution to violence against women is not to arrest more women, that much is obvious. The Swedish Model, therefore, criminalises the buying of sex but not the selling. Since women, it argues, are the victims of the inherent violence of the sex trade, they can be protected by only penalising the men and therefore “Ending Demand.”

There are a number of problems with the Swedish Model once you get past the superficial attractiveness, but to my view the biggest game stopper — if anything, the only counter-argument you should ever need — is that sex workers in Sweden do not like the law.

“We want to save you. And if you don’t appreciate it, we will punish you!”

"We want a more sensible policy and legislation concerning the selling and buying of sexual services, a decriminalisation that means that the legislation prohibiting sex for pay between consenting adults is removed. As a result of a policy change, sexworkers could then start to be protected for real by the existing laws, for example rape, sexual abuse, trafficking…I can tell you that the law against purchasing sexual services have increased the risks and the violence against sexworkers and the law against procurement make it impossible for us to work safely."(emphasis in original)

"Things like having a little chat through the window are very important. This is not happening anymore, you get into the car and then you're driven away. Where you are criminalising men for buying sex, you are hoping to deter law-abiding citizens from partaking. The clients who are violent to sex workers are committing crimes of rape, assault and even murder. Do we really think that those men are going to be put off by the possibility of a fine? When women can work together it's easier to manage those sort of clients."

"In Sweden sex workers are losing their apartments because their landlord will be charged with pimping otherwise. We have to pay taxes, but when we are on sick leave they estimate our incomes as ZERO as we won’t make any money in the future as our clients are criminals. The government just did an evaluation of the law criminalizing the clients. It was about 200 pages, and the voices of sex workers got less than a page. The heading of that section was “Experiences from people abused in prostitution.""

While the Swedish government has produced much trumpeted publicity about how successful the model is, close analysis has revealed a different picture from the official one. Susanne Dodillet and Petra Östergren did a good job of analysing the evidential basis of the Swedish Government's claims, and it's really quite damning. The lack of scientific rigour in analysing the law from an official perspective, though, can be traced back to the attitudes of legislators that evidence of whether it works or not doesn't matter, or that "The gender-equal symbolic value of the Sex Purchase Act is more important… [than any] adverse effects for individual women who sell sex, or if it violates their right to self-determination." (pp. 2) Advocates of the law have gone as far as to characterise adverse effects as a feature rather than a bug:

So it is of minor importance that some women willingly prostitute themselves and are happy, she argues. This activity should not be made easier but rather more difficult with the help of the act. She concludes her argument by saying that there may be a few thousand prostitutes in Sweden who are thus sacrificed on the alter of gender equality.(emphasis mine again)

The official report even makes mention of this:

For people who are still being exploited in prostitution, the above negative effects of the ban that they describe must be viewed as positive from the perspective that the purpose of the law is indeed to combat prostitution. (cited in Dodillet and Östergren, pp. 23)

It therefore appears that "making sex workers' lives more dangerous and difficult" is not merely an unfortunate side effect of the Swedish Model, but a deliberate and integral part of the model and the abolition strategy. This attitude, that sex workers are in some sense disposable obstacles to their own liberation, may not be held by all abolitionists, but I can say from experience that it is far from unknown.

They also point out that marginalisation of sex workers voices in Sweden is a significant problem.

The most common and perhaps most serious complaint regarding sex workers themselves is that they experienced an increased stigmatization after the introduction of the Sex Purchase Act. Some also state that the ban is a violation of their human rights, and many say that they don’t feel fairly or respectfully treated: they are not regarded as fully worthy members of society. Sex workers object to the fact that they were not consulted in the making of the law. Since sex workers feel they are not able to influence their legal or societal situation, they feel powerless. And since the ban builds on the idea that women who sell sex are victims, weak and exploited, many claim that the law propagates stereotypical notions about sex workers. (pp. 21)

"A fear raised by the [Swedish Discrimination] Ombudsman was that the increased stigma would lead to worse prospects for health promotion and HIV preventive work. It referred to UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, that discourages criminalization for this reason: social stigma might influence the contact with social authorities, the health care system and the judicial system. " (pp. 24)

Nor does the Swedish Model address another major concern that Sex Workers' Rights Activists have, that of institutionalised abuse of power by those in charge of regulating the laws. A police chief who advocated for the reforms has been charged with both running a prostitution ring and with several rapes. Since transactional sex is still a criminal act, the official position of sex workers in Sweden remains that of officially mandated vulnerability. Sex workers are vulnerable to losing their homes, their jobs, their security if their status is revealed, and this makes them vulnerable to coercion and extortion — just like they are under full criminalisation. It should be taken as effectively axiomatic that increasing the powers of the police to act against sex workers increases the number of police officers raping sex workers, and the Swedish experience appears to be no exception to this general principle.

Further, the idea that the model is driven forward by an ideological commitment rather than any scientific evidence that it improves the lives of women is further supported in the general academic literature. For example, in the concluding part of the paper Rape, Prostitution and Consent , Barbara Sullivan says:

"Feminists and human rights activists need to…work to ensure that that all women, including sex workers, continue to be 'made' in law as agentic subjects. In relation to prostitution, this would involve paying attention to the way that propositions for law and policy reform, maximise (or reduce) the consensual capacities of sex workers… Advocating for these rights and for a variety of ways of practising legal prostitution should clearly be seen as a rape prevention strategy." (pp.138)

She also says

"[T]he findings of this article call into question the claim that prostitution always involves an act of rape… [and] point to the need for a rejection of such simplistic approaches to prostitution law reform… In radical feminism, sex workers are always seen as already the victims of rape; this clearly calls into question workers' stated claims that there is an experiential distinction between sex work and rape, and positively undermines both their consensual capacity and the ability to pursue individual rape convictions." (pp. 139, emphasis in both cases mine)

Ramya Subrahmanian, of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, produced a report for UNRISD reviewing the Swedish Model from a global perspective, in which (among other things) she said:

The shift from implicit to explicit regulation of women’s bodies has been first, a natural development of the policy trajectory that has emphasised consensus based social policy with a strong emphasis on social engineering as a necessary role of the welfare state. Second, it has been in keeping with Sweden’s strong self-perception as well as an external perception of Sweden as a champion of women’s rights and gender equality. Third, it has been influenced by the strength of the feminist movement, particularly as a force operating within the political system.

Yet, the Swedish state in its attempt to shape gender equality has taken a on a particular approach which appears to deny the agency and voice of those women it seeks to protect. Is this approach a model for the rest of the world? While many would welcome a state that protects its citizens from exploitation, it is not clear in this case whether the policy has been entirely successful. As noted earlier, there is a concern that through criminalization, the whole phenomenon has been driven underground, hence preventing the state from protecting those it seeks to protect. This risk explains policies elsewhere in Europe which have chosen to decriminalize sex work with a view to more effective regulation. Further, how relevant can this policy approach be in a context where poverty and constrained economic opportunities remain a deep concern? The importance of disaggregating the phenomenon to unpick differences in circumstances of those who undertake sex work, and to acknowledge differences in the degree of agency that women may exert to come into or leave the trade on their terms, is not reflected in the Swedish discussion. (emphasis mine)

Liv Jessen, head of The Pro Centre in Norway and recipient of a Human Rights Award from Amnesty International Norway for defending the human rights of sex workers, is very critical of the Swedish model, not just from a practical point of view, but with a total rejection of the underlying philosophy on which it is based.

Radical feminist theory states that it is men who are in power, men who can choose. The prostitute is a victim — an object, or less — forced to sell sex for whatever reason. To look at prostitution in such a one-dimensional way leads to the same result as viewing it as a Whore/Madonna dichotomy. The prostitute will still be the “other woman”—not like me (a non-prostitute). I am a subject who can choose, and she is not. Thus, the radical feminist theory leads us astray…

This is also why they never listen to prostitutes with whom they disagree. These prostitutes “do not know what’s good for them;” they have “false consciousness,” because no woman can, in this analysis, choose prostitution…

The only prostitutes these women accept are the repentant sinners, the survivors — those who have come to their senses. Prostitutes who disagree with them politically or otherwise are objectified and looked upon as children, not capable of making their own choices.

A radical feminist group in Norway says strikingly, “We can of course not leave the politics of prostitution to the prostitutes, any more than we could leave drug policy to the drug addicts.” (emphasis mine)

It is worth pointing out, also, that the Swedish Model is not just some idea the Swedes accidentally had which other people have noticed because it works so well. It is a product with a publicity and marketing team behind it, funded by the Swedish Government, and vigorously pushed over the objections of both Swedish and International Sex Workers Rights organisations and unions, and this has been true since before its implementation — in other words, the people behind the law were in favour of exporting it as the solution to the Prostitution Problem before it had even been tried — before anybody knew what the results would be, the were assumed to be positive because the ideology said they must be.

Because of this ideologically based funding and the exclusion of sex workers’ voices from the process, governmental bodies and feminist groups who have been wooed by the Swedish Model’s superficial attractiveness merely continue to objectify and talk over marginalised and stigmatised groups and decide how to treat them to save “society” from the problems caused by their existence. Unfortunately, we’re so used to fighting against right wing authoritarians that we forget left wing authoritarianism and moralising statists have the same capacity and form when it comes to railroading minorities and stigmatised groups in order to achieve their larger social goals.

I do not dispute that many people who support the Swedish Model do so because of a clear concern with violence against women. The theoretical basis of it is superficially plausible, fits in well with Radical Feminist notions of sexual violence as a heteronormative result of patriarchal behaviour by male actors, and has a well funded publicity team behind it. It looks like a compellingly simple square to a frustratingly complicated problem. Overwhelmingly, though, it appears that it is a fatally flawed answer to the problem of violence against vulnerable women in and out of the sex industry. It does not have the support of the constituency whose opinion should matter the very most (indeed, who I would argue, matters to the exclusion of all other opinions), that of Sex Workers in Sweden. Indeed, if anything it seems that the negative opinions that sex workers have of the law are regarded as a good thing because they are allowed to exist merely as exploited victims whose autonomy, health and wellbeing are disposable in service of the “greater good” of gender equality.

Personally, I would say that because of this, if you care about violence against sex workers, you should not be a supporter of the Swedish Model.

Read this. Then try and get to a Western feminist interpretation of it without also being race-essentialist or going down the culturally patronising route, and that doesn't end up tying you in knots.

This originally started out as a comment on this post at Natalie Dzerin's blog, but it grew too large and frankly a little too rambling, so I thought it would be better off over here. Still, you should read that post first for the immediate context.

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The problem with blaming "feminism" for the problems faced by men as a group, because they've "undermined traditional gender roles" or something, is that it's bullshit.

Men as a group are large and disparate. Masculinity as a cultural construct is much more restrictive. It's not over, it's not been eradicated. To some extent gender differences are probably "wired in" biologically - there are differences in other physical aspects of our body, why not in the brain too? - but these differences are shaped to a much greater extent by the culture in which we live. It's the difference between having the inate capacity to learn language and growing up to speak English or Mandarin. Just because some foundational aspects are intrinsic doesn't mean that the shape of the final product is necessarily so.

We live in a society where gender is integrated into the fabric of everything we do. It informs our expectations and the way we value objects. The precise trappings of any given gender norm vary depending on the when and the where (which should be a clue as to how fluid and arbitrary it is) but they're constantly there.

With or without feminism as currently or historically constituted, traditional masculinity, a behavioural norm evolved for use in a certain kind of society, would be struggling now anyway. Much as we're seeing the function and use of religion shift and change as the winds of future shock start to erode old certainties, so it's the same for gender. It used to be possible to say "this is normal" without having someone on the TV or the internet point out that it's just one way of being among many. People who instinctively deviated from the norm, be they effeminate or submissive men, genderqueers, or even just men who don't like beer and football, could be effectively policed into at least hiding away in shame much mroe easily in the past. We could arrest homosexuals and slut shame prostitutes and ensure that, even if we weren't entirely happy performing this gender role, at least we were doing the objectively right thing.

Now the problem for those who find comfort in those gender roles is that they're restrictive but also optional. You don't have to be a manly man if you want to. You can wear a skirt and call yourself Suzie even if you're 300lbs and have the world's best beard. Your wife can earn more money than you. To those who still have the impression that there is A Way Things Should Be, carved in stone tablets somewhere, this creates a massive conflict and uncertainty. This is especially true, I think, because although the masculine role has its definite upsides, much of traditional masculinity is bone-stupid and not particularly fun. Spending all your time running away from being feminine and living up to masculine ideals means you cut down on aspects of your life you find natural and enjoyable. It makes sex worse for Christ's sake, particularly if your kinks relate to gender subversion in any way. But we're trapped in this dilemma - if it's wrong we can be free from it, but it means we've been wrong our whole lives. For those who are 30 or 40 years old, that's a shocking thought, particularly if we've been harbouring doubts that whole time. Cognitively, people have an innate resistance to being told that their opinions are wrong, and merely proving it objectively beyond reasonable doubt is completely insufficient to convince most people. Instead, they double down. This is understandable, and natural, but it doesn't make them less wrong.

Even more unfortunately for them, the box is open now, this genie is not going back into the bottle. We're not going to eradicate gender as a driving cultural force any time soon, or probably ever, but neither are we going to suddenly rediscover the attractions of the 15th century.

If you feel uncomfortable, as men, in this new world, then consider this. This is what everyone who didn't fit into your particular box felt like ALL THE TIME in the past. This is what some people still feel like because your conceptions of binary gender norms are enforced more strongly on their part of the planet, even though they don't fit into them. Welcome to our world. Going back to the one you want necessarily entails us agreeing to feel uncomfortable and rejected all the time. You don't like it, why should we?

It is, I think, necessary to incorporate the needs of men into the driving ambitions of feminism. Some people have started, but it's little and it's late. Feminism is perceived as being a club for white middle class ladies and the boys who want to shag them, which is unfair but not entirely without rationale. If we *don't* make it an intellectual domain which considers all aspects of class, race, gender and sexuality, it becomes atrophied, inward-looking and useless. There are things we need to change, and things we need to concede.

But, and this is a big but, what we will not concede is that we were wrong to fight to break down traditional gender roles. We won't concede that what needs to happen is a resurgence of binary gender norms. We won't concede to legislate according to some culturally conservative simplification of dubious Evo Psych handwavery. That would be pointless. It would put everyone who's gained in the last century back in the box so that you could be comfortable, which would be cool for you until people started breaking the box and making you uncomfortable again.

Some women end up struggling with the breakdown of traditional gender roles too. They're taught one thing, and then hit 20, 30, 40, find that the world's been changing round them but their cultural inclinations and familial expectations have not. The past becomes romanticised and nostalgia for "real men" kicks in, even if intellectually most of them acknowledge that the concept of a "real man" is as mythical as the happy 1950s housewife who put dinner on the table and never ever cried herself to sleep or drank herself stupid on gin by noon. It's natural for both sides to hark back to a simpler age, but the fact is the simpler age was not simple, it wasn't neat and tidy, it wasn't utopia. It fucked up a lot of people, and that's why so many people spent so much time pointing out how diabolically awful it was and trying to change it.

What feminism has been able to do is open the options for women in the new world it's created. Even if the barriers are still there, people exist who go out and kick girls up the ass with the message "go and try to be a CEO!" Even if they resist, or just make the choice not to be, the cultural expectations are out there. But nobody has done the same thing with men, gone into schools and said "have you considered being a housewife? Because you could, if you wanted to." As a result the gendered expectations on women, while still tragically constrictive in real terms, are broader than those on men. The range of culturally acceptable male behaviours is narrower. Men need feminism not in the sense of being told "women are teh awesome lolz" but in the sense of a genuine feminism for men.[1] An opening of the options of what it means to be "a man". A point blank broadside assault on the notion that there are restrictions on your actions which immutably spring from the position and shape of your gonads. Because the genie is not going back in the bottle, and feminists or queers aren't ever going to admit that life was so much better when women were women and men were men and anyone outside that was defined as abnormal.

There's a middle ground to be found here. But it's not going to be found if MRAs keep equating the rights of straight cis men with devotion to strict binary gender norms.

[1] I do believe I stole this idea from tyopsqueene back in the day, proper attribution due and all that.

It's a horrible abusive asshole. But it's the current cool kid on the block and, because it has a lot more theocracies, gets to play out a lot more. All the abusive assholes who can't get away with it are totally jealous. The proliferation of Fatwah Envy shows it.

For those unfamiliar with Fatwah Envy, it goes like this: criticise a non-Islamic religion. Members of that religion will pop up and say "you're just taking pot shots at the easy targets because you're afraid Islamists will murder you." Subtext: "I wish I could get away with murdering you like those awful, terrible, dreamy Muslims in my head."

So when feminists start going on about social deprivation/class/homophobia/racism I don’t feel so sure they really care about those things. I wonder if they just wheel them out to prove how much worse everything is for women, in all situations.

Quiet Riot Girl

We may be hitting one of those tipping points where an accumulation of bullshit and shoutiness forces me from the shadows of linkdumping and hanging around on comments threads into a week or so of posting actual positively argued thoughts on the matter. Albeit in TL;DR form on a blog that few people read or care about.

First things first. I, personally, am a white, cisgendered, straight male. I, personally, am a feminist.

When I, personally, post or make reference to matters of class, race or sexuality in reference to gender and feminism, it is not because I am seeking a way to link female victimhood to the plight of other groups to piggyback on their oppression. It is because economic class, race, social status, religion, sexuality and gender are linked issues which intersect in complex ways and create feedback loops. You can't look at the problematic way in which gender normativity constricts people's behaviour without also looking at class, race and sexuality.

Mark Simpson's objection to the disdainful "whataboutthemenz" from feminists misses the point. Yes, we mock whenever some Men's Rights Activist gets all butthurt because someone was mean to a man on the TeeVee. Not because there aren't problems with male gender stereotypes, but because these problems are the same problems as with female gender stereotypes. They fuck society up in the same ways. And if you look at these things in isolation and disconnect them from broader class issues, it is easy to get to a zero-sum game of huffiness where you see "feminism" as being women getting the right to complain about men and not vice versa, because you haven't put the concept of masculinity into its context of class and noticed that it's a very good way of pitting men, particularly men of low social status (generally in capitalist societies, you can read this as a proxy for money) against other men as well as against women. "Whataboutthemenz" arguments are that lazy, and they're dull and unhelpful for that reason.

Are men presented as grotesque stereotypes in the media? Yes. What's the solution? Fucking feminism, mate. Yes, the kind of feminism that is class-aware, which not all of it is. But nonetheless, the problems are not rectified by ridding ourselves of the attempts by feminists to understand the constructedness of gender and the extent to which social status is dictated by our conformity with particular normative kinds of behaviour which are themselves designed to ensure that we stay compliant with the authoritarian structures of our society.

Mere whataboutery doesn't cut it. If some feminists need to be educated on class and the pressures of masculinity, making stupid comparisons only highlights the intra-class discrepancies between genders that remain. So some men are mocked in movies, OK. Male actors are paid more and given more interesting roles. So, it's a wash, right? You need to delve deeper than that, and whataboutthemenz is a puerile response to someone highlighting an issue that affects women.

(Attention conservation notice: I'm moving this post from tumblr to here. I put it there through experimentation, really. You may have already read this)

I’ve finally knocked the Heresiarch off my Google Reader. I started following him because he seemed at first glance, during the decline of the Fucking Labour Party, to be pleasantly anti-establishment enough and incisive, and I've taken two long years of giving him the benefit of the doubt. He has managed to be occasionally insightful enough just often to keep him on. But, no, enough’s enough. I’m over being pissed off at his attempts to wrap an unimaginative defense of the status quo in flowery language in an attempt to appear outside whatever box the rest of us are trapped in, or his pointless and mundane equivocation that uses up far too many paragraphs in comparison to its actual content.

I’ve got a few basic rules for my own philosophy that don’t necessarily amount to any kind of rigorous framework but that do make me feel better about my decisions, and one of the biggest is: “side with the little guy.” You don’t kick people who are smaller than weaker than you, even if they are bastards. I think this is just basic fairness, really.

Where I see people like The Heresiarch and the shouty Quiet Riot Girl popping up with their self-styled anti-liberal contrarianism which seeks to poke holes in the various feminisms and anti-homophobia campaigns and whatnot, to explore whether something is really as truly racist as all that or if the solution to rape is to glamourise heterosexual male sexuality a bit more or something, after I’ve got past the eye-rolling “simple answers to simple questions” part I’m always left wondering where they actually fucking stand. The thing about Heresy is that, historically, it means to not just stand against the Status Quo, but to stand for something which threatens the Status Quo. It’s no good just being against the Church, you have to be for the Gnostics too. Or, y’know, whatever you want. But the crop of Heretics that set themselves up against the liberalisms and Guardianistas from somewhere south of The Left[1] don’t seem to have anything they want to positively achieve. They don’t even seem to have that many problems with the things they devote acres of space to poking holes in, they just don’t like the way it’s dressed. Which results in lots of tedious wankery that doesn’t seem to even have a point it wants to make. You get to the end of the epic post and go “so?”

Well, y’know, fuck that. I kept reading hoping that the quality/shit ratio would rise above one post in twenty, but there’s only so much shit you can shovel.

It’s funny, too, because I can’t get enough IOZ, who comes in for much the same criticism of being a stateless bomb thrower who doesn’t devote time to offering solutions. But I think there are a number of ways IOZ can teach people like The Heresiarch a thing or two about being actual heretics.

• His posts are often very short. In the time it takes the Heresiarch to witter on about why it’s not homophobic to ask “why are people ok with sex-change therapies but not ex-gay ministries?”[2], IOZ has reviewed a movie, skewered several leading-light beltway talking heads, sworn at a head of state and given everyone a delicious recipe for rabbit soup. Even if some of his posts are just him being a cunt to people, he can often do it in three sentences.


• Additionally, his posts are often very funny. Heresiarch posts sometimes think they are funny, but never display much in the way of actual humour.


• I've never seen IOZ side with power and privilege over need. This may be the need for the length on the Heresiarch's side. It's a lot easier to say "actually, no, fuck the rich and their whining" than to side with privilege during a recession and claim you're speaking truth to power, so you need a lot of words to obfuscate the fact that you're talking plainest balls.


• Although accused of not having a “solution” to the many problems he skewers, IOZ does. Admittedly, it is in general “burn the whole lot of it down, or wait for its inevitable collapse, either way”, and I would not go so far as to say that I agreed with it in every particular, but at least it’s an ethos. One gets a definite sense of how he thinks the world should be. Wheras the Heresiarch is simply contrarian, IOZ disagrees. This is a really important distinction.


• The Heresiarch rarely gives his posts titles cribbed from Coen Brothers movies.

So, yeah, unsubscribe’d!

[fn1] this applies less to The Heresiarch himself, since he’s a Tory in the “David Cameron is probably an OK egg” kind of mould, which is further reason for disliking his output more and more over recent months, because you necessarily get stupider when you defend the indefensible.
[fn2] for those unclear about this, it actually is. But explaining that to people is just so fucking wearisome sometimes.

Unwitting couple branded swine and infidels at ceremony to renew wedding vows

The public relations disaster unfolded after someone uploaded a video of the ceremony on YouTube, threatening the Muslim-majority country's reputation as one of the world's most exclusive tourist destinations.

"You are swine," the unwitting couple were told. "The children that you bear from this marriage will all be bastard swine. Your marriage is not a valid one. You are not the kind of people who can have a valid marriage. One of you is an infidel. The other, too, is an infidel and, we have reason to believe, an atheist, who does not even believe in an infidel religion."

After the video went viral, the Maldives government went into crisis management overdrive to protect its lucrative tourism industry.

Look, this is very naughty and impolite and shouldn't have happened, etc.

But, honestly, if you are the kind of person who pastily and colonially shows up to splash a bunch of fancy western cash around and co-opt someone else's religious belief because it's so much more Authentic or Quaint or Spiritually Real or whatthefuckever than the stuff we've got over here, you actually kind of deserve to have your clueless little bubble burst a bit, you know?

I mean, if they were so uninterested in what was being said that they didn't even bother to find out a translation of the vows, they just wanted an exotic, foreign-sounding wedding, what in the blue hells did they expect? If they didn't take the vows seriously, why the hell should the people who were hired in?

Religions, for all their faults, do actually *mean things* to the practitioners, and I'm frankly not even remotely surprised that people would get pissed off at a steady stream of cultural tourists coming in and cherry picking ceremonies because they happen to take place somewhere sunny.

Back in my less cynical days, I perceived democracy to be a good thing for many reasons, but chief amongst them was the idea that it enabled us to enact revolutionary regime change without civil unrest. We didn't have to let society crumble under hereditary dictators until it got so rubbish that everyone started setting things on fire and chopping off heads, we could just have a mini revolution every half-decade and do it that way instead.

Now I'm inclined to think that this is not the benefit I once thought it was. I think that it generally dissuades the public from the idea that setting fire to the rich and chopping off their heads is a way to achieve reform. And, to be honest, I think the wealthy could do with a bit of healthy fear of the mob, sometimes. We may be unruly, unwashed peasants, but there are a lot of us, and we can certainly find a rope and a convenient lamppost if we so choose.

I am not saying we should all do it tomorrow, but I do wonder whether the confederacy of dunces at the top of our national food chain would have different opinions about their "big society" bollocks if they had to look over their shoulders a bit more at the possibility that we might burn all their fucking shit down.