Vacuum . 'Sex' Issue

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The Erotics PEBBLED of Ulsterness NUBBINS RICHARD KIRKLAND

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magine the following situation. It is Easter and, appropriately enough, you have been given an egg – let’s say your mum bought it for you. You now have two options. You could eat it and with this perhaps reflect upon the significance of the season. Alternatively, you could copy Kay Morris, a character from Glenn Patterson’s Belfast novel Fat Lad, and carefully separate the two halves of the egg, place each half over your breasts and then invite your lover to carefully lick through the chocolate until you come ‘almost imperceptibly’. It’s that ‘imperceptibly’ I like.

Given that the task of provoking perceptible desire in one’s sexual partners is so fraught with difficulty, the idea that there are imperceptible orgasms taking place is one that I find immeasurably reassuring. So, thank you for that Glenn.

The bigger point I am trying to tease out here is, of course, that while Northern Irish literature can teach us many things about ethics, responsibilities, the role of the artist in a conflict torn society, what it cannot teach us about is sex. Or, at least, one would gain a curious sense of the act of physical love if one’s reading was to be so restricted. It is not that people in Northern Ireland don’t have sex – I’m sure it has been attempted on many occasions since Partition – but that something curious happens to it when it intrudes into the literature. ‘Examples’, you are thinking, ‘I need examples’. Right let’s see.

Exhibit A: the case of the Honest Ulsterman.

It’s May 1968, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association are mobilising, the North stands trembling on the edge of history, wherever you look there are nascent signs that something is going to happen. Alongside this – and unavoidably – in the rest of the world hippies everywhere are having sex, lots of it, in technicolour. Surely these two phenomena are connected? Well, no they aren’t actually,

‘I caress the heaving province’ he writes in that work: a line that, however you take it, is really just silly. but if you are James Simmons, editor of the aforementioned journal, not only are they connected, more daringly again it is through the very expression of civil rights that free love, at long last, will finally come to Ulster.

And there was me thinking it was about Council Housing. Of course once you start muddling up the search for a just and equitable society with the search for a quick fuck, you are in dangerous territory, and it is no surprise that the literary results were usually unfortunate. For instance, Simmons’s ‘The Imperial Theme’ gets sex and territory all confused, describing ‘delectable/cuntland, free trade, and grazing/ on breasts and belly, rest and shelter/ in forests of perfumed hair […]’.

Sorry, I think I misheard that. Did he actually just say ‘delectable cuntland’? Not erotic is it?

We mustn’t be too hard on Simmons though. At least the HU called Northern Ireland as it saw it at a time when it was easier by far to keep your head down. And, anyway, it was Seamus Heaney who started all this

unfortunate ‘the situation of Northern Ireland is akin to a sexual encounter’ business with his poem ‘Act of Union’. ‘I caress the heaving province’ he writes in that work: a line that, however you take it, is really just silly. Heaney, though, can be as erotic as you like when he so chooses. Without wanting to give too much away about my own sexual predilections, the lines which conclude his poem of married love ‘The Skunk’ do it for me every time: ‘Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawer/For the black plunge-line nightdress’ he observes. Yowzah.

So what can we deduce so far? Well, at the very least, there seems to be an unmistakable whiff of testosterone to the discussion.

Certainly in Simmons’s artistic universe sex is everywhere and it is accompanied more often than not by a certain masculinist brutality. It was he, after all, who penned the infamous lines ‘last night the wife was fucked into the ground/by a fat rugby player’ in his poem ‘A Man of Principle’. Some have observed dark sexual desires at work in the poetry of Paul Muldoon as well, but for now I would prefer to point you to some of his early volumes which obsessively detail sexual encounters taking place all over South Belfast. Does the Northern Irish Tourist Board know of this I wonder? A coach tour of the various locations would be highly diverting, and certainly more interesting than looking at yet another godawful mural. Given this frequency, it’s no wonder that our youthful Lothario gets confused, poor soul. ‘Where and when exactly did we first have sex?’ Muldoon asks in his poem ‘History’. Now there’s a question to warm a girl’s heart for sure.

But I can only take so much of this kind of thing so let’s change direction. For sheer uninterrupted and extended sexiness in Northern writing there is only one place to go – and I am not thinking of the collected poems of John Hewitt. No, if you want to explore the erotics of Ulsterness (and when described as such who wouldn’t?) Medbh McGuckian is your only woman. Consider this from ‘Venus and the Rain’: Whatever rivers sawed their present lairs Through my lightest, still-warm rocks, I told them they were only giving up A sun for sun, that cruising moonships find Those icy domes relaxing, when they take her Rind to pieces, and a waterfall Unstitching itself down the stairs.

OK, I confess that I am not entirely sure what is going on here but, either way, I want some of it for myself. And evasive or not, it is surely better than going on about fat rugby players and their urges. As this snippet suggests, to read McGuckian is to learn a new language of erotic love and I would argue that this has tangible benefits for those of you still in pursuit of sexual congress. ‘Fancy a trip on my cruising moonship?’ has, after all, something of a ring to it.

A

ccording to the ‘Learn to Write webpage’ of eharlequin.com, the top ten overused euphemisms in romance fiction are, in descending order, ‘Her heaving breasts’, ‘His punishing kiss’, ‘Her liquid centre’, ‘Like silk over steel’, ‘Her sensitive bud’, ‘Her honeyed sweetness’, ‘A dance as old as time’, ‘His throbbing manhood’, (a bit unbelievably) ‘Her pebbled nubbins’, and, finally, ‘An intimate kiss’. That Harlequin Mills and Boon – ‘the ultimate destination for women’s fiction’ – acknowledges this inert vocabulary, while insisting on other equally hackneyed criteria for potential manuscripts, suggests some of the weird, self-deluding contradictions at the heart of this most formulaic of writing genres.

For to anyone who’s ever read more than two of these books, it seems pretty clear what’s required of a Mills and Boon style romance. A feisty, independent, slender-yetfull-bodied heroine is attracted to a domineering, sardonic, possibly aristocratic, almost certainly masochistic hero, exasperated as much by her own physical response to him as by what she deems the purely sexual nature of his overtures, until – after one hundred pages of unfeasible misunderstandings, slammed doors, and her saying no but meaning yes – she realises that, hey, he loves her after all. The roles of these characters will be encoded, not so subtly, in their names. Hers must suggest the fiery/feminine nexus; his, masculine ‘hardness’ or, failing that, pointyness. Thus, in The Englishman’s Bride by Sophie Weston, we have Sir Philip Hardesty (Hardness) and Kit Romaine (abrupt, androgynous first name; connotations of romance, or Romany, in the second). The Duke’s Proposal, then, gives us Jemima Dare (Girly/ daring) and Niall Blackthorne. (pointiness). My favourite hero’s name, from a Mills and Boon whose title I can’t remember, is Heath Masterson, managing to evoke both ‘Heathcliff’ and, almost redundantly, ‘masterful’. The ‘conflict’ that keeps the lovers from understanding each other might be another woman – she thinks his niece or sister is his mistress – or some event buried in the past. The advantage of having the pair unwittingly thrown together five years after the cataclysmic ending of their original budding romance (where both believe themselves to be the abandoned party) is, perhaps, that older readers find it more acceptable for them to sleep together pretty much immediately (though without resolving anything). Sometimes they’re already married – indeed in their tips to potential writers, Harlequin warn that they’d ‘rather not see so many marriage of convenience stories’. The book ends with the heroine’s demotion to childlike pliability, occasionally with the proviso that she’ll still be a bit of a handful, but in a good way.

In, Reading the Romance, an academic study of the genre from 1982, Janice Radway found that dedicated (American) readers disputed the existence of these predictable structures; instead, they tended to stress small differences of detail, such as the historical setting. Most readers also claimed to dislike overt kinkiness, or episodes in which sexual violence is inflicted on the heroine, and on the whole, they protested that their enjoyment stemmed not from the titillation of the conflict, but from the ‘loving’ resolution of the tale. Harelquin’s

online writings guide perpetuates this unlikely gloss on things. On one hand, a strict outline of what the publishers are looking for is provided (under the headings ‘It’s her Story’, ‘Live the Emotion’, ‘It Could Happen to You’, ‘Sensuality’ and ‘A Variety of International Settings’) yet the site also advises ‘develop your own voice – it should be unique and distinctive!’. The centrality of ‘Sensuality’ and ‘Live the Emotion’ also indicate that Harlequin Mills and Boon aren’t about to tout their product’s status as, pretty uniquely, mass porn for women. Instead, once more, ‘feel-good’, ‘emotional’ stories are called for. In their ‘Romance’ imprint, indeed Harelquin prudishly stipulate that they don’t want explicit details of the sex – though you can be as filthy as you like if you write for Harlequin Blaze – but that ‘the sensual tension between the couple should tingle’. This is as coy as the euphemisms they warn against: there’s no such thing as sensual tension. As for the other writing guidelines, it’s perhaps hard to see how the ‘It Could Happen to You’ factor can be credibly reconciled with the ‘Variety of International Settings’ – or, for that matter, with a cast consisting of high-powered diplomats and minor royalty (unless you’re a diplomat or a minor royal). Aspiring purveyors of Belfast-based smut, though, might be interested to know that someone called Trish Wylie, sets all her Tender Romance books Northern Ireland. It could happen to you.

Of course, depending how you look at it, Romances are either a denigrated womenauthored, women-read genre in which readers can identify with a strong heroine who teaches a man to love (while getting themselves off into the bargain), or gender-role reinforcing conservative pulp peddled to junkie housewives. The same mixture of exploitation and enablement is suggested by the number of services offered by the How to Write Harlequin website. The site offers to foster writers from their first sentence down to ensuring their manuscript is formatted properly for submission, with a Romance Novel Critique Service offering detailed editorial advice. An online ‘writers community’ currently boasts 15 accepted manuscripts between them. While it’s probably good economic practice for the publishers to convert their biggest consumers into producers, the blurred line between romance readers and writers seems to be the natural conclusion to a genre which trades on pervy, clichéd fantasy and calls it (‘emotional’) real life. The same glossy rhetoric surrounds both romance plot outlines and the guidelines to new writers: ‘Are you ready to make this the year you start taking your career dreams seriously?’. If there’s any doubt that it could happen to you, an online ‘grammar girl’ will help out with tricky long sentences, and the Harelequin poll is thought-provoking on the subject of which line of the novel is the hardest to write (The opening line, it should really grab the reader? The closing line. It should linger in the reader’s mind? All the lines in between?) The biggest fantasy here, though, might concern the nature of Mills and Boon stories, and the masturbatory function they actually serve.

THE ‘DOS AND DON’TS’ OF SEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS O

pinions on certain issues are strong in Northern Ireland: nationality, for example, or religious identity. Popular opinions and expectations on what is right and wrong in terms of sexual behaviour are not voiced quite as loudly all the time, probably because sex is meant to be a private affair, but they are nevertheless very present. The sexualisation of society in the shape of publications in monthly glossy magazines of the type: ‘Ten ways of seducing the man you really love’ are often mistaken for increased sexual freedom. In fact they are just the other side of the same medal: the continued conservatism and moralism in terms of sexuality. As far as the otherwise rather divided Northern Irish society is concerned, the perception of the ‘dos and don’ts’ of sexual relationships are surprisingly un-debated among those who usually stand at the opposite ends of the divide: 1. Don’t have sex before you get married.

(Do get married, by the way!)

2. Only have sex to procreate, never for fun.

3. Do not use contraception and do not terminate pregnancies, no matter what.

4. Do not have same-sex relationships. And if you think you are gay (Of course you are not. You only think you are or were mislead.), for heaven’s sake, do not let on.

And get a cure…

5. Finally, don’t talk about sex.

True, I have over-exaggerated a bit. In the last few years, Northern Ireland has taken massive steps towards a more sexually enlightened society, at least from the legal and policy point of view; the aftershocks of the much-quoted Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act. However, much of these five ‘do’s and don’ts’ have managed to survive at grassroots, and whilst there are many people who work to overcome these frankly quite dated attitudes, there are as many who continue to fight for their survival.

Since we know that sexual health has much to do with the social climate in a country, this is quite important.

In the year 2000 I was appointed as the research officer for the University of Ulster and the Family Planning Association (fpaNI) to produce the first large-scale study of sexual attitudes and lifestyles of young people in Northern Ireland. One of the first things I learnt in my new post was that the main reason why Northern Ireland was excluded from the much celebrated British Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, which was published six years earlier, was not that Northern Ireland is strictly speaking not part of Britain – which of course is true; but rather that researchers found it impossible to recruit interviewers in Northern Ireland that were prepared to go to people’s houses and question them about sex. This was not exactly good news for someone who was supposed to conduct a survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles in Northern Ireland within three years.

The fact that I’m writing this article here is probably indication enough that the goal was eventually achieved. Instead of having one-off interview encounters with randomly chosen

Shall we go upstairs?

about sexual matters. Above all, the majority of young people themselves did not approve of homosexual relationships, in particular of relationships between men. One young man reported: ‘In my experience it was I who had to educate my mother, sister and non-gay friends about my sexuality.’

people in their homes – which clearly did not work – we went to places where we knew young people socialised and of course formally or informally talked about sex: their schools, their youth clubs, colleges, to universities and training agencies. After developing some sort of rapport with them – and often with their teachers and youth leaders too – we found that they were quite willing and interested to discuss sexual matters and were eager to find out those things they had always wanted to know about sex, but were afraid to ask… In the end over 1,200 14-25 year olds took part in the study.

At the start of the project, inevitably, not much was known about sexual health of young people in Northern Ireland. But what was known was that in three areas that were seen as crucial indicators for the sexual health of a country, Northern Ireland was doing poorly: 1. Sexually transmitted infections were on the rise. The AIDS scare from the 1980s and 90s had clearly worn off.

2. Although slightly under the British figures, the figures for teenage parenthood Northern Ireland were higher than those in all other Western European countries.

3. The frankly rather bizarre lack of a legal framework with regard to abortions in Northern Ireland meant that official abortion statistics were unavailable. More importantly, what was known however was that many women who chose to terminate a pregnancy had to make arrangements to travel to England and pay privately for a procedure which is freely available on the NHS (for those who live in England).

One of the absurdities in Northern Ireland law is that young people can get married at 16 with the consent of parents or guardians, yet they cannot legally have sex for another year because the age of consent for sex in Northern Ireland is 17. Our survey showed that the average age for first sexual intercourse to occur was 15.6 years. Thus, over one third of all respondents we asked had their first sexual

encounter before the age they were legally allowed to do so. Apart from the fact that such a ban on sex is clearly not working, there is also no coherent argument for having the age of consent different from the case elsewhere in the United Kingdom, where it is 16.

The experience of the Netherlands, Sweden and other European countries reveals that good sexual health has much more to do with openness about sexuality, pragmatism and acceptance of sexual behaviour, as well as good sex education and easy access to sexual health services. Again, we found that Northern Ireland fares poorly in all three areas.

In terms of sex education, the ability to talk openly and freely about personal and sexual matters to parents, friends and teachers has important consequences for young people’s expression of their sexuality. Since Freud we know that people have sexual feelings from childhood. One of the most common myths is that by not talking about sex the subject will go away. However, one of the findings was that parents are often failing to talk to their children because of lack of knowledge and confidence as well as feelings of embarrassment. Young people reported that their parents did not educate them on sexual matters at all or used humour and innuendo to deliver blurred messages. One young man said for example that the sex education he received from his father was restricted to the following sentence before he went out at weekends: ‘If you are not in bed by 3 o’clock, you may as well come home.’

Another young man reported: ‘If my mother knew that I had sexual feelings she would become more protective, leaving me never on my own or allowed near whom ever the feelings were towards.’

We found things to be much worse for young homosexual people. Their relationships to their parents were worse and they were even less likely to be able to talk to their parents

Other gay people told us about self-harming and thoughts of suicide, about dropping out of school or full-time education altogether.

Young people were also highly critical of the sex education they received in school.

What was most likely to be taught were areas that were regarded as safe, i.e. subjects closely related to human reproduction (intercourse, pregnancy, menstruation etc.) Other issues related to feelings and emotions were barely touched, and if they were, students were often told to suppress feelings until they were married or just to say ‘no’ to sex. Of course, saying ‘no’ to sexual intercourse at 14 or 15 is not a bad idea, but it is how this put into context with personal development and aspirations that matters, and often it was not.

Sexual maturity can only come about in a climate, which allows sober and informed discussion of sex. Simplistic sex-negative messages do nothing to encourage such a climate. In fact the survey found that those who had higher aspirations were less likely to have sex before age 16. In this vein, there is nothing more negative than the criminalisation of sex for certain young people. Here is what two young people thought about their sex education in school: ‘The information at school was factual & illustrative, but not relevant to real life experience’ ‘…more about sex in relation to the emotional upheaval it causes. Less moralising and more on how it effects self-esteem if it’s gone wrong.’

In this climate of sexual negativity it was not surprising that the sexual health service provision in Northern Ireland was poor. We found that some GP’s refused to prescribe contraception to unmarried people, that some hospitals did not give out emergency contraception and that it was especially the most volatile group of young people for whom it was hardest to access any protection or information at all.

It is hypocritical to set standards and expectations for certain sexual behaviours but not enable young people to live up to them or to challenge them in an open debate. The times when the five ‘dos and don’ts’ of sexual relationships quoted above had any relevance for the majority of young people in Northern Ireland are long gone by. Let’s not pretend they will ever come back. Rather let’s have an open and sober discourse about what makes healthy sexual relationships.

A STICKY SITUATION

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Jason Mills flashers

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came across a nice flasher in Sligo – dressed partly as a woman – regular ‘Da’ from the shoulders up with grey hair and a wholesome looking face but from the shoulders down he was wearing a see-thru baby-doll dress with a golf jacket over it and men’s socks and shoes below. He definitely wasn’t wearing any knickers and you could see his parts quite clearly. He didn’t come across as lewd somehow – he was just getting off the train as you do.

sex dreams

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’ve had two dreams recently about female friends surprising me with their penises.

Not sure what to make of them. Maybe I want to be with a woman but am finding it hard to give up the cock. I’ve told one of my friends who was quite amused but couldn’t bring myself to tell the second one. I’ve changed all the names to avoid any more embarrassment.’

In the first one, which was very vivid, I was in a pub somewhere in Ireland and it was quite busy with a noisy group of men at the bar. My brother and the Fulsome twins were talking earnestly at a table nearby while I was on the floor with my friend Lizzy having full on sex. She was lying there with her long hair all over the place and I was on top. She had a very eager erection and was a pretty good shag. I was painfully aware of my brother and the twins sitting over at the table but I carried on regardless. They didn’t seem to be paying much attention to us anyway.

In the second dream, I was hanging around in a public toilet with my friend Kate. I think it had a urinal and everything – definitely felt quite male. Anyway, Kate pulled down the zip of her trousers and pulled out the biggest cock I had ever seen. It was a dirty great purple thing with veins all over the place. Quite horrible really. She was very matter of fact about it and said, ‘well that’s just what we have’. We didn’t do anything sexual and she seemed to think it was all very normal. I was self conscious because I didn’t have one and I was also in shock because I’d never seen one as big as hers before.

P

icture the scene. Citizen X is ambling amiably along Royal Avenue with their two lovable little urchins in tow, occasionally pausing to browse in the stores, and generally displaying all the characteristics of an upstanding and dutiful member of society. However, as they approach the junction with North Street, the collective tranquility of the occasion is irrevocably shattered. From around the corner of Gresham Street lurches a lone, male figure, middle-aged and donning a long dark raincoat, his eyes glazed over in a frenzy of depravity as he hurls obscenities at passing cars. Traffic prevents Citizen X from crossing the street, and as the figure moves closer, morsels of food are visible in his unkempt beard, which is also streaked with saliva. In the hand not permanently contorted into a deformed claw from excessive masturbation, he carries a small package wrapped in an unmarked black plastic bag. Now frozen to the spot in a mixture of horror and confusion, Citizen X attempts to shield the eyes of the precious children from the abominable being now standing directly before them. Alas, it is too late; leering sadistically, the man pulls a copy of Truncheon Time at Belvoir Park from the bag, and waving the explicit cover in the their poor, petrified little faces, he hisses through filthy yellow teeth ‘There is no God!! This is how you really got here! This is what your mummy and daddy do next door when you’re asleep, you little shits!’. The last thing Citizen X remembers is stumbling backwards in terror over a loose paving stone, and then blackness.

Upon awakening in hospital, Citizen X is told by the doctor that although he/she will still be able to lead a relatively normal life, but frequent violent flashbacks are likely. The children have not been so lucky. The psychological trauma they suffered was so intense that it is unlikely either of them will ever speak again.

Such is the chain of events likely embedded in the minds of our local elected representatives as they formulate policy on sex shop licensing, an issue which effectively displays the Kafkaesque eccentricities of local government. Under the Miscellaneous Provisions Act 1982, it became legal for R18 videos (ones depicting real sex) to be sold on licensed premises, although responsibility for providing these licenses and regulation thereafter was passed down to individual local councils across the UK. For some reason, Belfast City Council did not actually adopt this legislation until around 2000. In the interim period there was no way of applying for a license since no such application form or license officially existed, and so a number of sex shops sprang up in Belfast around Gresham, Winetavern and North Streets; unlicensed but technically legal.

However, Trading Standards were still being invoked by the council to carry out raids until, according to a sex shop owner, they were urged by a Trading Standards official to put an end to the whole farce by making the possibility of actually obtaining a license a reality.

And so began a lengthy and costly process of council hearings, consultations with outside barristers and even a demographic survey of parts of the UK which had sex shops. The legal

recommendation to the council at the end of this process was that under the newly adopted legislation it would be very difficult to justify not licensing any shops at all, and that the granting of at least one license would permit a clampdown on others. However, with the Northern Ireland Assembly elections of 2003 fast approaching no party or politician wished to be seen to advocate such wanton deviancy, and subsequently they voted against all applications for sex shop licenses on the grounds of the Miscellaneous Provisions Act. The main clause which was used to legitimize this decision related to ‘relevant locality’, whereby the law stated that a sex establishment must be 500 yards from a church or a school, lest it upset children, Christians or little animals.

However, given the compact nature of Belfast city centre and a culture steeped in religion, it is difficult to believe that any city centre business is more than 500 yards from a church.

Under the circumstances it can hardly be convincingly argued that Gresham Street is an unsuitable area, given its relatively low number of pedestrians and its seperation from the main commercial shopping district, and with no objections from other traders.

According to a City Hall insider, the decision taken was entirely the wrong one, not only leaving the City Council’s legal position weaker than they would like it to be, but demonstrating that it is ‘still stuck in ethical and moral ground rather than legal and regulatory, and it would rather bury it’s head in the sand than properly regulate the sex

still stuck in ethical and moral ground rather than legal and regulatory, and it would rather bury it’s head in the sand than properly regulate the sex industry industry’.

For their part, the sex shops not only supply the huge demand in R18 videos and a multitude of other items to dress up in or fill your orifices with, they also have significant legal and financial backing. Last month a judicial review in the High Court upheld the unofficial blanket ban on sex shops in Northern Ireland, although as Ian Brown, owner of Bliss in Bangor, points out ‘which local judge is going to want to be seen as the one who advocates having sex shops operating here?’. Mr. Brown, is one of the people spearheading the challenge to the local authorities through the courts, and following the recent decision the case now looks set to go before the Court of Appeal, and possibly even the European Court. His main argument refers to Article 1 Protocol 1 of the Human Rights Act, which stipulates that the individual has a basic right to choose, and a basic right to trade.

‘What we’re actually seeing here is a censorship of the official censors. R18 videos are legal and you can buy them all over the rest of the UK, but once again adults from Northern Ireland are being treated differently and told by the authorities that “No, you aren’t adult enough to make your own decisions, so we will make them for

you”. Just to give you an idea of the kind of mentality we’re dealing with in this country, in Ballymena there is a British Home Stores which just opened recently, and they were told in no uncertain terms that they had to remove the chocolate willies they were selling from their shelves. Now, I understand you don’t want these things in with your Mars Bars and your Milky Ways, but seriously, what chance has a sex shop got of being granted a license by these people if you can’t even sell chocolate willies? Anyway, that’s a headline waiting to happen if ever there was one, “Councilors Force BHS To Pull Their Chocolate Willies”’.

It would be interesting to see what the City Council financial records say about this one.

Certainly, the tens of thousands of taxpayer’s pounds being spent fighting an esoteric moral battle are disproportionate to the number of taxpayers who actually care one way or the other about a shop selling legal videos in a backstreet. Bearing in mind that the trade will continue with or without licenses, and that the police have stated that they have neither the time nor inclination to deal with the situation, the Council are doing little more than killing the incentive to even bother applying for them in the first place. The fee is a non-refundable £3,500. Allowing the market to flourish unregulated can hardly be a desirable outcome for High Sheriff Ruth Patterson, who says she is concerned that pornography is ‘demeaning to women... and a horrible side of life’, nor will it assist Jim Rodgers in his crusade to ‘send out the right message and make sure that we have an attractive city’ (conveniently ignoring the 20ft high paintings of masked gunmen close to the city centre).

Perhaps the city fathers should reconsider their options. They might, for example, decide on the wholesale revoking of licenses of those stores which sell products that could, as the legislation states, ‘provide sexual stimulation’.

Obviously, Ann Summers (which first appeared in the 60’s with blacked-out windows itself) would be the first to go.

Considering the ubiquitous use of the allusion to ‘sexual stimulation’ to sell products, this would inevitably spell an end to establishments dealing in cars, washing machines, mobile phones, Cadbury’s Flakes, and so on.

Furthermore, the necessity of taking into account the many and varied fetishes determinable in human society means that shoe shops would clearly be a no-no, as would vegetable shops, for fear of someone willfully impaling themselves on a cucumber. On the other hand, the City Council could simply use the semiotics of advertising to their advantage, applying the technique to future party political broadcasts. Images would abound on primetime UTV and BBC NI of Barbara de Brun suggestively caressing her inner thigh with a decommissioned weapon, and Sammy Wilson frolicking once again, stark bollock naked, through the fields (obviously first ensuring that he is at least 500 yards from the nearest school or church) screaming ‘Vote DUP for a Better Future!’.

THE ULSTER

SEX SCANDAL I

n 2002, at the height of the sleaze period associated with the Major cabinet, the Cincinnati Post proclaimed that ‘the British, it must be said, do sex scandals much better than we do’. The article accompanying this revelation suggested that American scandals were more lachrymose affairs (literally) that tended towards the grubby or farcical.

Unfortunately the article failed to point out why the British form of sex scandal was either better or different and as readers we are left to contemplate why Edwina Currie and John Major is better than Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.

In the Northern Irish context this ability to excel at sexual scandal might be the ultimate weapon in proving that we are, indeed, not of British stock. Northern Irish residents would appear to find it impossible to deal with the idea of sexual scandal. Any attempt to research this phenomenon always seems to lead to the conclusion that, with a few notable exceptions, we don’t seem to do it very well, or to revel in the misfortune of others who have done it and allowed themselves to be caught. Given that we live in a place for which rumour is the lifeblood of daily interaction this seems strange. A positive reading of this might suggest that, ironically, when it comes to sexual rather than religious matters we ar e tolerant, believing that what people do in their private lives is their own business. Or could it be that we are sympathetic to the vulnerable who succumb to temptation working on the premise that in Northern Ireland it may be a long time before temptation comes around again?

Unfortunately, the real reasons may be more slippery. Societies that repress their sexual needs and proclivities generally tend to be the same societies that fail to recognise any kind of behaviour outside the sexual norm, believing instead that sexual deviance and scandal is something that happens in other, less God fearing populations. The result of this ostrich-like attitude is that when sexual scandal does strike it undermines the social fabric in ways that would not be relevant to other, more advanced, social structures.

Unfortunately it is also the case that a failure to accept the presence of other forms of sexual activity creates a situation where the sexual scandals that do arise tend to be associated with predators and victims. The failure to recognise serious problems and to be prepared to make them public can be seen in the case of Father Brendan Smyth. The Norbertine Order, of which Smyth was a member, had been warned as early as the 1940s that he was systematically abusing children, but the failure to report him to authorities allowed him to continue his activities in parishes in Belfast, Dublin and the United States. Instead he was shunted from parish to parish when allegations were made against him until he was finally exposed by the UTV Counterpoint programme, an exposure which ultimately led to the collapse of the southern government at that time. More significantly perhaps, it might be argued that it cannot be coincidence that this opened the floodgates for further scandalous revelations about the Catholic Church, the outcome being that attendance at Mass in Ireland plummeted

during the 1990s from 68% to 48%. In this case one might argue that the scandal did its job.

(For a full discussion of this case see Chris Moore (1995) Betrayal of trust: The Father Brendan Smyth Affair and the Catholic Church) Although no major figure was ever prosecuted, the rumours were damaging enough for leading figures when the Kincora scandal surfaced in April 1980. Three staff members of the Kincora Boys Home, Belfast, were charged with acts of gross indecency.

These charges, and subsequent revelations, led to years of accusations that elements of the security service, civil servants and a number of Loyalists, and indeed Republicans, had been involved in the sexual abuse of young boys at Kincora. It is a salutary lesson when it comes to sexual scandal that failure to identify those involved can have a more sustained impact on those associated because the rumour mill can remain active for many years as a search of the internet for information on Kincora will attest.

Interestingly the Kincora scandal also became the platform for some of the most vicious black humour heard during the entire troubles period, a fact that again may indicate that we

The bridge between these serious and truly scandalous cases and a more enlightened and healthy attitude towards sexual behaviour may be one Sammy Wilson don’t as a society know how to deal with our problems and weaknesses, hoping that if we laugh hard enough they will simply evaporate.

And, of course, as a recent tantalizing article in the Belfast Telegraph which referred to a memo distributed by the Vice-Chancellor of one of our leading universities concerning rumours about his private life proved, the rumours are invariably more exaggerated, more salacious and more mischievious than the truth will ever be.

The bridge between these serious and truly scandalous cases and a more enlightened and healthy attitude towards sexual behaviour may be one Sammy Wilson. The DUP’s expert on all things social has on a couple of occasions found himself embroiled in public exposures relating to his own alleged public exposure. Whether the esteemed MLAwas involved in naked romps around Tullymore was less interesting than the public’s view of these activities. The fact was that we did not actually care very much, but we did savour the opportunity to revel in his unease and to glory in his discomfort especially when lighthearted reference to the incident even found its way onto the chamber floor of the newly elected Assembly. Sammy would later win a court case against prying photographers, winning a moral victory on two counts; one that his privacy had been violated and two, that he knew which battles were worth fighting and which were not.

It would appear, therefore, that Northern Ireland is emerging from the sexual scandal dark ages into a period where the antics of others give us nothing more than unqualified voyeuristic pleasure and glee at the discomfort

of those caught with their trousers down.

Hence it was that when we heard in March of this year that a prison officer had been suspended for having an illicit affair with ‘notorious husband-killer’ Julie McGinley we knew that a new era in sexual scandal had arrived. All the classic elements were there; the puncturing of authoritarian pomposity, imagined sleaze behind closed doors, the prisoner/jailer relationship, and the colourful language with which it was all reported. It helped, of course, that this was indeed the third scandal to have rocked the prison in as many weeks with the news that the ‘Black Widow’ Lesley Gault had also been involved with a prison officer and the ultimate Red Top tabloid prize, a female officer had been involved with a UVF leader and one of his associates, ‘a well-known drug-dealer’.

An article from the Mirror on September 21 of this year heralded the fact that Northern Ireland had arrived in the land of 21st century sexual scandal. Entitled ‘Colonel Webcam Quits in Disgrace’ it recounted the wonderfully vulgar and sleazy tale of Colonel Mark Varley. The Mirror called his exposure the greatest sex scandal to hit the army since the Lady Bienvenida Buck affair so it had to be good. In essence the Colonel resigned after accusations that he had passed on sensitive material while involved in webcam sessions with a ‘string of lovers’. No doubt he had left himself open to blackmail and revealed important operational details about army strategy but more importantly he revealed that all is well in sexual scandal world.

The truth may be that whether it is newspaper stories about sex for sale in a lay-by in Ballygawley or rumours of orgies in Belfast parks we all secretly enjoy the sniff of sex scandal provided no one is becoming a victim of someone else’s abuse. And it may just be that the more scandals we have the more we will come to accept that the world of sex is probably the most complicated, and private aspect of the society we choose to live in.

sex dreams

I

dreamt I was having sex with a guy I used to go out with. He was black with curly hair and nice eyes but in the dream he was a shaggy black dog with long floppy ears. He had a man’s cock though and lay on his back with his legs all splayed [like dogs do] while I straddled him. I think I enjoyed it.

flashers

F

riday night post Vico’s drunk o’clock and I needed to get home. It was clear on this particular night that there were more people than taxis on the streets of Belfast. In need of carbohydrates and a lie down I did my usual and began flagging down any passing car that came my way. In the wee small hours in the dark, blonde hair and ample breasts will get the attention of most passing male drivers and more often than not will lead to a safe ride home (blah blah not to be recommended blah blah blonde hair breast remark not very womens’ lib blah blah). On this particular night I had been passed by a white Ford Escort and thought it was going to stop, it didn’t it carried on past but I watched it as it moved all the way around the round about and came back my way. Sure enough the car stopped and my friend and I jumped in. Pleasantries and directions were shared, we were heading to South Parade and the driver began asking us what club we’d been to. He then began to ask us if we knew of any fetish clubs in Belfast. We said no, but maybe the Kremlin would be a good place to start. He then proceeded to tell us that he had a fetish for wearing tights and did we think they’d mind if he wore his tights to the Kremlin. He was quite a nice fella with an immaculate moustache, dyed black to match his dyed black hair. He told us how his girlfriend didn’t know about his fetish and just as we were feeling sympathetic to his cause he began to undo his jeans with his one non-driving hand.

I think it was because he asked first but we said we didn’t mind him showing us his tights. He pulled the car over and unbuckled safety belt and jeans – low and behold ta da daaa there they were, stretched taught over a (massive) hard on.

‘They’re a lovely denier’ I said as if grasping the only nice thing I could think of so not to hurt his feelings. He told us how good it felt to be out in his tights and he thanked us for allowing him to show us.

Should have left it at that really but the smell of the gusset must have driven him crazy because he proceeded to ask if we’d mind if he had a wank while we watched. His hand already close to laddering, we said we’d rather not and got out of the car. He smiled kind of understandingly and drove away. I felt kind of bad for him and worse for not telling him that if he ladders his tights a spot of nail varnish stops it getting worse.

BROWN BAG

NATION SEX IN THE NORTHERN IRISH CITY, A RUSSIAN VIEW by TANYA HATZKO

M

y first sexual experience in Northern Ireland came from brown bags. My friend (whom I was going to turn into a boyfriend) told me his older brother had to buy condoms from under the counter in wee brown paper bags not so many years ago. The same style they use for hiding beer bottles on American streets nowadays – everybody knows what’s inside, but nobody can see. I was stunned. I never realised that an advanced western society could act like that. I even considered bringing a year stock of condoms with me. I was also wondering what sort of lovers would such a society produce. Whatever they say about all people being different it does not stop us girls from discussing German, Spanish, Belgian, Canadian, Dutch and African lovers when you guys are away – I’m sure you guys do the same.

A man is a product of his society; of course one can be an intellectual genius without getting a degree in Oxbridge but the mentality is obviously formed by the society and conditions under which a child was raised. For example, it is pretty hard to find, err, a male Muslim western-type feminist in Saudi Arabia (they’ve all emigrated to the UK already – it’s easier to fight for women’s rights from here).

My brown bag sex experience made me wonder how sexually open-minded Northern Irish society is.

One of the most detailed works in this field was done by Dirk Schubotz, Audrey Simpson and Bill Rolston in association with Family Planning Association. It was called Towards Better Sexual Health. A survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles of young people in Northern Ireland, The research, which is available from Queen’s University library, contains quite a lot of statistical evidence – the team questioned more than 1000 young people for the survey.

According to the results, sexual attitudes in NI are not too different from the UK and most European countries. Young people start their sex life at the age of 15 or 16 – despite the legal age of consent here being 17. The average age at first intercourse, according to survey, is 15.6 years. The sad fact is that about a half of firsttimes had had sex without a condom. School is blamed, as usual: the general point of view was that school sex education was crap; that teachers ‘skipped the important parts’ and were talking ‘about petals and stamens’. In fact, some teachers involved in sex education programs were officially advised not to talk about bi- and homosexuality. Even worse, most of them haven’t had shown to teens how to put a condom on!

Meanwhile a girl who provided her story for another book about sex by Mr Schubotz & collegues, Telling It Like It Is. Young People's Experiences of Relationships and Sex in Northern

Ireland had a very reasonable suggestion to solve all those problems. She proposed inviting a special councellor or a guest teacher who would hold lessons about sex. Now, imagine a beautiful blonde with big breasts (just like me) waltzing in the classroom and telling wet-dream-exhausted, princecharming-awaiting highschoolers everything they wanted to know about sex but were too afraid to ask. All about how to make love for the first time. All about how to attract a girl or

But who said sex lesson should not be playful and funny? With learning how to undo bras on a mannequin and and put condoms on a mannequin, too? a boy. All about menstruations, bi- and homosexualism, sperm, coming too quickly and not coming at all and also – how to live through being dumped. It is bloody important.

Hardly anybody at school can tell you how to overcome it – except for your friends who have sometimes even less experience than you do.

In my days the ‘sex lesson’ was held separately for boys and girls. I remember asking the teacher why and she answered ‘If I put you together you’ll all giggle the lesson away’. But who said sex lesson should not be playful and funny? With learning how to undo bras on a mannequin and and put condoms on a mannequin, too? There’s an old anecdote about why God put unmarried sex among deadly sins: God sent a special angel to Earth and he (or she) reported that people expressed no fun while having sex. On the contrary, they expressed all the signs of a hard job – they moaned, puffed, breathed hard, groaned, but hardly laughed at all while lovemaking. So God, in his wisdom, realized that sex is not fun for people but a pure necessity – to make kids, or to make a stubborn sweetheart marry you. That’s where all the sexual taboos, all the old-fashion traditions started. Because people refused to laugh at the issue.

So imagine this serious-faced, thin-as-astick young person getting out of school, into the university, college or their first job and getting their first sweetheart. What sort of lover would he (or she) become? The more strictly s/he would be raised, the less information about sexual pleasures s/he got, the more wild this person will get. There’s a good chance that a man would not pay attention to all the details of sex and a woman would think that being together in bed is more important than quality of lovemaking. There’s also a good chance that he or she would turn to kinky sex and will spent hours on spanking and fetish internet sites. I suppose another

good chance is that our new-born sex star would go jumping from bed to bed, but Mr Schubotz & colleagues’ research says that most of Northern Irish people aren’t too promiscuous. But it doesn’t make Northern Irish sex less kinky. Nor does hiding. The Ann Summers shop in Belfast pretends to sell mostly women’s linergie – that’s what any window-shopper would think. Inside after a few turns you discover penis-shaped chocolate with creamy cum, handcuffs, vibrators and – best of all – pulsating ‘butterflies’.

Back to our serious but sexual guy (or girl): the second type of Northern Irish lover is the shy but tender and attentive person. He or she would probably not party too much but sublimate the unreleased sexual energy into work. Regarding sex information not very assessable, s/he’d rather go to have a pint with colleagues or work extra hours or do some community work. Pushing their 30s they stay suprisingly half-virgins. That kind of man or a woman is a treasure once picked up by an experienced partner.

There’s always a third way available – have no sex, get married, get a child, and another one, and another one, and another, and keep making sex with one partner only. Never divorce. Nothing’s wrong with it – as a person who survived through my parents divorce as a child, I must say that nothing can turn you towards becoming a good Catholic more than a family crush. I vote with both hands for the family.

But... incredibly, in Mr. Schubotz survey 53.1% of young people questioned would forbid a woman to have an abortion even if a couple/woman claim they/she can’t afford to have any more children financially. They’d rather force unwanted kids to live in misery, have little chance for education and maybe a bigger chance to become criminals. Another 13.4% would prevent a raped woman having a termination and 9.3% said the woman shouldn’t interrupt her pregnancy even if her health is seriously endangered. It’s just...

"

HANDY GUIDE TO HOW TO DO IT BETTER

HOW TO

MAKE LOVE (8 steps – choose your way – FIRST-TIME LOVERS, STABLE COUPLES and THE EXTRAWILD ONES).

STEP1 Reassuring your partner that s/he is the most desirable person in the world.

FIRST-TIMERS: Tell him or her words of love and admiration; STABLES: Make fun out of him or her; EXTRAWILD: Stand in the corner of the room panting as loud as you can.

STEP 2 Lay hands

There’s also a good chance that he or she would turn to kinky sex and will spent hours on spanking and fetish internet sites. people consider women’s bodies belong not to women but to the community, to the husband, to whoever. So, what’s the point of starting a family if an attitude towards a woman in Northern Ireland is still... as if she owes something to a man and to the society?

FIRST-TIMERS : Cuddle and snug into each other STABLES: Give him or her a lightest, but long

stroke along the spine EXTRAWILD: Smack his or her bum hard and laugh as if it’s a good joke.

STEP 6 Friction

STEP 3 Undressing and preparing

FIRST-TIMERS: Gently remove each other’s clothes item by item and proceed to bedroom.

STABLES: Tear all the clothes apart and fall on the sheepskin in front of the fireplace (don’t forget to replace each other’s demaged items from Marks and Spencer’s later).

EXTRAWILD: Whatever you do, don’t even think to undo the bra. You’ll kill all evening on it.

STEP 4

FIRST-TIMERS: Start slow and increase the frequency and amplitude, keep caressing the clitoris.

STABLES: Start quickly and decrease the frequency and amplitude until you both are asleep after a day of hard work. Keep caressing the clitoris even in dream.

EXTRA WILD: Try to make at least a few more than last time.

STEP 7 Orgasm

Foreplay

FIRST-TIMES: Do half an hour of foreplay including cunnilingus and fellatio.

STABLES: Do an hour and a half of foreplay and fall asleep in each other’s arms after a day of hard work.

EXTRAWILD: Do 5 minutes of foreplay, come and start preparing for the next intercourse.

STEP 5 Penetration

FIRST-TIMERS: For men – reach her G-spot and listen to the reaction. For women – squeeze his penis with your vagina and listen to the reaction. Try to avoid thoughts about where your G-spot is.

STABLES: Get the sweetness in every muscle.

Try to avoid thoughts that your orgazm is different from what they describe in Cosmopolitan and GQ. EXTRA WILD: Ahh! Uhh!! Ohh!! That was quick.

STEP 8 After play

FIRST-TIMERS: Put the condom on and penetrate gently and lovingly.

STABLES: It is very unlikely that you wake up from step 4, but if so, think have you or your partner forgotten to take the pill or not.

EXTRAWILD: You mean, you are ready to do it again?

FIRST-TIMERS: Kiss, cuddle and say nice things to each other.

STABLES: Proceed to the kitchen where have a beer and a chat about work.

EXTRA WILD: Hrrr.... Hrrr.... Hrrr...

silver ring thing

T

eenagers love moral certainties. This fact is often overlooked by those who take the easy route of characterising all adolescents as spotty troublemakers, randomly kicking against the dour institutional pricks.

Of course, most of them don’t actually do anything anarchic, preferring to sit morosely in their black-painted bedrooms, thinking about existentialism (the easy bits, anyway). Many teenagers find that a convenient way to express their disenchantment with the conservative values of the mainstream is to buy a Che Guevara t-shirt from Fresh Garbage.

They do this because the discourse of revolution makes their angst-ridden little hearts swell with delight. Why does it appeal to them so? Because the puritanical idealism which motivates such political action is clearcut and recognisable. It’s black and white. The good guys against the bad guys. And that’s deeply comforting to the embattled teenager, who’s desperately trying to develop a stable sense of self with a coherent range of beliefs and values to match (as well as dealing on a daily basis with the contradictory emotional and physical demands of an embarrassing, disobedient body.)

Hence the appeal of the popular US-based sexual abstinence programme, ‘Silver Ring Thing’, soon to hit our native shores. It offers its adherents a clear set of moral rules, all couched in the unequivocal language of religious zealotry. It may not have the cachet of Che, but it provides a distinctive, recognisable way through the confusion of being an adolescent. Like the icky BuddyHollyesque ‘True Love Waits’ movement, Silver Ring Thing aims to persuade teenagers that sex before marriage is A Very Bad Thing and, to reward them for their promised celibacy, offers them a dinky little ring to wear on their finger. (Presumably to be dramatically cast off when the big wedding night finally rolls round. By that stage, its proud wearer having grown a bit, it will probably be stuck.)

The ring is a symbol of the pledge that they will have made: to remain sexually pure until marriage. Using a teen-friendly display of flashing lights, videos, raps (Grange Hill’s ‘Just Say No’ is nothing on this) and ‘comedy’ sketches, the Silver Ring Thing crew urge their young audience to resist temptation and avoid the risk of disease. Beating disease is a big part of their shtick. The US sexual abstinence lobby claims that 65 million Americans are afflicted by a sexually transmitted disease. The ‘epidemic’ is apparently a result of the promiscuity unleashed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. America, the abstinence lobby says, is reaping what it has sown.

The Bush administration has given tens of millions of dollars to abstinence organisations, while simultaneously dramatically cutting funding to sex education projects. Republicans justify their support for this by claiming it’s a matter of Christian conscience. Of course, it also happens to conveniently boost their

conservative credentials via an issue that remains less contentious than abortion. It’s significant that many of the abstinence organisations, like the Silver Ring Thing which receives around $700,000 per year in federal funding, are faith-based groups. ‘Ringmaster ’ of the Silver Ring Thing movement, Denny Patten, an ordained minister, says that abstinence is a tool to reach young people for God, safeguarding them for the Second Coming. He believes that the end of the world is, as they say, nigh - and that Christ will return within a generation.

You can imagine how all this mouthfrothing fundamentalist stuff will go down just fine in repressed and repressive Northern Ireland where bodies are traditionally seen as yucky dirty things to be kept covered up and certainly never to come in contact with each other except in strictly matrimonial situations.

And even then two nighties, a foot-warmer and a pair of Marigolds should be worn at all times. Long years of bodily uptightness dinned into us by conservative religious discourses makes our lips particularly evolutionarily-equipped to whisper with conviction the words ‘sex is dirty’ (the unspoken sub-text behind the invocation of ‘purity’ beloved of the Silver Ring Thing movement.) Our inherited collective cultural unconscious prompts us in all the (wrong) directions.

But of course, the Silver Ring Thing won’t be universally welcomed here. Some of us are deeply uncomfortable with its discourse of self-denial. Yet if we reject the idea of promoting sexual abstinence to teenagers, what are we saying? Just shag away to your hearts’ content, youngsters, we don’t care?

That doesn’t feel quite right either. One local reproductive health worker told me, ‘I hate to admit it, but maybe the Silver Ring Thing could be a positive force. After all, look at our teenage pregnancy rate. It’s atrocious. I don’t agree with the religious proselytising but if it makes some teenagers think twice about shagging around, or gives teenage girls a bit of self-respect then perhaps it’s a good thing.’

The trouble is that teenagers will always obey the longings of their fizzing, burning, sexually awakening bodies. That urge will overcome even the most powerful disincentive. A little silver ring isn’t likely to stop it. So even ring wearers are likely to ‘fail’, to ‘give in to temptation’ in the abstinence parlance. And although the Silver Ring Thing programme appears to accept fallen young shaggers back on board (perhaps after some complex atonement process? Some spiritual revirgining procedure?), the implicit message is clear. You are dirty and you have sinned. And that kind of distaste for the excesses of the body isn’t exactly known for engendering selfrespect and esteem in the vulnerable teenage heart.

FLASHERS sex dreams

I

n the dream, I’m in a house – just a boring semi detached 3 bedroom thing like I lived in when I was young. Not a stunner by any stretch. I’m in a downstairs room when I hear the noise of a forced entry through the front door. Immediately, although I don’t know what, I know I’ve done something illegal/immoral and an angry mob is breaking in to get me. I act as quickly as I can in the treacle-as-air speed of my dreams and make it upstairs to a landing window. The shouting of my pursuers and the splintering of woodwork forces me out the window and across to the main gutter, which I shimmy up until I reach the eaves of the house (if that’s what they’re called), all the while with the noise of a gaining pursuit beneath me. My plan is to get up onto the roof, where maybe I’ll be able to hide or escape via the adjoining house, but I don’t have the strength to pull myself up and I remain dangling from the eaves, against the side of the house. Instead of painful, I realise the feeling is overpoweringly erotic. The sensation of my groin rubbing against the brickwork and the burning of my strained arm muscles feels like the best sex I’ve ever had.

I’m right against the wall smelling the masonry of the house and it’s fantastic, better than any woman’s scent. but I’m confused because I’m still terrified about being caught. I want to get up on the roof to escape, but I also want to hang there for ever. This house is driving me wild. I want to go, but I want to stay, but I want to go, but I want to stay... etc... until I wake up. In a pool of my own.. stuff, you know.

I’m not proud.

‘It seemed quite funny at first. I was looking round waiting to see who else was about.

It’s just one of those things that you don’t expect to happen, and it takes you a while to realise what is actually going on.’

One of my friends was recalling an incident last year when she was ‘flashed at’ by a man in a South Belfast park, who exposed his genitals to her. She was walking, alone, on a bright afternoon, through a busy area. She continues to visit the park on a regular basis.

‘I just stared at him for a few seconds, and then walked on very quickly. It was only when I had looked away from him, when I was walking away, that I began to feel real fear. It was actually very threatening. I know it sounds melodramatic now, at a distance, but I was really glad to see other people about. When I felt safe, I began to feel really angry. How dare he do that to me. I’m not prudish, but it was all so out of context. I can’t even remember what he looked like now, I was so taken aback by the act.’

She didn’t report the incident to the police, but heard subsequently that other women had reported similar experiences. What are her feelings now?

‘At the time I just wanted to put it behind me. I suppose I just decided that he was a pathetic weirdo, and that was that. It still makes me angry though. Why? I think it’s because “flashing” is quite a brutish act; it’s the most brute basic way to signify sexual interest in someone. It’s totally uncivilized.

He behaved like a fucking caveman.’

And that’s ‘flashing,’ and the response it engenders. I had no real clue. Even the word is vaguely comic. ‘Rape’ sounds harsh, sharp, vicious, even had we no idea about its meaning. ‘Sexual harassment’ is explicitly and suitably forensic, but ‘flashing’ conjures up smutty seaside postcards, Benny Hill, the

stereotypical dirty man in the dirty mac.

One of the difficulties in examining the act is that there are a number of ways of exposing your ‘privates’ which are culturally accepted as relatively ‘benign’ instances of flashing. A few years back I was in a club which was running one of those nights where two airline tickets to Chicago were on offer to the guy voted as having the nicest boxer shorts. Ten willing volunteers stood on stage in their keks, and the crowd were encouraged to clap and cheer their favourite. When it was his turn, one enterprising contestant whipped out his manhood and received the loudest cheer of the night. He won the flights.

Similarly, every summer the media illustrate their annual horrorfest about young Brits abroad with footage of drunken teenage bints flashing their tits’n’ass to the locals in Ibiza, Ayia Napa, Rhodes or Faliraki. Tutting all round, of course, but little genuine outrage or sense of threat. Further, show me the teenage boy who hasn’t ‘mooned’ and I’ll

show me the teenage boy who hasn’t ‘mooned’ and I’ll show you the teenage boy who hasn’t lived show you the teenage boy who hasn’t lived, although a line of pudgy, pasty, white behinds in the back window of a bus is possibly one of the least attractive sights known to humanity.

These are all overt instances of ‘flashing’ but they are not implicitly threatening. They may even be read, by some, as examples of an acceptance of the body which is unapologetic and healthy, a contrast to the dominant cultural discourses of shame and guilt which often mediate our relationship with our body.

When I go to a beach abroad I resolutely ensure that I wear a pair of football shorts which reach from my navel to my knees, yet I admire the nubile Spaniards or beefy Germans around me who let it all hang out without a moment’s hesitation.

However, ‘flashing’ is different, it’s much

more loaded. For a start, evidence suggests that it is overwhelmingly inflicted on women by men, and, as such, is an act which, in part, seeks to assert mastery or power. My friend certainly read it this way.

‘He knew he would get a reaction from me.

I sure he got off on the attention. I tell myself that he was pathetic, that he wanted negative attention because he couldn’t get any other attention. But he wasn’t going to ask me what I thought about it. He was going to show me his dick, and I had no choice in the matter, no say. All I could do was walk away.’

In doing this, she followed the usual advice on how to deal with this type of incident. Victims are advised not to react, not to scream (unless they genuinely fear they’re about to be physically attacked and need someone to come to their aid), pass comment or shout abuse.

Rather, they’re told to pass by, paying as little attention as possible, refusing to give the perpetrator what he wants.

And what of the perpetrator? In part, those who ‘flash’ are motivated by illicit sexual pleasure, but of a kind which floats beyond the boundaries. For many people, the pleasure of sex is heightened by a level of benign danger. Whether it’s a fumble in the room upstairs from where your parents are sitting or a shag in the woods, sexual gratification can often be heightened by the knowledge that you might get caught at it. For the flasher, however, getting caught is not just a spicy thrill, but the whole sad point. More broadly, it also gives excess ammunition to all the moral harbingers who portray sexual activity as essentially dirty and furtive.

But whatever the obscure motivations which prompt it, flashing is a profoundly selfish act, gratification coming primarily from the victim’s discomfort. Our flasher, to use an apposite phrase, really doesn’t give a toss.

Robbie Meredith

DANCIN THE REEL O BOGIE ‘W

e’r aw Jock Tamson’s bairns’ is the weel-kent phrase uised bi Scots fowk whan thay speak up for tolerance an agin racism an nairae-nebbitness in general. The eemage o Scots-speakers as dour Presbyterians, on the ither haund, isna ane that wad pit a body in mind o sex, an ye coud be forgien for thinkin the wird wis liker tae be uised for whit Ballymena fowk keeps thair coal in. Houbeit, in common wi maist fowk langages, Scots haes a guid share o wirds tae dae wi ‘dancin the reel o Bogie’. Naebody wi a guid ken o Chaucer wad be putten aboot tae lairn that the makar schuil o the Meedle Ages kent bi anglocentric academics as ‘the Scottish Chaucerians’ wis pairtial tae strang langage. In The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the Lawland poet William Dunbar cries the Gaelic bard Kennedy fae the lang-deid Gaeltacht o sooth-wast Scotland a ‘cuntbittin crawdoun’. No bad for a body in Catholic haly

orders, A’m shuir ye’ll gree.

An it’s no juist in the medieval period aither. Tho we’r aw acquent wi the sexual appetites o Robert Burns, a wheen o his bawdiest sangs is expurgate fae the canon in maist edeetions o his darg, mebbe the best exemplar bein Nine Inch Will Please a Lady .

‘What length o’ graith, when weel ca’d hame, Will sair a woman duly?’

The carlin clew her wanton tail, Her wanton tail sae ready – I learn’d a sang in Annandale, Nine inch will please a lady. – But for a koontrie cunt like mine, In sooth, we’re nae sae gentle; We’ll tak tway thumb-bread to the nine, And that’s a sonsy pintle.

If ye’r wantin tae hear thon sang yersel, it can be gotten on Jean Redpath’s CD, The Songs of Robert Burns, Volumes 1 & 2. Burns wisna juist a leddies’ man but a sexual revolutionar an aw; it wis only the daith o Hieland Mary that stappit him giein ower his guidwife an rinnin awa tae Jamaica wi her. The affcome o his likin for the weemenfowk, o coorse, wis that he fand hissel poued up afore the kirk session.

Sexual licence gaed alang wi sexual prudery in thae days juist as it dis nou. The leeterar reflexes o thir twa tradeetions o the Scotsspeakin warld wis the twa beuks aften listit as bein the only anes fund in mony a hoosehauld on baith sides o the Sheuch, Burns an the Bible, a hap that sets me thinkin that a wheen fowk forderin the leid in Ulster the day mebbe gat a hauld o the wrang ane.

Growin up masel in Scots-speakin airts, a fair feck o the sexual vocabular o the schuil close wis fae the leid. Later on A lairnt tae ma

surpreese that some o it wis gey near the same in German. The female sex, an bi extension ony fashious wee eediot, wis cried a fud (German Fotze) an an erection wis a staunder (German Ständer). The war ither wirds like tae be unique tae oorsels, an aw, but. Fowk that in Inglish micht be sayed tae be ‘riding the Hershey highway’ wis ‘awa for a broun’, an expression uised tae pit doun fowk ye didna like, maist ava twa fowk putten tae flicht thegither efter a guid kickin. Conseederin that niver a ane o us wad hae kent hochmagandie fae Mahatma at the time, the langage wis gey an coorse. Seen in thon licht, it’ll come as nae surpreese that Jock Tamson itsel, alang wi pintle, pillie, tossel, whang, toby, taw, Robin an tot, is a Scots wird for ‘penis’.

Gavin Falconer

SEX IN IRISH AISLING CHOLLAÍ I

n the early twentieth century sexual matters were excised from the new ‘traditional’ and ‘worthy’ literature in Irish, reflecting the profound Catholic influence on the revival of the language. In fact, today the official Irish word for abortion is ginmhilleadh ‘destruction of the conceived’ and masturbation is féintruailliú, ‘selfpollution’. Yet there are Gaeltacht alternatives for the latter that do not do offer moral judgements – ag caitheamh an tsíl ‘throwing the seed’, lámhchartadh ‘hand-tossing’ and a favourite of monks that even seems to recommend the act – lámhchairdeas ‘handfriendship’. The plethora of pocket Irish dictionaries does not mention ‘masturbation’ as they are aimed at schoolchildren.

Different perspectives on sexual morality are offered in Irish – clú cailín a mhilleadh (‘ruin a girl’s reputation’) is to make an unmarried girl pregnant, but the resulting páiste gréine ‘sun child’ doesn’t sound so bad. Diocesan matrimonial commissions would not approve of a pósadh beag ‘little marriage’ which refers to sex with a future spouse.

The lack of discussion of sex is in Irish literature is peculiar for two reasons. Firstly, the Irish language can seem particularly earthy to English speakers as no word is considered by native speakers to be profane – an upright torpedo erected on Tory Island is called matter-of-factly An Bod Mór ‘the big penis’. A mountain peak in Skye was called Am Bod ‘the penis’, until blushing Presbyterians re-named it Am Bodach ‘the old man’.

Secondly, in the past many native Irish speakers lived on farms surrounded by copulating animals. Thus dáir, the usual expression for heat in a cow, is applied to women – bhí dáir dhomhain uirthi ‘there was a deep heat/lust on her’. Fowl language appears – Bhain mé na cleiteacha di ‘I took the feathers from her’ (‘I had sex with her’). Ag marcaíocht ‘riding’ requires no explanation, nor does sa dialait, ‘in the saddle’. Even the turf bog gets an occasional look in – portach ‘bog’ is a euphemism for vagina and there is Chuirfeadh sí fód ar do phíce ‘she would put a turf sod on your fork’ (she would give you an erection).

Fishermen have been heard to say Tá breac amach asam ‘there is a trout coming out of me’ or Tá breac ar mo dhuán ‘There is a trout on my hook’ (‘I have an erection’). A woman on the prowl will be said to have a cuid eochraí ar bharr an duáin aici ‘fish spawn on the top of her hook’. After a night of courting a man can be asked An bhfuair tú faic ar do dhuán? ‘Did you hook anything?’ (‘Did you score?’). A woman can be complemented as ‘Is deas an bád í ’, ‘she’s a nice boat’.

A virile man could be described as a tarbh ‘bull’ a reithe ‘ram’, or a stail ‘stallion’ and a middle-aged woman might like to keep a stailín ‘little stallion’ (toy-boy). Randy women do not have flattering terms in the Irish language – in descending order of nastiness

we have striapach ‘a prostitute’ giobóg ‘floozie’, and bó aonaigh a ‘fair cow’ – a girl who’ll go to all fairs to get a man (hint of desperation here).

However, in Donegal the word leadhb refers to a sexy woman, and is considered complimentary, although the dictionary definition is ‘slut’.

Given the gender imbalance in Irish society, there is no really insulting term for a male slut in Irish, as in English – the only

most sex-talk in Irish seems to be among men. In the one dictionary of sexuality in Irish, women only speak in the first person when they say ‘I have a period’ possible expression is striapach fir ‘manprostitute’ (promiscuous man). There are a multitude of terms such as banaí ‘womaniser’ and an-fhear bean ‘a great man for the women’ which are considered complimentary – most sex-talk in Irish seems to be among men. In the one dictionary of sexuality in Irish, women only speak in the first person when they say ‘I have a period’, as in Tá an nadúr ag plé liom ‘Nature is bothering me’.

A promiscuous man could be called a cat fir ‘tomcat’ – the crafty feline also gives us catsúil ‘cat look’ (sidelong look i.e. a come-on).

One could say of the wandering willy Rachfadh sé suas ar aer ‘He’d climb onto air’ or Chuirfeadh sé isteach i bpoll sa gclaí é ‘He would put it in a hole in the hedge’, though of course this could insult the ‘hole’ in question. A man may have a crann ‘tree’ if he’s well-endowed, but women have plenty of ammo to take him down a peg or two if not – cuiteog ‘earthworm’ and éinín ‘little bird’ are a few of many diminutives.

Women do not seem to suffer as many uncomplimentary terms for their body parts.

Sex itself is usually described using the word craiceann – ‘skin’, which gives us ag bualadh craicinn ‘skin pounding’ (having sex) aithne craicinn ‘skin acquaintance’ (knowledge

A man may have a crann ‘tree’ if he’s well-endowed, but women have plenty of ammo to take him down a peg or two if not – cuiteog ‘earthworm’ and éinín ‘little bird’ are a few of many diminutives. of someone through sex only) babhta craicinn ‘a skin bout’ (sex session), fonn craicinn ‘mood for skin’ (sexy mood) ag cuartú craicinn ‘searching for skin’ (looking for sex) and even craiceannach ‘skin-like’ (sexy). Another expression which usually entails the

missionary position is ag dul suas ar ‘going up on’ which gives us the Irish curse Gabh suas ort féin! ‘Go up on yourself!’ (Screw yourself!).

Definitely not doggy-style is pógadh féileacáin ‘butterfly kissing’ (soixante-neuf).

A coy term is ag déanamh fómhair ‘making the harvest’ which can mean anything from holding hands til the dirty deed itself – similar to coorting in Irish English. Another ambiguous term is mór ‘great’ as in bhí siad an-mhór lena chéile ‘they were very great together’ which the listener can make of what he/she will. Another euphemism is An bhfuair tú giota? ‘Did you get a bit?’ Native Irish speakers occasionally use the language to take the mickey out of English speakers – Tá slat agam duit! ‘I’ve a rod for you!' shouted a boy at a teenage girl, who looked puzzled as she couldn’t understand a word.

Irish prefers to convey meaning through idioms rather than distinct words. These phrases range from the eloquent to the graphic – ag cuimilt meala leis ‘rubbing honey into him’ (sweet–talking), ní raibh ach gaoth an fhocail uathu ‘they only wanted the wind of the word’ (they were gagging for it) and thug sí suirí tóin le balla dó ‘she gave him an arse-to-the-wall courting’(a knee trembler). A woman who goes off with a group of men may receive the grotesque pósadh na conairte ‘marriage to a dog pack’. Irish speakers also use many inventive similes e.g. Bhí sí mar a bheadh poll feadóige ann ‘she was (as tight) as a whistle mouth’.

The terms for homosexuals reveal a variety of moral judgements – ar an dóigh eile ‘of the other way’, fear fear ‘a man for men’, and the anglicism aerach ‘carefree/gay’ are relatively value-free – more obscure is Brídín na pluaise dorcha ‘Little Bridget of the dark cave’ (a lesbian). Strapairlín ‘hussy/lesbian’ suggests the masculinity of some lesbians. On the contrary, an effeminate man is a piteog ‘little vagina’ and his talk piteogach ‘little vaginalike’. Male gays are trying to reclaim the old term buachaill bán ‘fair-haired/favourite boy’ – more insulting is fear tóna ‘arse-man’ and sodamach, ‘sodomite’, which comes with the obligatory biblical whiff of sulphur.

Céile ‘partner/companion’ usually appears in the standard words bean chéile ‘womanpartner’ (wife) and fear céile ‘man-partner’ (husband), although there is also céile leapa ‘bed partner’. Yet political correctness in Irish is spreading with the use of céile ‘partner’ which does not hint at gender or marital status. Furthermore, recent writers in Irish, such as Father Pádraig Standún, are describing women’s sexuality (including lesbianism) in liberating rather than condemnatory tones – allowing them to take the initiative in ag marcaíocht, literally and figuratively rising above their role as the passive objects of men’s lust.

flashers

I

t all happened in August 1992 on the 11.42am Budapest – Lake Balaton train.

Still sitting in the station, my train wasn’t due to leave for another 25 minutes. So I had plenty of time to sit and ponder. Then a man got on. I remember he was skinny, wearing huge baggy summery shorts with socks and sandals, and what might very well have been a wig on his head. He stood in the doorway, staring out ahead of himself. I was on the first seat facing towards the exit, so he was in profile to me. I observed him gradually yanking his shorts up higher and higher, seemingly engrossed with what he was looking at straight ahead. As he did this, I couldn’t help but notice that his free-hanging genitalia were being revealed to me. I found all this pretty amusing but my mirth kept being interrupted by a soft thud on the grimy window next to me, which looked out onto the train standing on the next track. I eventually realised someone was trying to catch my attention by throwing crumpled paper at my window. I looked over peering through the murkiness, and saw a window with curtains pulled. The curtains were split toward the bottom, and as soon as the exposante within knew I was looking, a frantic hand holding a penis sped up in masturbatory action. I have often wondered if the two flashers were in

cahoots with each other. The shorts man watched the curtains man, who watched me looking at him and then at shorts man who watched curtains man, etc, etc..

SOME OTHER PERVERSIONS

BIGOTRY AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE!

H

T

Fergal O'Prey

ow many times have you turned on the set after the watershed and found some programme or other spewing out yet another hour of information on underground sex culture? In my armchair, with a cup of tea in one hand and a precautionary cushion in my lap I’ve had thrown at me, umpteen times, images of dominatrixes (or dominatrices, I don’t know how pedantic fetish culture tends to be) in leather basques blather on about paddles and flails and businessmen in swaddling and bonnets. The derivative format (interview with madam, cut to dungeon set with implied punishment, cut to nightclub, perhaps some silhouetted lesbian finger sucking, back to madam; repeat) means that each time one of these shows is made, it has to be subtly different, or more shocking than the last time.

My favourite is when they justify their actions through art, declaring their bodies a poem devoted to the ultimate expression of sex and sentiment, melded in a moment of caned extremity as the pseudonymic givers and takers (Miss Topaz and ‘Brian’) wax (usually melted and dripped) lyrical about their dry-rot dungeons and describe in computer altered voices the ecstasy to be experienced from a scrotum in a tourniquet. This brand of S&M is little more than Spectacle and Money to titillate the middle class M&S viewers in TV land by way of vicarious possibility ‘But that could so easily be me.’

‘Who knows what the neighbours are up to behind those curtains?’

Egad, why to hear Mr. Voiceover tell it, they could be anywhere, doing anything.

What’s to stop the podophiles (or foot fetishists) from escaping the privacy of their own bedrooms? What if kissing their girlfriend’s toe isn’t enough satisfaction and they have to get their sick kicks by sitting in the park watching ladies in open toed sandals?

What if they allow depravity to make them mug helpless citizens, steal their shoes and escape down an alley where they can moan behind bins with in-sole gratification? It’s almost too much to think about. Why casual preferences could all too easily become criminal. One moment you have an inclination towards a particular scent, the next you succumb to base urges that override social conditioning to turn you into a deplorable Dickensian, longcoated villain, complete with sneer, shrill voice and eerie bottom lighting. I mean, I love the smell of conditioned hair and but for the grace of my excellent posture and Christian repression I would slip into the despicable abyss of osphresiophilia, sitting behind women in public transport, my nose tipped at their heads, filling olfactory bags of

coiffeused loveliness, waiting for a distracted moment when I can snip an aromatic lock for myself to add to my collection.

But what is there to stop me there? We already know I’m sick so I might as well get the most out of it. I recently got my hair cut in an expensive salon and for the first time since primary school had someone else wash my hair. It was fantastic. The smell of my own hair had already set me off on some kind of deplorable Onanistic kick, but the massage, the feel of fingers on my scalp was so relaxing and tactile it took massive willpower to keep my hands off myself. What would it take, I thought, for me to become the self-interfering tripsologniac, reclined and violent sex demon of the hairdressers, my photograph kept on the counter of Tony and Guy so that staff and customers could justifiably recognise me for the despicable filth of the world?

My degradation from upstanding, financially viable citizen to synaesthetic pervert is on the cards, it seems, as each sensory experience betrays itself to be yet another lure into the fetish dungeon of the sexual pariah. I can see no difference whatsoever between myself and Miss Topaz’s giant businessman baby anymore. I’m sure that at one stage, he too had a picture of Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses on his wall, but now all he has is a blown up photograph of a bloodied, roadkill tomcat; and a gimp mask hangs from the hook that used to be home to an art print calendar because his filthy obsession had rendered time useless, business appointments missed, children’s violin recitals ignored as yet an other socially acceptable gentleman falls victim to the carnal.

It’s a domino affect. One day you decide to engage in non-missionary sex, or to extend foreplay beyond some cursory kissing, the next, you are a pantophilic liability, aroused by everything all the time, the supermarket queue frotteur, brushing against the fine wool blend of someone else’s overcoat; the osmolagnist that hides out in gym changing rooms for the engorging whiff of body odour or the amphigenetic invert who indiscriminately harbours feelings for both sexes. It’s everywhere and it’s inescapable; an enveloping sea of arousal accompanied by the bamboozling nouns of a register designed to inspire suspicion and fear in the ignorant.

Documentaries should be recognised for their value as cautionary tales, educational tools whose unending dry heave of dubious poppsychological terminology gives us the terms with which we can recognise, suspect, vilify and ultimately force underground those featured fetishes that start out as little more than personalised quirks of sexual preference.

he first group in Northern Ireland ever to totally gobsmack Dr Ian Richard Kyle Paisley in public was NIGRA(the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association), in 1982. I sometimes wonder why so little is made of this corner of NI history.

NIGRAdid not start this particular tussle: Paisley walked into it himself, because (like many religious leaders) he is basically a bully, who assumed (like the same religious leaders) that gay people are a weak enough target to bully. HE started it, and appeared to score a complete victory – but WE finished it.

Jeff has already told you (in The Vacuum Underground issue, see website) how NIGRA was founded in 1975, as a public face for the NI Gay world, interfacing between our community and the wider world.

Straight away, we were plunged into our first controversy. The Sexual Offences Act passed in 1967 made gay men’s lives legal for the first time anywhere in the United Kingdom; but it applied only to England and Wales. In the mid-70s the NI Office began to hint about extending the 1967 Act to here. So we set about drumming up support.

Someone in the NIO then alerted Paisley and friends, suggesting to them that – if THEY attended certain ‘talks about talks’ which the NIO hoped would lead to a devolved NI government (where have I heard THAT tune before?) – OUR little noise would be safely strangled at birth.

Paisley responded with his Campaign to Save Ulster from Sodomy. He undoubtedly reckoned this cause his best sure-fire winner.

District councillors, churches and MPs fell over themselves to follow the Paisley Pied Piper, with citizens in their tens of thousands signing a mammoth petition which Paisley triumphantly handed in at Number 10, Downing Street.

A few brave voices did dissent. At its 1977 annual conference, the SDLP defied Paisley, and adopted a Queen’s University branch motion, calling for the 1967 Act to be extended to NI. Just to show they were serious, they repeated this call at their 1979 party conference, passing a similar East Belfast branch motion.

And NIGRAfought a courageous campaign, spear-headed by their iconic poster of Big Ian, holding a petition form SAVE ULSTER FROM ----SIGN HERE (OR ELSE), and captioned THE AYATOLLAH IS WATCHING YOU and GAYS NOW – YOU NEXT! But, by and large, Paisley’s campaign swept the whole of Ulster, and left him

standing like Cú Chulainn defending Ulster’s ‘culture.’

‘Fait accompli’‚ thought he, ‘a nice pink scalp for my collection. Move over, O’Neill, Chi-Chi and Faulkner!‚ (three NI prime ministers he had humbled).

So you can imagine the Doc’s incredulous fury in late 1982 when Westminster summarily swept his whole campaign aside, and quietly passed the Sexual Offences (NI) Order. They really had no choice, after Jeff’s 1981 victory at the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

NI queers now enjoyed similar rights to those in GB. Paisley had been rightly slapped across the gob by the Pink Hand of Ulster.

Doc learned his lesson. Never again did he front any anti-gay actions, leaving David McIlveen to lead prayers outside City Hall, while our happy Pride Dander dances past, year after year. And Paisley’s opposition to Civil Partnership was strangely muted.

Ian picks his band-wagons carefully. So I was all the more astonished to find him halfheartedly spouting the half-truths peddled by the so-called ‘Christian’ Institute.

The CI had totally refused to allow us to speak at their (poorly-attended) Belfast ‘Public Meeting’ on Tuesday 12 October. The chair, Dr Esmond Birnie, allowed some of us to each ask a question (but no follow-up), so the CI guy just waffled around the point.

Paisley repeated in the Commons the CI claim that the recent NI census lists only 288 same-sex households, and that these are the only people here interested in a Civil Partnership. This is doubly false. Firstly, because Paisley knows full well there are more of us; and secondly, because this very claim was advanced months ago by mad Baroness O’Cathain in the House of Lords, only to be comprehensively rubbished there.

His silliest claim was ‘The Minister will be aware that in all political parties in Northern Ireland there is opposition to this Bill.’ Stephen King stated clearly on Hearts & Minds that to the UUPthis is a matter for individual conscience, the SDLPsees it as a human rights question, while Alliance, the PUP and Sinn Féin are all in favour of equality. In fact, the only NI party against the bill is the DUP! It’s not like Paisley, to leave himself open to such an obvious counter-blow.

Local gay activists recently felt a cold shiver of déjà vu on hearing the British government postponing gay law reform, in order to get Paisley to attend ‘talks about talks.’ After witnessing his slipshod performance in the Commons, it is clear we were worrying needlessly.

DIRTY BITS JOHN MORROW A

bout 1939 – I was 10 – for a tarrif of two wine gums or an inch of Crunchie bar, a schoolfriend let me have a quick skelly at a photograph he said his Da had looted from a dead Turk in the Dardanelles.

It was of a fat, smiling lady covered in sequins except for her pendulous upper works and what looked like an all-black kiltie’s sporran bristling on her lap, an early revelation that was to render subsequent experience of the generally sparse reality a disappointment. If the vulgar American animal figure is to be sustained, then that Turk’s was more bison than beaver.

Nowadays, of course, the top racks in our local newsagents offer glossy magazines devoted to the female pudenta in full colour and in detail one would have thought to be of interest only to a myopic gynaecologist.

(Speaking of sexual eye-openers, most daunting can be that of a normal man on first viewing a porn stud’s rampant abnormality. To counteract this trauma one should count one’s modest blessings and think of China, where a national phobia, called shuk jong, drives some men to sleep standing up with weights suspended on their members to prevent total disappearance in the night).

In between that Turk and today’s ‘in-yerface’ porn (an appropriate Clintonesque phrase) I had peeks at some other examples of an underground cottage industry, both visual and literary, that had thriven ever since cavemen had flints to scrape a wall and the odd lascivious monk had leisure to doodle with his quill on the margins. Items such as a delicate little booklet whose pages, I discovered later, were slivers of ivory which, flicked rapidly, provided a moving picture of ladies and gents in Victorian undress doing all sorts of odd things to one another. And some well-thumbed (and stained!) little storybooks, written in longhand, describing the sexual adventures of remarkably naive, and always blond, young women. There was also an under-the-counter trade in banned classics, published in Paris, such as Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Ulysses, though these were considered by aficianados of filth a bit much to wade through for the occasional dirty bit.

When the Yanks came in 1943 they brought with them alternative comics, obscene and often hilarious pastiches of popular themes.

One I recall particularly is Snow White and the Seven Depraved Dwarves (I would love to relate here, graphically just what Grumpy was doing to an obviously delighted Snow White; but of course I daren’t).

But before that, in the two years leading up to Pearl Harbour, there occured in my quarter of the city something of a minor scandal concerning a scantily-clad lady on the cover of a magazine called Black Mask.

It was possibly the most popular of the many pulp mags published monthly in the United States in the two decades between the wars. How it came to be in Belfast at this time was because president Roosevelt had bent the Constitution, outflanked his largely isolationist

Congress, ignored the lobbying of the German American Bund and of anti-British, pro-fascist Irish-America and had initiated the LendLease scheme to assist beleagured little Britain.

Ships began to ply the North Atlantic laden with food and, ostensibly, non-belligerent equipment. All ships need ballast to trim their cargoes, and this is usually made up from pigiron, gravel etc. but this time a better, more managable element was employed: pulp paper. American publisher’s warehouses were crammed with years of back numbers awaiting re-pulping; and it was found that it didn’t take many wired-up bales of old mags to make a ton.

One imagines a ‘sweet deal’ in the Yankee way being struck between publisher’s agents and navy bureaucrats. All of which led eventually to bales of mags being jettisoned on docksides in Glasgow and Liverpool – and, of course, being looted, first by the dockers, then by 2nd-hand booksellers, possibly by a ‘sweet deal’ with union officials.

The first Black Mask I saw, sometime in the early 1940s, was the issue for march 1932. It was displayed in the window of a newsagents I passed every morning on my way to school. it positively blazed out from its grubby surrounds, a glossy, full-colour cover depicting a blond young woman wearing a yellow blouse – well filled and deeply cloven – a very short skirt and black stockings. From her full scarlet lips drooped a cigarette and in her right hand she held an automatic pistol. (Above I used the phrase ‘scantily-clad’; I meant for that time; compared with most grammar school girls today she was swaddled).

A gangster’s moll, of course; but there merely to attract the eye of the lustful gawper,

There was also an under-the-counter trade in banned classics, published in Paris, such as Lady Chatterly’s Lover and Ulysses, though these were considered by aficianados of filth a bit much to wade through for the occasional dirty bit. such as I. Nowhere did she or anyone like her appear in the narratives within.

These took the form of 12 short crime stories, written by different authors, all featuring a different private eye as protagonist, each with distinctive physical make-ups or character flaws: one a neurotic gambler, another a hen-pecked father of five; yet another fat and slothful, but bright, and so on.

My favourite was a tall, thin, drippy fellow who was mean with money and, beside solving murders, spent his time figuring out how to dodge a taxi fare or a tip in a café.

They all appeared in that March 1932 number and I was immediately hooked.

The shop was run by a sour old woman – we called her ‘Granny Grunt’, that being the

only sound she ever uttered – and her middleaged son – cardigan, dandruff, hornrims – known as ‘Creepin’ Jesus’. He sniggered and winked as he passed the contraband mag. and grabbed your tanner – robbery at the time. She held it between finger and thumb with nose wrinkled and gave a grunt that conveyed the certainty that you were a sex maniac in embryo. But nothing deterred me in my passion for Black Mask and I had built a library of maybe 10, ranging from 1925 to 1939, before the local balloon went up.

One Sunday morning the Minister of a nearby Methodist church issued from the pulpit a strong condemnation of the ‘nameless filth’ being purveyed within sight of his tabernacle. Compared to the verbal pyrotechnics such a thing would have provoked from a Redemptorist missioner in St. Malachy’s down the road, it was low-key and, well, methodical. But it hit home to the culprits, she in the choir, where she sang alto grunt, and he an Officer in the ranks of the Boys Brigade... Socially, they never overed it.

Black Mask never again appeared in there window and I had to trawl Smithfield for an occasional fix, until the war ended and supplies dried up.

Around 1950 my mother, doing her annual ‘clearing-up’, came across the cache of 20 or so Black Masks under my bed. Unfortunately, also there was a copy of Health and Efficiency, a photo magazine in wartime, utility format – black and white, enthusiastic prose – which purported to be the organ of the British Federation of Nudists (it emerged during the war and was, I suspect, supported by the government as a response to Nazi ‘Strength Through Joy’ propoganda). In it men and women played volleyball with all their interesting bits blurred out. The fun was to fill in the blurs creatively and add risqué speech bubbles to the laughing lips of the athletes. one I recall (not mine) was attached to the mouth of a nude (blurred) young man, smoking a pipe, who held up a tin of tobacco mixture. We, besides grotesquely filling in his lower blur, had him say, ‘Buy Knacker Lacquer! Adds Lustre to your Cluster.’ Little wonder mother turfed the lot in the bin.

I was bereft at the loss – and was to be again 20 years later on learning that by Presidential Decree the entire range of Black Mask had been collected and installed in the Library of Congress, the highest honour America can bestow on literary worth. This came about when it was discovered just how many literary luminaries had, in their earlier impecunious days, made pseudonymous contributions to the lucrative pulp market.

Scott Fitzgerald certainly, and the young Hemmingway (though never proven); Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett of course; the New Yorker mob: Thurber, Lardner, Parker – and that short fat, spendthrift Robert Benchley who, I was delighted to learn, had been the creator of my favourite tall, thin, mean private eye; and many more.

The thought of those 20 odd numbers that

mother had consigned to the tiphead and the price they would now fetch on the collector’s market made me sick.

As does contemporary, ubiquitous porn. In its under-the-counter days there was about it an aura of illicit excitement similar, I imagine, to that experienced by many homosexuals when they too were beyond the pale. Now both have been subsumed into our allenveloping, politically correct, show-biz consumer ‘culture’.

Industrial porn caters for the passive beholder, a truth brought home to me some years ago when – in my drunk 40s – I attended a party in a student commune near Queens. In the small hours the hosts put on a porn videotape portraying an orgy. The young people present sat silent, seriously entranced, as if anticipating that questions about the production might appear on the next end-ofterm exam paper. And they were disgusted, indeed outraged, when we wrinkles burst into guffaw and coarse ribaldry... ‘Like a bucket of boiled worms!... God, can you imagine the stink!... Like a fire in a fish factory!’ and so on.

The only activity in the gamut of sexual expression that has remained untrammelled by disease, lucre or politics since the dawn of time is solitary, creative masturbation. The first tool emergent man learnt to handle was his own. And as any dedicated Onanist will attest, you really do tend to meet a better class of woman (or man, I suppose).

flashers

I

came across a very strange flasher in the woods one afternoon. He was wearing red and white striped pyjamas and was beating himself with a cane with his trousers down around his knees. It was about nine years ago, in Galway and I was with a few friends. I don’t think he saw us because he was lost in a flagellating world of his own. The experience was mostly amusing and there was no sense of danger as he was partly hidden in a thicket of bushes and we were 20 or so yards away on a raised path. We didn’t see him again but looked for him a lot.

THE CURIOUS WORLD OF ANIMAL SEX

$

Domino Joyce

A

ll living things have one thing in common. They reproduce, and the more efficient they are at it, the mor e of that species there is. Within a species, males and females want the same thing out of life – to reproduce – but they have very different and often conflicting approaches to the challenge.

First, why bother with sex at all? Many living things get around the need for sex just by splitting, dividing, what’s known as asexual reproduction. Simple, uncomplicated, and no need to get anyone else involved. Just think of sea anemones or single-celled amoeba. So why bother? The answer, is that sex makes new combinations of DNA, and those new combinations might produce a better individual than the old combinations of DNAthat each of the parents had. Better at evading parasites, better at digesting food, or even just better at finding mates and reproducing. New combinations aren’t always better, but if they are, they will end up being able to reproduce more (by having a longer life span, by being more attractive, or by being able to produce more eggs etc.). If everything stayed the same, it would be easier for things like parasites to take advantage, by having sex themselves, creating new combinations of DNAand getting better and better at parasitizing the same host. Good news for the parasite, but bad news for the host. So sex is a useful procedure for creating variation.

You would think then, that males and females co-operate over this necessary procedure. It is beneficial to each of them to produce offspring that are as able to deal with what life has to throw at them as possible. But males and females have their own interests to consider, and there is a split in the ways that each thinks is best to deal with the issue of reproduction. This ‘sexual conflict’ is largely what has lead to the array of sexual behaviour we see in the animal kingdom.

There is a wide range of strategies among animals. Either you spend your energy producing many eggs and sperm, enough that if some are wasted it doesn’t really matter.

Think of giant clams, who billow out clouds of eggs and sperm into the water in the hope that among the millions, at least a few will find each other, the sperm will fertilise the egg and the offspring will grow up and reproduce themselves. Alternatively, there is the option of saving energy by producing a small number of eggs or sperm, but instead investing more energy into making sure that the two meet and the offspring survives to adulthood, without leaving it to chance. Think of mammals, any species with internal fertilisation (a good way of looking after sperm and making sure it gets to the right place), long gestation periods, and parental care of infants.

But parental care sometimes crops up in species where you might not expect it.

Consider the cichlid fish. The males are beautiful fish and incidentally are common in household aquaria. They are brightly coloured, striped or blotched, and have bright spots on the fin nearest their genitalia, known as ‘egg spots’. These males have a hard time getting female attention, they are incredibly aggressive to one another, and spend a good

deal of time courting females, swimming around them, shimmying towards them, and trying to persuade the females to release their eggs. Whereas many fish release their eggs and sperm into the water and leave them to it, female cichlids have a different, more careful strategy. They keep the eggs in their mouth until they hatch into very small fish. They even keep the small fish in their mouths until they are big enough to swim around by themselves. So once a female has decided that the male fish is impressive enough, she releases her eggs and immediately turns around and collects them in her mouth. At that moment, the male shows her the egg spots on his fin, and she opens her mouth to try to collect them, thinking they are eggs she has missed. At this point, while her mouth is open, he releases his sperm into her mouth, where the eggs are fertilised and eventually grow into little fish. Male cichlids without egg spots must certainly be unlucky in love.

Female cichlids spend a lot of energy looking after their eggs and young like this.

Indeed for the weeks during which the babies are growing, they are unable to eat, and become thin and weak sacrificing energy for their young. This is often the way in the animal kingdom, particularly in mammals.

Females have gone down the route of investing a lot of energy in making sure that their offspring are given the best possible chance in life. They carry them around with gestation periods lasting anything from 21 days in mice to 21 months in elephants.

Females invest a lot of time making sure their babies grow up safely, so if you are a male, you have the opportunity to provide sperm and make sure that it gets looked after. From a male point of view, a little energy to produce the sperm, and a little more to make sure it ends up in the right place is all that’s required, so no wonder males are a little less choosy than females about who they have sex with. If the aim of males is to put their sperm into as many females as possible (since it costs them very little) then the aim of females must be to make sure they get the best sperm they can find to fertilise their eggs.

On the other hand, if all you have to do to reproduce successfully is leave your sperm with a female, how can you be sure that another male isn’t going to leave his sperm too? How do you know that yours will be the successful sperm? This is the choice some male animals make when they choose monogamy.

The albatross mates for life, with pairings that have been known to last twenty years. The male knows for certain that it will be his sperm that fertilises his partner’s egg and so it is worth his while investing time and energy raising the chicks. Or so scientists thought until recently. DNApaternity testing has actually shown that ‘extra-pair copulation’ (or adultery to you and I) is not unheard of in many seemingly monogamous animals, but we will return to that later.

When a male leaves his sperm with a female and another male does the same, the result is sperm competition. Sperm die off over time so that the freshest sperm is represented in higher numbers in the journey towards the egg, and therefore all else being equal, it is

more likely to win. If you are a male, you need to make sure you give the female your sperm as close to the time the egg is ready to be fertilised as possible, and males have various ways of doing this.

Male xylocoris, a close relative of the bedbug, are known to rape other males. Its sperm makes its way to the victim’s vas deferens, where they are stored. The next time the raped male inseminates a female, the rapist’s sperm and his own enter the female.

In guinea pigs, the male leaves a threecentimetre plug in the female’s vagina to stop rival males mating with her. Damselfly have a barbed hook shaped penis designed not only to transfer sperm, but also to remove any sperm which might have been deposited by a preceding male. Many species have prolonged copulation, which is a way to ‘mate-guard’ after the important sperm transferral part of the procedure is over.

But what about female choice? Females generally invest a lot in the process of reproduction. They need to be sure that they choose the right male. There might be short term, immediate gains for the female. A male hangingfly will bring a female some insect prey, and mate with her while she eats it. The larger the insect prey, the more time he has for sperm transferral, and the more time she is busy eating and therefore not mating with other males. From the point of view of the female, she has to spend less time in the risky business of hunting for herself. She also knows that a male who is able to bring a large insect as prey must be a good quality hunter, and so should provide ‘good genes’ for her offspring.

If a female can obtain the sperm of a good male and have some help bringing up the kids, then she is happy. Or so you would have thought. It turns out that more and more, adulterous females are being found in species ranging from anteaters to albatrosses. The strategy that females of many species adopt gets the best of both worlds. A situation in which the male sticks around to ensure his sperm gets to fertilise an egg, and also helps out bringing up the kids to ensure they in turn get to pass on his genes, can be good for him.

But if she can obtain the sperm of another good quality male without getting caught, she has the combination of good genes and paternal care. The best of both worlds.

From female choice, has come sexual selection. Males are chosen because they have a certain characteristic which females find attractive. These males have more offspring, and the genes not only for that male characteristic are passed on into the next generation, but also the genes for that female choice. Sexy sons will inherit their father’s appeal, and daughters will inherit their mother’s preferences. Sometimes this becomes ‘runaway sexual selection’ where an attractive character istic serves no other purpose than to get an animal more sex, and the trait gets more and more exaggerated. In the longtailed widowbird, females find males with long tails more attractive. Scientists know this because the same male bird is less successful with the ladies if they cut off his tail. Equally, if they tie it back on again, he becomes attractive again.

In fact, if they tie on an even longer tail, he

The penis of a damselfly, designed not only for sperm transferral, but also for removing the sperm from a previous mate.

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A hangingfly; males bring females gifts of food to keep the female occupied while he mates with her. The bigger the food item, the less likely she will have time to mate with another fly.

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The male longtailed widowbird carries around a ludicrously long tail because it makes them more attractive to females.

A male cichlid fish showing bright yellow egg spots on its anal fin which it uses to trick the female into trying to pick up while he releases sperm into her mouth.

Photograph: Nicola Barson.

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A pair of loyal albatrosses?

Picture: Jon Green

does even better, so females must really appreciate a long tail! The problem is that males with really long tails won’t be able to fly as well to escape from predators, so there is a trade off. Either you are super attractive but die before you have a chance to reproduce, or you are slightly less attractive, but at least get a chance to pass on your genes.

Some males get around the female choice aspect of life by sneaking. Usually, male guppies (another popular aquarium fish naturally found in central America) have fancy tails and orange spots, both of which female guppies find very attractive. A female guppy responds to a male’s courting and can even tell the quality of the male by the amount of shimmying he does (males covered in parasites are dull and less active during courtship, so females tend to avoid them, and as a result avoid their poor parasite susceptible genes). Males want to mate with the largest females, as they produce more eggs, so a single large female might be courted by many males all trying to impress her. So some males adopt an alternative technique. Instead of becoming bright and impressive, they simply become sneaky, and while the female is engrossed in another male’s courtship, he sneaks in and mates with her in a flash before she can do anything about it, taking her choice completely away. On the other hand, if sneaking is successful, there will be more sneaky sons, so the strategy pays off for both parties.

It’s difficult to read about sex without anthropomorphising. I haven’t mentioned humans once, but talking about ‘bringing up the kids’ and ‘adultery’ puts a somewhat humanistic spin on things. And as soon as one

understands that for women a quick shag can result in nine months of pregnancy followed by a good sixteen years parental care, whereas for a man it can simply mean the energetic cost of a millilitre or two of sperm (and the act itself!) it is easy to understand why, from an evolutionary perspective, women don’t always feel fruity as often as men. Sex can cost them more. On one hand the animal kingdom shows us some quite horrific sexual behaviour (think bed bug relatives) and on the other, frightening insights into our human reality.

One survey showed that as a result of long waiting lists for NHS sperm, four out of seventeen women whose husbands produced no sperm at all, became pregnant before they were artificially inseminated. So maybe adulterous female choice tendencies apply to our species too, as well as the more familiar adulterous male who wants to share his sperm with as many females as possible. But let’s not forget that we have certain insights into life that the rest of the animal kingdom doesn’t, we have a complex society and make moral judgements. Every species is different, and that is how we differ. Reproduction is a tricky and competitive game for all sexually reproducing species, but one thing seems certain. We are the only species to use love as a gimmick to help us deal with it.

If you want to read more try: The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley Promiscuity: An Evolutionary history of Sperm Competition and Sexual Conflict by Tim Birkhead

MISTRESS BODGER WILL MACLEAN

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y mate – for the sake of argument, let’s call him Dave – doesn’t really exist. I mean, he does, but only if you know him personally. If, however, you’re involved with any government authority or office of taxation, or any body that regulates building standards, or the Construction Industry Scheme – well then, in that case he really doesn’t exist, and hasn’t existed since the early 1970’s. Dave’s a member of that large, undefined class of people who fall under the category ‘General Handyman’, who can’t afford (and don’t want) to make a living within the system, and so choose to make a cash-in-hand living instead. Dave’s a plumber mostly, but due to the precarious nature of his finances he can never afford to turn work down. This means that, more often than not, he ends up doing stuff for which he’s not qualified, but feels he can have a stab at: bodging, in other words.

Bodgers are a historical archetype: they’ve always been with us. If ever I find myself in some National Trust-owned Tudor property and I see a wall that’s been roped off fearing collapse, or some not-quite decent panelwork that doesn’t seem to match the rest of the panelwork, I’m always tempted to imagine an Elizabethan Dave, four hundred years hence, dressed in tights and ruff, panicking because he can’t get the wattle and daub mixed up quick enough, as he wants to knock off at five to go see the bear baiting down Southwark.

Bodging, understandably, sets Dave up for all manner of scrapes, which is how he ended up building a fully-equipped torture dungeon somewhere in Marylebone. The client was one of those ‘Strict Mistresses’ who advertise their services in phone boxes. Said mistress was 24 years old, not very bright (but bright enough not to be working in a proper job, something Dave respected), liked the odd line of coke and was apparently ‘raking it in’, (something Dave discovered after she left her accounts out on display, which of course he looked over.

Wouldn’t you?)

The actual ‘dungeon’ itself was in fact the back room of a flat in one of the more salubrious mansion blocks. Dave was charged with making a set of medieval stocks, a ‘whipping stool’ (i.e., a stool) and, most importantly, as the centrepiece of the place, a rack, upon which Madame’s clientele – the usual motley selection of decrepit high court judges and hereditary peers – would be duly stretched as far as their pacemakers would allow. In addition to this, Dave was also appointed the task of transforming a serviceable living space into a lightless place of pain and suffering, something the more cynical would say doesn’t deviate from the usual mission of builders all over Great Britain anyway. It was a very rough brief, and therefore exactly the kind of brief Dave thrives on.

Dave finally achieved the requisite dungeonesque-ness by dint of several rolls of (yes!) that wallpaper which looks like brickwork, something designed surely with the bodger in mind. In addition to this, he mounted several of those electric candelabra round the walls – the ones that look like flickering candles but actually achieve the effect by having two alternating elements inside. Wallpaper that looked like brick and bulbs that looked like

candles: this at least fitted consistently into the canon of much of Dave’s other bodging work.

The whipping stool and stocks were no problem either, but the rack proved to be a little more problematic. To begin with it was absolutely vast (Dave told me some months later that when Mistress moved out she had to leave said torture device for the next set of tenants. God only knows what they made of it.

A dining table?!) and secondly it was difficult to get right, even employing all the methods in the bodger’s bag of tricks. Two weeks of fiddling about with MDF and rope finally paid off, however, and the centrepiece of Dave’s Dungeon was complete. To this day I think of any poor sod who had to get tortured on that rack. They probably got much more pain and suffering than they bargained for. Maybe that was the point.

Before he left for the next bodge, Dave did have a few conversations with Mistress, and they fell to talking about their different lines of work. Mistress asked Dave how he got into the general handyman game, and Dave asked Mistress about what it was like to service tens of dapper old gents every day. ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ he asked her, ‘Shagging all them old men?’ ‘Naah’ she said. ‘The money’s good, and if I get too bored, I just reach round, squeeze their bollocks and it’s all over.’ She was a bodger, in other words. And with that unspoken understanding now forever between them, they went their separate ways.

sex dreams

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y the light in the room it is late afternoon, maybe early evening. I sit at a table drinking vodka with infamous author and drug addict William S Burroughs. I am faintly aware that this is not ‘real’. We don’t speak. It is one of those occasions where silence is not awkward. In fact there is no sound at all. Neither of us appears to be becoming particularly drunk despite consuming increasing quantities of alcohol.

The light in the room remains the same despite the apparent passing of time.

Eventually I stand up from the table and get into a bed in the corner of the room.

Burroughs climbs into bed beside me and we lie together in silence. Eventually we both undress. He rolls me over onto my side and penetrates me. He is gentle, almost apologetic.

Afterwards we lie in silence for another time, then get out of bed and resume drinking at the table. There seems no hurry or need to do anything else.

COUNCIL JUICE Minutes% Monthly

Meeting of Belfast City Council Held on Monday, 4th October, 2004 at the hour of 6 o’clock post meridiem, pursuant to notice.

Members Present:The Right Honourable Lord ’Mare (Cllr Edward Twohands); the High Sheriff (Cllr Snoopy Man-Friday); Cllr Clement Foghorn; Cllr Rupert L. Tastic; Cllr Santa B. Semite; Cllr Pinocchio Onassis; Cllr Mitchum Tasselhoff et al.

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READING OF SCRIPTURES In accordance with Standing Order 9, the Lord Mayor read a short passage from the Scriptures: ‘Then Zipporah, taking up a flint, cut off her son’s foreskin and with it touched his feet’, said Cllr Twohands, quoting Exodus, ch. 4, v. 25.

SUMMONS

‘Summons stole my seat, Jonty, wha?’ said Deputy Lord Mayor Shampoo O’Neill, his spide impersonation enhanced visibly by the H. Samuel chains of office which set off pleasingly his shapeless synthetic a priori nylon pullover made by St Bernard, patron saint of shapeless synthetic a priori nylon pullovers.

APOLOGIES ‘Sorry, but I don’t see your name on it,’ said Cllr Jumbo Foumart III to Cllr O’Neill.

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Minutes nanimously, it was decided that minutes in Belfast are now 1200 seconds long. The amendment to space-time was declared carried with immediate effect. A winning repercussion was that this would provide some badly needed time for Belfast to gain intellectual ground on the high culture of the primordial bouillon placed here by God to test our faith. It was agreed further that the amendment should be applied retroactively to the beginning of the council meeting. If 3 minutes had passed since the start of the meeting at 6 o’clock, then the meeting was now either 180 seconds old or 3600 seconds old. Everyone agreed, though they weren’t sure, that the time was in fact 3 minutes past 5 o’clock and that everyone present presently was both at the council meeting and wherever they where an hour earlier. This gave Cllr Mahatma Gaddafi an excellent alibi for the punishment beating he both did and did not carry out at whatever time it wasn’t and isn’t now. Further, it was agreed that the proposed City of Culture bid for 3038 now looks both more and less like a waste of time. Imagine.

U

Reality llr I. B. Solipsist of the Alliance Party thanked everyone for coming on his behalf, but raised concerns concerning the Reality of the Situation.

Cllr Lord Sir Ascendancy of the Sulphur Onionists used a sublime blend of neo-Fregean and Spock logic to prove ineluctably that the Reality of the Situation is that ‘a united Ireland is an impossibility.’ However, Cllr Innocent Entirely of Sin Feign used Intuitionist logic with a Quinean twist to prove ineluctably that the reality of the situation is that ‘a united Ireland is an inevitability.’ With

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this paradoxical epistemological revelation, fissures began to open up in the very fabric of nature: Larne was about to turn into a black hole and Londonderry was about, once more, to inflict infinitely dense matter on the universe.The situation was resolved after every local politician was treated by indebted tax payers to a pedicure, manicure and hangover cure at Belvedere Palace. After an intensive session with a team of disrobed ego masseuses, it was decided that, in future, the reality of the situation is that the dogs in the street know. (Wittgenstein cried.)

The resolution of the situation was, however, too tardy to prevent Londonderry splitting into two distinctly separate entities: the Derry part remained a north-western economic backwater with a cow urinating upstream; the London part was flung through space to a far corner of the mainland, where Jamie Theakston lives.

the oversized warty meaty man-tampons of Lucifer ’s minions. Hence, the transgressors’ arse tendons will trumpet the mellifluous pings of justice through forever.

The Righteous City Councillors, however, having tacked successfully against the headwind rolling down from volcanic Mount Vice, which rises like a shark fin in the stinky seaweedy sea of sin, will be blown pleasurably by Poseidon towards high heaven. From there, councillors will cast the first of many stones at the damned beneath.

The motion was declared not carried since loyalist councillors, for fear of offending their Israeli allies,didn’t want to be seen supporting Philistines.

Ponchos Of Vacuum Extraction ouncillors Aristotle Hodcarrier, Hugh-Henry Wilberforce and Darwin Pinkpanther, rallying righteously against remnants of local culture, proposed jointly that anyone reading The Vacuum right now should look over their shoulders at the galloping dust of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.The Horsemen are coloured variously green, white, gold,and the invisible yet undeniable shade of insidiously encroaching papistry. The Horsemen are riding bareback; they are wearing only lac y diphthongs; they are wielding hurley sticks; they have more than one way of looking at things; and, for Vacuum readers, they have fatal head wounds on the long finger. Writers for, and editors of, The Vacuum, it was proposed, should be defrosted for eternity in an infernal microwave, all the while having their tumour-riddled poop-hoops stuffed by

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llr Portly L. Hoop proposed that brown with green checks is the new black, peace is the new war, Taigs are the new Prods, and ponchos are the new balaclavas. Poncho wearers, it was suggested, should be approached with caution, then arrested, clobbered with their concealed bandoliers, strangled with cello strings, painted lilac, and sent to prison for 15 years with personified Jamaican clichés for something they definitely didn’t did not do. The poncho motion was declared carried, but by the end of the meeting everyone was wearing one.

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SCOTS CONFUSED Dear The Vacuum, I’ve been getting the occasional copies ae yir paper sent doon ti mi, here in Galway, n have enjoyed it immensley. it seems, though, that people are a bit confused/ concerned about Ulster Scots. As a Scot living in Ireland I can sympathise with people feeling a bit scunnert at the whole Scots language issue. We have a similar problem in Scotland, where the best poetry in Scots is written by Scots speakers but is not recognised because it dizny fit in with official interpretations o Scots. The result is that the Scots you find in anthologies is, to put it bluntly, fucking shite and clearly written by people wae muckle Scots language dictionaries but not the slightest understanding of vibrancy of the language.

The problem though isnae that different from ‘living’ versus ‘state sponsored’ usage of Gaelic (in both Scotland and Ireland). It may be that the problem with Ulster Scots is that it is a high heid yins-led movement as opposed to an organic speakers-led one. Though I honestly don’t know, but it’s something to think about. As for Scotland I’m not sure there is a Scots language movement per se. There are affluent English speakers who use dictionaries ti churn oot shite in exchange for

art grants n state funding. However maist folk who write in living (and maistly unpublished) Scots, just write in it cos its the natural thing to do: thurs nae decision tae write in Scots, it’s just done cos its part ae thur normal living world.

If people are interested in seeing what modern scots looks like, they can aye tune into my website TRANSFORMATION, which was recently commisioned by the arts office in the National University of Ireland, Galway.

They’ll find plenty of Scots poetry there which will gee thum an idea ae the range and flexibility ae the language. More importantly they’ll also find lots ae ma short stories of terror, which are written in English, and are suitably scarey for hallooween.

The website can be read at: www.frink.nuigalway.ie/~rab Cheers (& BOO!) rab

IT’S WORTH IT Dear The Vacuum, As a pretty regular Vacuum reader and English teacher I lifted your education issue with interest. My first port of call was Leontia Flynn’s ‘Bad Student Essays’, many features of which I am familiar with! I was particularly amused by the reference to the ‘Ralph, I like him a lot‚ essay’. The staple of the GCSE English lesson is often (and of course much to the dismay of students) the ‘past paper’ – Ralph and his sheep being one I have (admittedly only rarely – may I be forgiven for it!) used. It reminded me of the little community teachers form, with our sets of common references, no matter our different school or other places of work and I recognised this all the more as I read the rest of the issue.

The contributions by all those who identified themselves as being (or having been) teachers (Leontia Flynn, Mick Wilson, Chris Arthur, Sean Kelly) all shared a generally cynical view of the impact they

made on students. Stuart Watson’s ‘School is Hell’ comments certainly seemed to confirm this notion of the ineffectiveness of the teacher.

I was especially interested because I can identify with both perspectives. While I might not think of my school days as ‘hell’, I certainly associate many of them with anxiety and insecurity (comforting to hear that someone else feels PE to have been a traumatic experience!)

Under these circumstances, it is perhaps unusual that I chose to become a teacher but now being in that role, I sometimes find myself thinking, like Leontia Flynn, that ‘you can’t really teach anyone at all: some teach themselves, the rest just ignore you.’ At the end of the day, though, we’ve all chosen to go into teaching! The teaching profession is a much-maligned one, both within and beyond its ranks and we’ll have been aware of this when we signed up. Yet we still did so.

Presumably we at least hoped that we could do things better. Maybe that’s enough to mean that we have done, if only sometimes. I think the education system is still failing people, but I think that’s more to do with the issue Colin Graham wrote about, i.e. the nature of the whole system on a national level. We can only work in the framework that’s created for us and at the end of the day we treat students as a homogenous mass by teaching them in (increasingly) large groups. It’s hard to see how this can cater to the individual’s development in the way that it’s supposed to and it’s to such treatment that most of your writers identified (implicitly or explicitly) as being a problem with the system.

So what’s my point? Mainly, thanks for producing a series of articles that take a truthful but humorous look at the issue and, secondly, that maybe the education system can do some things right, even if that’s just some of us recognising that things are wrong. I realise that sounds a bit trite(!) but even Stuart Watson pointed out school’s success in preparing us for the reality of adult life, if only its disappointments. Hopefully, in the end, most of us do a bit more than that.

Sarah Rountree, Belfast.

sorry?

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t the end of September Factotum (the publisher of this paper) received the following letter from Belfast City Council.

Dear Richard,

Further to your recent application to Belfast City Council’s Culture and Arts Project Grant Scheme (Second tranche).

The Arts Sub-Committee of 4 August 2004 had agreed to provide financial assistance of £3,300 to Factotum under the above funding scheme. the agreement was adopted by the Development Committee at its meeting on 18 August 2004.

Howeer, as you are aware, at Full Council of 1 September 2004, it was agreed that this assistance be not provided in respect of ‘The Vacuum’ element of the Factotum applicationfor grant assistance, until such time as

Factotum provides an apology for any offence which may have been caused to Members of the Council and citizens of the City by previous publications, and provides an assurance that future publications will meet such criteria as may be established by the Council.

Please contact me if you require any further information.

I look forward to your response.

Yours Sincerely Siobhan Stevenson Culture and Arts Manager

Factotum would like to respond to this letter from the Council and would ask if any readers can assist in either of two ways.

1. We are looking for advice on possible legal responses to the Council’s decision. Anyone who could offer this advice can phone our office on 90330893.

2. We would like to generate a broader debate among cultural organisations and the general public about the Council’s decision and its approach to culture in the city. In particular we note that their demand that ‘future publications will meet such criteria as may be established by the Council’ may have serious implications for the freedom of arts organisations to operate in future. To this end we plan to stage public debates over the coming months. For further information or if you wish to get involved please call our office on 90330893 or email us at info@factotum.org.uk.

Published by Factotum The Foxy Dog 112-114 Donegall Street, Belfast BT1 2GX 028 90330893 [e] info@factotum.org.uk www.factotum.org.uk www.thevacuum.org.uk

EDITORS & DESIGN Stephen Hackett Richard West REVIEWS EDITOR Eugene Macnamee ILLUSTRATIONS Duncan Ross COVER PICTURE Duncan Ross WEB EDITOR Stephen Hull DISTRIBUTION Eugene Macnamee ADVERTISING To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 90330893 or email info@factotum.org.uk print run: 20,000 distribution: Northern Ireland

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Printer: Bangor Spectator This project is supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

NOW THAT REALLY ( IS OBSCENE ' Gavin Sutter

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hat’s obscene: a phrase which passes my lips on a regular basis. I might be commenting on what horrors have been inflicted on the world by a military warlord such as Saddam or, for that matter, Bush. Or I might be bemoaning the fact that a particular Premiership footballer earns in a week the equivalent of my pre-tax academic salary for a whole year. Or again I might even be passing judgment on whatever soft pornographic output a particular television channel has decided to screen on Saturday night, or on the magazines on the top shelf of any Belfast newsagent’s. In contemporary spoken English, the word ‘obscene’ is thrown around with a reckless abandon similar to that of the armchair politician who unthinkingly dismisses everyone to the right of him or herself as a ‘fascist’. Most commonly, the word ‘obscene’ is applied to sexual material which the commentator finds to be indecent. This can, depending upon that individual’s point of view, encompass anything from the most extreme forms of hardcore pornography, to Page 3 of The Sun, via the infamous Sunday World photos of a naked Sammy Wilson. The legal meaning of ‘obscene’ is, however, much narrower.

The roots of the modern legal concept of obscenity can be found in a court judgement dating from 1868, a criminal prosecution of a man called Hicklin. Hicklin was prosecuted in respect of the distribution of pamphlets attacking the Roman Catholic practice of confession. The pamphlets were found to be obscene due to certain descriptions of what the author claimed to be the way in which Priests would question ladies in the confessional about sexual matters. [What did he do?] The judge stated that the question before the court was: ‘whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands such a publication might fall.’

When the (in)famous Obscene Publications Act of 1959 was passed it followed the judge’s words, providing that: ‘an article shall be deemed to be obscene if its effect… is, if taken as a whole, such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.’

This test of obscenity is very much focussed on the effect of the article – be that article printed word, photograph, television broadcast, audio recording (in 1991 a prosecution was brought against record label Island over a record by rappers Niggaz With Attitude), or internet website – upon its audience, rather than the intent of the author, photographer or director.

So the artistic intentions of a photographer who has put together a book of photographs by design to comment on human sexuality and the power relationship in sadomasochistic encounters will be irrelevant if that book is

considered likely to deprave and corrupt its audience. In March 1998, a copy of a book of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist well known for his explicit depictions of male homosexual activities, which belong to the library of the University of Central England was seized from a student’s home by the West Midlands Police, and there was much talk of a prosecution for obscenity, although ultimately no case was brought. While the vast majority of obscenity trials will be concerned with depictions of sex and pornography, it is not essential for an article to be ruled obscene that it is of a sexual nature. Indeed, in 1967 a successful obscenity prosecution was brought against a company which produced bubble gum cards depicting in great detail various acts of lethal violence in warfare. The cards were sold to children via a tuck shop in an English school, and the court decided that the violent scenes on the cards were likely to tend to deprave and corrupt the young children who bought them.

There is no requirement that evidence of actual depravity or corruption brought about by the publication of the article be produced in order for a successful prosecution to be brought under the Obscene Publications Act: merely that it has a general tendency to do so.

This seems harsh: is every artist, author, or director to be placed at the mercy of whatever unforeseen effects his work might have upon any of his audience? In 1968, a prosecution was brought against the UK publication of the

It may surprise the reader to learn that Parliament’s intention in passing the Obscene Publications Act in 1959 was actually to provide a greater degree of artistic freedom novel Last Exit to Brooklyn. The book described in depth the sordid details of life in contemporary Brooklyn, including drug abuse and (only just decriminalised in the UK, but still very taboo) gay sex. The Court of Appeal overturned the conviction in this case in part because the jury had not been directed that they should base their decision on whether a ‘significant proportion’ of readers of the novel would be likely to be depraved and corrupted by it, not just whether any readers might be so affected.

It may surprise the reader to learn that Parliament’s intention in passing the Obscene Publications Act in 1959 was actually to provide a greater degree of artistic freedom – in the words of the Act itself, to ‘provide for the protection of literature’ (widening of its scope to include other media, such as film, came later). The Act was intended to clarify existing obscenity law under which Joyce’s Ulysses, and even medical textbooks, might be considered obscene. This is where the subjective test of tendency to corrupt and

deprave the audience can come in to play in favour of the person responsible for publishing the article: a book on the medical effects of certain hardcore sexual practices may risk corrupting the public if on general release, however, were its readership to be limited to medical persons acting in their professional capacity, the likelihood of corruption of a significant proportion is substantially reduced.

Under the Act, there are two key offences: the distribution of obscene material, and the ‘possession, ownership or control of an obscene article for publication for gain.’ The former can be committed simply where a person who owns an obscene article – a hardcore sadomasochist porn video, for instance, or a video featuring a woman having sex with a dog – lends it out to a friend. The latter is somewhat more involved: this is where the obscene article is held in the course of a business, for example, under the counter in a dodgy backstreet video shop, for sale or hire to those in the know. It is possible, according to the courts, for even those who are already depraved and corrupted to become more so: it may be that the pornographic video will need to be much more explicit, or feature much more extreme acts in order to have a potentially corrupting effect upon a regular user than a more innocent soul, but the simple fact that the borrower of the video habitually watches obscene videos and is therefore already corrupted will hold no weight as an argument in court.

The Act includes a number of defences for those being prosecuted for making an obscene publication. The key ones are innocent possession or publication, ‘merit’ (or public good), and aversion. It will be a defence for someone to show that he did not know and had no reason to believe that an article he has made available is obscene. For example, a newsagent who did not know and could not reasonably have been expected to have been aware of the fact that a particular top-shelf magazine has crossed the line in its content and is obscene would not be guilty of making an obscene publication. Simply not being aware of the content is, of course, not enough to qualify for the defence here: if the magazine in question has a reputation for obscene content, or the front cover suggests that it might be obscene – say the magazine is called Doggy Style and features an unclothed woman and an Alsatian on the cover – the newsagent will not be able to claim the he innocently made it available without knowing the content.

Publication for the ‘public good’, the socalled ‘merit defence’, was introduced in the UK for the first time by the Obscene Publications Act. In essence, it will be a defence to show that publication of the offending article is in the interests of ‘science, literature, art or learning, or other objects of general concern.’ A narrower version of this defence is available for films and plays in the interests of ‘drama, opera, ballet or any other art, or

literature or learning.’ For TV broadcasts, the defence is publication in the interests of ‘drama, opera, ballet or any other art, science, literature or learning or any other objects of general concern.’ The courts have interpreted ‘learning’ here to be narrower than merely educational – it must include some form of scholarly activity. Claiming that an obscene porn video is intended for use as a sex education tool – even where a ‘man in a white coat’ is inserted throughout the proceedings in order to give it a faux air of educational value – will be no defence to an obscenity charge. As is the case with deciding whether an article is obscene in the first place, this is very much a subjective judgment call for the jury.

Essentially, a jury will be asked to consider the proportion of the obscene article’s audience who would tend to be depraved or corrupted by it, the strength and the nature of that corruption, balanced against any sociological, or ethical, or literary merit it has. A hardcore porn video is unlikely to have any such merit, on the other hand, this defence was successfully, and famously, first used when the publishers of Lady Chatterly’s Lover were acquitted of charges of obscenity relating to that book’s descriptions of the adulterous sexual relationship between Lady Chatterly and her gardener, and the liberal use of swear words in the text. Nothing that the average reader would bat an eyelid at in this age of Irvine Welsh and his similarly blue-mouthed contemporaries, but still pretty shocking stuff in the early 1960s! Similarly, had the University of Central England been prosecuted in respect of the Mapplethorpe book, this defence would most likely have applied.

The third major defence to charges of obscenity, aversion, is not really a defence at all. It comprises a claim that the material in question cannot be obscene because it is so shocking and disgusting as to have the opposite effect of depraving and corrupting its audience, instead causing them to shun the activity depicted. Where this is successfully argued, the effect is that the article will be found not to be obscene in the first place. This ‘defence’ came to the rescue of the defendants in the famous Oz trial, a much celebrated case often regarded as a victory for free speech in the face of a restrictive, censorious law. The issue in question was the School Kids Issue, which included both an advertisement for a magazine entitled Suck, extolling the joys of fellatio from the standpoint of the female performing it upon her man friend, and a picture of children in school uniform having various sorts of sex with each other. The Court of Appeal, overturning a conviction for obscenity, decided that ‘far from tempting those who had not experienced the acts to take part in then they would put off those who might be tempted so to conduct themselves.’

In other words, rather than being corrupted by these images, the children who made up the readership of Oz would be more likely to be repulsed by them. There is perhaps no better

illustration of the Obscene Publications Act’s focus on the effects, not the content, of ‘obscene’ material.

For completeness sake, we might also mention the old common law obscenity offences, which include ‘conspiracy to corrupt the public morals’ and ‘outraging public decency’. Charges under these old judge-made laws are only very rarely brought in cases where no other offence seems to quite fit the bill. In 1990, both an artist who had included in an exhibition a pair of earrings made from freeze-dried human embryos, and the owner of the gallery which put it on show, were convicted of ‘outraging public decency’. While the exact nature of this old offence remains unclear, it would seem that the shock and disgust which that particular exhibit caused was sufficient to constitute an outrage to public decency – a different (and more easily proven) animal altogether to tending to deprave and corrupt. Also unlike the obscenity offence under the Act, there is no ‘artistic merit’ defence to a charge of outraging public decency.

It is fair to say, then, that the law on sexually obscene material in the UK remains very subjective, and any firm decision on whether something is actually obscene can only be made on a case by case basis. The legislation certainly seems to allow for a fair degree of artistic freedom – the artist responsible for the embryo earrings, for instance, might have been guilty of indecency, however, the work was not considered to be obscene. The fact too that the test is subjective, considering the audience for an article as of now, builds in a fair degree of flexibility to allow for changing social attitudes and mores over time. There are, however, those still who regard the obscenity laws as outdated, draconian restrictions on free speech. The National Campaign for the Reform of the Obscene Publications Act (NCROPA), for example, would contend that that law is enforced at the behest of restrictive minority opinions, and is in direct contravention of the freedom of expression rights granted in both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the European Convention on Human Rights (now part of UK law as a result of the 1998 Human Rights Act). Whether this is, as a matter of law rather than ethics, strictly true is arguable: the rights granted in these Conventions are generally subject to such restrictions as might be considered necessary for the protection of society’s interests as a whole. The real question then becomes who is to decide what is in our collective best interests. NCROPA argues that this law is being (ab)used to restrict freedom for the political ends of ‘highly-organised, vociferous pro-censorship factions, in their role as selfappointed “guardians of the nations morals”’ who would seek to use the law to ‘spread their repressive, bigoted doctrines.’ Perhaps a fairly extreme way of putting it, but while Mary Whitehouse may be dead and gone, her army of crusaders, whom many will view as interfering busybodies, continue to campaign for their brand of common decency. Perhaps telling about the NCROPA’s own political slant is its identification of ‘feminist extremists’ as another ‘dangerous faction’, intent on ‘forc[ing] their demand for more censorship on everyone else’. The NCROPA argues that socalled obscene, sexually explicit material is harmless and thus should not be regulated beyond a basic level of protection for children.

In theory, any material which is harmless, and therefore unlikely to deprave and corrupt a significant proportion of its audience, will not qualify as obscene under the Act. On the surface of it, this supposedly censorious Act’s provision for decision on a case by case basis as to whether material is indeed sufficiently harmful to warrant being banned might even be considered less dogmatic a position than the NCROPA’s insistence that sexually explicit

material is harmless. It seems unlikely that the law in this area will change anytime soon, not least because no politician wishes to be remembered come election time as the one who voted to reform the law in favour of hardcore pornography. It may be that at some future date the law will be changed such as to require proof of corrupting influence of obscene material, however, even this seemingly straightforward amendment requires a significant policy decision to be taken: do we hold to the current position where a sufficient level of risk of depravity and corruption is enough to justify a ban, or must we wait until actual such harm is caused before it can be censored?

Even the self-professed vehemently anticensorship NCROPA would draw the line at child pornography. The key legal provisions in this area are set out in the Protection of Children Act 1978. This Act was passed at a time of increased concern about paedophilia in order to provide an extra measure of protection for children, both those who might be directly involved in the production of child pornography, and those who might be abused as a result of the desires it might encourage in its audience. Unlike common or garden obscene publications, the mere possession of child pornography is an offence in itself – no intention to distribute is necessary. As it now stands, following much revision, the Act forbids the creation, possession and distribution of child pornography, whether in a traditional photograph, or as computer code – an image stored on a server which may be downloaded from a website, for example. The courts have ruled that a child pornography image being downloaded in the UK from servers located elsewhere on the globe is sufficient to constitute an offence of making child pornography.

Modern home computing technology has raised new issues of legal difficulty across many areas, and the issue of obscenity, and especially child pornography, is certainly no exception to this rule. Readily available software packages such as Paint Shop Pro can be used to airbrush images to make them appear convincing, yet very different to the original picture. This is the technology that a few years ago was employed in a famous GQ photoshoot wherein the actress Kate Winslett appeared to be several dress sizes smaller than she then was in reality. It has even been employed by Trekkies for the purposes of turning themselves into Klingons – and creating Klingon porn (there’s much truth in the old adage that it will always be the

It has even been employed by Trekkies for the purposes of turning themselves into Klingons – and creating Klingon porn pornography industry that drives forwards the development of new technologies!). And it is this same technology to which paedophiles have often turned to create images for their own sexual pleasure. Starting with a photograph of a naked adult, perhaps in a sexually compromising position, the user of such software can alter body characteristics, remove pubic hair, shrink breasts, superimpose the head of a child, and very quickly end up with a wholly convincing sexual image of what seems to be a child. This problem first came to be an issue in the early 1990s, when anecdotal evidence shows that endless problems were caused for the law when a number of paedophiles began to claim that the images in respect of which they were facing charges were not photographs of real children at all, but rather convincing fakes, and so not illegal. Proving otherwise was technically very difficult for the prosecution.

Also, there was a concern that even if no real

children were harmed in the production of these images, their availability could still feed desire and lead real children being abused. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 may have been a very flawed piece of legislation in other ways, however, the introduction of the concept of a ‘pseudophotograph’, making such fakes illegal, may be considered a good thing. Unanswered questions still abound in relation to photographs of adults who appear much younger than their real age, perhaps wearing school uniforms, or otherwise dressed to appear younger – a somewhat different position than later ‘doctoring’ of the photographs. It would seem likely that these

Unanswered questions still abound in relation to photographs of adults who appear much younger than their real age, perhaps wearing school uniforms, or otherwise dressed to appear younger would be illegal, but no such prosecution has yet been reported.

The law may be able to respond to the challenge of new technology within national boundaries, but there remains in our modern world one great and unconquered obstacle: the World Wide Web. Since its birth just about ten years ago brought the internet out of the shadowy world of the military and the ivory towers of academia into the mass consciousness, any individual can now very easily reach a global audience. Previously isolated, the internet provides paedophiles with a channel of communication to reach likeminded persons and exchange information and material. Despite the best efforts of some governments – China for a long time attempted to censor internet content at the level of the internet service provider, with Chinese users only officially allowed to access the web via one of three state-licensed ISPs – it is largely impossible to prevent content uploaded in one country from becoming available elsewhere. Considerations of what is obscene, or otherwise unacceptable in relation to sexual content, or pornography, is immeasurably culturally sensitive, and no global agreement is ever likely to be possible, even on a ‘minimum standard’ level. No state on earth, to the knowledge of this author, permits child pornography – but what is a child? In Russia, the age of consent is 14, in the UK 16, although thanks to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, pornography featuring anyone under the age of 18 will constitute child pornography. So material which might be legal in Russia, where it is uploaded, if downloaded – which includes simply viewing it online, not only saving it for later use – in the UK will be an automatic breach of the law. In 1996, the US Congress passed an amendment making a similar provision as found in UK law in relation to ‘pseudo-photographs’ of children.

An umbrella body of civil liberties groups, including the ACLU, took action against this law and the US Court of Appeals threw out the law on grounds that it contravened the First Amendment right to freedom of expression. ‘Any victimisation of children,’ the court said, ‘that may arise from paedophiles’ sexual responses to pornography apparently depicting children engaged in explicit sexual activity is not a sufficiently compelling justification for the[se]… speech restrictions.’

So a paedophile in the USAcan quite legally, using his right to free expression, create images which will be illegal the instant they are downloaded in the UK. Of course there are all kinds of legal provisions with relation to jurisdiction, taking a case against a party outside the USA, and prosecutions would certainly be brought within the UK against anyone accessing such sites. A new twist here,

as publicised in the Pete Townsend case, is that the UK prosecuting authorities are reportedly prepared to bring charges not only in relation to downloading, but of inciting the operator of the website where the images originate to distribute child pornography.

Stopping production of the material at source will remain a problem, however, so long as such irreconcilable difference in national laws exist. The US will never permit the extradition of a citizen to face charges it considers to be in violation of the First Amendment. And that’s before we even consider whether the responsible person can actually be found – internet paedophiles are notoriously skilled at covering their online tracks, leaving little or no virtual paper-trail.

And so the internet age places a new twist on our concept of obscenity, one in which the traditional law, while not exactly defunct, certainly can be difficult to enforce. These difficulties for enforcement may well inevitably lead to a resurgence in campaigns to reform or remove the Obscene Publications Act (although not the law on child pornography).

Sex and pornography will always be matters of great cultural sensitivity, whether in liberal Scandinavian countries or conservative Northern Ireland, and so long as this remains the case, some level of regulation seems inevitable, whatever challenges the technology of today

sex dreams

I

dreamt there was a porn film being made in a very seedy nightclub. I’m not sure what my involvement was but I was there with some guy who I vaguely fancy in real life. We wandered about slowly. There wasn’t much happening but there was an inner room where people were shagging and warming up for the real action. They looked a bit bored and half-hearted. I seemed to be alone at this point.

The vaguely fancied man had evaporated or pissed off but everything seemed to be ok and it felt fairly normal. I considered joining in but then thought better of it. I just watched them sleazing around for a while.

A dog came into the room and padded over to me. It looked slightly perverse and was drooling a lot. I knew it was a sniffer dog but it seemed to like me so I patted it and squeezed its face in my hands while muttering typical doggy nonsense. It soon tired of my chatter and went out again.

Suddenly there were police all over the building and a whole pack of dogs bounded in. I tried to leave because the situation was not looking good but before I had a chance to make an exit, the original sniffer dog leapt at me and started to sniff my bum and tear at my jacket. I knew it was sniffing out traces of sex and drugs and there was nowhere for me to hide. The police surrounded me and said, ‘Yes, that’s her.’ They were pulling at me and ripping off more of my clothes while I struggled and panicked. When I woke up I was sweating and my pyjamas were all dishevelled.

LIVING WITH A DIFFERENT SEX !

by Alice Dreger

A

lot of social institutions depend on the assumption that there are two, neat, clear sex categories in nature. That assumption is wrong. At least 1 in 1500 (and maybe a lot more) people are born with a body that blends elements of the male and female.

This doesn’t mean that a person with a socalled intersex condition has all the parts of a female and all the parts of a male; that is physiologically impossible. What it does mean is that such a person has some parts usually associated with males and some parts usually associated with females, or that she or he has

The Hermaphrodite at the Louvre some parts that appear ambiguous – like a phallus that looks somewhere between a penis and a clitoris, or a divided scrotum that looks more like labia.

The Hermaphrodite at the Louvre is the mythic image of intersex, but in fact, intersex doesn’t always involve ‘ambiguous’ external sex anatomy. Sometimes a child or adult who is intersex can look quite unambiguous sexually, although internally their sex anatomy is mixed. This happens, for example, with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), where a person has some male parts (including a Y chromosome and testes) internally, but is quite clearly feminine on the outside.

People today tend to think of intersex as a medical issue, but medicine became the primary means for dealing with intersex fairly recently, namely in the late nineteenth century.

It was even later than that – not until at least the 1960s – that medical professionals began aggressively looking for cases of intersex.

Before that point, the vast majority of people with intersex conditions appear to have gone unnoticed by legal, religious, or medical estab lishments. That’s because most forms of intersex are largely benign medically speaking, and those few that weren’t tended to result in early death. The records available show that in the centuries preceding the nineteenth, at most a few cases per year came to the attention of authorities. Presumably the remainder of people with what today gets labeled ‘abnormal’ sex anatomies lived their lives pretty much like everyone else, either because their anatomical variance was not noticeable or because it was not considered especially

important. In cases of serious genital ambiguity, midwives, grandmothers, and other local matriarchs and patriarchs appear to have chosen a sex. All individuals were expected to then have sexual relations only with those who had been identified as the ‘other’ sex; in many places, violation of this rule was punishable by violent, even fatal means.

By the late nineteenth century, the rise of gynecology and medical examinations for military conscriptions meant that doctors were starting to get a much better sense of just how common ‘abnormal’ sex anatomies were.

Indeed, late-nineteenth century medical men (virtually all were men) began reporting dozens of cases a year of ‘hermaphroditism’ and ‘pseudo-hermaphroditism.’ These cases caused notable stress for medical experts because they tended to be politically conservative and wanted to keep sex borders clear in the face of rising open homosexuality and feminism. (The conflation of these anxieties becomes clear in the 1890s use of the term ‘psychic hermaphroditism’ to refer to gay men, and in the common 1890s ‘scientific’ claim that university education physically ‘masculinized’ women.) As a consequence, biomedical specialists worked hard to come up with a system that would label everyone ‘truly male’ or ‘truly female,’ regardless of the extent of sexual blending.

What they came up with is the fairly arbitrary division that still stands – against all reason – in most medical texts today, one that is based on gonadal tissue: If you have nonstandard sex anatomy and ovaries, you count as a ‘female pseudo-hermaphrodite’; if you have non-standard sex anatomy and testes, you count as a ‘male pseudo-hermaphrodites’; and if you have ovarian and testicular tissue, you count as a ‘true hermaphrodite.’ Victorian doctors liked this system because they couldn’t easily diagnose ‘true hermaphroditism’ in living people given the medical tools available to them; as a consequence, for the most part the only ‘true hermaphrodites’ were dead and dissected people – not coincidentally, a socially convenient outcome. All others shown to be intersex were labeled ‘truly male’ or ‘truly female’ (even if pseudo-hermaphroditic) and basically told to straighten up, that is, not to act in a gender variant way socially or sexually.

This, however, did not solve the ‘problem’ of intersex. Improved medical techniques and increased access to healthcare meant that mor e and more people were being diagnosed with a biological ‘true sex’ that made no sense socially. In the 1910s as today, for example, women with what we know now to be CAIS couldn’t practically just be labeled men simply because they had testes. And there was no social category for those diagnosed with ‘true

hermaphroditism.’ As a consequence, by about the 1920s, experts treating intersex began to develop a notion of gender (social role) separated from biological sex. And they began to more actively offer surgical ‘corrections’ to bring the biological sex into line with the gender. So the theoretical approaches and surgical techniques evolved bit by bit, though motivation remained the same: keeping sex categories distinct and numbering only two.

We should note that, in the last half of the

most people with intersex survived psychosocially without surgery; they did not disproportionately live as hermits or attempt suicide nineteenth century, a small percentage of patients with intersex had started to ask for, and some surgeons had started to offer, surgical reconstructions of large clitorises, small vaginas, and hypospadic penises. With the exception of the rare clitorectomy performed on a child because she had a large clitoris, most of the genital surgeries performed for cosmetic reasons in the nineteenth century were performed on adults at the adults’ request. Elective surgery was generally avoided by both patients and

surgeons for reasons of safety. There is also reason to believe that most people with intersex survived psychosocially without surgery; they did not disproportionately live as hermits or attempt suicide. The evidence for this comes from my historical investigation (documented in Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex), and the extensive research John Money performed at Harvard University for his Ph.D. in Psychology. For his dissertation, Money studied adults with intersex and found – before the era of standard cosmetic surgical intervention for intersex – that they enjoyed a lower rate of psychopathology than the general population.

Nevertheless, like many other realms of biology, sexuality, and psychology, intersex increasingly became the purview of medicine.

For a small number of people with intersex – namely those at risk for gonadal cancers and salt-wasting – the medicalization of intersex probably improved their health, even saving their lives. Nevertheless, most of the treatment of intersex was motivated not by metabolic health concerns, but by psycho-social concerns; as in the 1890s, by the 1950s, intersex was viewed primarily as a psycho-social problem that mixed sex categories in uncomfortable ways.

In the 1950s, Johns Hopkins University became the first medical center to offer an

Taken in Northern California at the first-ever retreat of persons with intersex conditions, in 1995.

The picture shows 10 people with intersex conditions.

Top row, left to right: Heidi Walcott, Tom, Max Beck Middle row, left to right: Angela Moreno, David Vandertie, Mani Bruce Mitchell, Martha Coventry Bottom row, left to right, Sugee, Cheryl Chase (founder of the intersex rights movement and ISNA), Hida Viloria

organized multi-disciplinary approach to intersex, one that sought to essentially eliminate intersex in early childhood. The Hopkins approach to pediatric intersex developed there came to be known to proponents as the ‘optimum gender of rearing’ model. The basic idea was that each child’s potential for a ‘normal’ gender identity should be maximized by making each child’s body, upbringing, and mind align as much as possible. Because of the belief that it was harder to engineer a boy than a girl, most children with intersex were made as feminine as possible, using the tools of surgery, endocrinology, and psychology. A ‘successful’ patient was one judged to be stable and ‘normal’ (i.e., apparently heterosexual) in the gender identity assigned. Though the early texts from this team advocated truth-telling and consistent psychological support, in practice many patients were deceived and given minimal psychological support. As in most of pediatrics – indeed, most of medicine – at this time, doctors made the decisions for patients. There was little investment in the ideas of informed consent or of studying outcomes in a systematic way.

John Money performed the theoretical heavy-lifting for the Hopkins model, arguing that gender identity was largely plastic early in life, that nurture was more important than

Surgeons and psychologists liked it because it led them to believe they were providing necessary and good care to ‘abnormal’ children. nature. His chief support for this claim came from a famous case known as ‘John/Joan.’ The person at the center, later named David Reimer, was born an identical twin (not intersex) boy in 1965. At eight months, a doctor accidentally burned off David’s penis while botching a circumcision. The parents consulted with the team at Hopkins, and John Money recommended they sex- and genderchange the child and raise him as a girl. For decades Money reported that the change worked, that the child had ended up a convinced straight girl. The truth – revealed by Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmundson, and later documented in full by John Colapinto and David Reimer in As Nature Made Him (2000) – was that David had never felt fully female. Indeed, when his parents told him the truth about what happened to him, he immediately re-assumed the gender role of a man.

A great historical mystery lies in why Money – who in 1953 had found a relatively low rate of psychopathology among adults with intersex – thought people with intersex needed to have their sexes and genders engineered to be well. Less mystery lies in why it took so long for people to question Money’s theory of nurture-over-nature approach for cases of intersex. Surgeons and psychologists liked it because it led them to believe they were providing necessary and good care to ‘abnormal’ children. Feminists liked it because they preferred the idea that gender – and therefore gender norms – wer e socially constructed and malleable. Parents probably liked it because they could be reassured that their queer-bodied children would grow up to be straight-acting adults.

But someone didn’t like this system: namely, people who – like David Reimer – felt mistreated at best, and medically assaulted at worst, by this form of care. Nevertheless, most stayed silent, having been led to believe they were alone in their experiences. That changed in 1993. That year, feminist biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling published in The Sciences and The New York Times articles exposing the basic fact that intersex exists. In response, Cheryl Chase wrote a letter to The Sciences

announcing the founding of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA). Chase had been led to this by her attempts to recover her own history of sex-reassignment in infancy and medically-induced shame – and by the disinterest of most of her former care providers in what had happened to her. Soon Chase had gathered around her dozens of people with intersex.

Though ISNAbegan as a support group, it quickly turned into an advocacy group because its members realized that they had suffered from similar problems. Like many of the early ISNAmembers, Chase drew on her political consciousness as a lesbian woman to recognize the degree to which intersex had been unnecessarily pathologized. With the successes of the women’s health movement and the queer rights movements as a backdrop, people with intersex began agitating for openness and reform.

Early on, only a few medical professionals recognized ISNA’s critiques as legitimate.

Many responded that the standard of care was necessary, successful, and justified, even going so far as to actively defend lying to patients about their medical histories. Those at the top simply tried to ignore ISNA. As the leader of what had become the intersex rights movement, Chase adopted a blitzkrieg strategy, walking through whatever door was open, and protesting on the street with collaborators when doors were shut. With her professional background in computer science, she was particularly adept at using the tools of the internet to spread ISNA’s message. ISNA also supported the inquiries of researchers like Suzanne Kessler, Fausto-Sterling, and me, and engaged in media outreach as much as possible.

By about 2001, it had become clear to experts in intersex care that the intersex rights movement was not going away. The claims of activists were being amplified in story after story of problematic intersex treatment (from ISNAas well as allied groups like Bodies Like Ours and Intersex Initiative), as well as in research that strongly suggested gender identity is not simply a matter of nurture. The fact that medical professionals were unable to produce for journalists an intesex patient satisfied with his/her treatment belied the claims that the advocacy groups represented a disgruntled minority. Finally, many medical professionals began to respond directly and indirectly to calls for outcomes research, truthtelling, and revision of homophobic and sexist protocols. The intersex rights movement undoubtedly was helped in its success by surrounding trends in favor of gay rights, patients rights, and children’s rights.

Today, it is safe to say that tens of millions of people who did not know about intersex in 1993 know about it now. It is also safe to say

It is also safe to say that medical professionals are less inclined to lie to patients and parents in intersex cases, are less likely to make openly homophobic or sexist remarks, and are more likely to admit uncertainty about the right course of action. that medical professionals are less inclined to lie to patients and parents in intersex cases, are less likely to make openly homophobic or sexist remarks, and are more likely to admit uncertainty about the right course of action. A number of teams are engaged in active outcomes research, though opinions still differ about what outcomes should be sought. (For example, some think stable gender identity and heterosexuality are the objective; others suggest lack of depression may be.) What care an individual or family will receive now varies

dramatically; what happens to a child with intersex today appears to depend not only on where she or he is born, but who happens to be on call when she or he is born.

As in the 1950s – indeed, as in the 1890s – the goal of many leading teams treating intersex is still to make intersex disappear.

Witness, for example, the work of pediatric endocrinologist Maria New, who recommends Dexamethazone to women who may be carrying an XX child with CAH; treatment with ‘Dex’ does not alleviate the CAH, it is used only to try to make the child’s clitoris appear smaller. Witness also the offering of abortion to women who are likely to be carrying children with intersex conditions, including Klinefelter’s Syndrome. Finally, witness the continued construction of vagino plasties (vaginas constructed out of colons) in young girls, in spite of arguments on the part of many medical professionals that early vaginoplasties fail too often and are unnecessary to begin with.

By contrast, as in the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, and the gay rights movements, the goal of intersex advocacy groups is to have people understand intersex conditions as human rights issues.

ISNAmaintains as its fundamental principle the principle also fundamental to the women’s health movement and the gay rights movements: that one’s genitals are primarily for one’s own sexual pleasure, not for the comfort of others. But sadly, this continues – apparently – to be a radical idea.

sex dreams

L

ast week I dreamt I was a pole dancer and I was very good at it but was trying to hide it from my 8 year old son. This was difficult because I was getting quite a reputation.

I did my dancing in a velvet room wearing typical sexy gear – basque, stockings and killer heels. My hair was much longer than it is in real life. The whole room smelt of sex, sleaze and smoke and groups of men and women stood around watching. I was the ultimate pro and they all thought I was brilliant.

After a lot of writhing and sensuous sliding it was time for me to have a break. I went into an adjoining room and realised I was at home. This was good because it meant that nobody would notice what I got up to. I was particularly paranoid about my next-door neighbour and my son’s teacher finding out. I must have woken up after that because I don’t remember any more.

holes eating through the time-warp – the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment announces that to people who have never been to Belfast their image of the place is often far-removed from the reality. No more Belfast champagne, gas bubbled through milk; no more heads in ovens. Intoxication, death, will find their new connections. Cul-de-sacs and ring roads. The city is a map of the city.

PRAVDA City Matters

by Neal Alexander City matters: this somewhat glib phrase might also be taken seriously as a proposition. For if it is possible to agree that the city does indeed matter then this recognition immediately raises a series of more difficult questions: howwhen-and-why does the city matter – does this city matter – and to whom for what reason?

Moreover, as Belfast gradually recasts itself in the rosy glow of its post-Troubles present, how have our ideas about what matters to it begun to shift?

Some answers are suggested by a quick glance at City Matters, a free publication distributed by Belfast City Council as part of

their attempt to improve communications between citizens and City Hall. In an article headed ‘Public survey backs council’s priorities’ it is revealed that the best things about living in Belfast are the shopping (58%), entertainment (47%), and sports and leisure facilities (43%); while the worst aspects of city life are the cleanliness of the streets (38%), traffic flows (38%), and community safety (30%). Perhaps the utopian Belfast of the future can be glimpsed through these statistics as an urban mega-mall serviced by multi-lane skyways and patrolled constantly by litterconscious, heavily armed security guards. In any case, City Matters panders to the needs of its citizen-readers by supplying comprehensive events listings, articles offering ‘consumer advice’, and a pull-out feature on leisure services and changing ‘lifestyles’ in the city.

On the other hand, the editors also see fit to sandwich an article on the problem of homelessness in Belfast, between informative pieces introducing the latest initiatives to curb littering and air pollution. By this unfortunate juxtaposition then, all three become integrated into the council’s scheme for ‘cleaning up the

city streets’, thus shrugging off questions pertaining to the causes of such social problems as homelessness as largely irrelevant, or in any cause ultimately unanswerable. Indeed, this small example is symptomatic of a particular emphasis which returns again and again in City Matters: that is, a concern with Belfast’s image over and above its material reality. Thus articles on the growth of tourism in the city report with ill-concealed delight that Belfast is fast becoming a popular City Break destination, a port of call for ‘luxury cruise liners’ rather than the grimy industrial locus of their manufacture.

Similarly, in a short article on recent live concerts held in the grounds of the City Hall the crux of the matter is reached almost immediately: ‘Positive images of the city were sent to over 100 million people worldwide’.

The Black City is fast becoming a 24-hour City, image-building having replaced shipbuilding as the dominant industry in the early years of the twenty-first century. The danger, of course, is that if we tell ourselves what we are often enough we will begin to believe it and become tourists in our own city.

Speaking of his own home city, Paris, the philosopher and spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre once remarked: ‘I have the impression that architectural and urbanistic interventions have not matched the transformations of the city’. This is perhaps simply to observe that the city tends to add up to more than the sum of its parts, and it might be hazarded that this is one reason why the city matters. Yet the lag that Lefebvre identifies might also be seen to apply to Belfast in the present moment. For one way of understanding the almost pathologically positive gloss that is currently given to the city by promotional literature and cultural commentary alike is as a symptom of our inability to keep pace with Belfast’s contemporary transformations.

To adapt Fredric Jameson’s take on the postmodern condition, recent mutations in the city’s spatial fabric ‘stand as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions’. This suggests an interpretation of City Matters’ tag-line slogan – ‘looking after your city’ – not in its usual metaphorical sense of solicitous husbandry but in its mulish literality: rendered impotent in the face of accelerating socio-economic change, Belfast City Council can only ‘look after’ the city as it careers heedlessly towards an unsuspected horizon. All of which has, of course, already been anticipated by Ciaran Carson, whose 1989 book Belfast Confetti, might I humbly suggest, should be distributed to homes across the city in place of City Matters. Carson’s prose piece, ‘Revised Version’, concludes famously: The jargon sings of leisure purposes, velodromes and pleasure parks, the unfurling petals of the World Rose Convention. As the city consumes itself – scrap iron mouldering on the quays, black

Carson is acutely aware of the difficulty of extricating image from reality in a Belfast already entering into the argot of promotional sound-bites, and his dystopian figuration of the city’s incipient post-industrial transforma tions implicitly places the planners’ anodyne vision of a sweet-smelling leisureplex Belfast under erasure. Moreover, what ‘Revised Version’ as a whole offers is what City Matters struggles to ignore: a critical awareness of the fact that, as Lefebvre puts it, ‘the metamorphoses of the city and the urban continue’ instead of resolving themselves in the forms we would desire. Or, perhaps more pertinently, that new forms of critical awareness are necessary if we are to ascertain what matters in the strange new city we are only gradually and incompletely coming to know.

sex dreams

T

he dream takes place in a friend’s house, where I am a guest for the weekend. It’s late and I’m in bed in the spare room, on my back, wide awake. The bedroom door opens, the hall light shines dimly into the room. But no one comes in. Then I feel something land on the bed – I’m frightened at first until I see that it’s my friend’s cat that has come into the room and is now sitting at the far end of the bed. It’s a female cat I’d like to add (probably exposing a healthy homophobia). It’s looking at me intently in that cat way, with slow, lazy blinks. Then it stands up and walks, frankly, like bitch in heat, up the bed until it’s standing over my crotch, on which it seductively lowers itself down and begins purring. Purring deeply and loudly while intently holding my gaze. Oh god. Suddenly I feel I have an erection the size of man’s leg – the purring and the gazing continue until I orgasm uncontrollably – in the dream and in real life. Shit. I promise I have never fucked a cat.

CALLING ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS

see your work in print – get some feedback about your photographs.

Source photographic magazine regularly publishes new photographic work and to this end is interested in meeting up with photographers in Belfast to see their work. This is also an opportunity to get some informal feedback about your photographs on Saturday 4th December Source Office, Belfast To arrange a time email John Duncan at john@source.ie or phone 90329691 If you are unfamiliar with the magazine it can be seen on line at www.source.ie and is available through Easons and all good art galleries including Belfast Exposed and the Ormeau Baths Gallery.

DREAM IRELAND

E DREAM IRELAND www.dream-ireland.com

ELIZABETH

By Dario Fo Kabosh Theatre Company Directed by Rachel O’Riordan OMAC Sept 21st

THE ENCHANTED EVENING Botanic Gardens, Belfast September 24th-26th

HAVOC IN ITS THIRD YEAR Ronan Bennett Bloomsbury, 2004 ISBN: 0747562490 Price: £16.99

ver wondered, as you spray paint your fiftieth ‘tag’ of the evening on the back wall of a scout hut, that there might be a more productive and useful outlet for your creative impulses? The other day I tooled over to the website of some people trying to help us all say what we have to say to the world, at www.dream-ireland.com.

‘Dream Ireland Ltd is a research and development company that promotes the growth of the creative industries in Ireland North and South.’ I looked around to see exactly what these chaps were researching and developing – perhaps a piece of software to generate a new Joyce novel from transcripts of the media appearances of John Prescott – but the front page gave nothing away except a few strange statements that read slightly oddly, as if they’re coded messages placed to activate sleeper agents. ‘We keep the focus on the idea because in the end it is the quality, originality and marketability of the idea that drives projects, products and profits.’

But each of the three sections described (‘learnin?’, ‘£nterprise’ and ‘ideas’, the latter with a lightbulb for the dot of the ‘i’) had more behind it and so on I ploughed on, pushing aside thoughts of going through Checkpoint Charlie in the boot of a Trabant, ready for creative growth. And behind each of the strange messages, I found, well, more strange messages. Something called ‘Dreamlab Generation’ promises to ‘develop and test ways in which young people (15-18) can further their skills in art, design, music and technology’ while keeping an eye on ‘the rate of change engendered by digital technology.’

What does that mean? Is this just a way of saying we should have huge LCD blackboards in schools, or do they want to wire teenagers up to sleep-learning centres that monitor their biorhythms and empty their bladders for them during the night?

And it gets worse. ‘The Digital Step partnership aims to address unequal access to the labour market for marginalized young people by developing new models for learning, training and employment in the area of digital media.’ What is a ‘new model for employment’? Are people to be paid in chocolate?

In a section titled ‘Dreamlab Invest’ (something these people are pleased to call ‘a proof of concept fund’) the following observation is offered: ‘it is difficult to get started on creative business ideas due to lack of finance and support’. Now this is certainly true, although I don’t know if I needed to come this far into the site to be reminded that money doesn’t grow on trees. And what is Dream Ireland doing about it? ‘Seeking to create a sustainable network of creative individuals, companies and ideas and direct them to national and international markets’.

Right… I see. Create a network of creative individuals. Is that like a book group? Are they going to draw them a map to the shops?

And so it goes on, but you get the idea. Or rather you don’t get it either. The thing is, if this is in fact a genuine website, I can’t imagine it gets much traffic. It’s almost as if the people involved are trying to engender some bootstrapped leap in economic growth by some collective imagining that this is the case. If we all close out eyes and wish it to be true, then when we open them we’ll all be riding around on jet-scooters between nectardrenched exhibitions at each other’s cybergalleries while, on a nearby greenfield site, smiling robots turn out life-enhancing products by the spaceship-load. I mean, it’s a nice idea, but does this really seem the best use of however much money went into this

strange venture? Wouldn’t they be better off writing science fiction novels where they can better use eugenic slogans such as ‘Skills + Knowledge = Growth’?

In the meantime, I would recommend that nobody respond in any way to this website, lest Belfast be overrun by decrepit, nylon-clad KGB operatives wandering about taking photos of government buildings and commenting on the weather in Volgograd to anyone they can find who is sitting alone on a park bench.

Michael Begg

ELIZABETH A

ll male casting isn’t the novelty it once was, and it doesn’t add anything at all to this high energy take on what emotional tempests Good Queen Bess may have weathered as she sailed her ship of state through love, war, political murder and court intrigue. What we have in this play is a great deal of rampaging about by a (possibly) hermaphrodite (so what?) Elizabeth and a lot of ‘calm down, calm down’ from the supporting cast. There’s a sub-plot that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was really a sexually inverted parody of Elizabeth’s life and times, but this runs out of steam early on and gives way to lots of sound and fury signifying nothing much at all. Or rather, nothing we haven’t seen done better in recent films and television shows.

The yeast to make the whole thing rise is supposed to be the humour, but there’s only so many crude cock jokes that a reasonable person can take (make that none) unless the cast really know how to sell them, and this lot don’t. Having said that, I have to admit that most of the many teenagers in the audience on opening night did seem to titter and howl on cue. Kabosh makes much of itself as a physical theatre company but the physicality here looks stale and grafted onto the piece rather than integral to what it’s about.

The only diamond to shine out amidst the dross is Paul Hamilton’s grotesque performance as Dame Gross-Lady, and it’s probably worth the trip just to see his mad eyes staring out from beneath his over-hang brow and hear his big growly voice. Dame Gross Lady also gets to entirely carry the theme of language cross-fertilization and weirdness in that period, a theme around which the whole thing could have been profitably structured. Hamilton takes his chance brilliantly and makes funny and interesting and odd out of what could have been just odd, as the character mixes standard English, dialect and invented and foreign language terms into a crude gutterShakespearean argot, all delivered in a Geordie accent.

The large amount of Italian terms in this stew gives away somewhat the heritage of the play as having been written by Italian Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo. No better satirist, but satire generally needs to be of its day, and this stuff is thirty years old now and well past its sell-by date. Enough already with Elizabeth and the sex and the power and the madness; we’ve been through that movie before.

Johnny Treat

THE ENCHANTED EVENING M

aligning the more-often-than-not lacklustre cultural initiatives of Belfast City Council is hardly much proof of one’s critical mettle. Every once in a while however they do get it right, and as such it was with considerable delight to see last year’s ‘Enchanted Evening’ returning to Botanic Gardens for a weekend of after dark revelry in the closing days of September. With the untimely and obscene demise of North Street Arcade and its resident colourful esoteric haunts, a gap has been left in the city’s more open-minded cultural community that is unlikely to be filled any time soon; it was a wonderful thing then to see not only the denizens of Belfast’s sole esoteric and leftfield meeting space out en masse for this festival of verdure and make-believe, but what must have been hundreds of eager parents and children out to usher in the season of chestnuts and bonfires within the beautiful atmosphere that the Park is singularly capable of providing after nightfall.

Every aspect of the landscape was put to use pleasantly. Botanic’s impressive arrays of grand trees were gently uplit in swathes of purple and green, with simple but eye catching sculptural décor similarly illuminated. The effect was quite beautiful against the night, and one would be hard pressed to remember that they were slap bang in the middle of an increasingly cosmopolitan and busy Belfast, such was the spell created. If the mission was to recreate the feel of an enchanted grove, it succeeded, with oversize ladybirds, changeling faeries and an Old Father Time mingled with the revelers, bantering with eager children and humourously accosting the more wary grown up kids in attendance. Add to this an evocative flautist who wove melancholy through the air from the bandstand, flanked by traditional mediaeval regalia, an open-to-all drum tent for that essential carnival drone, and the atmosphere was one of happy festivity.

Chief among the delights provided however was the nocturnal opening of both the Park’s tropical ravine and famed palm house. As a memento of the Victorian mania for collection and grandeur, the tropical ravine was utilised charmingly with the same lighting as outdoors. Nothing much different from any other daytime really, save for the special atmosphere that comes from illuminating 20ft high foliage in a dense green glow: worth walking round for that alone. The Palm House however was the real gem.

Radiating in the flicker of thousands of church candles, every walkway through this local architectural jewel was a transportation in time. Admittedly it is enjoyable if a little bland on the average daytime trip. But to see the grand glass structure and generous greenery softly glowing along to the strains of an ensconced cellist and violinist was a treat seriously worth waiting a year for. It is hard to put precisely to words the magic and olde world feeling that they managed to evoke, except to say that they really and truly did it.

Perhaps in order to explain the satisfaction felt at attending a night like this in a generally vulgar Belfast, it would be useful to call upon Yeats. ‘The Woods of Arcady are dead / And over is their antique joy’ he lamented; ‘The world of old on dreaming fed / Grey truth is now her painted toy.’ So in an age of banality and modern day demands, the relish of being part of a Romantic, Arcadian and faery tale

mini carnival isn’t to be sniffed at. And that doesn’t just come from some tree hugging hippy overly enamoured of the environment that our favourite arcade used to give us. The happy hubbub of children’s voices eagerly awaiting their Halloween dress up was enough of a reason to take a night out at this evening of enchantment in our own neck of the woods. I’m glad it only happens once a year, and I’m more than happy to wait for the next. Whether child or adult, the charm of seeing faeries come to life on an Autumn night has much to offer. And all the more so now that the only other place in Belfast capable of hosting such a display has been firebombed out of existence courtesy of our cultureless horde. A delightful night to usher in the new season. Long may it continue.

Ciaran Tracey

HAVOC IN ITS THIRD YEAR T

he story centres around John Brigge, Coroner and Town Governor in a North of England town in the early 1630’s. Brigge is a closet Catholic – an illegal religion – and

constantly under suspicion, which worsens as the mood in the Governing Council turns ever more Puritanical and paranoid about sinfulness and the threat of violence from vagrants and Irish raiders. Brigge is thrown into a crisis of conscience when an Irishwoman, Katherine Shay, is arrested on suspicion of murdering her child and his defence of her legal rights brings him into conflict with his fellow Governors.

The Times has called the book a ‘masterpiece’ in its ‘moral range’ and ‘characterisation’. The ‘moral range’ of the protagonist the Coroner? He hangs out with his fellow governors saying to himself that he only hangs out with them because his wife has pushed him into accepting the protected position (of power). Like his fellow Protestants in authority he accepts his theatrical role in the collective voyeuristic physical abuse of the powerless (I thought the description of the bridle to prevent Katherine Shay talking vivid – it adds a stone to the weight of her head, cuts into her gums and lips). But he shows moral outrage at some punishments, pities those on whom meted out ‘justice’ has gone too far eg. a sixteen year old who has been caught with someone in a haystack: ‘Brigge turned her over and saw that her back had been flayed so there was hardly an inch of skin between her arse and her neck.’ He softens in his attitude to a group of vagrants who have set up camp in the countryside because one of them saves his life when he is caught out in a storm with a fever and another one (a squatter producing decent milk) saves his baby son’s life. He is forced to debate points of Catholic and Protestant scripture in relation to what

makes good government because as an old school English Catholic he is having to defend himself from modern ambitious Protestants.

I suppose the book’s ‘moral range’ is thought bigger for the inclusion of ‘strong women’. The coroner’s wife engages the acknowledged Chief Governor of the town in an impassioned but articulate argument to defend Catholicism’s moral philosophy as a political foundation for merciful governing and show up the weakness of putting Protestantism’s unforgiving moral philosophy into political practice. Irishwoman vagrant Katherine Shay is a leader of a revolt of the oppressed (but her life is in the hands of the Coroner and the rest of the Governors) and she wastes away in prison for most of the book. The whole business of politics overshadowed motherhood and the tone of the book is entirely male. The plot used three mothers who had lost their babies but there was no real examination of their experience apart from what the cold inquisitions of the coroner revealed – it was all about how the facts of the babies deaths affected him.

I tried to get a bit of empathy for the coroner all the way through but I never felt any for this well-trodden plot-voice (a Greene favourite): a Catholic guy of moderate power and social standing, who has to weigh his conscience with the practicalities of power, who is made vulnerable because of his home life (including a bit of adultery with the young servant of his household when he and his wife were suffering a rough patch), whose trajectory leads him to be saved by people below him in social status and who wakes up to their cause, then becomes one of their number in the attempted salvation of the oppressed; whose soul consists in his capacity for receiving and exchanging good sex and love with his wife and who practises concern and charity for a wider household.

Ronan Bennet is writing about the 1630s in England in a modern voice. From what I remember of the pamphlets and ranters and free speakers that are roaming around the country at that time, they are magical, far out, producers of spiritual wonderment, madness and free love. The sensibility of Bennet’s novel is that people go in fear, are quick to get paranoid, quick to seek violent solutions, salacious and vicious, shallow enough that I the narrator, the one with the screenplay protagonist lense, probes deeper and has the audience feeling my emotional nuances, moment to film narrative moment. It feels like there is too much missing and that the novel is following the rules of a historical thriller that meets the research standards. A screenplay version would need a full and detailed prop cupboard, but it got to me that the landscape was so predominantly bleak, paranoid, brutal, humourless, fun free. You might as well take liberation out of the sixties as take creative energy out of the 1630s. Even the coroner’s baby son felt too much like an outcome with consequences for his household, either a sick and coughing object or full and gurgling one.

Here is a friendship between two men, one Catholic, one Protestant, who have political authority and begin with a common hope to govern justly, but religion combined with the political intrigue that uses popular religious prejudices drives the wedge between them and destroys their friendship. Here there are examples of unexpected alliances: a relatively powerful English Catholic an ally to a vagrant Irish woman and poor English squatters. A young man who has begun his life in a Catholic household becomes an ally to landowning governing Protestants for the sake of ambition? All of this is here, but I’m not sure with what purpose. Is it supposed to be some analogy for the uneasy coexistence of Protestantism and Catholicism in N. Ireland?

A paranoia about the future of this coexistence? Playing out a competition between Catholic arguments and Protestant

arguments for how to govern?

The 17th century is notoriously the century of class jostling and power political jockeying in religious costume, men and women switching from one side to the other. A century of ideological mortal combat at the birth of a modern nation. For some context call to mind John Milton’s crazy deranged maniacal Catholic hating ( the colourful, over the topness of it, let them be burned and tortured in hell, let me count the ways). In some of those tracts you see Milton as if under a spell or some kind of Hitlerlike vitriolic possession. That sure was weird ( like when you watch Hitler and you think, wow, what was it the Jews in your life did to piss you off so much?) Maybe Milton’s fallen angel Satan is an eloquent and resourceful Catholic rival of Milton in his life, one who losing the war also loses the Catholic spiritual landscapes of falling and renewal through confession and mercy, the colour and variety of hell and of paradise, imprints of justice patterning this life and the next. In Havoc in its Third Year the Coroner finds himself as a St. Germanus, the role Shay gives him, freeing all the prisoners and becoming their reluctant leader as they tramp about the country. They approach a large town and an inhabitant asks the former Coroner now pilgrim (leading his nag which carries his baby son in the arms of the squatter whose love and milk has saved the child) who does he think he is, going in mockery of the Lord? The Coroner replies honestly enough, ‘I am John Brigge and no other. This is my son and this is his nurse.’ The town dweller responds by delivering a blow with a club from which John Brigge never recovers. He dies a joyful man lying on the heather and gazing up at the gentle sky, finally freed of the political machination and intrigue from which he sought escape all along.

The overriding images of the book for me were the porn punishment and the paranoia which made me feel uneasy. The overriding feeling I got from the book was a weariness of missed opportunities to explore the history and themes with creativity.

Maria Andrews

flashers

I

was sitting on a wall eating an ice-cream when an oldish man drove past on a Honda 90 with his dick hanging out. I’m not absolutely sure if he was flashing or giving it a bit of a cooling because it was a hot day.

one more dominated by music. Thus modern opera came into being. Critics have complained that Welsh National Opera’s Iphigénie en Tauride is too stark and grey – grey sets, grey costumes, one metal chair – but this calculated understatement is the foil for dramatic bursts of colour in the final act. You probably need a device like that for this opera.

In scarcely two hours there’s hardly time for much complex characterisation, and the music, too, is well-mannered – not yet fully romantic.

DJ

NO TOPLESS BATHING Behind Central Library, Belfast One of Belfast’s oldest pieces of public art.

Recently the witty rejoinder (‘Ulster has suffered enough’) has become seriously weathered and extensive restoration is necessary. The Heritage Fund of the Lottery, perhaps in conjunction with the Ulster Museum, should set about this work forthwith. Experience of the media and supports used (aerosol, emulsion, breezeblock, brick) will be essential. However, the thorny debate between ‘reconstruction’ and ‘restoration’ is expected to rear its head. DJ

THE FOLKS ON THE HILL

CHANGE

BBCNI, Friday

Church Street Gallery

Oh dear. This animated ‘satire’ courtesy of BBC NI occupies a 15 minute Friday night slot between French and Saunders and Have I Got News For You, which gives a rough indication of its target audience. Ill-conceived and distinctly unfunny, with graphics that look like they’ve been done on a Commodore 64, it is difficult to imagine who would choose to mark the beginning of their weekend in such a fashion, aside from those who are actually depicted in it probably.

JM

Interesting to see the city’s talented graphic designers display their wares again. It turns out they fall mostly into one of two camps, either they are political (bombs, Mrs. Thatcher, swastikas, fighter jets) or they have young families (babies). This might indicate that they all want to be ‘artists’ as I didn’t really learn anything about the exhibition’s theme ‘change’.

RW

IPHIGÉNIE EN TAURIDE Grand Opera House, Belfast, 22nd Oct. Gluck redefined opera in the mid-18th century, moving away from the recitatif tradition to

ART COLLEGE DEMOLITION York Street, 20th October onwards The dilapidated hunk of 60s architecture that is the Art College (complete with gaping void at its centre) is currently being devoured by concrete-munching yellow dinosaurs. By 2007 a glorious, multi-million pound, space-age structure will stand in its place, surrounded by Babylon-style hanging gardens and complete with a new tubeway across York Street which will continue straight to heaven.

JM

NORTHERN BANK FAMILY ALBUM Waterfront Hall 22nd Oct - 7th Nov.

George and Aunty Mary, scan them and turn them into enormous banners. The colour printing is terrible with most pictures going a sinister blood red; not that it matters because they are hung in a stairwell so you can only see a few pictures from each landing.

Hilarious that they harvest these pictures and then name them after their bank sponsor (The Northern Bank Family Album!). Such an interesting subject – the unseen family pictures of Belfast – so much money spent on it, what a missed opportunity. The press blurb though is in a class of its own: has pure cynicism ever been more eloquently expressed? ‘this exhibition lovingly displays the domestic world that underpins our society and shapes our values. In a city famous for conflict, the Family Album demonstrates our shared journeys from life to death and puts our most cherished memories into the public domain in an expression of unity and celebration.’

RW

Truly stupendous piece of Wonking with the Community. Get lots of family photographs which are for the most part boring and mean nothing to anyone who doesn’t know Uncle

Context Gallery

23 October – 6 November Jennifer Youell Geometry of Thinking The exhibition will be accompanied by a special edition of incontext

Context Gallery, the playhouse, 5-7 artillery street, derry bt48 6rg tel 028 71373538 fax 028 71261884 email contextgallery@yahoo.co.uk context gallery is a registered charity