In a ‘Barbie’ world…

Writing a review of the new Barbie film also gives me an excuse to share some photos from a more recent shoot I did, based on the version of the character from Toy Story 3. The outfit answers the question of whether or not I floss.

I never played with Barbie dolls – my thing was Star Wars figures and Lego sets – but there are certain aspects of playing with doll-like figures which apply no matter if you were a boy or a girl. (For the record I never played with He-Man, Action Man, GI Joe, or any of the others like that.) So there are certainly playtime things which can be mined for comedy as per the Toy Story trilogy or The Lego Movie (that fourth Toy Story film never happened; shut your mouth; just shut your goddamn mouth).

This is pretty much what I was expecting from Barbie: jokes about playing with the dolls and making fun of ‘toy logic’. I figured it’d be an easy-going mood-lifter. Having seen it now: gurl, are you serious?!

A balanced sunrise photo

The film starts off that way, and I wondered how it was going to fill two hours with this. Surely the joke would be beaten to death within 90 minutes? Barbie-land is amazingly realised with vibrant sets and costumes and the logic of playtime and the Mattel-friendly corporate messaging of using dolls representing empowered career women to inspire girls (and there’s a Barbie played by a trans actress too!). And sometimes, when the dolls are played with a little too much, they go a bit weird (cue Kate McKinnon’s Barbie with scribbles on her face and unable to undo the splits). Joining the various Barbies are the dolls that should never have left Mattel’s drawing boards (the pregnant doll, or the one with inflating boobs), and various iterations of Ken, who in all cases is just an accessory and exists on the periphery of Barbie’s existence.

Ryan Gosling’s Ken has no particular qualifications or reasons to exist – and his love for Margot Robbie’s [stereotypical] Barbie goes unrequited. While this presumably reflects the girlhood experience of playing with the dolls, the script goes further and makes Barbie-land into a supposed inversion of our world: one sex does all the jobs and has all the agency, while the other is supposed to just sit about looking pretty and doting on the do-ers. Maybe this was truer in the time Barbie dolls were invented, but I don’t think it’s quite so clear-cut today. The film sometimes has to put in a major effort to stick to this conceit and the message it projects.

You could fairly say to me, “Twist, shut up and watch the damn film, it’s just a bit of fluff and not that deep!” but I would have to turn back and say “Oh, just you wait…”

Not the leg-over I had in mind.

Things go awry for Barbie when she starts having morbid thoughts and her magical toy experience goes wrong (her feet no longer fit into heels amongst other things) – it’s like she’s having a midlife crisis. The only way to figure out what’s happening is by going into the real world, and finding out what happened to the girl who plays with her. And Ken tags along for the ride.

In the real world, simple, vacuous Ken is immediately taken with all the representations of The Patriarchy: men driving oversized wankpanzers, going to the gym, doing all the manly things like construction and fighting fires, overanalysing superhero movies, belittling women in the office, and being in a boardroom full of middle-aged white men (led by Will Ferrell who was presumably the first and last choice for the role after Anchorman and The Lego Movie). Ken wants to bring some of this back to Barbie-land. (At the same time, he also encounters a woman doctor who tells him he can’t perform surgery ‘just because he’s a man’ – but this real-world character is quickly glossed over; hmmmm.)

Barbie finds that her colourful fashion sense is out of place, and girls only see her as representative of a feminine ideal they can never live up to; a figurehead of a corporation telling girls what they should be like and making money off them at the same time. Being denounced as a fascist by Sasha, a Californian middle-schooler, brings her to tears. It turns out the middle-schooler’s mother Gloria is the woman having the mid-life crisis that’s been afflicting Barbie back in her world.

Cheeky beach pose

By now, the film has Ken wanting to bring toxic masculinity to Barbie-land, the leaders of Mattel wanting to hide the fact that Barbie’s crossed over into the real world, and Barbie wanting to bring Sasha and Gloria to Barbie-land to inspire them.

Along the way (and via maybe one too many musical numbers), we are presented with Gloria’s midlife crisis and soapbox speech about 21st-century womanhood, Ken’s existential crisis (what is his purpose in Barbie-land? – which some middle-aged, male commenters, especially those who overanalyse superhero movies on Youtube, have taken to be a reflection of the film’s attitude towards men), and we’re also given Barbie’s existential crisis (what is she for, if she no longer inspires girls but is instead seen as an unattainable goal?).

If you’re going through your own midlife crisis this is some heavy shit to contend with. This isn’t family-friendly fare like Toy Story – in the UK it has a 12A rating and I suspect it’s not just because of the jokes about Barbie and Ken’s inability to have sex. The target audience appears to be jaded Millennial women (I was one of only two guys in my sold-out screening).

I don’t want to be fit, I just want to be slim. And body-shaping underwear will only go so far.

The film mashes up the toy-logic-meets-real-world comedy of Toy Story and The Lego Movie, with a script from any feminist blog (sometimes with sparkling wit, sometimes less so, and sometimes with soapbox speeches that could only come from an affluent Californian who works in Hollywood), and adds in a haunting existential crisis that mirrors the modern movie affliction of turning fun things into over-serious downers in an attempt to give them ‘meaning’. It feels like there’s about three or four competing films fighting for attention.

At my screening, when Ken sings about his crisis, Gloria does her speech, and Barbie ponders on the futility of it all, the audience fell utterly silent and the mood never recovered until the final punchline before the end credits. (That could just be an Edinburgh thing though – in Scotland we’re not really given over to whooping and hollering and clapping at the cinema…)

The knowing sense of humour and in-jokes do a lot of heavy lifting.

I could do this all day. But I didn’t; I really didn’t.

I saw the film’s Barbie-land as representative of girls’ experiences playing with the dolls rather than an inversion of ‘our world’ (or at least the US part of it) – using it as a metaphor can only go so far before it breaks down. I think the script took it right to the edge of what you could do with it (tonally, too). Barbie‘s purpose and targets are muddled and scattershot.

For me, the film was at its best in Barbie-land, where it managed to capture in live action the sort of charm found with Barbie and Ken in Toy Story 3.

Yes, I know I’m not doing this exercise properly!

Barbie is the best new film I’ve seen this year so far (but that’s not saying much), and certainly the most entertaining thing Ryan Gosling’s ever been in – but I wonder if it was trying to achieve too much in its two-hour run time?

The jokes are funny, but if you’re caught in the wrong mood you’ll spend the rest of the evening drinking red wine alone in a darkened room wondering if you’ve ever really known who the fuck you are.

(You can ignore the angry, male, right-wing, conservative reviews of this film, by the way. Which is true for any film. As long as they have Tom Cruise to look at they’ll be fine.)

The film’s making a ton of money, which suggests that original, stand-alone stories, and films aimed at female audiences are the way to go. Instead, it would appear the lesson Mattel’s taken is to try to turn all of their toys into separate film franchises. This is why modern film studios can’t have nice things.

The morning receptionists were probably glad I didn’t come in…

Enough about Barbie’s existential mid-life crisis! Let me tell you about mine instead! (Just kidding. That would take too long.)

The photos I’ve chucked in with this review were taken at Portobello Beach next to Edinburgh, and were a chance to test out some slightly-too-small, Barbie-inspired, shiny Lycra, and some definitely-too-small, body-shaping underwear. I’m in my mid-40s and starting to feel like I’m getting old for this shit. On the up-side, I lost any sense of public embarrassment years ago.

I confused the hell out of so many dog walkers on this beach.

I’ve got a few more girly road trips left in me, but I’m running out of new costume ideas and photoshoots to try out. I think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve pretty much achieved all the things I’d hoped to try out wayyy back when I started – hell, I’ve done more than I ever hoped I would!

Unlike Barbie, I don’t think I need to resolve my midlife crisis by becoming “a real woman”; like Ken, being Twist from time to time is “Kenough” for me…

I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world…

When I met The Ladyboys Of Bangkok…

The Ladyboys’ show has been visiting the Edinburgh Festival Fringe since the 90s, and it’s only recently I went along to see them. It put me in a thoughtful mood… (this had been in my drafts folder for far too long!)

First of all, it’s impossible not to be aware of sensitivities regarding words and names, and that ‘ladyboy’, however it might have been regarded in the past, is now considered offensive (‘kathoey’ is the correct term in Thailand). Personally, I specifically use the term to describe the show or the performers (like it or not, that’s the brand name they perform under; and changing the name would likely confuse the fans and harm the business). Whether you take offence at the name or not, it was clear to me that many in the audience for the Ladyboys were devoted fans who loved the show.

When they first came to people’s attention in the UK in 90s, they were treated as something of a punchline. I spent my student summers working in a Fringe venue box office, and was involved with a show each night so I never really had the chance to go along and watch. To be honest, I wasn’t all that interested. The only time I saw them was when they were caught out in a rainstorm walking through one of the city parks – they stood out because compared with the locals and fellow Fringe-goers they were all outstandingly pretty (even off-duty), and they were wearing the most gloriously impractical clothing for a Scottish summer (and platform heels on cobbled streets is a brave decision!).

It was a long, long time later before a friend suggested we go along and check out the show, and I figured what the hell – clearly they were doing something right to have lasted this long, so why not see what the fuss was about? All I really knew was that they pitched their tent where they could, and the music was loud. Otherwise, they just felt like part of Edinburgh’s artsy background noise.

The show is an energetic song & dance cabaret mixing solo and ensemble performances (and a ton of costume changes), with lots of lipsynching to well-known songs and parodies (like the adult version of She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain When She Comes, with lyrics like “I was very nearly coming when you came…”). In between are smaller sketches and audience interactions. Some of the Ladyboys’ troupe were boys; one was relatively senior in years, and swapped between male and female presentation throughout the show; one was more diminutive and what they lacked in height they made up for with a powerful pair of lungs to belt out songs; and one was a slightly plumper jester/’madame’ who would harrass the men in the audience.

The audience was mostly middle age to elderly women, and quite often little old ladies would jump up and try to dance during the performance – sometimes being steadied by a friend or relative.

A notable scene – played straight – involved the senior Ladyboy slowly changing out of her evening gown into a suit while singing I Did It My Way – singing as a woman until the very end, when she removed her wig and sang as a man for the last refrain. I found it oddly affecting – I’ve long known that I won’t be doing Twist stuff forever, and at some point I’ll take the wig off and never put it back on again. Will I do it singing My Way, or will I simply not realise it’s the last time? That was the sober part of the show – it can’t be comedy and high energy all the time…

The only other bit that gave me pause for thought was the the jester/madame’s humiliation of men in the audience. Every so often she picked a victim, dragged them on stage, and groped them to cheers from the audience. The worst one I reckoned (hoped!) had to be an audience plant (we saw him later leave via the staff exit) – he refused to kiss the jester/madame on stage, so she got him on the floor and dry-humped him. My friend and I understood how this routine started as a way of “power-rebalancing”, by dishing sexual humiliation out to the men, but it felt kind of dated. (That, and I’m not keen on ‘prank’ humour – it’s a bit like comedy wanking in that the only one really having fun is the one doing it, not the one who’s on the receiving end…)

In all other aspects, the show seemed to be really in tune with the times in its message and inclusivity. Everyone was gorgeous, funny, and talented, and I’m amazed at the energy they put into the performances, given they do both lunchtime and evening shows (we went at lunchtime). But if the performers weren’t the Ladyboys, would there be anything special about it?

Afterwards we had a chance to get our photo taken with them. I felt kinda frumpy standing next to them (okay, a lot frumpy) – who wouldn’t want to look as good as they do? – and I got a lovely reaction from them when they heard my voice and figured me out!

Spot the odd one out…

Because SIWOTI

You can be almost certain that someone will never change their mind because of a comment posted on social media. Does that mean we should never try?

When you get so accustomed to particular arguments and evidence, it can be something of a shock to encounter people who’ve clearly never heard them before, and have gone through life assuming that what they learnt at the age of 11 (simplified and summarised, if not superseded by now) must always be true.

What do you do when Someone Is Wrong On The Internet?

I had that experience on social media, and ended up regurgitating pretty much all of the sciencey posts I’ve done on this blog (with a couple of choice quotes I found elsewhere; unfortunately I can’t recall the original source).

Here’s what I wrote in reply:

“TL;DR version: sex, sexuality and gender aren’t ‘either/or’ concepts. If a person doesn’t fit into the way you think about the world, maybe *just maybe* the problem isn’t with that person?

The TL bit:

CHROMOSOMES
yes, there’s XX and XY, but there are other variants like XXY or XO (Klinefelter’s Syndrome or Turner’s syndrome); intersex people exist (and since 2003 are starting to be recognised on some nations’ passports, such as Germany in 2013).
– So I wouldn’t go about saying “XX or XY! Boy or a girl! End of story! Science!” because that’s not what the science says; things are more complex than that:

You can be male because you were born female, but you have 5-alphareductase deficiency and so you grew a penis at age 12. You can be female because you have an X and a Y chromosome but you are insensitive to androgens, and so you have a female body. You can be female because you have an X and a Y chromosome but your Y is missing the SRY gene, and so you have a female body. You can be male because you have two X chromosomes, but one of your X’s HAS an SRY gene, and so you have a male body. You can be male because you have two X chromosomes- but also a Y. You can be female because you have only one X chromosome at all. And you can be male because you have two X chromosomes, but your heart and brain are male. And vice – effing – versa.

SEXUALITY
Sure, most people identify as heterosexual, but homo-, bi-, and asexual people exist too. Whether or not people come out as such depends on how tolerant their society is; if it’s against the law or punishable by death, then they’ll obviously not want to say. Check Wikipedia to see how wildly the statistics vary between Brazil and Iran (for example).

Adler (1991) and Byne et al (2001) found a cluster of nerves in the hypothalamus was largest in straight men, smaller in gay men and slightly smaller in women (this develops before birth).
Garcia-Falgueras & Swaab (2010) found environment doesn’t affect sexuality. Bailey & Zucker (1995) say 63% of gay men and women don’t conform to ‘gender behaviour’ as kids (vs 10-15% of straight people not conforming.)
– So nature, not nurture, determines one’s sexual orientation – and it’s not an ‘either/or’ proposition – people can be more hetero-, or more homo-sexual (think of it as a range), or simply not interested (asexual; maybe 1% of people will identify as such).

BRAINS
Joel et al (2015) did 1400 MRI scans of brains; there are some sex/gender differences in brain and behaviour. We have unique “mosaics” of features, some more common in females, some in males, and some common in both. Regardless of whether nature or nurture causes sex/gender differences in brain and behaviour, human brains cannot be categorized as ‘male’ or ‘female’.

Garcia-Falgueras & Swaab (2008) showed that the interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH) in the brain is:

• larger and more elongated in men and more spherical in women.
• Male-to-female transexuals have a similar INAH to women, as do castrated males – so is the size of the INAH determined by testosterone? (But: study criticised for a small sample size and no study of different sub-types of transexuals.)

– So, there’s a bit of the brain that might well tell you what gender you are?

Swaab (2005) found sex differences in your body develop early in pregnancy (the first few months), but sexual differentiation of the brain occurs later in the second half of pregnancy and might be modified after birth by culture. This explains why, for certain transexuals, you can expect to see ‘female brain structures’ in people who are ‘otherwise male’.

• So your body’s sex and your brain’s ‘gender’ can be different?
• So can we really divide people into two genders? Not if we use biology, it seems!

On television, Secrets of the Sexes (BBC, 2005) said that men and women don’t always fit neatly into their respective groups. A University of Cambridge around that time study found that 17% of men have a ‘female’ empathising brain and 17% of women have a ‘male’ systemising brain. We aren’t ‘Male OR Female’; these are just end points on a range.
Hell, you can test yourself and find out where you belong on the range at this BBC website.

CULTURE
Why do we find it hard to accept there are more than two genders? Other cultures recognise three, four, or even five (such as Kathoey in Thailand, or Hijras in India, or ‘two-spirit’ people among some of the first nations of North America. Greeks accepted other sexualities, Romans accepted transgender folk. What changed?
Not wishing to upset anyone’s sensibilites, I’d just simply suggest that when the Romans adopted a variant of bronze-age desert mythology as their state religion, that’s when it started to get really difficult for women and transgender folk. This idea mutated and spread around the world for the next few centuries; almost all of us have grown up indoctrinated by aspects of it.

Bem’s Sex Role Inventory (BSRI, 1974) lists 20 ‘male’, 20 ‘female’ and 20 ‘neutral’ traits (eg: males are assertive, ambitious, swear a lot, etc, while females are meek, peacable, don’t swear… you get the idea). But by 1998, Holt & Ellis found recorded differences between men and women have decreased since the 1970s – men are less ‘manly’, women more ‘manly’ (but on average, men are still more impulsive)… at least in the west.

CONCLUSIONS?
Costandi (2013) found Sex is determined by genes; Gender is determined by culture/upbringing.
Elliott (2013) found male and female brains have far more similarities than differences; gender differences come from culture/ upbringing.

Just because we’ve been brought up to believe something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true, or that we have to keep believing it. In the 21st century, bearded women win Eurovision, men can get pregnant.

Intersex people exist. Trans people exist. So do men and women. Denying any of these things will weaken whatever argument you want to make about sex and gender.

Before anyone says “But it doesn’t happen in nature!” – well, actually it does, from lesbian hedgehogs to cross-dressing cuttlefish:

…you can have females be females because they developed in a warm environment and males be males because they developed in a cool environment (reptiles), you can have females be females because they lost a penis sword fighting contest (some flatworms), you can have males be males because they were born female, but changed sexes because the only male in their group died (parrotfish and clownfish), you can have males look and act like females because they are trying to get close enough to actual females to mate with them (cuttlefish, bluegills, others)…

That’s it; I’m done. I’ve laid as much science on here as I dare to, given that nobody’s ever had their mind changed by a Facebook comment. But I just *had* to get this out because SIWOTI.”

Peace, out.

The Horror!

I recently went to the Edinburgh Horror Festival screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for the first time in …okay, a couple of decades. But you know what? It’s still damn good fun. It’s funny how fans can just fall into conversations with each other, even if complete strangers.

It was an odd crowd that night: lots of first-timers; and only one girl at the back doing all the shout-outs to the screen. And (being in a pub-slash-music-slash-cinema venue), drunken guys stumbling in halfway through the film with pint glasses in hand, and uttering profound insights such as “Fuck’s this? Is i’ like a fillum abou’ poofs or summin?” (I could go on -at length- but they left after a period of time that wasn’t short enough.)

I did a handful of shout-outs (overcoming my Edinburgh reserve and a desire not to freak out the first-timers). My main contribution was at the very end, when the camera shot starts rotating around. I leapt to the front and mimed spinning the camera shot as it went faster and faster. A lot of people hadn’t seen that one before; they liked it, and I got a round of applause for it!

One pricelessly awkward moment came after the girl at the back shouted “Slut!” at Janet for the umpteenth time. A guy at the front stood up and shouted back at her to stop slut-shaming. Rocky Horror certainly has the potential to set off a ton of trigger warnings for the more sensitive among us. I mean, the iconic character is a murderous, pansexual, alien, cannibal, sex pest. I could see a lot of kids today getting confused about whether they should no-platform him for being a homicidal rapist, or tell his critics to check their cis-het, terrestrial, vegetarian privilege.

(I am so glad I’m not growing up in the 21st century. It must be awful meeting people and apologising in advance for any perceived slights you may or may not inflict.)

*

Just as the golden age of science fiction is about 12, I reckon the golden age for Rocky Horror must be about 14 (I think I was that age when I first saw it, anyway). And at a summer drama camp the following year (an activity with a sex ratio skewed toward girls), I and the other kids my age were all into it – so we decided to end our show with a performance of Let’s Do The Timewarp Again (as the only boy involved in this, I played Riff Raff). I was just glad the dance moves are simple enough for me to do.

I try not to think too much about the really fucking awkward time my parents watched it on TV with me.

And, as mentioned in previous posts, the first time I went out cross-dressed was for showings at university (did that a couple of times).

It wasn’t long after that Simon Pegg came out with his little anti-Rocky-Horror rant:

I hate Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s boil-in-the-bag perversion for sexually repressed accountants and first-year drama students…
(Simon Pegg, Spaced)

It’s possible to like someone’s creative works, yet not really care for their opinions. In this instance, I thought he’d missed the mark, badly. He was making generalisations based on ignorance, as if Rocky Horror was nothing more than an “grown-up Hallowe’en“.

I’ve got friends who say that Rocky Horror introduced them to concepts of transexuality which helped them figure out who they were – that they weren’t “wrong”, and there was even a word to describe them.

For me, it’s more general than that.

Look at the Transylvanian partygoers in Frank’s place. They’re all ages: they’re very tall; very short; thin; fat; different skin colours; and everything in between. They’re more representative than the bridge crew of the Starship Enterprise. Not one of them ‘fits in’ anywhere else. They would never be considered ‘cool’ anywhere – but in Frank’s place, they are.

That, for me, was the big message the film had to give, and is the point Simon Pegg completely missed: the ‘cool’ kids are nowhere near as cool as the uncool kids. The uncool kids are cool in ways the cool kids cannot even conceive of. The ‘cool’ kids are the ones staggering into the cinema with their pint glasses halfway through, wondering what the hell everyone’s watching (the plot is nonsensical and the song lyrics doggerel, but none of that matters in the slightest).

The uncool accountants and students Pegg mentioned? They’re wanting to grab a bit of proper coolness by breaking out from their everyday lives, even if only for a couple of hours.

Everything you get picked on for, or you feel makes you weird, is essentially what makes you sexy as an adult.
(Justin Timberlake)

So, if you’re the wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong colour, the wrong, sex, the wrong sexuality, or simply in the wrong clothes – you can be cooler than ‘cool’. That’s what I got from Rocky Horror, and that’s why I’d recommend it to the 14-year-old outsider marking time until they can get the hell out of school.

If you think about it, “it’s astounding…”

Gendered agenda addenda

During Edinburgh’s 2016 Science Festival I got to introduce a talk on world cultures which recognise more than two genders, by Professor William Naphy. It’s a topic I’ve briefly alluded to in a previous blog, but this seems like as good a time as any to go a bit more in-depth.

Update 13 April 2016: you can listen to the talk via the Edinburgh Skeptics podcast, starting 4m30s in. (Warning: if you do listen to the first few minutes you can hear me erm-ing, um-ing and ahh-ing through an intro to a poet and to the speaker…)

The talk was really excellent – densely packed with information, yet presented in a very clear and accessible way. I won’t regurgitate the talk verbatim, but the significant take-away messages were these:

1. There are cultures around the world and throughout history which recognise three, four, or even five genders. From their point of view, they don’t ‘have’ three (or more) genders – there are three (or more) genders.
2. ‘Genders’ and ‘gender roles’ seem to be inextricably linked – for example, in certain cultures if a woman wants to run a business, she will be seen as a ‘businessman’, and is not allowed to become pregnant (because ‘businessmen’ do not get pregnant). These are entirely separate from matters of sexuality.
3. Just because a culture recognises more than two genders, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s open, tolerant and socially liberal – sometimes there can be very strict rules about what each gender is allowed to do, and the jobs they can take on.
4. Following on from the last point, people in these cultures are likely to be disinclined to talk about genders; it would be as impolite as asking complete strangers about their sex lives.
5. Generally speaking, across the world, there appears to be a bigger deal made about men adopting female gender roles than women adopting male roles.
6. The influence of gender-binary cultures is adversely affecting the ones which recognise more than two – a culture which might celebrate a third gender could now start describing people in binary terms  – ‘gay’ or ‘trans’, rather than whatever words they have to describe a concept which we don’t have the words (or even concept) to describe in English.
7. The cultures with more than two genders could be said to have more than two labels or pigeonholes to stick people into. Sure, it’s better than limiting it to two, but it can still be an inflexible system.
8. I suspect the model we’re moving towards in ‘Westernised’ cultures is one which doesn’t see people as one thing, or another, or yet another, but rather has us occupying different points on ranges: a range of sex; a range of gender identities; a range of sexualities.

After the talk I spoke to some of the audience in the bar afterwards. As you might expect, it drew a lot of interest from people who are, or have been through, transitioning (m-to-f and f-to-m), or otherwise gender non-conforming in various ways. I don’t really get involved with communities or support groups (because reasons), but I really enjoyed hanging out with other people who’ve had to come to terms with being at odds with what society considers ‘normal’.

If anything, I came away thinking more strongly than ever that each of us has to act as an ambassador for everyone else. We probably need to learn as much as we can about sex, gender and sexuality, even if we don’t think it applies to us, because there’s always the chance that someone somewhere will latch on to us as their ‘token’ expert in these matters.

If we want to live in a more enlightened culture, that means sometimes fielding questions from other people which might be crude, or insensitive, or blithely ignorant and we’ll have to reply openly and honestly. To borrow a phrase from Jim Jeffries‘ stand-up routine about gun control:

…we have to play to the one per cent of society who are such fuckwits they ruin it for the rest of us. We have to move as slow as the slowest person to keep society moving…

Anyway… we all agreed that Professor Naphy’s talk was an eye-opener, and he did an excellent job of presenting other viewpoints we simply aren’t used to. It’s not often you can come out of a talk having to rethink certain bits of how you think the world works, but this was one of those times.